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How to Leverage Social Selling Through Brand Ambassadorship

The human element is something that’s often overlooked in B2B demand generation. It’s important to remember that even in B2B, people buy from people. Therefore, personal branding and brand ambassadorship are key components that can help build trust and engagement.

That’s why we’re talking to the “B2B Demand Gen Queen” Dilara Cossette (Founder & Head of Demand Generation, Focus Image Pro) about how marketers can leverage social selling through brand ambassadorship. During our conversation, Dilara explained the importance of personalization and being intentional in content creation. She elaborated on which pitfalls to avoid and how to get buy-in for social selling. Dilara also shared strategies on how to work with subject matter experts (SMEs) and obtain testimonials.

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https://youtu.be/zACCj5Nl8OI

Topics discussed in episode

• [1:18] Dilara explained why the human element is often overlooked in demand generation
• [2:45] The differences between a personal brand and brand ambassadorship
• [6:28] How to get buy-in from customers to give testimonials
• [8:15] Pitfalls to avoid with social selling through brand ambassadorship
• [13:35] The importance of having the right strategy and conducting the right research for social selling through brand ambassadorship
• [16:54] How demand gen through brand ambassadorship, social selling, and thought leadership content helps companies
• [19:41] Tips for dealing with internal pushback for social selling
• [22:15] How to work with subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop content for social selling
• [23:21] The process of leveraging social selling through brand ambassadorship, and the key components required for this approach
• [26:25] The content format that performs better for social selling and demand gen
• [27:31] An example of how social selling through brand ambassadorship helped a company to generate positive results

Companies and links mentioned

• Dilara Cossette on LinkedIn
• Focus Image Pro

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Dilara Cossette

Christian Klepp 00:01

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host. Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to Dilara Cossette. She is the founder and head of demand generation at Focus Image Pro. She has extensive experience in helping B2B marketing leaders to navigate growth. Her company does this by creating, capturing and converting demand through demand generation strategies specifically tailored to the unique needs of small and mid-sized businesses with B2B demand generation solutions. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp 00:38

Okay, fantastic. Dilara Cossette. Welcome to the show, and I’m so glad to have you on here. And I also want to give a shout out to Anthony Leung for the introduction.

Dilara Cossette 00:50

Yeah, hi, hi, thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp 00:54

Absolutely, absolutely. So without further ado, let’s dive in, because this is, we’ve had a couple of guests previously on the show that have talked about demand gen, but not this specific aspect. So what specific aspect am I talking about here? It’s how to leverage social selling through brand ambassadorship. So why don’t we kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think the human element is often overlooked in demand gen?

Dilara Cossette 01:18

I think if we look at our news feed on LinkedIn, on any social media, as well as open our inbox, we will see that we’re getting tons of messages. They’re coming from individuals, from companies. But when we ask ourselves, do we know those people? Do we trust them? Where they’re coming from? Where is the background? The answer is no, and we all know that people buy from people. They don’t buy from companies. So this is where personal branding is very important, but it’s so much tied with brand ambassadorship and social selling, because there should be someone behind the brand, behind every single brand, the person who will be brand ambassador or advocate of that brand, who will become a thought leader of the industry and also share the expertise. And it’s not necessarily sales people. People really think that, Oh, if we’re talking about brand ambassadorship or social selling, it has to be sales team, not necessarily. I think even if it’s someone outside of the sales department, it’s even better, because the person will sound very authentic, knowledgeable, and that will actually increase the engagement awareness and potentially lead to some really cool conversations that will eventually lead to closed deals.

Christian Klepp 02:33

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I had a follow up question there for you, if you can. Is there any difference between personal brand and brand ambassadorship?

Dilara Cossette 02:45

It’s very similar I would say. Personal branding is like, more when it’s like, I would say, maybe you’ve heard about the founder-led company, right? I’d say like, it’s there where the personal branding, the person is building their brand through the thought leadership, founder-led content I would say. This is where the person is building their brand to help the person or the company eventually to sell. Brand ambassadorship. It could be like, really, for a bigger organization with 1000s of people, right, but it’s still important to have this brand ambassadorship. It could be one person, like dozens of people, just like doing this brand awareness. And I would say, like, see it as a more brand awareness, right? We think that brand awareness should come only from the company page when it’s a boosted, promoted content, not necessarily. Now on LinkedIn, you can actually boost a personal post as well. That actually it’s a sign for us that, okay, this is how LinkedIn and all our social media channels, they put more emphasis on personal branding rather than company branding. And I’ve done several tests when we took the same content, we promoted it from company page versus the personal page, and it has 10x more engagement than the company page. So it means that people resonate, you know, and they engage more with the personal content, which leads to the personal branding and personal, you know, promotion as well.

Christian Klepp 04:07

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. It’s, um, it’s very interesting that you mentioned that, because, you know, I’ve noticed it as well on platforms like LinkedIn. If you look at the company pages, even if they do post content on a regular basis, you see that either their engagement is quite low, or if there is engagement, it tends to be the employees. So it’s kind of like, let’s pat each other on the back and internal high five. We’ve posted something, right? Whereas, if it’s from somebody’s like, as you said, like personal feed, right? It’s, it’s also, to a certain extent, a reflection of their personality, but it’s also a reflection of their expertise on a specific subject, right?

Dilara Cossette 04:49

100% I would also add to that, brand ambassadorship can be not necessarily from the employees of the company. Actually, it will have like, even maybe 100 more results and engagement if that is some something shared by customers, by, you know, other employees, by the experience. So that’s where the reviews and customer support comes in place. Testimonials is now a really good example when you actually promote thought leadership content. This is where you can actually work and leverage, let’s say marketing team, sales team. They work very closely with the CS team to get those testimonials, and it’s not hard to get, like, a few really happy customers, and they would like really to advocate for your brand, just getting a few sentences, putting a nice, really visual, and just like sharing that content, I had a call with someone earlier today, I asked the person. It was a marketing leader in the very big organization, and I asked, like, what is important to you when someone is reaching out to you, what will make you to hop on a call with someone and explore the marketing or sales opportunities? She told me, testimonials. I will believe someone else about the person, rather than the person, no matter what the person is saying, and that’s so interesting, that’s a real feedback of person who is really working with external vendors.

Christian Klepp 06:07

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I had a follow up question for you there on the topic of testimonials, because this is a challenge that I see time and time again, even with some of the customers that we are working with, right? How do you get those testimonials? How do you get buy in from customers, to give those testimonials to your company?

Dilara Cossette 06:28

I think it’s, it’s about the moment, right? How to find the moment? It shouldn’t be at the beginning of the you know, your collaboration, and I’ll give that example. You know, we work with… someone is working with a marketing agency, for sure, it’s required minimum few months to get their results. And honestly, it doesn’t mean that the results will be right away positive, because we do a lot of testing and trials and AB testing, so they might be like not so impressive results, but you know better what you can achieve and the moment when you get some really good results, this is a moment to ask testimonials. Another way, an advice for someone who is just starting and they don’t have a lot of clients, or they don’t feel comfortable, or the results are not there, is to ask, you know, someone to give that in return to something for free. So, you know, I’ve heard something recently, and I agree with that, because when you start and launch your own company, or any in the business. You think, like, all my time is like, you know, gold, but I think, like, you should give your time, you should offer something for free. And, you know, it can be service, it can be free trial, if you’re in the product market, if you have a product or stuff. If it’s a service, you can offer free audit. You can offer like, you know, free Trial or something similar, and asking the person if you’re satisfied, if you like it, would you mind leaving a testimonial? That is the best way to get the first testimonials, even without the strong database. And that will help, actually, to close the first clients, and then you can find the best moment to ask for those testimonials.

Christian Klepp 07:56

Yeah, no, you bring up an interesting point there. It’s like leading by helping, right? Leading by helping. Okay, fantastic. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I’m sure you will have no problem answering this. Pitfalls to avoid. Right. When it comes to social selling through brand ambassadorship.

Dilara Cossette 08:15

Number one is being too pushy and too salesy. It’s so interesting, but I’m getting dozens of invites, connection invites every day on LinkedIn. And, you know, in the first original message, person saying, like, Oh, I’m impressed with your background, and I would like to learn more. I would like to be connected. Second message down, they’re selling you something. I’m like, seriously, that’s not authentic, right? And I’m not saying, like, I’m not responding. Sometimes the offer is great, and I’m always open to network, communicate, collaborate with others. I truly believe that we work, you know, we work and grow together, because that’s the only way, you know, to help each other and make sure we achieve our own goals. But I would say, like, yeah, try to be salesy. Try to be pushy. I don’t think, yeah, sales outreach, you know, cold outrage, cold calling, all this stuff really worked very well 5-10 years ago. I don’t think you know, especially if you’re targeting marketing leaders, and maybe depends on the industry, but it doesn’t work, right? We’re just overwhelmed with tons of messages every day. But what works when person is really offending and the person really wants to connect, network, offer something without asking anything in return, and that’s the best way right to refer clients, because it’s not only black and white, right? If you meet with someone, the product is not the right fit or the service is not something you’re looking for right now. But there’s always great to have people in your network where you can refer people, help someone else. Maybe you will see a post if someone is looking for specific solutions and you can help someone. I do believe in karma, so I would say, just be nice to people and treat them the way how you would like to be treated? Would you like to be sold? You know, right away the first message? Probably not. So try not to do that.

Christian Klepp 10:02

Absolutely, absolutely. There are so many examples I could give here, but there’s an individual, also a B2B marketer, that I’ve been following online on LinkedIn for many, many years. His name is Steve Watt. He’s also based in Toronto, and one of the posts he put out there, in fact, I think he put it out countless times, is that people do not wake up in the morning and check their LinkedIn hoping to get pitched right. Nobody wakes up in the morning and drinks their coffee and checks their phone and says, Oh, I am looking forward to getting pitched today, right? In fact, there was another guy and I cannot. I’m not. I cannot claim to have coined this phrase because other people have used it, but nobody likes to get pitch slapped, right? And that’s what that is like, for example. Case in point, you know, we get there every day.

Christian Klepp 10:50

Hi, Dilara. Your name, your name popped up, and I was recommended to connect with you, and I’m looking forward to expand my connection, and then you accept the connection request. And then the moment you do, bam, auto, pitch slap. We do whatever the service is that is actually not really relevant to your business at all. And then, would you like to jump on a quick chat to talk about this? And in my opinion, it’s never a quick chat, right? It’s at least 30 minutes.

Dilara Cossette 11:19

Yeah, there are always different tactics and methods. People are asking to get your feedback on something. People are trying to share something, they’re offering like, Oh, I’m working on a case study. It’s like a free something at the end of day, people don’t believe anymore. They know that it’s all about the sales pitch. You know what is interesting? I was really asking someone recently to get their feedback on, you know, the offer that we came up, and the person was like, and we’re having a chat, we were asking some specific questions and so on. Was probably the person. And it happened three times within a week, because I was trying to get feedback from marketing leaders. Three people asked me, are you trying to sell me something? I’m like, No. I was like, I was waiting for the sales speech. I’m like, No, that was a really genius question. I really wanted to get your feedback. Thank you. Have a great day. I’m like, That’s it. People were really asking me, is that it? I’m like, that is it? I told you. It was a real question. Thank you for getting back to me. Do you think that makes sense? Yes, bye. And people don’t believe anymore. They were like, Where is a sales pitch? And they were really asking me, like, is it something coming up? Are you trying to say… I don’t understand the reason of this conversation. I’m like, it’s just a question to get your feedback. It was so funny. Three people. I’m like, Oh my God, right, we overused LinkedIn and, you know, you know, email and everything.

Christian Klepp 12:37

I mean, it’s probably the same reason where a lot of people don’t have landlines anymore, and also why they don’t pick up if they recognize, like on the call display, they see a number that they don’t recognize, right? Because, chances are at somebody like, you know, you can drop any name you want of any of those big corporations here in Canada that are trying to sell you something right, from telecommunications to insurance to internet and everything in between, right?

Dilara Cossette 13:06

Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Christian Klepp 13:09

Okay, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which where I’d like you to like talk to us about the importance of having the right strategy, but also conducting the right research, right? Because social selling through brand ambassadorship is not something that, you know to use that North American phrase, wing it. It’s not something that you should wing, right? It’s something that needs to be thought out. It needs to be well researched. It needs to be intentional. But over to you, your thoughts.

Dilara Cossette 13:35

I think personalization is a key, and I know like how people are like leveraging AI right now with personalization in order to send one to many messages. I mean, AI and personalization, honestly, I don’t see that matching, because with AI, you don’t need AI to personalize the message. If you’re checking someone’s profile and you refer to the post that you saw or maybe something resonates, maybe you went to the same university, you can use AI. You don’t have to, because that’s your own personalization. That you will take that example and link it, and that will be very personalized. Um, you know, like the emails when they say, like, oh, I noticed, like, someone gave you recommendation, and the person mentioned this, this and this. So the person for sure, like, look into the details, right? And refer to that. There is certain way to do AI, but now I think people are they, they, they relied too much on AI, and now they don’t know how to do personalization, and they call personalization AI, which is still not very personalized, and you can feel it right away. And there’s so many copy paste messages very similar that we’re getting every day. And you can feel right away if it was really written by human or by AI. But I understand also, if you know sales team, they all have quota as well as marketing, and they need to reach hundreds of people every day, because they go after volume. Definitely there’s not enough hours in the day to do all this personalization one by one, and it’s hard, right? Going after volume. I think we’re creating the problem for ourselves first of all, but also for the industry. We’re trying to succeed by sending 1000s of emails. Someone has to send even more. So it’s sometimes like people are overusing and purchasing domains, you know, hundreds of domains in order to send more, the results are getting less. So they have to do more volume in order to get… I mean, it’s hard, right? We’re not making it easier. And if we are where we are now, what’s gonna happen in five years, right? I mean, how will we reach out, how we will talk to people, who will respond, who will believe us?

Christian Klepp 15:46

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, again, I suppose it goes back to the industry, the vertical, and also like what it is that you’re trying to sell to people, or rather, what service you plan to provide. Because, for example, like the services that you and I provide Dilara, I would, you know, I would park that under consultation. It’s a certain level of consultation. I would, I mean, even for myself, it would be very hard for me to close a deal for a consultation project on a cold call and automated, like, you know, something that’s done through automation, like, you know, an email campaign, an email blast, a blast on LinkedIn. Because it’s a, it’s a multi, as you as you well know, it’s a multi stage process, right? And it’s also about a lot… it’s trust building, right? Because what you’re selling is your expertise. It’s not just necessarily your time. It’s your expertise, because you’re helping your customers to transform their business for the better, right? So to a certain level, that’s not really something that AI could solve on its own.

Dilara Cossette 16:54

Yeah, I don’t think so. And this is where demand gen comes in place. And I would say like it’s across all industries. I never saw any brand that the demand generation brand awareness harm that company. And this is what you can do through social selling. We can do for brand ambassadorship and social selling. And again, I don’t want people to think like if there is a selling, it means that it has to be salesy. Social Selling doesn’t necessarily have to be pushy or salesy. Social selling is something. There’s so many methods to do that. You can share the content. You can be a thought leadership you can share case studies. You can do or whatever you want without even sales approach or asking anyone to hop on a call. That’s part of demand gen, and when you do that, people, it will ring a bell, or they will remember you when the need will come. So let’s say they’re looking for the solution, but they are not in the market right now. You create a demand. It’s kind of like a three steps. You create a demand through brand ambassadorship, social selling, thought leadership content. You have someone on the team who is like an advocate, as a true advocate, and feels comfortable to be on the video, to share the content, to share the tips, maybe weekly product newsletters, something that you share, and you leverage that content. That’s where you create the demand. Then it’s like converting the demand. When the demand is there. This is the way to make sure they find you. This is where you know some paid ads comes in place, where you can leverage some review websites and capturing the demands, make sure you actually capture and assign it to the right sales team, and make sure you actually provide the excellent support there as well. Because if they see that, you leverage and just like share so much tips and best practices at the beginning, you also want to leverage and continue the same level of support.

Dilara Cossette 18:39

As an example, I’ve been working with so many vendors. It’s all all great until you sign the contract. Once you sign the contract, it’s not exactly what has been, you know, promised, right? And you feel the huge difference, I think, like it has to be across sales and marketing. This is where I say demand gen sits in between marketing and sales department, because it’s connecting and building bridges between two departments, and one of the reasons is to make sure we provide and help a prospect, eventually potential customers with the same level of support.

Christian Klepp 19:12

Absolutely, absolutely. So moving on to the next question. And I’m sure you get this a lot right, because more often than not, especially in B2B, there’s not many people outside the marketing function that actually understand the concept of social selling. So what’s your advice to marketers out there that are dealing with internal pushback? How do you, how do you, how do you get buy in from those that don’t understand what social selling is?

Dilara Cossette 19:41

So interesting. I would recommend to start maybe with internal sessions, like more educational content, and then I will make it in a very game type of contest, like maybe, like incentivize or maybe like to make some internal contest, let’s say, you know, announcing the months of Social Selling for sure, it has to be supported with some internal sessions and then to provide them with maybe like support. Because the biggest roadblock for people that they don’t want to share, they don’t want to be judged, and they don’t know what to say and how to say, especially when it comes to product or services, they don’t want to share something which doesn’t make sense, and get a feedback. And that’s the biggest concern. If marketing team can support with educative content, by sharing, what is social selling, what are the best tips, but also support them with the content creation and provide with this tools, and then create a contest, or just like, you know, announce the winner, or like, incentivize that, that will be in a game like, you know, type of you know, environment, I would say that will make sure, like everyone, not necessarily sales and marketing, are involved in social selling. It can be customer support. It could be, you know, through different departments and content might slightly change, but will be something interesting to see. Let’s say how many… The winner is, like the person who is getting the highest number of impressions or engagement, or someone who books a call, I don’t know. And you know, this incentivize can help to increase engagement.

Christian Klepp 21:12

Yeah, something a little bit like healthy competition, if I understood you correctly, right?

Dilara Cossette 21:18

Yeah. Well, if you push too much. It won’t be healthy, but, yeah, it depends. It depends how competitive, competitive they are. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 21:27

Fair enough. Fair enough. You mentioned something that I wanted to go back to right because obviously a lot of what you’ve been talking about during this conversation, when it comes to social selling, is also developing the right content. And for a lot of B2B marketers, to develop that right content, they probably have to almost obviously look outside their function and lean on subject matter experts or SMEs, right? So these SMEs, I would say, nine times out of 10, are not in the marketing function. They’re in different business units, and they’re probably very busy people. So what’s your advice to marketers out there? How can they build those relationships and that rapport with those SMEs and get them on board with the content development?

Dilara Cossette 22:15

Yeah, it’s a very good question. I think if marketer, it’s content marketing falls under like if there’s someone internally, the person usually works with different departments, and one of the biggest challenge, I would say, is to come up with the brand positioning, and also, like, you know, the way how the content is presented. I believe there’s someone internally, the person who really knows how to put the content in the way that it will sound actually authentic, and also will make sense if CS team, or IT team is sharing something that are not related to their, you know, expertise, so that’s something like, you know, content marketers should take in consideration while preparing the content to be shared by the different departments of the organization.

Christian Klepp 22:58

That’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. So we get to the point where I wanted to ask you to walk us through the process, right? And you’ve given us plenty already, but walk us through the process of leveraging social selling through brand ambassadorship. So what are the things that B2B marketers need to do differently to achieve this, and what are the key components required for this approach?

Dilara Cossette 23:21

I think their main point is to find the right person I would say. I mentioned that sometimes people say that, Oh, social selling, it has to be salesperson. Has to be founder. I would encourage actually, to find someone who is first comfortable to be on the video because I think video content is the best performing and it’s easy to connect on a personal level when you share something valuable. For the video conversation, the person has to be very comfortable. The person has to have knowledge in the industry. Usually it could be someone in the product team. Could be sales, it could be customer support. The thing like this is a great example, where they know the brand, they know how the customer, they know the market, and the chances that are comfortable are very high because they talk to people every single day, they are in customer support, and find the person. And it could be again, through the content, you know, create a survey who would like to become an ambassador. It could be changing if the organization is bigger than, let’s say 100 people, or there’s like a more interest. It could be changed every month. For sure, they will require support from the marketing team in terms of the video editing, you know, content creation, posting and scheduling, but that will be the first step to do, to find the person who would like to share the content and work with that person for the social selling. What sales and marketing could do. They could leverage the content and include it in product newsletters, in sales outreach, in LinkedIn outreach. They could, it’s so easy to take that content so like, Hey, I’m just reaching out to you. It could be sales outreach, but still, I would like to share this that you might be interested in or you find insightful. So it’s not a sales outreach. Nothing selling, just sharing, because sharing is caring. And I think that content can be reused in so many different ways. It could be used in product email marketing. Could be used in the marketing newsletters. So it could be actually used in e-blasts. If you know, you know the company is investing in external vendors and supporting that could be interesting idea as well, just to me and make a series of that. Another idea I just thought about that. It’s an interview series, so that person is comfortable to do the 5 Minutes interview, and if the person is actually in the CS team, that will be actually very smooth. Asking clients and customers, also depends on the number of customers the company is having, if they would like to interview them for like a five minutes. And that could be actually the series of thought leadership content.

Christian Klepp 25:58

Wow, you’ve given us plenty already here, but like you know, and there’s also different… mentioned different content formats. So in your experience of all these content formats that you’ve mentioned for social selling, ultimately, also demand gen, are there any one of these that you say would perform better than others? Or Would it depend on the industry, depend on what stage the company is at. What are your thoughts to that?

Dilara Cossette 26:23

The shorter is better.

Christian Klepp 26:25

Okay.

Dilara Cossette 26:25

It doesn’t really matter the industry. I think the shorter is better. I mean, look, people don’t spend hours like, you know, listening hours and hours unless it’s very specific that they really want to deep dive into specific, you know, topic or industry. Other than that, if we’re talking about social selling, it has to be very short. I would say maximum five minutes. To be honest, if you make a series, you can talk a lot about, like, you know, someone very sub, sub topic. If it’s something like, you know, related to one product feature or like, one tactic, I think five minutes will be more than enough, especially if it’s like, not an interview series or just the video, and you’re sharing the best practices or tips, I believe it can be really short, but it will be very valuable. So I would say the shorter is better.

Christian Klepp 27:12

Okay, okay, okay, you’re definitely not the first one that’s mentioned that. So there’s definitely some truth in that. Um, could you give us an example of how social selling, through brand ambassadorship, helped the B2B company to generate positive results, ideally, from your own experience.

Dilara Cossette 27:31

We recently launched a campaign where we collected all the testimonials and put them, excuse me, in the really nice you know, on LinkedIn, you can do a carousel photos, images, not a PDF. It’s like a one long, but they can actually scroll. We combined all that, and we started boosting it, and that was very successful. We actually got a lot of engagement for that specific boosted post, what we also did, we asked the person who is doing the thought leadership content, and we agreed with the person that we’re working. It’s someone working in the sales. Like, the person is overseeing marketing and sales, but he has a lot of experience, so we actually shared that content from his personal page as well, and we boosted both. And people started reaching out to the person because they see instead of the company, sometimes they don’t know who to reach out to when they see that the testimonials or next piece of content is promoted by someone, they click and they can get in touch. We got a really good prospects for one of our clients coming directly from those boosted testimonials of their clients. So like, yeah, it’s step by step, but it’s very successful.

Christian Klepp 28:37

Yeah, and I believe there’s something to be said about leveraging client testimonials that way, because, you know, it’s one thing for a company to talk about, like, oh, you know, this is, you know, we’re so great. Our products and services are so awesome. And there are some thought leadership pieces, but to have the testimonials there, which is basically that company’s customers talking about how this provider, or this company, helped to make them successful. That just adds so much more substance to their claims, right

Dilara Cossette 29:13

Yeah, 100% and, you know, sometimes I don’t know why, but companies are hesitant to ask for testimonials. I mentioned about, like, the best time, and I’m not the only one saying that sometimes I was like, I’ll wait a little bit more, I’ll ask later. I’ll do that. But I mean, it’s never late. Sometimes, like, you know, the contract ends and they don’t, they actually churn, and you never have a chance to ask. So in addition to just like, also trying to find the best time and thing, like, you have to have a lot of courage and just like, let’s do it. This is where the customer support can come in place. I don’t know, maybe like, every third month when you still kind of like, you wrapped up on boarding, but you’re still getting the first results. I would say, Yeah, on the third or fourth month will be the best time to ask for testimonial, but it has to be kind of like documented somewhere. Okay, on 12 week or 42 week, we’re asking for testimonial. At least it will be easier to compare. Are we getting positive responses or negative responses? Because if someone doesn’t want to leave a testimonial, I mean, it doesn’t really matter when you’re asking that person. Another thing that could happen you started working with one person, the person is leaving and you don’t know who to ask, just… So, yeah, the quicker is better. But I would say not to quicken up. Depends on the industry and services or product offerings, you have to, like every company should think about their own timelines of asking testimonials, and then they can create a file, collect them, and, you know, set a minimum, maybe three, then, just like, boost a post with three, then collect two more. Just recreate that. Just have five. But sometimes it was like, Okay, 10 is perfect. I’ll wait for 10. Just start with three. Three is better than nothing.

Christian Klepp 30:57

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, okay. Dilara, this is what I call the soapbox question. Okay, so what is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Dilara Cossette 31:14

I think when people say we don’t… When I meet with people, especially like CEOs and founders, they say marketing doesn’t work for us. And I’m like, What do you mean? I was like, well, we invested in paid ads 2000 and it didn’t work. I’m like, Okay, so just put a x on marketing. Yeah, we don’t believe in marketing. And I think even when people work with agencies, right? And there’s so many agencies out there, and they all have unique approach. If it didn’t work with one or two, it doesn’t mean that all agencies are bad or like, for example, you hire someone and the person doesn’t match, you know, or aligned with your values. You let that person go. You don’t just, like, eliminate the title entirely. You still look for another person, right? The same thing with agencies or fractional folks or external vendors, if it didn’t work, you know, with one or two, it doesn’t mean that you should just, like, completely forget about that. I would say, like, yeah, when I hear marketing didn’t work, I’m like, you had a bad experience with marketing. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, because it works for a lot of companies.

Christian Klepp 32:20

And this is, I’m so glad you brought that up, because this is the reason why it’s so important to yeah, sometimes I hesitate to use this word, but to educate yourself, right? It’s to also educate yourself and understand what’s out there that you have options and so that people can also make informed decisions, right? It’s absolutely right for you to say that you know people… I guess, as humans, we tend to say, Okay, we have had one one bad experience, and as a result of that bad experience, we tend to put labels, or throw people into boxes, as I like to call it, and we have this preconceived notion of certain people, certain industries, certain professions, and there’s always this negative connotation or association, and I totally agree with you that we have to get out of this type of mindset, okay, that, yes, you had a bad experience, but perhaps maybe you can look back at that, and I always say, do an autopsy to see what went wrong, and not to play the blame game. It’s to do investigation. All right, this is what happened. This is what didn’t happen. This is what didn’t work, and this is probably the reason why. So moving forward, what can we do, or what steps or procedures or systems can we put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, right?

Dilara Cossette 33:43

Yeah, 100% I think, like looking back, is very important to analyze. Okay, maybe it was not enough budget. Maybe you didn’t choose the right channels, maybe you didn’t, you know, work with the right agency, right? Or maybe you didn’t hire the right fractional person. There’s so many why? Why? Why? But I agree with you 100% you have to look back and say, okay, it didn’t work. Lessons learned. Let’s move forward. But it doesn’t mean that you have to say, no, never again, right?

Christian Klepp 34:12

That’s right. That’s right. Well, you know you and I both are entrepreneurs and we’re business owners, and we know that that’s how we grow, that’s how we learn, right? It’s through the mistakes that we make.

Dilara Cossette 34:23

Oh, yeah, 100%. Every single day. You know, you make something small by mistake, that’s for sure, right? Well, I always say, if you don’t make mistakes, and I think, like, it’s not my expression, something like, I’ve heard like, a long time, though, if you don’t make mistakes, it means you don’t work, you know? I mean, like, it’s very straightforward, right?

Christian Klepp 34:42

Yep, that’s definitely one way of looking at it. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. Okay, so here comes the bonus question. So with all these conversations that we’ve had in the past, I did come to realize that, like me, you’re also a student of languages. Let’s put that way. You speak a few languages, and you’ve learned a few along the way. So if you were given the opportunity to learn another language, what language would it be? And why?

Dilara Cossette 35:11

I would say it would be Spanish, because my daughter, she’s going to high school, and she will be learning Spanish, and my husband started learning Spanish a few years ago, but I think 6 language would be a little bit too much. So I’m not quite sure about that. So I’m like, I’ll still give it another thought or so, but yeah, it would be Spanish.

Christian Klepp 35:28

Oh, nice, nice. It is a beautiful language, and in this part of the world, very, very useful.

Dilara Cossette 35:37

Oh, yeah, 100% and I also know that it’s if you speak French, it’s also easier to learn Spanish. There’s so many similarities, like, like, you know, simpler version, it’s not other way around.

Christian Klepp 35:49

Absolutely, absolutely. The difference, I would say, is that the speed at which language is spoken.

Dilara Cossette 35:56

Yeah, exactly right.

Christian Klepp 35:59

Fantastic. Dilara, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. A quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Dilara Cossette 36:09

Oh, I’m an open book, you know, my LinkedIn inbox is always open. I really get back to someone who is asking for help advice, you know, or just want to connect. I think, as I mentioned, we grow together. And I’m always happy to, you know, share my expertise and knowledge, because you never know right where our path will cross in future and how we can help each other, because it’s all about networking. So yeah, I mean, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m an open book. Always like sharing my knowledge with people.

Christian Klepp 36:40

Fantastic, fantastic once again. Dilara, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Dilara Cossette 36:46

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 36:48

Bye, for now. Bye.

View Details

How Marketing Plays a Vital Role in a Crisis

From political landmines to cyberattacks or a pandemic, B2B marketers are constantly confronted with many challenges in their work. All of a sudden, brand building and generating demand no longer seem to be sufficient to do a modern marketer’s job. What does it take for marketers to be better prepared and equipped to deal with the realities of the contemporary landscape?

Join us in this insightful conversation with seasoned B2B marketing and communications expert Ren Agarwal (CEO, StoryAZ Studio) as he talks about the instrumental role that marketers can play in a global crisis. During our conversation, Ren elaborated on the new skills and approaches marketers need to address expected and unexpected volatility. Ren also defined volatility in the context of modern marketing, how it creates opportunities for marketers, and provided advice on how teams can better prepare their organizations internally to respond to external challenges.

This episode was brought to you by Leadfeeder: Know who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com/try

https://youtu.be/fT-1k7yMYFs

Topics discussed in episode

• [3:09] Ren talks about the need for strategic foresight to understand and create opportunities in a volatile environment
• [5:33] Ren provides examples of how marketing can take a proactive role in helping companies navigate
• [15:42] The importance of strategic and multidimensional thinking, self-education, and understanding market issues
• [24:49] An example of how a company has successfully adapted to volatility
• [28:05] How you can successfully turn challenges into advantages
• [33:57] How marketing differs from crisis communications and PR
  [37:06] Ren’s actionable advice: Have a strategic review of relevant topics and prepare to address specific issues in your communications.

Companies and links mentioned

• Ren Agarwal on LinkedIn
• StoryAZ Studio
• Prevalent

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Ren Agarwal

Christian Klepp 00:01

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. I’m your host. Christian Klepp, today I’m going to be talking to Ren Agarwal. He’s a trusted executive, entrepreneur and strategic advisor who helps companies and clients refine their business value proposition and accelerate growth. He’s created and executed go-to-market and sales enablement programs at multiple firms that led to successful IPOs, acquisitions and double digit growth. He’s also extremely experienced in the world of B2B copywriting and content marketing. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. Here we are. Mr. Ren Agarwal, welcome back to the show, I should say, so it’s always a pleasure to have previous guests come back. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Ren Agarwal 00:48

And Christian, thank you so much for having me. I guess we’re recording this in August. So you know, it’s summertime and things are feeling good out there. So.

Christian Klepp 00:59

Yeah, absolutely. And the Paris Olympics just wrapped up too. So…

Ren Agarwal 01:03

And I am a big fan.

Christian Klepp 01:05

I know, I know. That in itself is a separate podcast interview. I think.

Ren Agarwal 01:10

We should definitely do it. I mean, the competition was great this year. The venues were fantastic. It was just all around the great competition.

Christian Klepp 01:17

Absolutely, absolutely. So Ren, we’re gonna just dive right into it. Because while this topic is it’s very, I would say, for lack of a better description, very profound, but also very relevant to B2 marketing today. So what am I talking about? Right? So you’ve built up a lot of expertise and experience in the field of content and communications, but I’m gonna say for this conversation, we’re going to focus on how B2B marketing can play an instrumental role during a global crisis. So I want to kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think the marketing function has to step up even before such a crisis occurs?

Ren Agarwal 01:57

I mean, marketing is essentially the interface between the company and the outside world, and marketing owns how the company is perceived, how the company communicates and so on this topic, you know, it really is the one of the key responsibilities of marketing, to be able to handle it, to understand it, and to shepherd the company forward. There’s no other function in a company that can be responsible for helping a company navigate. You know, in either in a new crisis or an ongoing crisis.

Christian Klepp 02:45

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And that brings me to my next question, right about, well, we’re going to talk about volatility a lot in this conversation I have. I kind of get the feeling, right. So how can marketers adapt and respond to a volatile world? I mean, like, you know, we’ve got so much going on. We’ve just, we’ve just gone come out of a pandemic. And there are a lot of things that happened this year that we’ll probably get into.

Ren Agarwal 03:09

You know, it’s interesting, because this topic actually is about strategic, having strategic foresight. And, you know, we can use the word crisis. I prefer actually, to use the word volatility. You know, anybody that’s been around for a couple of decades will tell you that, you know, the volatility is real and it’s increased. So we know we need to do is kind of look around and we’ll use some examples, right, all of the things that are happening, and understand how your products or services play in that volatile environment, and that creates opportunity.

Christian Klepp 03:54

I had a follow up question for you there, like, Why do you think there are so many companies out there that don’t adapt quickly? Is it because they’re their own worst enemy in terms of their just the internal culture, the way the organizations are structured? Or what are your thoughts on that?

Ren Agarwal 04:08

No, I think it really goes out to marketing, not making a convincing case at the leadership level. I think what we need to do is give marketers permission, almost to say, No, get involved. You know, be more active in these conversations. You know, whether you’re the CMO or some other you know position. Understand that this is a part of your portfolio and that you know you need to kind of bring it forward. Now, it doesn’t mean that you know this kind of conversation can’t come from other parts of the company. They certainly can. But if it’s not happening to your question, then it’s because, you know, marketing hasn’t taken the… they haven’t self-authorized themselves to say, you know, we could actually have an important role to play in something that’s happening here. And let’s. So, you know, let’s be proactive.

Christian Klepp 05:02

So it’s almost like they need to take the initiative. I mean, maybe, maybe not, be the gatekeepers, but they need to, they need to get that initiative going, right? Like, if you see, for example, you know, we can use many examples, but like, say there’s a recession on the horizon, right? And do they then take initiative to, like, prepare in case that occurs, and, you know, in terms of the internal and external communicate or something of that effect.

Ren Agarwal 05:33

You know, recession is an interesting example, because you’re really talking about a financial impact, and usually your CFO and your CEO will be kind of thinking about that from a budgetary standpoint, you know, if I could, I want to just present another example. So let’s say, you know, this is actually a very topical example. We know that there’s a lot of waste in clothing manufacturing, incredible amount of waste. Now, if you’re a marketer at a company that manufactures, let’s say, you know, sporting goods and clothing, you know, and you know that this is a criticism out in the market and a legitimate concern that we should all have about the waste stream of clothing manufacturing, or clothing that is no longer used. Well, you could say, well, what could we do about that? You know, so you understand that there’s a strategic opportunity here, because you’re manufacturing clothing and, you know, you’re selling it into a market where people are actually thinking about this question. So as a marketer there, there are steps that you can take to frame this conversation for your company and your brand, and to say, how can we be more thoughtful about this? Is there something that we could do to be relevant to this concern about waste from clothing manufacturing? And there are brands out there that you know are have an active voice to say, send your clothing back to us. We will create a recycled stream where we’ll make it available for sale again, you know. So that’s an example of where you’ve understood very clearly the marketplace, and you’ve understood the environment, and you’ve kind of proactively said, let’s, let’s be a part of the solution. So, you know, it’s created an opportunity, and if you can come up with a solution, it’s going to have significant benefit to your brand.

Christian Klepp 07:40

Absolutely, absolutely. I like the way you said that. You know, it’s a way to frame the conversation, and marketers need to lead that initiative, because I think it was something you mentioned before I hit record. Before waiting for the criticism to come, right? Because, in this sense, the wastage from manufacturing somehow that criticism, one way or another, in some shape or form, it will come. So I guess it’s a question of like, how do you address that? How do you proactively go forth and talk about this issue in a way that you’re showing that you are, in fact, a responsible company, right? You are, you are, do, doing something about it.

Ren Agarwal 08:19

Yes, and it’s, you know, it’s recognizing that you are a manufacturer of clothing. So you’re not changing that fact, but you’re saying, How can we do that in a better way? Can we monitor our supply chain, for example, and can we publish the findings? Can we actively work with our supply chain partners, you know, so marketing can start the conversation, can start to frame this opportunity. And then, of course, there’s multiple departments and functions within a company that will get involved with it. But what we can start to see happen is that marketing, you know, begins to have a positive impact on the operations of the company, even, I would go as far as to say has a positive impact on our world and also, you know, just thinking about the marketing function makes marketing more strategic in terms of The value that it’s actually bringing to the table.

Christian Klepp 09:23

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I’m gonna move us on to the next question. Still on the topic of volatility, I think it, it’s probably fair to like, just start with defining volatility in the context of marketing. So how do you define that, and what are some of the key challenges that you see marketers facing in this environment that has become increasingly volatile.

Ren Agarwal 09:46

Yes, and if I could let me use some examples to try to define what we what we mean here when we talk about volatility. So we’ve already talked about one, which is our environment that we all have responsibility to take care of and the stream of waste in that environment. So, you know, that’s a volatile topic, because we see what’s happening with climate change and we know things that are kind of contributing to the degradation of the environment.

Let’s use another example cyber attacks. You and I know through our work that this is a very real issue. A recent survey found that over 60% of companies have been impacted in some way by cyber attack. So this has become an unfortunate, permanent part of our technology landscape. You know, in the US, all of us are not familiar with getting emails or getting the dreaded letter that says we’re sorry to inform you, but somebody gained unauthorized access to our systems and your information was compromised. I mean, now we’re receiving that like regularly throughout the year. That’s an example of volatility. It’s happening out there. We don’t always know when it’s going to happen, but it’s happening and you know. And later on, I’ll give you an example of how, you know, you can address something like that. Another example I’ll give, and I really like this example. It’s from, you know, my past. Cyber Monday for two decades was a really big issue. And just to kind of remind everyone that’s listening to this, you know, it was basically the idea that the big shopping season at the end of the year, which was known as a Black Friday because it happened after Thanksgiving, obviously, with the internet, people were now shopping when they got to work, because they had a better Internet connection on Monday. And so Monday became this really big shopping day, and we called it Cyber Monday. And for two decades, we weren’t sure how sites would kind of hold up to that increased traffic. And so sites would go down, there would be all kinds of mayhem that would occur. I worked at a company that said, Hey, this is an opportunity. We know this is going to happen. We don’t know the level of that volatility, but we know it’s going to happen. And the company that I was working for had the ability to monitor the performance of websites. So what we did was we got the company ready on Monday to monitor the top e-commerce websites to see how they’re holding up to the additional traffic from Cyber Monday. And we would be available for reporters to call us and ask us how things were going. And we would be able to say, you know, the following e-commerce sites are really crashing under the additional traffic, and these other sites are doing better. And so we were able to take that volatility and that kind of environmental change or impact. That’s something that everybody was following and using our own products and services, we were actually able to create an opportunity out of that, and there was a terrific PR opportunity for our company. We were regularly quoted in the best and most popular media outlets out there, but we had strategic foresight to say, Hey, this is going to be happening on a regular basis. So how can we help? And so the way, the way we were helping is that those companies would then come to us and say, hey, help us understand what happened and how we could do a better job. So we would provide them with monitoring capability, right? So that volatility, that crisis, created an opportunity where, you know, we could build our brand, but we could also help those companies improve the performance of their websites. So, you know, I hope those examples kind of help to define what we mean when we talk about volatility, whether it’s societal volatility or business volatility or economic volatility, and how we can play a role.

Christian Klepp 14:28

No, absolutely, absolutely. And I think it’s a topic that we’re probably going to discuss later on the conversation. But how do you turn this period of adversity or these challenges into an actual advantage? And I think your story really showcased that, right, how you’re able to do that. And I saw this statistic the other day, and it still blows my mind, and the source evades me at the moment, but in the year 2031, it is estimated that a cyber attack is going to happen every two seconds. Wow. Let that statistic sink in for a second, every two seconds. So that means, like, you know, in this, in these couple of minutes, that you and I are having a conversation, a cyber attack is going to happen somewhere in the world, right? And it’s, it’s absolutely shocking, right? Yeah, all right, moving us on to the next question, which I think is also very important, what new skills and based on what you’ve said, right? Like, what new skills or approaches do you believe are essential for marketers to navigate landscapes that are this unpredictable? And how do these differ from your traditional marketing practices?

Ren Agarwal 15:42

You know, I think that there is a higher premium on strategic and multidisciplinary, even multi-dimensional thinking, you know, So marketers could traditionally get away with kind of understanding your products and services and understanding your customers’ needs, and those are still vital skills to know. But I think now the multi-dimensional thinking here, the strategic thinking, is to say that none of us operates in a vacuum, and how can I understand what’s happening so that I can better position my company to participate in the environment in which we’re operating, and that means familiarizing ourselves, educating ourselves on the issues that are relevant. You know, for example, you know, with Cyber Monday, I had to educate myself to understand, you know, as the head of marketing, what is happening on this day? What magnitude of increase in traffic? What does that increase in traffic actually do to those websites? What does that do to the revenue of those e-commerce companies? Why would they be willing to work with us? So, you know, there was a lot of self-education that’s necessary. If you are in clothing manufacturing. It’s incumbent on you to understand what are the environmental challenges, how much of the waste from the manufacturing process is kind of being diverted into landfill. How is that impacting water quality. How is that impacting communities around the world? So that’s what I mean about the multi-dimensionality and the strategic thinking that has to come forward in order for you to be an effective marketer that really understands the moment and understands how to operate and respond in the moment.

Christian Klepp 18:03

That’s great answer. And now I’m going to ask you a follow up question. And that’s not because I want to play the devil’s advocate. I’m just kind of trying to highlight everybody to the reality that a lot of B2B marketers deal with, because it’s, yes, absolutely, it’s important to have multi-dimensional thinking, strategic thinking and whatnot. But how do you how do you address the issue? And it’s a very real one of companies in the B2B space that don’t believe that it’s marketing’s place to step up and deal with these situations. How can marketers address that kind of pushback?

Ren Agarwal 18:42

Yeah. Um, well, I mean, it’s a very broad objection, isn’t it, to say we don’t believe in XYZ. So it’s hard to, you know, it’s hard to address that specifically, but what I would say is that companies that are going to be around for the long term are going to be successful. Know that they have to speak to their customers and speak to their market. I think what we’re saying in this conversation is that it’s not just about the features and the price of your product. You know, it’s it goes beyond that. You have to do those things, and I spend a lot of time working with clients to help them with the core marketing skills. Content marketing, how do you satisfy the needs of a prospective site visitor, for example, to turn them into customer and client. So those things are still important, but clients are also looking broader, and so an effective company has to be able to understand the tone and the tenor of what customers are looking for, how your own brand is going to be seen out there, because if you are just kind of ignoring the conversation that’s happening out there, you know, you’re going to come across as being tone deaf, and your competition that is really up with what’s happening is going to seize market share, because they’re going to be seen as more responsible. They’re going to be seen as more relevant, and we, we know from data that customers want to see engaged companies that don’t have their head in the sand. But I’ll also say that each one of us has a choice to make. You know, some people will say, look, I want to go work at ethical companies, or I want to go work at companies where I can make an impact. I mean, rarely do you hear somebody that says, I want to go work at a company where I don’t really care if I make an impact or not. In fact, if I found that kind of a person and they were applying in my company, I would say, you know, this is probably not the right fit for you, because we want folks that want to make an impact, want to make a positive impact, right? So, but folks have to, you know, make their own choices when it comes to those, those decisions.

Christian Klepp 21:12

Yeah, no, absolutely. So if I’m hearing you correctly, I think what you’re trying to say is that marketing needs to lead within their organization, by A. being the voice of the customer and also leading with market research. I mean, to your point like, uh, using that manufacturing example, getting that research to understand the reality of the market, the situations out there, and how the companies can adequately address those issues in a responsible manner, right?

Ren Agarwal 21:42

Yeah, absolutely, because we know that you know the next generations really care about these topics. You know, you know your dad or your granddad might not necessarily care that your favorite sporting goods manufacturer, whether they recycle their products or not. But I can assure you that the future generations that means something to them, because they have to live in this world for a long time to come.

Christian Klepp 22:13

Absolutely, absolutely, and like a lot of these documentaries, say they are going to inherit the world that we are living in right now. Yes, right, yeah. And I find that that word is, that’s a very strong word, inherit, because it’s not necessarily something of their own doing, right? But this is the world that they’re, that they’re going to come into, essentially.

Ren Agarwal 22:34

I think you’re exactly right. I mean, they, they’ve inherited something that, you know, they have some challenges, and, you know, they want to be good stewards, and they want to know that the brands that they’re working with are good stewards. You know.

Christian Klepp 22:47

That’s right.

Ren Agarwal 22:48

But also, I mean, there’s a, there’s a tremendous, almost undefinable quality to working at a company that is doing no evil, and in fact, is actively working to do right in the world. And it does, you know, we’ve been talking a lot of environment, let’s leave that aside. You know, it could be just the Cyber Monday example that I gave. Hey, I work for a company that helps other companies improve their web performance, you know. And here’s how we do it, you know. So we’re actively involved with improving the internet. I mean, that’s a really powerful sell to your employees, that you’re looking to hire, your talent, your partners, you know? It’s a fantastic story. As opposed to, yeah, we’re selling web monitoring services. That’s not quite as sexy. And if you look at the companies that have outstanding brands, you know, it’s, it’s about more than just peddling product and service. It has to be, it has to be, you know.

Christian Klepp 23:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you’re just focusing on product and service, well, then you’re just going to drown, you know, it’s an overused term, drowning that sea of sameness. You’re just going to be like everybody else.

Ren Agarwal 24:06

You’re exactly right? Then it’s, then it’s just a price war, you know, right? Is your thing… If all you’re selling is price and features, well then, okay, that’s, that’s an easy conversation. Which one’s cheaper. And whether it’s consumer or B2B marketing, it applies because if you’re just going through down a list of features, and there’s nothing else to set your brand apart, you are not going to be as successful as you can be.

Christian Klepp 24:33

Absolutely, absolutely. I know you already mentioned one example, but like, can you give us some more examples of brands or companies that have successfully adapted to volatility, and if you can, what strategies they employ that set them apart.

Ren Agarwal 24:49

Recently, one of one of our clients had a just an advisory that went out, and it came on the heels of the CrowdStrike global impact. So what happened is that the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor product triggered this outage on Windows machines, and it was a really big deal. It was the biggest outage that we’ve ever experienced. No cyber-attack has ever even come close. So what this client of ours did was… said Hey, we can actually address this, because what we help their customers do is assess third party vendor risk. And so if you’re, think of yourself as a company. I mean, say you’re Delta Airlines, and which is a true story, and they are using CrowdStrike. Delta Airlines had half a billion dollar outage, so it really hit their company financially. So if you’re Delta Airlines, CrowdStrike would be a third party provider, or to you potentially, because you may not have had a direct relationship with that so our client, Prevalent, they sent out this great tool that they have to say, hey, we’ve got this vendor risk assessment tool that we’re making available to you that you can use to kind of assess who, which one of your third parties in your kind of IT supply chain, are they doing all the things that can prevent something like this from happening? So they inserted themselves into this conversation about the CrowdStrike Falcon outage in a really smart way, you know, kind of the way we did it years ago in the Cyber Monday example. They said, we’ve got a product or service that can actually help our customers. Let’s make this available to them. And, you know, and I think that that’s going to return to them, you know, really positive things. Now Marketing was involved with that. Say, this thing is happening. What can we do? And very quickly they were able to, kind of get this tool available, put this email together, and kind of send it out to their customer base, almost immediately. And you know, that’s an example of responding to volatility in a really, really smart way,

Christian Klepp 27:24

Yeah, yeah, no, great example, yeah, I almost had a feeling before you mentioned it, I had a feeling that you were talking about Prevalent, right? I don’t suppose they did it through some of the white papers too, right?

Ren Agarwal 27:33

Yes.

Christian Klepp 27:37

Fantastic, fantastic. On that note. I mean, just building on that topic, right? And you’ve given a few, but maybe if you can give us a few more, how can volatility create opportunities for marketers? Because, you know, it’s very easy to look at this and say, oh my gosh, this is like, you know, panic mode, crisis and whatnot. But what are some ways that companies can turn these challenges into actual advantages, right? Because it’s very easy to, like go down. I call it negativity slope, right

Ren Agarwal 28:05

Yeah, well, I think it comes from a strategic review. So you know, if you’re kind of heading up marketing, or you have people in your team that you’re assigning this to, I think the question to begin to ask is, what’s happening in the markets that we play in. So identifying those, those vertical markets, if you’re in B2B, and if you’re in B2C, identifying your personas and understanding, hey, let’s do an audit and understand what are the hot topics of conversation. Now, going back to your earlier question around kind of skills that marketers need. Well, you need the ability to very quickly pick up signals from the market. You know, what are the markets saying in these verticals that are important to us? And whether you do that through social, whether you do that through survey instruments, whether you do that through other means. You know, it becomes a skill to be able to understand how to pick up those signals. So that’s the first thing you have to do. You have to do an audit. You have to take a look at what the environment looks like, what’s trending, what are the hot topics in the verticals that you play in, or in the personas that that are important to your business. Once you understand that, then you want to review your own operations. It comes down to reviewing your products and services. It comes down to reviewing your own supply chain and seeing whether you yourself are doing things that kind of contribute to that volatility. So that’s A. B. If there are things that you can do to manage that volatility through your products and services. So if you’re doing something to kind of cause it and contribute to it, well, that’s the conversation that you can bring, you know, to the executive conversation and say, hey, you know, this is a really hot issue. Let’s go back to clothing manufacturing. In our space, we need to have a position on this. And I can assure you that every executive roundtable across the world that is involved with you know, clothing manufacturing cares about this topic, you know, and they want to do something about it, you know, if they want to stay relevant and they want to have a future. So now, you know, let’s say that you’re not contributing to it, but you could do your products and services do something to help your customers, maybe manage that volatility. Well, then you need to kind of dive deep and understand, hey, how can we be relevant, just the way that, you know, we did back on Cyber Monday. How can we be relevant in this conversation? You know? Well, we can be relevant by monitoring these websites on Cyber Monday and publicizing so that everybody can share in the insights on what companies can do to improve their website performance. That’s going to help everyone across the board. So, you know, though, that’s A and B. Those are, those are two ways in which you can begin to create, you know, tactical agility, after you’ve had the strategic foresight to understand where the volatility coming from.

Christian Klepp 31:31

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, there’s some great advice. I mean, you know, keeping your finger on the pulse of the market, understanding what you’re doing an audit, I guess, of what your your current assets and resources are, and also like, you know, having that ability to manage that volatility, right? It brings me back to something that was, you know, back in the days when I was still in advertising, and it was during the time that Barack Obama became president, and unfortunately, he inherited what then became the massive financial crisis of 2008 if memory serves me well, yeah. And almost I would say one to two weeks after that announcement right, that the markets were the markets were going haywire, we were officially in a recession, or what have you, this big advertising agency called Ogilvy and Mather, right? So O&M, one of the big four A’s, they came out with these series, the series of eBooks called marketing in a recession, right? Because at the end of the day, yes, there is a recession, yes, budgets are being cut, yes, you’re cutting back on a lot of costs, but if you completely switch the marketing engine off, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. So these eBooks were basically meant to guide people through. Okay, there are, there are some budget cuts, right? You’re not, you’re you don’t have as much budget you know to use as you did before, but you can still do marketing, and this is how you can do it, right? So basically, yeah, you can say that they were reacting to the situation, but they were also using it as an opportunity to educate people. Okay, so now that you no longer have these resources at your disposal, it’s not all hopeless, right? It’s not all doom and gloom. There are options, there are solutions, there are alternatives.

Ren Agarwal 33:24

And they stepped into maybe a really quiet period where nobody’s reacting, and they say, Hey, let’s react to this, because we have something to say that can help contribute in a positive way.

Christian Klepp 33:40

Absolutely, absolutely. We brought this up in a previous conversation, but I’d like to go back to it like, so all these things that you’ve been talking about, right? And marketers reacting to all this volatility, how is this different as compared to, like, crisis communications and PR.

Ren Agarwal 33:57

Yeah, it’s a great question, and we should clarify it, because people sometimes get confused, right? You know, PR corporate communications is within the marketing function. What you want your PR, your crisis communications people to be really effective at is dealing with the media and dealing with the press. So that’s number one. Number two, they’re responsible for dealing with things that specifically impact the company and the brand, and so they have to be ready and prepared to be able to handle that. Now you can see, we haven’t said anything about customers. We haven’t said anything about being proactive. So and what happens is that marketers sometimes think, well, that PR has got that it’s volatility, it’s crisis. That sounds like PR, but in the conversation you and I have been having, I’m hoping that we’ve shown how there’s actually this incredible area that’s being completely unaddressed today, because PR is not doing it, because they’re saying, Hey, I’m dealing with the media, and I’m responsible for the company’s reputation, and marketing hasn’t picked it up and understood that, oh, there’s tremendous marketing opportunity here for us that we can actually step into. Have some strategic foresight, do that audit and then come back with tactical ways in which we can address it? Does that make sense?

Christian Klepp 35:21

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s that, you know, that ability to draw the line in the sand between, okay, so this is, this is not what this is not what crisis comms and PR should be handling. And, right?

Ren Agarwal 35:35

And they work together. I mean, there has to be partnership, you know, there has to be partnership. But the head of marketing is really the person responsible for taking a look at this topic, this volatility, and saying, You know what, we need to kind of step up and have some positions. We need to have some capability to be able to participate in this conversation. What ends up happening is that when you don’t have an approach and you haven’t thought through these issues, that’s when your brand can get snared. When volatility shows or crisis shows that directly impacts you, because you’re caught flat footed, as opposed to your proactive. You have position statements, you have products and services that can address the issue. You are educating your customers. You are vocal on these points in these conversations, so people clearly understand where you stand, and the absence of that is where you can get caught flat footed. And you know, then you need your crisis communications people to step up.

Christian Klepp 36:42

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Ren, you’ve given us a lot of like, actionable tips, I’m gonna say during this conversation, but I like to ask you for a little bit more, right? So the question is, what advice would you have for marketers on preparing their organizations internally to respond to external challenges. So how can they ensure their teams are ready to act quickly and effectively?

Ren Agarwal 37:06

Yeah, well, I think it comes from that, you know, that kind of strategic review that we talked about, because you can only be ready when you thought about the topic at hand, right? And so you need to have a part of your marketing plan, your marketing strategy that takes a look at these issues, and we identified that earlier, right looking at the verticals in which you operate, and looking at the personas that you are actively marketing to, and being really familiar with the topics that are hot button issues in those in those situations, it’s only when you’ve gone through that then you can then sit down and say, Okay, here’s how we’re going to prepare for it. And then you can have messaging platforms that say, here’s how we are actively, proactively addressing these specific issues, and that messaging platform can then help you get those key messages into your product pages, into your services pages, into your customer communications, into your employee communications, into your partner communications, right, your website, your newsletters, your collateral, your presentations. That’s the way it happens, because somebody sat down, thought about it, put that messaging platform together, and then over time, actively worked to get it into those other channels.

Christian Klepp 38:37

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, that’s fantastic advice. All right, Ren, I’ve got two more questions before I let you go, right. So here comes the bonus question. So rumor has it, or I should say, let me rephrase that, the word on the street is that you dabble in playwriting, or writing scripts for theatrical performances. So the question is, if you had the opportunity to stage one of your plays anywhere in the world, where would it be? And why?

Ren Agarwal 39:10

Oh, boy, that’s a terrific question. So since I’m based in San Francisco, I’d love for my play to be set to be produced in San Francisco, because then I can invite my family, my friends and my business colleagues, and also, San Francisco is just a wonderful place, you know, for people to visit, if they want to come visit. And there’s great energy here as well. So I’d love for that to see, to see a play produced here.

Christian Klepp 39:41

Fantastic, fantastic. Yeah, somehow I kind of felt that you were going to be more inclined to say something like La Scala in Milan or Covent Garden or something like that.

Ren Agarwal 39:51

Well, you know, maybe the play will be so successful that it’ll travel the globe, and I’ll travel the globe with it,

Christian Klepp 39:57

Maybe, maybe. But you know what, San Francisco’s a great start. Right, yeah, right, if ever. Ren, once again, thank you so much for coming on the show again, and you know, for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. So please quick intro to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Ren Agarwal 40:12

Sure. So I can be reached at Rena@StoryAZ.studio. We have a content marketing agency where we help our clients develop all manner of content, which is really core to what marketing does today. People can visit our website. Then, you know, they can. They can reach me directly. We’d love to talk to folks, and if they’re looking for consultation or just some strategy or some thoughts, happy to do that. If they’re looking for help with their content marketing, of course, we can go into that conversation as well.

Christian Klepp 40:54

Fantastic, fantastic once again. Ren, thanks for coming to the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon,

Ren Agarwal 41:01

Christian, thank you. Hope you have a great rest of your summer. All right.

Christian Klepp 41:04

Thanks bye for now. Welcome.

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How to Market Productized B2B Services

The journey for many B2B companies to transition from selling and marketing customized services to productized offerings can be a complex one. When done the right way, productizing services can help a B2B company to scale faster, more effectively, and serve a greater number of clients.

That’s why we’re talking to B2B marketing expert Eisha Armstrong (Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Vecteris) about how B2B companies can successfully sell and market productized services. During our conversation, Eisha talked about the “7 deadly sins of productization” and how B2B companies can avoid these pitfalls. She also highlighted the challenges to transitioning from a customized to a productized approach and provided us with tips on how to deal with resistance to the productization of B2B solutions.

This episode was brought to you by Leadfeeder: Know who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com/try

https://youtu.be/RxP-n3wE_-Y

Topics discussed in episode

• [1:46] The key challenges of transitioning from selling customized B2B services to productized offerings:
  • Business model transformation
  • Digital transformation
  • Cultural transformation
• [5:18] Eisha explains the spectrum of productization
• [7:57] Eisha’s point of view on generative AI
• [10:29] The 7 deadly sins of productization: The pitfalls that B2B marketers need to avoid
• [14:00] How to deal with pushback on conducting market research for productization
• [16:39] How to effectively market and sell productized B2B solutions:
  • Define the market segment and target buyers
  • Develop the right packaging and pricing
  • Create your marketing strategy and tactics
  • Identify the right sales channels
  • Make sure that the product is renewable
• [22:57] How to get management buy-in to invest in marketing for productized B2B solutions
• [26:30] Eisha’s actionable tips:
  • Why do you want to productize?
  • Can you dedicate resources to it?
  • Do you have the capital to invest in it and not see a return for a few years?

Companies and links mentioned

• Eisha Armstrong on LinkedIn
• Vecteris
• Get a free copy of the book: Productize

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Eisha Armstrong

Christian Klepp 00:01

Eisha Armstrong is the executive chairman and co-founder of Vecteris and a business leader with expertise in product innovation as well as product portfolio management. She has extensive experience launching new data and information service businesses, building executive education products, advising C-level executives and overseeing data analysis and qualitative research in a recurring revenue model. She is also the author of the Amazon best-selling books Productize: The Ultimate Guide to turning professional services into scalable products, and Fearless: how to transform a services culture and successfully productize. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. This is a show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp, and today I’m joined by someone on a mission to provide B to B companies with actionable insights, innovation and growth. Eisha Armstrong, welcome to the show.

Eisha Armstrong 01:03

Thank you, Christian. It’s so great to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:06

I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I mean, we already had a great conversation previously, but, man, this one is really gonna hit the nail on the head, because it’s so relevant to a lot of B2B companies out there, and B2B marketers. So without further ado, let’s just jump right in.

Eisha Armstrong 01:21

Great, great.

Christian Klepp 01:24

So short of staining the obvious, you’re an expert when it comes to productization, and go to market solutions for B to B professional services firms. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that has become part of your professional mission, and that’s how to sell and market productized B to B services. So if memory serves me well, you even wrote a book about it, if I’m not mistaken. So let’s kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think it’s such a complex journey for B to B companies to transition from selling customized services to productized offerings.

Eisha Armstrong 01:46

Oh, good question. Yeah. So they’re really three things going on when you start with a services model, you know where you’re selling time by experts, to selling something that’s more productized, whether it’s more packaged services that are sold based on value, or even a real product, like a data product or a software product or something like that. There are three things going on. So the first one is it’s a business model transformation. So you’re changing the way that you deliver value to your customer base and the way that you make money. And that is hard for any company to do, to transform their business model, even if you’re keeping your services, which a lot of companies do. So they want to introduce more productized services or products alongside their customized services. It’s still a business model transformation.

The second thing is that it’s a digital transformation. So most B to B professional services firms, and they choose to productize, are doing so by tech enabling the delivery of how they create value and deliver value. So maybe they’re creating, you know, software tools that they use internally, or investing in technology to like AI, to standardize the way that they deliver value, or maybe they’re creating a actual tech product, like a, you know, like I said, a software product, or even a data as a service product. And digital transformations are hard again, no matter what type of company you’re talking about.

And then the third thing that makes it hard is that it’s a cultural transformation. So what we found in our research is that the things that make B to B professional services firms great cultures, like having strong expertise, having a high bar for the quality of deliverables, things like that, can actually torpedo their attempt to productize, because when you’re in a more productized environment, especially a digital productized environment, you have to put your learner’s hat on. You take off your expert hat and put your learner’s hat on. You have to kind of lower the bar for how good things are before you show them to customers to get their feedback, you’re much more focused on collaboration rather than individual heroics. So it’s a cultural transformation, too. And so you put those three things together, a business model transformation, a digital transformation and a cultural transformation. And that is very difficult change for organizations.

Christian Klepp 04:43

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Thanks for sharing those with us. Um, I had two follow up questions just based on what you’ve said in the past couple of minutes. How do you… and I’m sure you’ve gotten this more times than you care to count. But how do you deal with pushback from companies that say, Eisha, that’s all great, but we cannot productize, right? Because we have to custom tailor our approach. Because each client is different. They have individual needs, individual different requirements, or at different stages of their business cycle. How do you deal with that?

Eisha Armstrong 05:18

The first thing I do, Christian, is I try to educate them on the fact that productization is actually a spectrum. So most of the organizations that I end up working with are actually still providing services. They’re just trying to standardize and tech enable them a little bit more so that they can achieve some benefits, like being able to scale or being able to not be key-person-dependent on how they deliver those services, so that they can assure quality as they grow and more and more people are delivering those services, and when I talk about productizing services, the way the client experiences, it may still be the same, it may still be through people, but the way that it’s delivered is more codified, more standardized, the professionals delivering it or doing it using the same tools and techniques, and perhaps the pricing has changed, so rather than being time and materials, it’s priced based on value. So there’s more packaging and standardization to the pricing, which then also makes it easier to sell using a professional sales force, and you don’t have to have your professionals be sellers as well. So there are a lot of benefits. So you can achieve just by going kind of down that first step of productization, which is what we call productized services. And then you may decide, oh, we could actually sell some products alongside our services, like a maintenance product, for example. And this is where then maybe you’ve got organizations who think about creating software products, or, like I said, data products, or training products, or things like that, where you no longer have professionals delivering them, but it’s delivered primarily through technology, for example. So I think it’s important first to just educate leaders on what I mean when I talk about productization, and then focus on those benefits of scale and quality assurance and no longer being key person dependent on your highly expert hard to find professionals.

Christian Klepp07:37

Absolutely, absolutely. That’s a good point. Okay, so that was the first follow up question. So the second follow up question is around the digital transformation aspect. So just from your professional experience and from what you’ve seen, do you feel that there’s an over reliance on technology to get things done? Like, no, no, not at all…?

Eisha Armstrong 07:57

Not at all, not at all. Yeah, and I think that’s probably a misnomer right now, especially there’s so much froth around the potential of generative AI to displace professional services, and a lot of hyperbole about how it might be used based on what I have seen Christian I do believe that generative AI creates a great opportunity for professional services. And I do believe that professional services firms who use generative AI will be more competitive than professional services firms who don’t. Do I think technology is going to completely displace professionals and professional services? No, but I tell all of the leaders that I talk to, if you’re not actively experimenting with how to use generative AI in the delivery of your services, you’re already behind, and here’s why. Because I do work with companies who, for example, have automated using generative AI, 85% of code creation. That’s pretty significant. I work with accounting firms who have automated between 40 to 50% of how they do audits using generative AI, law firms who’ve automated 50 to 75% of how they do discovery using generative AI, marketing agencies who’ve automated 30 to 50% of how they do content creation or design work using generative AI, market research firms who’ve automated 75% of how they do market research using generative AI. These are not made up examples and so, and this is still, I would say, relatively early in the nascency of the technology. So if you’re not already experimenting with it, you’re probably behind it’s okay, go ahead, start experimenting with it. But this idea that tech is is being overused, I think, is absolutely false.

Christian Klepp 09:58

And I’m glad you brought that up. Because that’s a big part about, you know, what the show is about, right? Like it’s dispelling, you know, debunking these myths, dispelling this information, and coming back with factual insights, fact based information that people can have a more informed overview, right? Okay, speaking of which, that’s a great segue to the next question, which is about the seven deadly sins of productization. So talk to us about that and the pitfalls that B2B marketers need to avoid.

Eisha Armstrong 10:29

Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So when we did a research study back in 2000-2001, looking at why is it hard for B to B services firms to productize and what we found is that there are seven common mistakes that organizations make when they try to productize services, and they’re very predictable mistakes, and they range from ignoring the cultural change that has to happen to designing products for problem that doesn’t exist, so designing products that don’t solve the customer’s problem, designing products in a vacuum, like not getting early customer feedback on product design, to letting the fear of cannibalization hinder their sales and marketing efforts. So we catalog these seven mistakes, or deadly sins, as we call them, in our first book called Productize, and then proceeded to detail how to avoid making those mistakes. So for example, the mistake I talked about, where you design a product, but there’s not a customer problem that it solves. That’s actually something that happens a lot with B to B services firms, because perhaps you’ve had a client or two clients who have asked for creation of something that could be turned into a product. And we see a lot of firms then assume that that means that there’s a market for it, and they skip that very vital step that your audience knows it’s incredibly important, which is market research. And they don’t go out and validate and… does this solve a real problem? And we say the best products solve urgent and expensive customer problems, and is the market segment for who has that problem… Is it an attractive market segment for us? So is it one that we can easily reach, or is it one that’s big? Is it one that has a lot of budget and willingness to pay? Is it a market segment that’s growing? Kind of those basic, again, market research questions we were seeing a lot of firms not ask until they’d already developed a product, put it out in the market, and then we’re wondering why it wasn’t selling. So what we try to do is, again, outline those seven deadly sins and then talk about easy ways that companies could try to overcome those mistakes. So for example, again, in the case of designing product that doesn’t solve a problem, how can you quickly do market research without taking months and months and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars doing research? How can you kind of iteratively create products and get customer feedback on them? How can you design products where you don’t cannibalize your existing services revenue, things like that?

Christian Klepp 13:34

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And you brought something up earlier, which is a great segue into the next question about the importance of market research and developing that right strategy to productize these services. And I think we had a discussion about this in our previous conversation, you know, dealing with clients that say, Eisha, listen, let’s just skip the research part. Okay? Because we we know who our clients are, and we know what their problems are and what they need. Yeah? Your thoughts?

Eisha Armstrong 14:00

Yeah, I do hear that a lot, and I try to gently push back by one talking about how you do lean market research. So again, market research, that doesn’t take a lot of time, doesn’t cost a lot of money, to just validate your hypotheses. And I think that helps, because I think there’s this misunderstanding, especially among visionary leaders, who have a very confident, a lot of confidence, in their product idea, that, like you said, they know the market, they don’t need to do the research. And if you could say, well, can we just take a few weeks and just validate your hypotheses that will help us not only make sure that we’re making investments in the right place, because products require upfront investment to build, and digital products can be quite expensive to build, so let’s derisk your investment by doing a little bit of hypothesis validation and at the. Same time, we can, in our market research process, start to identify beta customers and get feedback on pricing and packaging, and ask the question, you know, would you be willing to be a paid beta customer? And if people start saying yes before you’ve even built the product, then you know, you’re on to something so kind of putting that kind of dual purpose around it, which is, yeah, we’re going to do market research, but we’re also going to start to engage in commercial conversations and see if we can get some early customers, is another way to overcome that objection I don’t need to do market research.

Christian Klepp 15:37

Fantastic, fantastic. So if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s, I always like to call it, like repackaging it a little bit, right? Like trying to highlight the commercial opportunities that this type of research presents, rather than look, this is going to be a massive investment that is going to take six months, and what you get at the end of it is this beautiful, 200 page report. (laugh)

Eisha Armstrong 16:00

What we’d like to deliver at the end is strong recommendations on not only that you’re on the right path with the problem you’re trying to solve, but here are the product features you should build, first, second, third. Here’s the pricing, here’s the packaging, and ideally, here’s a short list of people who’ve said they want to be paid beta customers.

Christian Klepp 16:21

Let’s appreciate that we we have about 30 or 40 minutes, right? But like, walk us through the process of effectively marketing and selling productized B to B solutions. So specifically, what are the key things that B2B marketers need to be doing differently, and what are the key components required for this approach?

Eisha Armstrong 16:39

Yeah. Great question. And I will say I have a book coming out in September about this. So yeah, (laugh) so very top of mind for me. So what we found in our in our work with companies who are productizing, is that it was one thing to build a product that solves an urgent and expensive problem is, you know, got a good product features, and it’s quite another thing to successfully commercialize it, because if you’re traditionally selling services, the go-to-market motions for selling products are very different, because you have to take more of a market mindset. So what we outlined in our new research that, again, is coming out in this book in September, kind of the 5 key areas that need to be addressed for successful commercialization of products. The first one is one I already talked about, and that is, who are you selling to? What is the market segment? Who is the buyer, who is the user, and asking those questions like, Is it an attractive market segment? Is it a growing market segment? Is it one that we can easily reach both to generate leads and to sell to, if not, what type of investment is going to be required? So really defining the who is the market segment is very important, and that’s something that is surprisingly hard for a lot of B to B services firms to do, because a lot of them have kind of made their money by being all things to all people. And that’s hard to do when you create a product. You need to be very clear on who your end buyer is, who your end user is, for the product to be successful. So that’s the first of the five.

The second one is the how are we going to monetize this product? And this is where we get into these questions of pricing and packaging. So how do we package features, unlock different features at different package levels, levels of usage, things like that. What’s the best way to package the product in different ways that map to our different types of buyers? And then, how do we price it? So what is the pricing model? What are the price points? And again, when you’re pricing time and materials, that is much easier than when you’re pricing a product, especially if you’re trying to figure out how to grow the product over time. So that’s the second one is the monetization.

The third one is then marketing. So how are we going to generate leads, especially if our product is designed to reach a new market segment that perhaps we haven’t previously marketed to, or where we have less brand recognition than services. If it’s our existing services customers, that’s a little bit easier. But then we have to figure out, how are we telling a product story versus a services story? So what’s the value proposition? What’s the messaging? And then what are the lead generation tactics? All of that falls into kind of that third category of marketing.

The fourth category is your sales channel. So if you’re, you know, let’s say an accounting firm or a law firm, and you’ve been selling, you know, with your partners, right? You have Doer-sellers partners who sell and do business development, and they also deliver the work. They’re probably. Probably not going to be skilled product sellers. So are you going to set up a new sales channel if you already have a separate sales force that’s separate from delivery, but they’ve been selling services, how are you going to teach them to sell products? So making those decisions around sales channel and how you’re going to maybe shift compensation or skill sets around sales channels, very important.

And then the last one is, how are you going to make sure that the product is renewable? So a lot of the organizations that we’re working with, when they decide to productize, they’re doing so because they want to create more recurring streams of revenue so they create, let’s say, like a subscription software product or subscription data product. And the key to making the economics of a subscription product work is the renewability rate and reducing customer churn, and that requires a whole separate set of capabilities in your organization around customer onboarding, customer success that a lot of firms may not have in place. So those five areas, it’s a lot, I know, but those are all things that we found critical to successful commercialization of products.

Christian Klepp 21:22

Fantastic, fantastic. I’m going to date myself here and say these are the Cliff Notes people, right? Like, do you remember those things from high school?

Eisha Armstrong 21:30

Yes, yes, yes.

Christian Klepp 21:31

Um, so these are the Cliff Notes for how to market and sell B to B productized services. So let me just quickly recap, because I’ve been furiously taking notes as you were talking, right? So the first one is defining your target audience and who you’re selling to. Okay, we don’t want any Swiss Army knives of of this category or that category. Correct.

Eisha Armstrong 21:53

Correct.

Christian Klepp 21:54

How are we gonna monetize? I think was the second one.

Eisha Armstrong 21:58

Correct pricing and packaging.

Christian Klepp 22:00

Pricing and packaging. Then comes the marketing bit. The marketing piece, how are we going to generate leads, right? Is it a product versus services story, then the sales channel and the final one is, how do we ensure that the product is renewable?

Eisha Armstrong 22:16

Yes, exactly. Very, good.

Christian Klepp 22:17

Fantastic, fantastic. On that note, I had a follow up question on your third point marketing, because this is a Marketing Show, and there’s a lot of marketers listening to this saying, okay, that’s fantastic, Eisha, but how do I get senior management or the board to buy into marketing, right? If they’ve, especially if they’ve never done it before, right? And these are maybe 8 times out of 10 people that are like, okay, marketing, is it like social media stuff, or we don’t need that because we already have a website. So, I mean, you know, I’m oversimplifying it here, but how do you deal with the pushback on, like, investing in marketing to get all this off the ground?

Eisha Armstrong 22:57

Yeah, so again, I think it depends, at least for the companies that I’m working with on whether or not they are targeting a new market or the same market. If it is the same market, it is going to be hard to convince them to invest significantly more in marketing assuming they’ve been successful. Now that doesn’t mean that they don’t need product marketing expertise, but if their business case for productizing is just around selling products to existing services customers, then it’s going to be hard to make the business case that they need a lot of additional marketing resources. But I see a lot of companies come to me and they say, Hey, we’ve developed this idea for a software product to sell to a more price sensitive market segment, who perhaps, let’s say you’re a agency, and you’ve done bespoke media planning for large companies, and now you have a tool that you’ve created that can automate some of the media planning, and perhaps you could sell it to smaller companies who can’t afford your bespoke media planning services. Okay, interesting idea, but that’s an entirely new market segment for you, a more price sensitive DIY market segment. So how are you going to generate leads in that market segment? How are you going to build brand awareness and know like and trust in that market segment? Well, you’re going to have to invest in marketing. And so what we do is we try to educate those leaders then on what a good marketing investment would look like. And honestly, we just use benchmarks. We’re like, Okay, this is what a software company spends, on average, on marketing, you know, as a percentage of revenue. So this is what you’re going to need to spend on marketing if you want to sell a software product to an entirely new market segment. And we put that in the business case, and then that’s something that they consider before they make a go, no go decision in developing the product, ideally, but we just try to educate them on the investment that’s going to be required in order for them to be successful.

Christian Klepp 25:14

Yep, sometimes I call it like it’s a steep climb up the mountain, right? It’s, and I suppose it’s to your point, right? You have to understand, or marketers have to understand, what these folks in senior management are looking for, right?

Eisha Armstrong 25:31

Yeah. And honestly, at the end of the day, Christian, it’s pretty simple. They’re looking for sales leads, sure. So we do, you know, a lot of educating on, okay, if you’re going to invest in marketing, how do you measure the return? Well, you measure the return looking at leads, MQLs and SQLs, you know, it’s very simple. This is, this is not something we came up with, it’s something that’s been used by 1000s of companies. And if you can, you can point to lead generation of, you know, qualified leads that eventually turn into real sales opportunities. It’s a lot easier to justify the investment.

Christian Klepp 26:07

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Eisha, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, right? But let’s just imagine that there’s somebody listening to this conversation out there that wants to act upon the stuff immediately. So what are like… Maybe 3 to 5 things that you could tell them they can implement immediately based on what you said.

Eisha Armstrong 26:30

Yeah, first one is get very clear if you want to productize why? So is it because you want to reduce key person dependency? Is it because you want to grow at a faster rate than you’re currently growing. Is it because it you know, in 5 to 10 years you want to sell your business, you know you’ll get a higher valuation if you’re more productized. But getting really clear on the why is important, because that will inform the types of productization investments you make and the way that you make that vision come to life. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that this cannot be an off the side of the desk job. You have to devote dedicated resources to it. And if you’re not willing to do that, you will not be successful, because in a B to B services company, client needs always come first. And so if you don’t have someone who’s dedicated to productization, their time will always be taken up by more urgent client needs. You know, revenue that we can bring in the door this quarter versus revenue that we may not see for a couple years. And then that leads me to my third one, which is that this is a longer investment horizon than you’re probably used to. So if you don’t have the capital to invest in it and not see a return for a couple of years. Don’t go down this path.

Christian Klepp 27:50

Absolutely, there is a little bit, if I’m hearing you correctly, there’s a little bit of risk involved, but it’s also like you have to make that long term investment to see those returns, and they’re not always immediate, right? They takes time.

Eisha Armstrong 28:05

Correct, and there are ways to de risk that investment again, by getting, you know, early clients to co create the product with you, and perhaps, you know, fund part of it, get those early paid beta customers, do a lot of iteration, but you’re not going to see significant returns in year one on your productization efforts.

Christian Klepp 28:29

Okay, a status quo that you passionately disagree with and why? And I’m sure you have plenty, but just pick one.

Eisha Armstrong 28:39

So I’ve been doing a lot of just kind of personal explanation recently around the power of our minds to stretch us beyond our limits. And I think that’s because I’m turning 50 next month, if you can believe it, and I’m wondering kind of what else is possible. So I’ve been doing research around, you know, we just finished watching the Olympics, and kind of how Olympians overcome false beliefs that they may tell themselves, limiting beliefs that they may tell themselves and and I’m really interested in how I apply that in my own kind of, you know, life as it relates to either physical challenges or professional challenges, as well as how I start to impart that on my own children. So I don’t know if that’s so much a status quo, but I think it’s just a an area of interest that we’re probably capable of a lot more than we think we are. And how do we change our mindset to kind of push through those limiting beliefs that we might have… Is something I’m really interested in.

Christian Klepp 29:49

Wow, that was very profound. And if I may say so, you’re a very young 50 year old. (laugh)

Eisha Armstrong 30:00

Yeah, well, I tried to start to put this in practice. So this summer, I did my first technical mountain climbing experience in the Cascades with my brother. And I think this is a key to longevity, and at least feeling younger than perhaps you are is the how can we continue to challenge ourselves and push ourselves beyond what we thought was possible. Someone had told me five years ago, I would have done a technical climb to the top of the mountain. I would have said, No way, but I did it. Yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp 30:31

Well, good for you. Good for you for doing that and for having the courage to do that, right? I mean, there’s many people out there that would have been like, no thanks. Not for me, and it comes back to what you said about self-limiting beliefs about, you know, feeling like you’re in this. And a lot of people tend to slide back into this. It’s a combination of the comfort zone. It’s the insecurities that you keep telling yourself you can’t do it. And you know, the more you tell yourself that you know, I can’t do it, well, chances are you’re eventually just not going to do it, right? And there are people, and I’m sure you have those in your life, the people that you surround yourself with, that give you that little nudge out the door, to quote the Lord of the Rings, right? Just get out there. Take that risk, you know. And if it didn’t work, at least you tried, right?

Eisha Armstrong 31:18

Yeah, totally.

Christian Klepp 31:20

Absolutely. Okay. Now here comes the bonus question, okay, a place that’s been on your bucket list that you’ve always wanted to visit, and why?

Eisha Armstrong 31:32

Oh, goodness, Ireland. Yeah, so my three out of four grandparents have strong Irish they’ve all passed but strong Irish backgrounds, and I’ve had a lot of friends who’ve gone to Ireland and family and have just said it’s beautiful, and I’ve not been able to visit yet. So that’s a place that’s high on my bucket list. Would love to take my children there and just spend time driving around the country and seeing the scenery and getting to know the people.

Christian Klepp 32:02

Fantastic, fantastic. And then let’s not forget the music. They have beautiful music there.

Eisha Armstrong 32:06

They do, yes, yeah.

Christian Klepp 32:08

It’s a little it’s a little melancholy for some but there is a beauty in it, right? And it’s amazing how some of that has transferred over to the United States. I mean, if you look at like the the Civil War period, there were a lot of like these, these songs and all of that that have Irish influences very strong, right? Like with the violin and so forth, right?

Eisha Armstrong 32:29

That’s right, yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp32:31

Well, Eisha, we could go on and on and on and talk about this, but you know, in the interest of time, I’d like to thank you for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Eisha Armstrong 32:45

Yeah. So Eisha Armstrong. Have been on this route of how do you productize services my entire professional career. Launched my own firm in 2018 called Vecteris, which is a great way to get exposed to our research that we’ve done that’s Vecteris.com, and as I’ve mentioned, you mentioned, have written a couple of books about this. Have another one coming out in September on how do you commercialize productized services. And best way to reach me personally is through LinkedIn. Eisha Armstrong and love to connect with people. Just let me know that you heard me on the podcast, and we can connect.

Christian Klepp33:31

Fantastic, fantastic. And congratulations on the launch of the new book. That must be super exciting.

Eisha Armstrong 33:37

It is. I’m very excited about it and very glad that we’re I’m done with the writing phase.

Christian Klepp33:44

I bet! And just the whole like editing and proofreading and, oh gosh, I found another mistake, you know, like that kind of,…

Eisha Armstrong 33:50

Yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp 33:52

Fantastic. Fantastic. Once again. Eisha, thank you so much for coming on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Eisha Armstrong 33:57

Thank you, Christian. Bye. Bye.

Christian Klepp 33:59

Goodbye for now, welcome.

View Details

How to Fix Marketing That Isn’t Working

Although many B2B companies invest heavily in marketing campaigns, their efforts don’t always translate into actual sales or marketing engagement. Where are these companies falling flat in their marketing efforts? How can B2B marketers fix this and start generating results?

That’s why we’re talking to Marketing Max (Founder, Marty Capital) about how B2B marketers can identify what’s not working and effectively fix their marketing initiatives. During our conversation, Max talked about the pitfalls that B2B marketers should avoid and what they should be doing instead. He also highlighted how having clear messaging, consistent touchpoints, and an understanding of customer needs enables B2B marketers to implement campaigns that are effective, impactful, and deliver the right outcomes.

https://youtu.be/dD1TWzok5kU

Topics discussed in episode

• Why your marketing is not working [1:38]
  • The marketing message is more product-focused and not benefit-focused
  • Maximizing investment: The target audience needs to see and hear your brand at least 5 times
  • The lack of social proof
• Focusing on only a few vs many marketing channels? [9:35]
• The importance of clear messaging, consistent touch points and understanding customer needs [15:19]
• How often companies should review messaging and ICP [20:34]
• Marketing is much more difficult than people think [23:09]
• Marketing Max’s response to those who hesitate to invest in marketing [27:43]
• The importance of analyzing your website data and continuous A|B testing [32:29]

Companies and links mentioned

• Max (Marketing Max) Bidna on LinkedIn
• Marty Capital
• MarketingMax.io
• Crazy Egg

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Marketing Max, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for change makers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by Einblick Consulting, helping you to stand up in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp, and today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies to fix their marketing and grow sustainably. So Mr. Marketing Max, welcome to the show, sir.

Marketing Max 01:04

Thanks for having me, Christian, good to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:07

Really looking forward to this conversation, Max, so let’s dive in, because we are going to touch on a subject today, which you and I will both agree, a lot of marketers are ashamed to admit. All right, and what is that? It’s the real reason why your marketing isn’t working, and how to fix it, right? So why don’t we kick off the conversation with this question, despite investing heavily in marketing campaigns, a lot of B2B companies find that their efforts are not translating into sales or marketing engagement. Why do you think that is?

Marketing Max 01:38

I think it boils down to really two things. Number one is having a marketing message that people actually want to hear or learn more about. I talk a lot about finding the right marketing message is much like finding like the juiciest carrot that you could possibly dangle in front of your target audience. And I think most companies in general, but especially B2B companies, I find there’s a lot more B2B companies than I work with, than B to C companies. They simply just tell people what their product is and their entire marketing strategy, whether they’re trying to get their message across in an ad or on their website or in a cold email, is simply just telling people what their product does, and they don’t actually dangle what whatever the juiciest carrot would potentially be for their target customer. And normally, nine times out of 10, the juiciest carrot is the outcome of actually working with you or buying your product or signing up for your service. So I think number one is the marketing message that most companies spend lots of money on, or even little bit of money, but it tends to be the big chunk of what they have. You’re spending your precious dollars on marketing, and you’re putting that marketing spend behind messaging that’s just falling short, and that’s not actually compelling or intriguing at all. So that’s the first thing. And I think the second thing is people really don’t understand the rule of fifths. I talk about this a lot too. I think a lot of companies just run a Facebook ad or send a cold email or post on Instagram or send a LinkedIn message or jump on a podcast, and they expect that a bunch of people to see that ad, see that LinkedIn post, see that cold email and immediately book a demo call or immediately sign up for the product or give the SaaS tool a free trial, or whatever it is. And the truth is, there was a study done a number of years ago by Harvard that said someone needs to see or hear your brand at least five times if they are going to even decide if they’re going to purchase your product or not. Now, that number, oftentimes people say, is much higher these days, because that study was done a long time ago. And so, you know, today, given the amount of content we see as humans and the amount of content we digest, scrolling through Instagram, scrolling through Facebook, driving around more billboards, more logos, we just see so many more things, and there’s a lot more competition in the market now. As the barrier to entry to build a business, a product, a service, whatever has gotten much lower that a lot of people say that number is actually closer to 15, but I still like to call it the rule of fifths, and just call that out as you know.

The second reason why a lot of people don’t maximize their investment into marketing, whatever that may be, in whatever marketing channel that is, is you need to be everywhere in front of your target customers every time they hop on LinkedIn. You should be pumping out enough content so that you know, one of every three times they hop on LinkedIn, they’re seeing your face, you should be running so many retargeting ads that you just feel like or that the customer just feels like you are everywhere. And if you can do that with a really good message to kind of go back to the first point, with a really good carrot, as I like to call it, then you’re going to start to really see success with your marketing. And you know, you’re going to get on demo calls, people say, oh my god, I’m. You everywhere, or wow, like, I really love this message, or Wow, you you have exactly what I’m looking for. And oftentimes, what people are looking for is not your product or service. They’re looking for the outcome. It’s very, very, very different. People aren’t looking for Facebook ads as a service, right? What people are looking for is a 2x return on ad spend these days, or a 4x return on ad spend, you know, a long time ago. So a lot of marketing agencies, just to use an example, a lot of marketing agencies will say, you know, we help you grow with Facebook ads. It’s like, okay, great, I’m not looking just for a Facebook ads agency. What I’m really looking for is someone that is going to generate a 2x ROI or help me lower my CAC 30% and so by leading with that messaging, you know, we lower ecommerce brands cost to acquire customer by 30% and plastering that everywhere, you’re going to start to see a lot more success, especially if you have… then the third thing. And forgive me if I’m rambling, but I guess, like the honorable mention, the third thing is social proof. So if you have testimonials, case studies, social proof to back up that carrot, whatever that outcome is, you know you’re hitting the trifecta of marketing, and you’re going to start to see a lot more bang for your buck with your time, energy and money investment into marketing.

Christian Klepp 06:18

Absolutely, absolutely. And yes, I have seen that Harvard study, and it’s interesting how many companies are missing out on that, but I have two follow up questions based on what you’ve talked to us about in past couple of minutes. So the first one is regarding messaging, and I agree it’s so important to get that right. But from your experience, why do you feel that so many B to B companies… I feel that like they’re always the repeat offenders, right? Why do they always default to the features instead of actually thinking about the outcome or the benefits to the target audience, the customers?

Marketing Max 06:53

Because, and I don’t mean this in a negative way towards anyone listening or towards anyone that does this, but it’s the easiest, it’s the easiest, most lazy way to do marketing. It’s, you know, we spend tons of time and energy and money building out features. Right? If you’re a SaaS business, you’re spending all your time building out features. You’re building, you’re spending a ton of time on sales calls with people who are saying, Hey, can you add this feature? Hey, does your tool do this? And your conversations oftentimes are about, especially in the early days, they’re about features. And again, you’re just spending a lot of your internal time in meetings and everything, saying, When is this feature going to launch? When is this feature going to launch? When in reality, people don’t care about the feature. They care about the outcome of the feature, right? So if in Canva, let’s just use Canvas as an example. If in Canva, you know, people are saying, hey, I really want to be able to remove the background right? They want a background remover, which they have, but let’s just say, right, people are requesting that, and everyone requested the background remover. Well, you could certainly run an ad the moment you drop the background remover. You can send an email to all of you, the people who have ever signed up for a free trial but maybe didn’t convert. You can send an email that says, hey, we now have a background remover, but it’s so much more powerful to say you can now remove these specific backgrounds for your podcast interview clips, right? Like talking about, like the outcome of it, right? So figure out who the core ICP is and what are they using the feature to accomplish. That is what you want to put in your messaging, because at the end of the day, people don’t care about the feature, even though the conversations are about it, what they really care is the outcome of using the feature. And I think people just spend too much time, energy and money on the feature itself. And so it’s one dimensional thinking. Maybe lazy isn’t the best, most PC word for it, but it’s one dimensional thinking. It’s what you’re spending most of your time, energy and money doing is building out the features and selling the features, when, in reality, no one cares about the features. You know, people don’t care that the Lamborghini’s seat, you know, was made with a particular kind of leather. What they care about is, you know, feeling comfortable when they drive. What they feel about it. What they want to know is, you know, is it going to help me look cool in front of my friends when they get into the seat, right? They want the outcome of the product of the feature, not the product of the feature itself.

Christian Klepp 09:12

Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. So that was follow up question number one. Follow up question number two is, you said you were talking about the need to be everywhere. And what do you say… And I’m sure there’s a camp out there that says, well, we feel that it’s better to just focus on a couple of channels and be great at them, rather than be in multiple channels and be mediocre at all of them. So what are your thoughts on that?

Marketing Max 09:35

I think it’s a fine line. My response would be twofold. One, if you’re going to be on two platforms or two channels, be everywhere on those two channels, right? If you’re going to really focus on LinkedIn, don’t post once a day. Post two to three times a day, you know, like, comment on 100 comments a day. Just like, if you’re especially if you’re going to niche down to just two. Man, like, go hard. So, like, you could always be doing more. And I just see so many companies, they’re like, Oh, we get all of our clients from LinkedIn. Okay, well, how from LinkedIn? Well, we post our CEO posts once a day, and we send out 50 cold messages from their account a day. Well, why isn’t the rest of the team posting? Why isn’t the CEO posting twice a day? Has the CEO done an audit, or hired someone to do an audit of what kind of their content drives the most amount of inbound leads, or the most amount of book calls from their profile? Like, let’s figure out how to quadruple down. Not just double down, but quadruple down on it if you’re going to focus on one or two channels.

The other comment is, there are ways to, quote, unquote, be everywhere without actually needing to spend a whole lot of time, energy and money on other platforms. So what I recommend clients do is they spend $5 a day on a retargeting campaign on Facebook ads. And I can’t tell you how many clients I have recommended this to, where I say, put a pixel on your website, a Facebook pixels on your website if you don’t have one already, and create a simple $5 a day retargeting ad that says, anytime someone visits the website, show them one of these three ads. And in a perfect world, those three things are social proof, right? They’re testimonials, because once someone’s already visited the website, ideally, the landing page that they visited makes that outcome claim, right? Decrease, you know, your time spent managing projects by 30% or whatever. And then the next time they open up Instagram, the next time they open up Facebook, in some cases now, the next time they open up WhatsApp, they they will see an ad proving that you can do what you said you’re going to do. And so you don’t need a whole lot of discipline. You don’t need to hire a $5,000 a month agency. You can hire a person literally on Fiverr, or on freelancer.com or Upwork for 500 bucks to set up the campaign if you’re really nervous about it. If you’re not, you can go on YouTube and learn how to set up a $5 a day retargeting campaign with social proof. And I can’t tell you how many people, like I do a lot of speaking at conferences, and everyone raises their hands when I say this, and says, Max, how do we track ROI? How do we track you know that this is gonna work. And my simple answer to everyone is, you don’t, you simply don’t track ROI, because not everything in marketing is meant to be tracked, right? There’s this huge article that went viral this week on LinkedIn about how Nike is royally, royally messing up because their new CEO shifted their entire marketing strategy from brand awareness to performance, and they are getting eaten alive by competitors for the first time In Nike’s history. Right? Why is that? Well, number one, they’re a consumer brand, and brand is super, super, super important. But number two, no company should be 100% performance or 100% brand. You need to find the equilibrium point for you. And so, you know, spending $5 a day, which is what $150 a month on the concept that you are going to get in front of people who already know you exist, who, in some way, shape or form, are interested in what you have to sell them. You’re going to get in front of them multiple times with a message that is very compelling, because it’s someone else vouching for you. If you use testimonials, videos or quotes or whatever. Like you’d be an idiot not to spend $150 on that every single month. Like, no offense to anyone. I don’t mean to keep offending your audience, but you’d be an idiot not to do that because people need to see or hear your brand at least five times before they decide if they’re going to purchase or not. So I get on the phone with a lot of clients. I’m like, What are your five touch and everyone says, Yeah, we do that. I’m like, What are your five touch points? Well, they’re emails. Okay, let’s take a look at your emails. And every single email is asking for a call or offering a free trial or giving a, you know, 20% off coupon. It’s your sales, sales, sales, sales, sales, right? By having a simple brand awareness $5 a day retargeting campaign, yes, you are quote, unquote, selling them. But by not having a button there, or by making the button something very informal, you are significantly increasing your conversion rate because you’re getting Top of Mind with people all the time. It’s why GEICO spends billions of dollars a year to be in every single commercial break, in every single TV commercial because they know that someone needs to see or hear GEICO a bunch of times before they decide when they recognize they need insurance. I’m going to go with Geico, right? You might have a worse product, you might be more expensive, you might have a bunch of headwinds, but if you are top of mind when it comes time for someone to say, You know what? I’m finally ready to buy this thing. We’re finally ready to hire a podcasting agency. We’re finally ready to, you know, get a project management tool. The person is going to choose the one that’s super top of mind and that is more educated on more than just based on one feature, or more than based on just one price.

Christian Klepp 15:04

Absolutely, I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is about the importance of having the following to fix marketing efforts, and top level, I’m happy to repeat, clear messaging, consistent touch points, and understanding customer needs.

Marketing Max 15:19

All three of those things that you just mentioned are table stakes. You know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you have never learned marketing, you won’t know what those three things are, or you haven’t given much thought to them, that’s totally fine, but spending 30 minutes or an hour with a old fashioned pen and paper notepad and writing down really clearly who your target customer is, what podcast they listen to, what influencers they follow on any platform, even if it’s B2B influencer on LinkedIn or whatever, right? What’s their age, what’s their name, What city do they live in? What car do they drive? Getting really clear on who your ideal customer profile is helps you with all three of those things, and then it’ll start to unlock opportunities for you, because you’ll be, oh, maybe we should sponsor this podcast, or, Oh, maybe we should reach out to this influencer for our partnership, or, Oh, maybe if we can’t afford that, we should at least look at what kind of content is in that podcast, or what kind of content that influencer creates, that we can create that content for our social channels. So that’s the first thing is, it’s table stakes, and doing a simple exercise like that will unlock so many doors for you. The second thing is, you are not going to hit the nail on the head the first go around, like if you did that exercise and you said, Okay, our target customer is, you know, Zoe, 32 year old, head of social media, lives in New York City, doesn’t drive a car because she lives in New York City, you know, makes $250,000 a year, works for a company that does over $100 million a year. She follows these influencers on Instagram, these influencers on LinkedIn. She listens to this podcast, right? If that’s who you think it is, and you don’t, and you haven’t been in business for a long time, you don’t have a ton of data, that person might change. Maybe it’s actually the person below them, like, not the social media manager that’s in charge of social media for that huge company. But maybe it’s, you know, the the smaller person underneath them, maybe it’s the CEO, right? That person is going to change. And so I think just having the awareness to know that you need to stick with one of those for three months or six months, but then having the awareness to know that that might change in three months or six months, and then eventually, as you grow, you might have multiple ICPs, right, depending on your features, as we talked about earlier, all of those things are really, really, really important. And I think a lot of people just realize, okay, we can talk about our features, slap it together on a LinkedIn post or on a Facebook ad, or on a LinkedIn ad or whatever, we’ll try to update our G2 bio, right? If you’re a SaaS business and you want to get listed on G2 we try to, you know, update G2 and, you know, we’ll go from there. But no one actually takes the time. Very few people actually take the time to really think through who is our ICP, what is the message that we can put in front of them that gets them to say, what is the message we can put in front of them that get gets them to say, I need to book a call with these guys right now, or I need to start a free trial right now. And it’s not going to be a feature. You don’t win on features. You win on outcomes, no matter what you sell, no matter what you sell, right? It’s why, like a weight loss pill. I don’t want to say like weight loss pill, but like, it’s why it’s called a weight loss pill. Their ads don’t say we have a really good flavor, people like our the taste of our weight loss pill, or a weight loss like smoothie, more than other people, they say, we’ll help you lose weight. The same thing applies in B2B, the same thing. What are you going to help these people do? What is your software going to help these people do? What is your team, if you’re a service, going to help these people do? What is the outcome? We’ll help you grow. That’s but it’s you’re going to help me grow. Great. So is every other agency. So is every other SaaS platform. But like, what do I want to grow with? What kind of growth do I want? Do I want affordable growth? Do I want fast growth? Like, does your ICP typically take five years to accomplish their goals, and you’re going to help them do it in a year. Amazing is that what they really want? They’re really concerned about speed. Are they really concerned about budget? We’ll help you grow faster on a smaller budget. Okay, that’s interesting. What do these people really want? They don’t just want growth. They don’t just want to save 20 minutes a day answering emails like superhuman or whatever that tool is, you know, they don’t want to take back their time. That’s cute, but you know, come up with three or four. Run them as Facebook ads, or run them a social posts and see which one does best. AB test the living crap out of it.

Christian Klepp 20:09

Yeah, no, absolutely. So we’ve talked about messaging and having that right and relevant messaging. We’ve talked about thinking through your ICP. From your professional experience, what would you say… How often should companies go back and review this messaging, this ICP, to see if it’s, you know, to your point, still relevant or not, or has that changed? Has it expanded? Etc.

Marketing Max 20:34

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t think people think about this. I think first and foremost, you need to come up with like, four and A|B test them over the course of a month. If you don’t have budget for Facebook ads, you know, install this tool called Crazyegg.com. it’s like 30 or 40 bucks a month, and you can AB test it on your website. And you could literally change the headline on your homepage or on any page, to three or four different things, and then see, you can track a button click, and you can see, depending on the headline shown to the people who visit that page, which headline gets the most amount of people to click book a call or book a demo or sign up for a free trial, or whatever it is, right, whatever your main CTA call to action button is. You should do that over the course of, you know, 30 days, depending on how many people visit your website, or depending on how big your Facebook ad budget is to test. Once you have that message, I would say every three to six months, I would even calendar block or set an email like on snooze for three to six months, because the last thing you want to do is not reintroduce some new variations of that to test before it starts to not work anymore. Either that audience is going to get tapped out, or the language, like the lingo of the space, is going to change, or people’s needs change, right? Your target ICPs needs, what they really, really, really want, will change, depending on the economy, depending on the time of year, even sometimes, right, like slower months. Like, what do you really want in the summertime, if you run kind of a seasonal business, or if things are way slower for you, if your target ICP is way slower in the summer, like, you know, changing the tagline to, we can help you do accomplish this ideal outcome in the slow months is really compelling, right? So you want to proactively do it. You don’t just want to do this when things stop working like anything else in business.

Christian Klepp 22:30

Absolutely, absolutely. Max. I’m going to throw this wild card out there, because you brought it up a couple of times now, so I’m seeing a bit of a pattern, right? And it’s on the question of technology, right? You’ve mentioned a couple of platforms or software that people can use. And I think where I’m going with this question is, do you feel sometimes that there are B2B marketers and B2B companies out there that get so either inundated or seduced by that technology that they let the technology take over instead of actually doing good marketing, right. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, what’s the fine line between good marketing and actually using the technology to support that marketing?

Marketing Max 23:09

I don’t think people, you know, to use the word lazy again. I don’t think people get lazy because they rely on technology too much. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think people think marketing is easier than it is regardless of the technology they use, regardless of their industry, their product, their service. There’s this very famous quote, and I forget who said it, and I don’t even remember the exact words of it, but it was basically like first time entrepreneurs spend 80% of their budget on product and 20% of their budget on marketing. Second time, entrepreneurs spend 80% of their budget on marketing and 20% of their budget on product. Marketing is just way more difficult than people think. Whether you’re a marketer or you’re an entrepreneur who came up with the idea and is running the company, you think that everyone wants what you have to sell, because either A. you wanted it, so you went out and created it, or they sold you, that people want this product in the job interview, and the 50,000 people that use it, or the 500 people that use it, or the five clients, or whatever it is, indicates to you that people want this. So you just think, Oh, we just have to go tell more people that it exists. And they’ll, they’ll show up. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works at all. If you build it, and they will come the famous line from Field of Dreams, that great movie, really, really, really great movie is the epitome of the trap that entrepreneurs and marketers fall into. They think just by introducing the product or service to people, they’re gonna go, Oh my God, I need this. I want this. Because either, again, either A they had it, they had that need and they found it, or the proof that other people are buying this, more people want it. But once you escape that first cohort, that first kind of early adopter group of customers who truly do want it just because it exists, which is very small and very rare, marketing is a huge uphill battle. It’s a huge challenge. And how do you make it easier? You go back to those three things that I said. You figure out the carrot, aka the outcome that they want most, and you never stop jamming that carrot down people’s throats. I know it sounds a little aggressive, but that’s just what it is. Every, every, every huge company, every successful company does this. You might not see it, but Salesforces at every single important conference, they’re running ads on LinkedIn all the time. They’re spending jillions of dollars on Google. They might not show up in your world, but they show up multiple times to the people that they know will make the decision to purchase Salesforce’s software. Geico on the consumer side, right? I use that example all the time, just because it’s the easiest, because everyone who has ever watched TV knows GEICO is all over TV, right? But it works in B2B too. It 100% works in B2B too I mean, I had a Facebook and Google Ads agency that I sold two years ago, built it up to, you know, seven figures in revenue, 15 full time people. And very small to a lot of people, big to some, but very, very small to a lot of people. But you know, the difference between the agencies that make a million dollars a year or millions of dollars a year versus the ones that don’t, are the ones that spend money on marketing. They’re the ones that spend on ads and that go to conferences, versus the agencies that got up to 50k a month in revenue, or 100k a month in revenue, and get it all in the back of referrals and say, well, I’ll just keep growing in the back of referrals, I’m too afraid to spend money on marketing, right? The ones that grow the most are everywhere to their target customers. They sponsor events, they run ads, they’re on podcasts. They host podcasts, they do cold email, not just once, but they follow up on LinkedIn, and then over text, and then, I mean, it’s, it’s just non stop on purpose, because that’s how it works. That’s how it works.

Christian Klepp 24:08

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. On that point, I had a follow up question for you, and you probably get this all the time, but I would imagine in SaaS and even in B2B Tech, Why do you think that there’s still this hesitation for people to invest in marketing like you probably still talk to people that are like, yeah, yeah, I know, but what if we don’t generate the right results, or the results that we’re expecting? So what do you say to those people that have those doubts?

Marketing Max 27:43

What’s your other choice? That’s my answer.

Christian Klepp 27:55

Right, right, growing on the back of referrals, to your earlier point, which is not sustainable in the long run.

Christian Klepp 28:02

Fair enough. Fair enough.

Marketing Max 28:02

Yeah, you have to take risks, but I can’t afford to, but I can’t afford to, then don’t, then get out of the game. You have to take risks. The analogy I’m using a lot these days is, you know, I’m a big sports guy. Love the NBA, the NFL I’m a golfer, so obviously I love golf, but in team sports, if you’re the owner of a basketball team, right, in order to get the best talent on your team, you need to not only pay them a ton of money, but you need to guarantee them that they will get that money even if they get injured. That’s a risk. That’s a huge risk. LeBron is making $55 million a year. If LeBron gets injured, you still have to pay him, but that’s just being in the league. That’s just being in the game. Marketing is the same way. Maybe you can’t spend $55 million okay, but let’s take smaller risks. Take smaller risks.

Marketing Max 28:12

You have to take risks to be in the game, or you’re never going to make the playoffs. People aren’t going to come to watch your team. You’re going to lose money. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He’s the single reason why I’m an entrepreneur. He came to this country with a few dollars in his pocket and was a serial entrepreneur. Some successes, some major failures, some successes. And he had a hat in his office that I have now in my office. He passed away. He has a hat in his office that says, You got to spend money to make money.

Christian Klepp 29:49

Absolutely.

Marketing Max 29:50

I had to blow $30,000 of my own money on Facebook ads before I found the right ad, showing to the right audience, dropping off on the right landing page with the right offer for my ad agency before I was able to acquire clients for like two grand, all in. Two to three grand, all in. $2600 or whatever, fluctuate around there, but let’s say two to three grand. But once I cracked it, I was able to acquire a client, let’s say for $2500 bucks. And the value of that client for me was upwards of $50,000 so I spent $30,000. I got to a point where I can spend $25,000 and make $50,000. So all I needed was, like, literally, one or two clients to repay back the 30k that I had to spend. What I have kept going at 100k and just burning before I found the right ad and the right everything? No, of course not. There’s thresholds. But you got to spend money to make money. You got to waste money, truly. And my wife, super positive, will always say, it’s not a waste. You’re learning, but you got to light some money on fire to start the fire. You know, you know you need some. You need some, whether they call it Kim Tim, not timber, kindling, kindling. You need some kindling. No, yeah, you need, you need, you need it. And it’s got to be money. And if you don’t have any money, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, Max, I have $0, then it’s your time. Then you need to study how to create viral LinkedIn posts. You need to study, excuse me, how to write the best cold email on planet earth. Because you’re either buying people’s attention with money or with your time. And the only way to grow your business and to market your business is getting in front of people, getting people’s attention. You’re either doing that with money or time. Money, aka ads, influencer partnerships, whatever. Time meaning, creating content, networking, events, relationship building, writing the best Twitter post you can possibly Imagine, and then networking with people so that they retweet you. You buy people’s attention with time and money. Yeah, that’s marketing.

Christian Klepp 31:35

There’s many ways to do it. There’s many ways to do it. So marketing Max, you’ve been, I think you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but I’d like to politely ask you to stay up there a while longer.

Marketing Max 32:22

I don’t like being on the soapbox, but okay,

Christian Klepp 32:25

A status quo that you passionately disagree with and why?

Marketing Max 32:29

I think we kind of touched on it. I think it’s like, if you build it, they will come. I think you really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really need to buy people’s attention with time or with money. You know, you can’t just get in front of people and hope that they purchase your product. You have to get in front of them and give them something compelling that makes them intrigued enough to double click, to zoom in, to get in contact. So many people, so many people, so many people I meet. It’s like, man, you know, word of mouth, we’re growing like wildfire. It’s like, that’s going to stop at some point unless you have a viral product, there’s, you know, viral nature in it, yeah, yeah. The other thing, totally unrelated, is less of like a marketing not true. What was the term, again? Status quo? Yeah. Status quo, another thing I talk about a lot, and that I believe very aggressively, and I don’t even think people like believe this, but I think it’s just the status quo. Your website is a living, breathing thing. The status quo, to use that term, is you spend 2 to 20 grand on someone to build your website, and then you never touch it or you update it with some features, you need to be constantly analyzing the data of where traffic is coming from, where people are clicking, what pages people are clicking to. When you really start to analyze the data of how people are interacting with your website, you’ll start to see some insane patterns. Sometimes I’ve found with clients like all of the people that convert check out one particular like breakdown of the features pages, or of the about us page, or of the like case studies page, before they actually convert. So it’s like, man, people are dying for this content, and once we show them this content, they convert. So how can we bring this content on the homepage? How can we take this content and put it in our retargeting ads? Like there’s a treasure trove of data inside of the data for your website’s user behavior. Your website’s a living, breathing thing. You need to be constantly updating it, analyzing it, checking it, testing call to actions, testing button, colors, testing headlines, testing pictures, text, testing backgrounds. It’s the easiest and best way by far to move the needle for your company. It’s to AB test your landing page or AB test your homepage, understand the data, see what’s converting, and then iterate from there. That is, by far and away, the number one thing that will have the biggest impact on revenue that you could do today. It’s not running Facebook ads. It’s not the $5 day retargeting ad. It’s thinking about your website as a living, breathing thing. If more brands spent as much time energy and money on AB testing their website as they do AB testing their their ad creative like on Facebook ads, we’d all be a lot richer.

Christian Klepp 32:34

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, two more questions for you and I will you go. Here comes the bonus question, if you had a superpower, what would you choose and why?

Marketing Max 35:54

I’ve always really wanted to fly. That’s always been my my superpower. I think also, like, under the business context, if I really had to choose, and I got time to think about it, I’d probably choose reading people’s minds. I would love to get on a service call and just know that this person is just, like, not paying attention to me at all. Yeah. But my favorite superhero is Iron Man, just because he’s…, because Robert Downey Jr is awesome, and because he’s rich and super cool and fights off bad guys with technology and not like bats, right? And spiders.

Christian Klepp 36:34

Spiders, yeah, fair enough.

Marketing Max 36:37

I choose Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow over Toby McGuire and spiders any day.

Christian Klepp 36:50

Hey, fair enough, man, fair enough.

Marketing Max 36:51

I don’t love spiders or bats. Honestly, I’ve seen them up close, and they’re very weird.

Christian Klepp 36:55

Yeah, yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Wow. Marketing Max. This has been an awesome conversation. So thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Please, quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Marketing Max 37:13

Yeah, intro for me. My name is Marketing Max. I spend most of my time on Twitter. So if you have any questions or anything that I spoke about today, or want help with your marketing, feel free to DM me on Twitter @marketingmax, or check out marketingmax.io. You can get in touch with me there. Yeah, I run a portfolio of marketing businesses. I run a couple different agencies, a couple different software businesses, media company. So I’m just a full stack marketer trying to help companies grow and scale with less stress and less headache and less budget. So thanks for having me on the show.

Christian Klepp 37:47

Fantastic. Fantastic. A marketing renaissance man of sorts, if you will.

Marketing Max 37:54

I like that better than the soapbox thing you said I was on earlier. But yeah, I guess I always think of renaissance man like sitting in a dark room smoking cigars, like, oh, hanging out being mysterious. I’ll take that. I’ll take all right.

Christian Klepp 38:13

Marketing Max, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Marketing Max 38:17

Thanks for having me see you guys on Twitter.

Christian Klepp 38:19

Bye for now.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Leverage Networking for Success

There are several misconceptions about networking out there, but it truly is a missed opportunity for many in the B2B space. When done right, empowered B2B marketers and professionals can build influential networks and businesses based on genuine connections and community support.

That’s why we’re talking to master B2B networker Donnie Boivin (CEO, Success Champion Networking) about how B2B marketers and other professionals can harness the power of networking for growth. During our conversation, Donnie highlighted why most networking falls flat, what pitfalls to avoid, and the importance of having a networking and follow-up strategy.

https://youtu.be/NQxdNBLm3vU

Topics discussed in episode

• What is networking and where do most people fall flat? [2:37]
• The difference between an introduction and a referral [4:49]
• How to deal with push-back when it comes to networking [5:58]
• How the networking landscape has evolved [10:41]
• What B2B marketers should avoid when it comes to networking: [15:22]
  • Giving out business cards
  • Ditch the elevator pitch
• The importance of having a networking strategy [20:57]
• How to conduct “Follow ups” the right way [23:58]
• How to get internal buy-in for networking [28:49]
• Donnie’s actionable tips: [33:50]
  • The 4 places for B2B marketers and professionals to network
  • Build a personal brand
  • The synergy triangle
  • Do something else besides networking
• Status quos that Donnie disagrees with: [39:51]
  • Networking is for broke people
  • Networking is just a social club
  • People network because they don’t know how to sell

Companies and links mentioned

• Donnie Boivin on LinkedIn
• Success Champion Networking
• Badass Business Summit
• BNI: Business Network International
• Monster

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Donnie Boivin

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to create B2B networking experiences that connect you with your ideal clients. So Mr. Donnie Boivin. Welcome to the show, sir.

Donnie Boivin 01:03

Hey, Christian, thanks for having me on. A couple of conversations we’ve had in the past… I am looking forward to this one, it would be a fun conversation.

Christian Klepp 01:10

Absolutely, absolutely. And like I said before we hit record, I think this is such a pertinent topic, not just to B2B marketers, but to people in general that are attempting to put themselves out there, build their network, build their businesses, and, you know, leverage, something that’s existing or even new. So, you know, why don’t we just jump right into it and get this party started? What do you think?

Donnie Boivin 01:32

Yeah, for sure, man, just, you know, from my perspective, networking is such a key fundamental skill that people have got to have. And I think a lot of people don’t understand what networking is, how to use it, what to use it for. So, you know, we can chase down all those rabbit holes and have some fun with it.

Christian Klepp 01:51

Let’s do that. So why don’t we kick off with this one. You’ve been on a mission to deliver, I love this one, networking experiences that don’t suck, for B2B. So if we’re gonna try to narrow down that topic, and this is going to be a handful, so bear with me here. But the topic is how to empower B2B professionals to build influential networks and businesses based on genuine connections and community support. So if we’re going to start off this conversation, let’s start off with two questions. And I’m happy to repeat. One is why should B2B marketers care about this? And number two, where do you think most networking falls flat?

Donnie Boivin 02:33

Great stuff. So I’m gonna answer both of those. But first, I wanted to define networking, because I think people just don’t understand what networking really, really is. And just so your listeners know, I look at networking completely different. And I tend to try and flip networking on its head for people. So for me networking, by definition, in a business development role, we’ll come at it from that perspective, is building other people’s companies. Most times, if you’re selling B2B, your clients are bigger companies, right? Like, you may not be doing a million dollar business, but your clients are likely to do, you know, a million $20 million plus in revenue. And if you’re selling to companies at that level, guess what, they’re not out networking. They are not at your after hours, they’re not at your breakfast meetings, you know, they are doing all kinds of things that are not traditionally networking in nature. So if we understand that networking is about building other people’s businesses, then we have to come at networking from a completely different perspective. What people tend to think networking is, is that happy hour, going to a conference, a trade show, right? All these things going maybe to a weekly meeting type thing, all this stuff. And they come at it from a perspective of I do networking to find clients. Well, it’s a surefire way to lose, because as I said, your clients, they’re not out there, right. They’re not sitting in those places. So if they’re not sitting in those places, what a heck should you go to those places, and it’s really, really simple. Because everybody who is networking, they’re usually in the same size business you are, selling to those same type of clientele that you’re trying to get to, right. But you’re not going to meet somebody at an after hours or at a breakfast or lunch, whatever else. And they’re not going to instantly say Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for a marketing company my entire life, where have you been, let me give you all my clients. Like it just doesn’t happen. So we have to understand that we’ve got to learn to leverage our network to actually get into their network. And to do that I’ve got to grow their business in a way I grow their business is through introductions and referrals.

I think we have to define what an introduction and referral is. An introduction is let’s just introduce two good people and put them together. You don’t know what’s going to come out of it. Maybe it’s a good collaboration, maybe It’s a good conversation. You know, maybe they do workshops or conference together, who knows. But a referral is the introduction with a sales call expected. So what I mean by that is, somebody’s come to you says they’re looking for XYZ services. And you say, I got a guy. I know who I can introduce you to, and you introduce them to them. So the basis for everything that I teach and the philosophy is understanding that you’re not networking to find clients, you’re networking to get introduced to people that have your client base, open doors for them, build their business, so then you can grab opportunities to have doors open for you. I don’t know if I fully answered both of your questions. But that’s a good foundation from start to sail off.

Christian Klepp 05:48

Yes, you have answered my question. And I’m gonna follow that up with two questions. Right. So number one, I’ll start with the devil’s advocate question first. What do you say to those doubters that push back on that and say, well, we get all that Donnie, but man, that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of time and effort, and we need to hit those numbers, we need that quota right now. What do you say to those people?

Donnie Boivin 06:12

Everything takes time. There is no overnight plan, there is no shortcut to anything. And I’ll tell you, every time you try and find the shortcut, every time you’re trying to find a hack, every time you try and find the workaround, you’re just costing yourself the opportunity to learn what’s actually going to move your business forward. What people don’t understand, is we’re naturally wired to find the shortcut. And it’s just almost in our DNA. If we go play games, we look for the cheat codes, if we, you know, I don’t know, play Madden, we want to find that one trick play that always works. So we’re always trying to do these quick workarounds. And every time we do that, we literally cost ourselves. So instead of being like playing Madden, and looking for that one trick play, put Madden on the hardest damn setting and play it over and over again until you figure out how to play it. Right? It’s the same thing. It’s just like marketing. Like if somebody comes in buys marketing services with you, and they’re like, man, I’ve got to get deals right now. I’ve got to get numbers coming in right now. I want those marketers to tell me, what marketing can I do that instantly puts clients saying yes, to me, and I’m printing cash. Right? And they don’t have that answer. It’s the same thing here. Right. So to understand that this is all a long game. And the faster you wrap your head around this, the faster this will work for you. Now, I can 100% say that if you got into your head that I can leverage the network to get introduced the people I need to get introduced to. So like for marketers, potentially a good referral partner for them, could be you know, fractional CMOs, it could be PR firms, right? It could be other extremely, really large ad agencies that don’t want to pick up a little bit work, right? It could be a plethora of people. If you understand this, anybody you get introduced to, you can ask to be introduced to somebody that has all your client base. And if you can do that, then you’re going to find miraculously that you get enough of the right introduction. So enough of the right conversations, and people are going to open up the right doors for you. So for instance, I had a young lady mid… sometime around June last year come to me and said, you know, she was very, very frustrated because nobody would give her referrals. And we talked through what a referral actually was. And she said that’s what she was looking for. And interestingly enough, I said, Okay, walk me through, what’s your business? And she said, I do tuition assistance for people trying to put their kids through college. And I laughed, and I said, Well, you understand why you’re not getting referrals, don’t you? And she said, No. And I said, it’s because nobody wants to admit that they don’t have enough money set aside to send your kids college. Right. Nobody wants to have that conversation. I said, but somebody is intimately having that conversation with those families on a regular basis. I said, so if you were to look at all your industries, who sent you the most referrals, what industry specifically? And she didn’t skip a beat, she said bookkeepers? I said, Well, that makes sense. Right? bookkeepers are constantly in there talking about money. I said, so here’s what I want you to do. I said, I want you to go out and network and I say, Hey, I do tuition assistance for families trying to put their kids in college. And I’d love to meet your bookkeeper. And she goes, Well, that’s really simple. I said, Yeah, what happens if you met 100 bookkeepers before the end of the year? She goes, oh my god, it would change my business, when in fact it did because three weeks before the end of the year she called me up and said Donnie, you’re not going to believe this. I tripled my business and actually had to tell people to stop introduce me to bookkeepers, because about every second or third bookkeeper, had already made client for me. And it works the same way in marketing is you just got to understand who’s got my clientele, and how can I leverage these people I’m talking to, to get connected to them. So now we can go talk about what collaboration between the two of us looks like, you know, how can we partner up? Right? How can we open doors? And if you understand this philosophy, it’s transformational for your business, and how he’s going to push it forward. So, yeah, instant success. Not a thing.

Christian Klepp 10:16

Absolutely, absolutely. It almost sounds like marketing 101, understand your target audience, understand where they’re at. But yeah, you’re absolutely right like that. A lot of people go down a really long path or the wrong path, I should say, and we can get into that in a second. But here comes the second follow up question. And you probably know this better than most, how is the networking landscape evolved? And why should people be paying attention to that?

Donnie Boivin 10:41

Yeah, a couple of things. You know, there’s an organization, just from the business landscape like BNI, you know, everybody’s run across them, great company, they’ve put the name, you know, networking on the map. Monsters, as far as number of members, and they, you know, kind of set the tone and pace for what networking was going to look like in the marketplace. What they went for was market share, right, and they didn’t care about who particularly came into their network. So it’s not a bad thing. It was a great business move, if you’re B2C, BNI is a phenomenal place to be. But if we look at where networking and how it was created and started. Networking, the way we know it, was created by even Ivan Misner, founder of BNI. And all your networking, all of it was created on the back of I don’t want to cold call. I don’t want to kick in doors. So there’s got to be an alternative to get clients and insert networking. Like Ivan Misner’s story is he lost his biggest client, created networking groups, right? You know, in almost every networking organization on the planet, it’s founded this way. But if we go further down, we think about, okay, cool. Who is, you know, literally, you know, teaching networking. Historically, everybody who’s taught networking over the years has been transactional in nature. They were a financial advisor, they were an insurance agent. They were a realtor, and I’m not knocking on those industries. But transactional networking is the idea where, and I’ll tell you this is not true, but it always is the case. But transactional networking is where everybody can say yes to you, like whatever you sell, everybody come by. So this is very much a B2C type world, because in B2C, if I sell a house, I can sell a house to anybody. If I sell financial advisory services, I can sell that to anybody. If I sell whatever MLM craps out there, I can sell that to anybody. So if we understand that networking was taught in a very transactional nature, even though they said, you know, you’re not supposed to sell your network and everything else, everybody does. And so traditional networking sees everybody go into a room, and everybody’s looking at everybody else going, please God, can you say yes to me, because I need the business, right, to really enact a desperation. Where networking really started to evolve, of course, when COVID hit, and everything went online, where the scale really tipped was, now you go, and you take traditional formats of networking, into an online space, and they don’t work. Because nobody wants to sit around and watch 45 minutes of people talking about what they do. I mean, you’ll watch cameras get turned off, you watch people not interacting, right. And it’s also not an environment where you’re going into a happy hour. And there’s, you know, different people, you can just walk up to and say hi. It’s a very capsuled way to do things. So we took that, that idea, and we created virtual groups around multiple meeting types and everything else to really shake it up. The interesting play that’s going to happen in the future, is with the continued advancement of AI and how it’s coming to come into place. One of the things that we’re absolutely watching is the World of Warcraft kind of style of business going to be a real thing, like am I gonna go to be able to create my own avatar, right, go to a virtual conference of some sort, and this is already out there. It’s already built. You know, I’m just watching to see if it really takes hold. Because it’s very much early adopter stage. You know, but most people that are networking are actually introverts, because a lot of your extroverted, you know, type salespeople in a business development role. They’re not networking, they’re the ones cold calling, kicking in doors, yada, yada, yada. So you got more introverts. Now you put introverts in a space where they can be a freakin purple dragon, and, you know, go to an event, you remove a lot of the traditional barriers that kick their butt when they’re trying to do any sort of networking. So it’s gonna be fascinating to see how it continued plays out over the years, but there’s a lot more to it, but that’ll give you at least a good you know, journey of it.

Christian Klepp 14:59

Yeah. absolutely. That’s incredibly interesting. I would be curious to see where, where they take it to next in terms of AI and whatnot with that kind of technology. But some of the things that you’ve brought up in the past couple of minutes. It’s such a great segue into the next question about common pitfalls, specifically with networking that B2B marketers should avoid.

Donnie Boivin 15:22

Yeah, I got two huge ones that drive me nuts. One is why the hell do you have business cards? So business cards, they’re just unwarranted in this day and age. And I don’t know a good solution. I mean I don’t know, a good reason, not solution, why anybody carries a business card. We’re all using LinkedIn, especially if you’re in the B2B game, right? So if somebody wants to connect, open up your phone, hit the search bar, hit that little doodads, your QR code pops up, connect on LinkedIn. And look, let’s be honest, you collect a bunch of business cards anywhere you go, what are you gonna do with them, you’re not going to put them in your CRM, you’re not going to scan the damn things in, they’re just gonna become a cluster pile on your desk. So what I’ll tell everybody is not carrying a business card is one of the most brilliant ways to quickly filter who you want to talk to and follow up with. So like Christian, like if you and I are out networking, and I’m like, Man, Christian’s the guy I really want to follow up and talk to with, and Christian goes, Hey, I want your business card, I’m gonna look and say, you know what, do this, give me your cell phone number, I’ll text you my information. And then you know, we’ll have each other stuff, right. Because a cell phone, there’s nothing greater than having somebody’s cell phone. Right. It is like the strongest thing in the world that you could have. So after I had sent you a text with my information, get your information, your phone, I’m gonna say, you know what, Christian, if we keep talking like this, we’re going to end up into some sort of business type conversation. Let’s go schedule a zoom. And then I’ll text him a link straight to my calendar. Right? So we can go grab a time, and then I’m gonna get out of the conversation, right? Because if you stay in that conversation much longer than that, somebody’s getting pitched. It’s unintentional. It’s a nervous tic, right? So we’re gonna get out of that conversation.

Donnie Boivin 17:07

The second thing that people need to get away with, and it’s my other biggest phob…, just hate it… is get rid of the stupid elevator pitch. Nobody gives a damn what you do, especially in the B2B game. I want you to listen and to really think about this. Have they ever gone to a B2B networking event in general, walked up to somebody and said, Hey, what do you do? And whatever their answer was, they’re like, Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for your services forever, right? It may happen, but very, very, very rarely, if it ever does. All you got to do is tell people in simple black and light language, what you do. After you tell them what they do, tell them specifically who you’re looking to meet at that event at that night, you know, where you’re out. So it’s, Hey, I do marketing for XYZ type companies. I’d love to meet anybody, you know, connected to marketing, PR, copywriting websites, anybody that touches that side of realm of things. And what’s fascinating, is what you do doesn’t matter. Because the people that are out there networking, they’re networking, they’re not, you know, they’re hoping you’ll say yes to whatever the hell they’re selling, right? That’s just the way they’re looking at it. So if we get rid of the pitch, and understand I’m here to grow their business, I’m going to tell them quickly who I’m trying to meet. And then I’m gonna flip the script as fast as I possibly can. Right? Because it’s networking, we’re gonna run into each other again, right? It’s not like we’re going to be a one time see and never see you again. So I’m going to say, Hey, I’m Donnie. I run B2B networking groups all throughout the world. I’m looking to meet people, people that have business communities and podcasts. And then I’m gonna immediately say, Tell me about your role. How did you get into what you do? And I’m gonna kick it off me as fast as possible. And how did you get into what you do is one of the greatest questions you can start off with to get people really connecting with you. But yeah, those my two biggest thing, get rid of the pitch, get rid of the business cards. And you’ll get a lot further in your conversations.

Christian Klepp 19:08

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those two points really resonated with me, because it was one of the things that frustrated me in the beginning. And now I realized, like, yeah, you know what, I actually don’t want people’s business cards anymore. Just connect on LinkedIn. And that’s it. Right? And to your second point, I’ve hated elevator pitches from the get go. So I’m kind of glad that they’re eventually like fading into the ether.

Donnie Boivin 19:32

There’s some organizations going to keep them forever. Like, I’ll go to LinkedIn, and say, you know, guys, stop the elevator pitches, and there’s elevator pitch coaches out there. And they come at me every time. It’s the funniest thing in the world. But if you need a jingle in the backend of what you do is because what you sell sucks.

Christian Klepp 19:49

Yup absolutely. And let’s be honest, how much can you really pitch to these people or tell these people within those 30 to 60 seconds? Yeah, I mean… correct me if I’m wrong, but then the elevator pitch like… wasn’t it developed because of cold calling like because you know, you only have…

Donnie Boivin 20:06

It was actually developed because of the elevator ride. So people were in these big cities, and they would find themselves on an elevator with somebody, and you got, you got like 10 floors or whatever to, you know, somebody asked what you do, then the frickin sales guys got a hold of it. That’s what it really evolved from the cold calls and whatnot. That’s where it got… Is bastardized bad word? I don’t know. But it got destroyed at that point. Because of, once salespeople get it, we’re gonna screw it all up and destroy it, and try and make it some sort of tactic or skill to convince you that, oh, my god, you need us.

Christian Klepp 20:06

You kind of alluded to it earlier. But why do you think it’s important for folks that have a networking strategy, and not just wing it.

Donnie Boivin 20:57

Because if you don’t calculate an ROI on every bit of activity you do, and marketers, you guys shouldn’t know this. Like, if you can’t put an ROI to it, you can’t look at the metrics, how to hell do you even know if it’s actually working? Right. So… and ROI has got to be defined as well. ROI does not always mean return on money, right? It can be money, time, opportunity, you know, information, like I’ve gone to events, just to figure out where a certain individual is going to be, right, or I’ve gone to events to figure out other events I needed to go to, you know, and different things. So you have to define what ROI is for all of this. And when you look at networking most times, most people because they don’t look at it as a business development tool. They don’t know how to effectively track everything that works. So that would be like sending out an email campaign, and not looking at the open rate. And you know, the accepted rates and all that like. It’s like sending out a postcard and not having any sort of QR code or some trackable mechanism on there to know if it’s working. Networking is going to be done the same exact way. So when you think about networking, like if you got a group of business development folks, or you’re going yourself, and I think, okay, I’m going to this after hours, what am I going to accomplish here, and it needs to go through your head, I need to set two appointments, not with clients. If the clients happen to be there, cool. But I need to set two appointments with strategic referral partners, people that can open doors for me, if I’m going to a trade show is… okay, if it’s a one day trade show, how do I set two appointments here? If it’s a trade show, that would be with the prospects. You know, if I’m going to a conference, can I set up a referral, you know, conversation while I’m there can you know everything’s got to have a trackable ROI. And all the way down to where we we look at networking as a whole, based on two solid parameters. How many introductions do I have to give before I get an introduction? And how many referrals do I have to give before I get a referral? Based off of that activity, I can tell a lot about how or what the things I have to maintain and do on a regular basis to keep my business coming in and get me into enough of the right conversations. So you can’t wing it networking. This. Just like marketing. It’s the same principle, same philosophy.

Christian Klepp 23:36

Absolutely. You brought up something and I’d like to go back to it. Following up. They do say that the fortunes in the follow up or whatever it is, um, what would you suggest to folks out there that are listening to the conversation like what’s the right way to follow up? Because certainly spamming the living crap out of people you met at a conference is not the way to go.

Donnie Boivin 23:58

Here’s what I’ll tell you. Everybody sucks at follow up. And you know, people have asked me all the time, well, how long do you wait to follow up with somebody after a conference or something. And my answer is very simple. Set the appointments at the event, so you don’t have to worry about the follow up. So, I’m just… let’s get the action done now. And this is what I tell you. Most times your clients aren’t networking. The difference being like maybe if you’re going to trade shows and stuff, they might be there. But either way, nobody wants to be the greaseball sales guy, right? So and that’s what following up usually feels like is that really greaseball sales maneuver. So if that’s the case, we have to start looking at it from okay, if I’m not gonna follow up, then I have to take action right now to get into a conversation. So I’m having a dynamic conversation with somebody and it makes sense that have a second conversation. They’ve got their calendars sitting right there in their hands. I’m gonna take them right then and there and go, Hey, you know, let’s do this. I’d love to continue this conversation, can we grab the zoom? Or maybe lunch, coffee, cocktail, whatever, and continue this conversation? And most times, people will go, yeah, for sure. Let’s do that. And I’ve done this with Mom and Pop companies all the way up to heavy decision makers and fortune 5s. If the conversation and the mood is right, they will almost always say yes. Right? If they say no, it’s because you are seeing a different part of the conversation than they are. But if you have to follow up, I’m of the firm belief that you need to be the first person to follow up because you know why? Because nobody else is going to, because everybody else sucks at the game. So it’s as soon as you get back to your hotel room. As soon as you get back to your office. As soon as you get home from that conference tradeshow. First thing you do is you shoot them a message. And the message needs to first remind them who you are. Remind them what you talked about, ask for some sort of next step. Right? Of where do we go from here. And then if you have a drip campaign, you have someplace, you know, you can put them off to the side and go, cool. Put them in a sequence, a series of emails, that takes them on a journey and path, right. But if you come hit them every email with Well, we do XYZ, the best of everybody, you know, you buy my crap now and all that stuff, you’re just gonna get lost in the sauce. Right? Remember, desperation smells, and everybody knows it. Right? So you know, keep it simple, but think through it like a marketer should. And what is my follow up campaign for these individuals. And you can’t send just the same generic crap to everybody, either, right? You’ve got to personalize and think about this way, if every one of these people you’re talking to can either introduce you to your ideal client, or they are your ideal client, right? There’s a lot of zeros on the back end of that conversation that that potential person is worth to you. You need to treat them like so. And if you don’t want to treat them like so, then why are you in the game in the first place? Right. So it’s, I suck at follow up. So I get it done right out of the gate.

Christian Klepp 27:23

Absolutely, absolutely. No, I love that. Well, desperation smells. And boy, is that true. But like, it’s to your point that you brought up earlier, it’s really a balance of timing, finesse. And there’s a bit of an art and science to it, right? Because of course you want to get them to a yes. Or you want to get them to a “sure, let’s jump on a call” or what have you. But there’s got to be a lot of these factors in between that help massage the… I always say massage the message a little bit instead of like, you know, Hey, Donnie, we’re gonna get on call. And you know, we work with companies from A to Z. And I’ve worked with dropping all these names of people you’ve never heard of, right? I mean, we get them all the time. And I just don’t understand why people don’t evolve because that stuff didn’t work before. And it sure as heck doesn’t work now.

Donnie Boivin 28:09

It does work, if you have a massive volume, right? If you’re going for volume, that stuff works. If you have a million contacts, you’re gonna capture a percentage of those contacts. But most of us don’t have a million contacts, right? We’re sitting on a list of a couple thousand people, we can’t blow that list, you know, and destroy the people we have in there, we got to nurture the hell out of them.

Christian Klepp 28:33

Absolutely. You brought this up a couple of minutes ago, but like how do B2B marketers get buy in from somebody up high for something like networking? Because you know, they get things thrown at them, like ROI questions and what have you. So what do they need to do?

Donnie Boivin 28:48

So they need to go into the conversation. One with a predetermined, this is how we’re going to track the success of this. So these are my key performance indicators. These are my metrics, my KPIs that I’m going to measure for this. So what happens to most people is they hear about networking, and they’re like, You know what, I’m gonna go to a couple of happy hours, I’m gonna go to this association and this thing, and they go into it. And because you can’t get immediate returns on it, you know, they’ll just tell your boss, hey, I’m going. Boss goes, Hey, what you get from that? And they’re like, nothing. They’re like, Okay, you’re not doing that anymore. Well, of course you didn’t getting nothing. Nobody does business, especially in a B2B game in the first conversation, right? It’s gonna take a couple of conversations, you know, and oftentimes, you got to see somebody multiple times at multiple events, before you’ll even be willing to have that second conversation with them, right? Because in B2B, things take time. This is not B to C, where anybody can immediately say yes to you. This is B2B and you can’t look at it as I go to event. I find a client. I go home right. It doesn’t work that way. So determine what your metrics are, of what makes it successful for you. So you can look at going to after hours and say, okay, my goal, higher up boss, whatever is I’m going to go this after hours, I’m going to attempt to set two events, you know, two meetings out there, I’m gonna try and find a couple of strategic referral partners, from those strategic referral partners, I’m going to try and get them introduced to a couple of people. And hopefully, I get introduced to a couple of really good people, right? And then you track the metrics of those things. But if you just go to a boss and say, Hey, I’m going to network, they’re gonna look at you like, you got two damn heads, right? Most times, because they don’t understand networking. They are introverted. So the idea of going around a bunch of other people is scary as hell, right? So you have to come at them. And it’s almost like doing… I’ve always said, there’s two sales in every sale, sale number one is gonna go get client. Sale number two, is you got to sell your company on taking care of that client, it’s the same thing for networking, you got to sell, you know, let me find the networks and number two, you gotta sell your company on letting you go to the network. And then it’s your job to buy you time, because networking does take time. So and if you’re a higher up trying to get your people that work for you, you know, network, then you need to buy them time. Like if you’re gonna join an association, if 6 months to a year, 18 months before you’re gonna see an ROI on that. Right. And you need to go into that expecting. You also need to tell your higher ups. I’m gonna go join Association. We’re playing for year two, we’re not playing for year one.

Christian Klepp 31:35

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you brought it up earlier, but it’s also… there’s a heck of a lot of nurturing going on here too.

Donnie Boivin 31:54

Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. You know, it’s B2B networking. If people are networking, then they network, they’re not cold calling. So networking is likely their top strategy to do business development, you’re gonna see them again. And think about it, you go to an event the first time, you walk in, you don’t know anybody. Yeah, it’s awkward. It’s even for an extroverted guy like me, you know, I’m more situationally extroverted. But, you know, it’s just weird that first time you walk in, there’s a lot of figuring people out, there’s men sizing each other up, there’s all the stupid things that are happening, right, you know, pissing contest, if you will, all that stuff that happens. So, you know, you go back to the second time, and you might bump into somebody you met the first time but by the third, fourth time, people start seeing you, they start recognizing you, it becomes a lot easier, and you’ll come more and more out of your shell. And over time, people will be more interested in what you do. And you know, everything we do, tells a story. This is personal branding 101. So how we show up, how we talk to others, what we do for other people all tell people, are we somebody that they can trust? Are we somebody they can approach? And the more you do the right things over time, the more your personal brand develops, and that’s when the real opportunities come to the table. You know, it’s over time doing the right things on a regular basis.

Christian Klepp 33:28

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so we get to the part in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips, and Donnie, you’ve given us plenty. But if we’re gonna summarize it, or recap it, like and list 3 to 5 tips or things that B2B marketers can do right now, to leverage networking, what would those things be?

Donnie Boivin 33:50

So the first one is, there’s four places you got to be networking, very, very tactical. You need to have an association that is filled full of people who also sell to your ideal client. So if we go back to the gal who did tuition assistance, her finding a bookkeeper association would be like the greatest thing ever. Okay. The second place you need to be networking is you should be sitting on a nonprofit board. And the reason you sit on nonprofit boards is because if you look at nonprofits, especially the bigger that is, they’re filled with decision makers of bigger companies. So you find a nonprofit that you’re truly passionate about their mission, and then you go work with them to get on their board. Third place you need networking group like Success Champions Networking, not trying to a shameless plug here, but B2B networking groups, you need to be meeting with a group of people that are proactively invested in growing your company. The fourth place you need to be networking is a private club. So this is anywhere where somebody’s paying a private membership. And business conversations can happen so this can be a business club, Country Club, cigar iounge, wine club, I don’t care, you know, but anywhere, and if you are part of a country club, cigar lounge or something, and there’s not a business club inside of that club, create it. But if you do those four places, you’re gonna find yourself freaking just blown away at the level of people you need to meet. Two, you need to understand, people buy you then get what you sell, you need to be building a personal brand of where I mean, because let’s be honest, people are talking about you. Right, we might as well help them tell the right story. So that means you need to be doing the right things, the right activity at the right time. And opening doors for other people. Think about everybody else is at these events and things they’re looking for business, they’re trying to get things going. Be the person that knows everybody in the room and can open up all those right doors. And watch what happens. Three, understand that your clientele are not networking, right, you’re leveraging your network to get introduced to people who have your clientele. And the more you do this, the better off you’re going to be. We call it a synergy triangle, we put you at the top, we put your favorite client in the center. And then at the bottom of that triangle, I want two industries that sell to that favorite clients industries, right, and find as many people in those industries as you possibly can. Think the bookkeeper and the tuition assistance, right? The huge combination. And then the last thing I want you to think about is if networking is the only activity you’re doing, you’re going to lose, networking alone will not build a business, you still need to be selling, you still need to be marketing, you still need to be connecting, you still need to be doing cold outreach, you still need to be doing a combination of all the regular stuff that you do to grow a business. My scariest thing that somebody tells me is their business is 100% referral based business. That means you have no control over what business comes in. And you’re literally living on the work and efforts of other people. Right, you’ve got to create an overall networking referral system, I got a whole bunch more but that’s good enough to get him started.

Christian Klepp 37:08

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well that will get them jump started on the road to success, hopefully. Right? Just to recap, so those four places that you mentioned, that’s a good place to start building the personal brand. Clearly. The next one is, and you brought this up, I think I lost count now but at least four times during this conversation: Your ideal clients are not networking. Yeah. Right. So keeping that in mind, and I do have a follow up question for you on that one. And number four, is doing something else besides networking. Right. So it’s none of this like, Okay, we only work off of referrals, or we get all our business from, you know, through word of mouth and what have you, right. You brought it up earlier in the conversation, but I think it’s worth repeating. Just define for us, you know, from your professional perspective, what a referral actually is.

Donnie Boivin 38:04

So, a referral is an introduction with a sales call attached. So it would say I specialize in building websites. A referral for me would be Hey, Bob, I hear you’ve been looking for a website. Let me introduce you to Donnie who does websites. I’ve told him all about your company, the things I know, he’s really looking forward to meeting you. Both parties know that there’s a sales call expected. So it’d be like for me Christian, if I ran into somebody who was looking for marketing services. I’m like, have you meet my buddy Christian? Regan, I would say Christian meet so and so they do XYZ. This is our business. As we were talking, they told me some of their marketing struggles, some of the things that they were frustrated at. I told them, they should talk to you. They’re really looking forward to the conversation, right? There’s an expected sales call and that’s a referral. Everything else is an introduction. And you have to separate the two out, because it allows you to define what you’re doing for somebody. Because what most people think they’re doing as a referral is actually an introduction. And for me, I want more introductions than referrals. Because if you know, a referral oftentimes is a one and done, you know, type deal. But if I can get you introduced to the right person, it can be 1000 referrals over a lifetime. That’s where I want to be.

Christian Klepp 39:33

Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. I’m Donnie. I get the sense that you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but please stay up there a little bit longer for this next question. A status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why.

Donnie Boivin 39:51

Yeah, so for me, there’s a couple. One, networking’s for broke people. Two, everybody thinks that networking is just a social club. And the third one is people only network because they don’t know how to sell. Right. And so, I want to go after all these, I mean, I’m a 25 years sales guy, almost 20 years spent working for other people, you can Google me doing live cold calls. And to hear both sides of the conversation, I can do all the traditional sales stuff. I look like a traditional sales guy, right, but I hate it. I don’t want to do that cold prospecting stuff. So if I’m going to network, then I’ve got to get damn good at networking, it cannot be a social club. Right? I run a multi six figure company, and it continues to grow. And I’ll tell you that when you’re out networking, most of the people sitting on the walls in networking events are decision makers in companies. They’re out there networking, because they know they need to get into conversations, they just don’t know how to pull themselves off that wall. So go rescue them off the wall. And, you know, overall, networking is a full contact sport. Like you literally have to be all in and do this right. So if you’re gonna do networking, you better study it, you better become a craft, it better becomes something that actually does business development for you, and grows your business. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing it? So if you’re not gonna get good at networking, you better get good at cold calling, you better get good at email marketing and all the other things, right? Or social media, something. You’re gonna have to get good at something, or you’re gonna constantly find yourself struggling to grow your business.

Christian Klepp 41:43

Absolutely, absolutely. I love the sports analogy, by the way. I mean, it’s almost like, it’s almost like working out, right? Like you want to, you want to get fit. And you want to have a nicely toned body. And you know, you don’t give up after three weeks if you don’t see results. So you gotta keep at it. Right?

Donnie Boivin 42:00

Yeah, 100%.

Christian Klepp 42:02

Month after month.

Donnie Boivin 42:03

I’m a firm believer though, too. And I wouldn’t be this way until this year, that if you’re not trying to work out and physically take care of your body, and I’m not the biggest dude on the planet. Like I got a long way to go to get where I want to go. But if you’re not working your body, literally you will not find success. Right, right. Even Elon Musk works out even though he doesn’t always look like it. But, you know, all the most successful people in the world have a huge fitness regimen. I think it’s a huge portion of figuring this all out.

Christian Klepp 42:39

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Two more questions before I let you go, Donnie.

Donnie Boivin 42:44

Cool.

Christian Klepp 42:45

Here comes the bonus question. If you had a superpower, what would it be? And why?

Donnie Boivin 42:52

If I had a superpower… I probably want to fly. Man. There are just so many cool places to go and see and do and that would save me a crap ton of money on flights and everything.

Christian Klepp 43:06

Security check.

Donnie Boivin 43:07

Right. Right. I just think that would be fun. I don’t know if I can put my wife on a backpack or something and take her with me. But you know, I think that’d be cool.

Christian Klepp 43:16

Or you could hold her like this. Right?

Donnie Boivin 43:18

Right. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 43:22

Yeah, see how long that will last. But um, man, Donnie, thank you so much for coming on the show and you know, for sharing your expertise and experience of the audience. Please quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Donnie Boivin 43:35

Well, before we do that, guys, if you’re still hanging out with us, and you got any value out of this, do me and Christian a favor and take a screenshot wherever you’re listening or watching this, go post it to social media. Tag us in there. If I see it, I promise I’ll come comment on it and engage with it. But you know, building a show takes a lot of work and trying to create that following. It’s a lot of things to do. So do Christian a favor. Take a screenshot, tag us in there. If we see it, we will come say hi. But it let him know that this is the kind of content you guys want more of and you’re more interested. As far as me, LinkedIn is the best platform to come find me so Donnie Boivin on LinkedIn. If you want to go check out our B2B networking group, successchampionnetworking.com. And if you want to come check out our summit, earmuffs really quick if you’re sensitive. It’s badassbusinesssummit.com. I didn’t cuss through this whole thing. Christian.

Christian Klepp 44:27

I’m so proud of you. Fantastic. Fantastic. Thanks so much for that shout out. That means a lot.

Donnie Boivin 44:35

Absolutely, brother.

Christian Klepp 44:37

So thanks again for coming on the show and take care, stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Donnie Boivin 44:41

Same.

Christian Klepp 44:42

Alright, bye for now.

View Details

How B2B SaaS Companies Can Position Themselves More Strategically

The B2B SaaS landscape is fraught with competitors who are essentially providing similar services and features that are difficult to distinguish from one another. Many SaaS firms are stuck in this cycle of stagnation not because their products aren’t good enough, but because they haven’t amplified their uniqueness to create exponential leverage.

That’s why we’re talking to B2B SaaS expert Ton Dobbe (Founder/Chief Inspiration Officer at Value Inspiration) about how B2B SaaS companies can become more remarkable and discover their hidden values. During our conversation, Ton talked about the pitfalls that B2B SaaS companies should avoid, how they can uncover “invisible things”, and provided some actionable tips on how they could become unique and ignite further growth.

https://youtu.be/xm_09fTflvA

Topics discussed in episode

• The challenges that B2B SaaS companies face when it comes to being more remarkable [3:51]
• What niching down or ideal segmentation should look like [7:07]
• How to be remarkable? [10:05]
  • Acknowledge that you cannot please everyone
  • Offer something valuable and desirable
  • Aim to be different, not just better
• Ton explains why many companies do not grow because of things that are invisible to them [19:00], and what the 3 fundamental questions [23:54]
• Actionable tips: [27:59]
  • On your website, describe the type of customers that will get the most value out of your products/services; and those that are not a good fit
  • Define the value that you create that is extremely desirable for your customers
  • Think about how you can be fundamentally different vs. incrementally better from competition

Companies and links mentioned

• Ton Dobbe on LinkedIn
• Value Inspiration

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Ton Dobbe, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. All right. Welcome, everyone, to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help SaaS founders fix stagnating revenue. So coming to us from Jávea, Spain, Mr. Ton Dobbe, welcome to the show.

Ton Dobbe 01:06

Thank you. Perfect introduction.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Pleasure to have you on the show, Ton. And, you know, this is a… we’ve been planning this for quite a while now, I believe. And I think congratulations are in order. Because at the time of the recording, I think Spain won the UEFA Cup. So there’s probably a bit of partying going on, on your side of the world.

Ton Dobbe 01:28

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I was sad that the Dutch got kicked out by the UK. Yeah. And that I was actually quite happy that Spain won against the UK. Yes. You know, you never win when you’re in a country where you’re Dutch and actually Spanish on the same in the same way.

Christian Klepp 01:45

Absolutely. Absolutely. So for one bad thing that happened. There’s also a good thing that happened as a result of it, you can look at it that way. But look, I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because we are going to dive into some really interesting topics today. So let’s start off like this, okay, because I understand that, according to your LinkedIn profile, you don’t have the magic formula, big surprise, to help B2B businesses, especially SaaS to grow. But what I do know is that you’ve made it your mission, to help them stand out and create exponential leverage. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic. And it’s something that you’re very passionate about how B2B SaaS can become more remarkable and discover their hidden values. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions. And I’m happy to repeat them. Question one is define what you mean by more remarkable. And number two is Why do you believe many B2B SaaS companies fall flat when it comes to well, being more remarkable?

Ton Dobbe 02:46

Yeah, these are deep questions to my heart. First of all, the definition of remarkable, it’s actually quite simple. It’s worth making a remark about. And, I mean, I’ve been in the software industry for a couple of decades now, as you can see from my gray hair. And initially, I was always sort of intimidated by all our large competitors, that had budgets that were 10x the size that we had, you know, millions, sometimes, you know, hundreds of millions of budgets. And I think, when it comes to being remarkable, it doesn’t allow that, you know, or doesn’t, it doesn’t need that. Everybody can be remarkable, because it’s about the small daily things that you do. So if a software company becomes worth making a remark about, then you’re doing something right. And that can be incorporated into everything you do. And as a consequence of that, you’ll be noticed in the marketplace, people start talking about you, and then you start to run a completely different type of business.

And then your second question, right, I would say the first thing, and actually, I’m already connected, connecting it to a number of the threads that I wrote about in my book, but it’s one thing to please too many people, this notion that okay, we have to, you have to have a very large market, a very large TAM (total addressable market). And it needs to grow big numbers and so on. And everybody is going after that because in a number of cases, people say we want to be… we want to have a valuation that is millions, actually billions in a short number of time, we want to be the next unicorn. When I forget that in order to become a unicorn, you first have to sell your first customer and then your second and then your third. And these are… Yeah, in the smaller markets, the niches whereby especially in the beginning, you feel far better off with the scope that you have to start impressing those type of customers and then grow from there. Then instantly going after a market that is way too big for you. So the first one are wanting to please too many. The other thing is, this already may be connected to what I just said, obsessing over competition, not following your own path. And you cannot outcompete the world, you cannot outcompete your direct competitors, or any alternative that your customer is looking for. So that’s, I was gonna say a waste of time. Not that you should be not following what your competitors are doing. But you should be learning from it and draw your own path, and being okay, that certain parts of the market are theirs. Because then others, other parts of the markets that can be yours. And then the last one. Yeah, that is kind of the thing that gets me so passionate about being remarkable is the alternative of that, the contrast of that is “good is good enough”. And that results in too many mediocre products. I mean, it’s I think it’s already starts with this notion of what people call an MVP (minimum viable product), where people are… okay, what is the minimum, the bare minimum, we can put the market for people to start to say something about it? I’d rather say okay, if you start like that, of course, you need to start with something but make it at least minimum remarkable, minimum sellable people sometimes say, something that people are actually willing to pay something for. Yeah. And in the heat of the competition, in the issues that are in the marketplace, the short-termism that sometimes arises a very, very many companies are opting for Okay, that’s good. It’s good enough. Let’s go for it. And I think that’s where they go wrong.

Christian Klepp 06:35

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those are some really great points. And I wanted to go back to something you said earlier and it reminds me of that expression, that the riches are in the niches or in the niches, depending on where you are. But um, my follow up question to that is, why do you think a lot of companies and I don’t think this is unique to SaaS, but a lot of companies don’t niche down? They wanted to try to, like, everybody is our customer, everybody that is a potential subscriber, right?

Ton Dobbe 07:05

It’s fear of missing out. I mean, I do a lot of repositioning projects, and at some point, you get to the discussion that go, who you’re really for, and who you’re not for anymore. And people always think, Okay, well, we’re not for companies that are in manufacturing, or in financial services, because we don’t have any companies there. And that’s not… It’s really all about, you know, you focus on a certain market, where your ideal customers are, and you try to make it as specific as possible. And that’s where people don’t dare to… like you said to niche down. Because I think, okay we might be missing out on something, whereby it’s actually the opposite. You know, if you’re fishing in this wide market, I wrote a long blog about it, an essay, when people are doing the segmentation, the niching, as I call it, and to decide where they’re going to focus, what I typically do is define the firmagraphics and the demographics of the audience, and both of the company and at the persona level, it’s typically how big they are, what industry they’re in, what region they’re in, all the things that you can almost Google or find on LinkedIn. What they don’t do, is what I call upcycled graphics. And that’s where the magic happens. So I wrote this long form blog where I compared it to, okay, a lot of companies, their segmentation looks like a glass of water, you know, it has something in it. And even you, when you drink it, it’s tasteless. Whereby the ideal segmentation is what I would call your favorite cocktail, because then you start to pinch in a snippet, or you say, a sniff of the dynamics that make your customers unique, and the risks that they tolerate or not tolerate, and then a little bit of sniff of what they value, and another sniff of what they aspire to achieve. And once you start doing that, it starts to get flavor, it starts to become something that both these customers recognize, because hey, that’s us. And we talk the same language. And once you can achieve it at that level, when a customer when they go to your website, he described exactly those type of specifics. When you then meet them, organic conversations go like “yes, and” rather than “yes, but” and I think that is where the magic happens.

Christian Klepp 09:32

Absolutely, absolutely. I love that analogy. By the way, your favorite cocktail. I would just caution that maybe you shouldn’t have too many cocktails (laugh).

Ton Dobbe 09:41

You only need one, right?

Christian Klepp 09:42

Yeah, only one, only one.

Ton Dobbe 09:44

Not too many. Not too many dishes.

Christian Klepp 09:46

That’s right. That’s right. Not too many cocktails right? Fantastic. So you spoke a bit about mistakes and why some of these SaaS companies fall flat when it comes to being remarkable, but what are some other, say pitfalls that some of these companies should be avoiding.

Ton Dobbe 10:05

If I turn it around and go to do what makes companies remarkable. So what’s what to strive for? Then the opposite, of course is what are the pitfalls. So the first one in my book is remarkable software companies acknowledge they cannot please everyone. So the opposite of that is they try to please everyone, and they go wide, and they target everybody. And the pitfall there is that messaging blurs, gets too generic, and at the end, you don’t stand out. Second thing is, the second trade is remarkable software companies offer something valuable and desirable. And this is a combination of those two, that is super important, because the only variable is only so good. The desirability is where you create urgency, there’s criticality to it, there is desire… like the word says, it’s something that they want. Too many companies out there, offer something and think that the customer will get what they’re offering and have to do the translation themselves. So they stay at a level of by actually promising the same as 20 or 30 other companies, even in different type of categories, and industries. I mean, I’ve seen CRM vendors, promising the same as ERP vendors, promising the same as procurement vendors, promising the same as… you know and the list can go on. Because they all go for this big bold thing, we help you grow your revenue, for example. Well, sure.

Christian Klepp 11:35

Oh really? (laugh)

Ton Dobbe 11:38

Oh really, exactly. Then the third thing is about remarkable software companies aim to be different, not just better. And that’s also one of these pitfalls that, and it connects again to being obsessed with your competitors. But it also exists in isolation. But companies just say, Okay, I don’t like what they’re doing, we’ve got to build the same, and we’re going to make this better, and this better and this better, which can initially, of course, be something that could be tempting to a potential customer. But depending a little bit where you are, in my expertise in the sales-led SaaS business, where investments are 20,000 a year, 50,000 a year, 100,000 a year, a million a year. But you have to realize that if a customer is going to move from one solution to the other solution, it needs to be significantly better. So your 5 or 10%, incremental better is not going to cut it. So that’s where it needs to be fundamentally better, or that’s what I would call get different. So that’s, that’s a pitfull. I can go through all 10 If you want.

Christian Klepp 12:52

I mean, those are, those are really good. And I think those would suffice for the time being. We’ll save the good stuff for later on in the conversation.

Ton Dobbe 12:59

Okay,

Christian Klepp 13:00

Those are absolutely like great points. And I would even say, this whole notion of offering something of value. And I want to know your take on it. Because more often than not, I’ve seen companies that are doing more of an inside out rather than outside in approach. And what I mean by that is like they’re trying to send something out into the world that they say, Oh, definitely, this is going to be of value to the target audience. But what they don’t realize is that maybe the target audience doesn’t actually need this at all. Right. So how often have you seen okay, download the old the ultimate checklist? Right.

Ton Dobbe 13:39

Oh, yeah, yeah, plenty. Maybe actually, I might have one on my website that I still need to… from 2018.

Christian Klepp 13:48

Exactly, or the 37 tips or the 5 steps to go to market and so on and so forth. Right. And keep going.

Ton Dobbe 13:58

Yeah, true.

Christian Klepp 13:59

Yeah. Fantastic.

Ton Dobbe 14:01

Now, there is no, like I said, there is no sort of golden nugget. And you phrase it in the magic formula. But there’s definitely a number of things that you can challenge yourself on. And that’s why I created these traits, because that’s something that you can, if you answer the questions around that, the right questions, you can say, okay, we’re actually now scoring a six maybe. And that’s where we are in order for us to get to a 10 to the full score that requires us to do X. And you can constantly keep raising the bar. And I think that’s important because a framework is just a framework and a template is just a template and it gets you maybe something quickly done, but it’s always average. It doesn’t stand out. To the point that of the three traits that I just discussed. It’s actually there is wrapped in what I call the foundation is like it’s your “Value Foundation”. A lot of companies, and that’s also a pitfall that I haven’t even mentioned. They keep fighting the symptoms of the problems. And they don’t realize that they might not have an operational problem where the symptoms typically are being dealt with. But they have a fundamental problem. So I recently came across a story, just to illustrate this, that a pretty large software company, I think we all know them. But it’s complaining to one of my peers. And they hired her for doing some pipeline advice, and helping to get well to fix a pipeline problem, which is typically a symptom of that they were feeling the pipeline wasn’t good enough. They actually felt also that the number of their best sales, were getting so desperate or frustrated that they left. And then they said, Oh, we got it all under control, because we hired a headhunter and these headhunters enter the race, is finding new people for us, better salespeople to replace them. Of course, also, meaning that they are paying 20, 30, 40k for headhunter fees, not realizing that it’s yeah, it’s throwing one fire out, and then yeah, putting the other on, whereby if they would make two steps back and realize, wait a minute, what we have here is not a problem that is in our sales operation. It is something that is more fundamental. It’s around who we are, who we are for, who we’re not for. It’s around what a value proposition is really about, uniquely for them something that customers really want, but they cannot easily get somewhere else. And the positioning of that, of course. And that’s like it to your point also about inside out versus outside in. Very hard to see from the inside, because you’re just living the day to day. And yeah, you’re in the rat race. And people are calling you and pushing you and your manager is on top of you. And so the only thing you can do is actually yes. Make sure that the metrics that you see, got improved.

Christian Klepp 17:08

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There are occasions where I like to refer to that sometimes as the internal high five, right. You run it pass everybody internally, and they think it’s great. And high five and fantastic. And then you launch it, doesn’t generate the results that you were expecting. And then everybody does the… I call it the Spanish Inquisition. Yeah. Why did it happen? Yes. Maybe? Right. Yeah.

Ton Dobbe 17:42

Yeah, no, it has to do with a number of things. Of course, that’s what I see with virtually all the customers that come to me. And you cannot blame companies for it, you know, the larger you grow, the bigger the invisibilities actually become. And these invisibilities, I categorize them into three, it’s either complacency, we start to tell ourselves stories that we actually start believing, we are so great. And that dip that we had last quarter, that wasn’t because of an issue we have in sales, it was just a couple of customers that postponed. There was a hiccup with a product and so on. So it’s never the fault of us. The other thing is what I called blind spots. And the last one is bias. And the larger you grow, the bigger these become. And yeah, the only way to get around that is to acknowledge it and to find ways for people to read to unblindfold you.

Christian Klepp 18:18

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we coined a new phrase today, unblindfold. Right.

Ton Dobbe 18:25

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 18:44

Speaking of invisible and that was such a great segue to the next question, because I believe you, you mentioned this in the previous conversation, you talked about how many companies don’t grow because of things that are invisible to them. Alright. So can you elaborate a little bit more?

Ton Dobbe 19:00

Well, I mean, to give you an anecdote, I recently had a customer coming to me, it’s a research planning tool. It’s been around for over 50 years, I guess, in the Netherlands, selling internationally to pretty large organizations. And the reason why these people come to me is not because the product is mediocre, actually is pretty good products. It’s not because the people are stupid, you know, the CEO is an ex-McKinsey… to be working for the big five. And, you know, he’s been capable of running the company profitably for a good number of years. It’s also not because the processes are not in place, because they have pretty sophisticated processes. It’s not about that at all. It’s just simply because they don’t see any more what makes them unique. And when he came to me, he said, we actually started doubting our own products. Like is it still as good as we think it is because they were growing. And they were stagnating and at some point they even started to almost decline, they had customers churning. And that’s what he’s struggling internally, you know, people start pointing at each other. People have to do overwork. I mean, there’s just not the right atmosphere. So he realized, Okay, pretty hands-on guy, normally he does all the things himself because that’s, or at least with the team because they have capable people and decided okay, maybe for this one we shouldn’t. So then we did a pressure cooker projects and in four weeks we resolved the whole thing. And out of them came that nothing was wrong with the products, their fans were raving about the product as it is today. It was just about clarifying where they have to ask these days. And I call this “who you for”, “who you’re not for”, but actually being very clear “who you’re not for”. Being honest, and open to yourself about a number of customers that you might have in your customer portfolio, that maybe would have been better off going to the competition. You know, it’s not that they are not good customers, because they pay the bills, and all of that. But you could almost feel from the starting point that they will never become fans. And I think too many companies out there, take customers knowing it will likely never become a fan, still do it. And what that does to organizations, it just drags everything down. To kind of elaborate a little bit on that, if a customer is coming to you, and you have to sort of bribe them already with a discount. So they buy, they don’t see the difference between you the competition. But if you drop the price enough, they buy from you, because at least they have something that’s the cheapest. These customers first of all, you’ve already dropped your margin on that level. Because they don’t see the value real value is, they’re going to use your functionality to just fix a couple of their products or problems in a way that they think you can. So they’re going to use your product in a way it was not designed. So the implementation is going to be stressful, it’s going to go out of budgets, overall, these types of things, then customers Customer Success comes, they cannot get the customer happy in the normal time, then they’re going to make R&D life miserable by asking for features that no one else is asking for. But they need them. And it seems to be that this is normal. Every other solution has them. So what you end up is that you need far more people to support this type of customers, you are going to be thrown off track. So you’re going to release products that might fix some of the problems, but no one is going to ever thank you for it because it should have been there in the first place. And it’s just a vicious cycle down. And the only way to break it is to get as far as okay, hey, we need to be honest with ourselves. These are the customers that always become a fans. And these are the qualities that these guys have. That’s what we got to focus on. And then things turn around.

Christian Klepp 23:15

Fantastic. Fantastic. So what I’m hearing you say, and this is all great stuff. What I’m hearing you say in the past couple of minutes is that the company has to really do, well, for lack of a better description, like a deep dive or some soul searching into what is the reason for being not necessarily just that the company, but what are we producing this product for? Alright, yep. Who is this serving? Does this really address the genuine challenges and pain points that this customer has? And will this help them to succeed? Will this be transformational for them or not? Right?

Ton Dobbe 23:54

Yeah, I would like to actually go a little bit further. In my book, I’m writing about a triangle and someone called that at some point, the broken triangle because it’s often broken. If you look at a triangle, it is strongest when of all three legs, I will say four legs, all three legs are equally in size. That’s where it’s the strongest. So what does that mean? It’s three fundamental questions. What I’m always going through with my customers to get to, to do that soul searching, particularly on the pain point side is to create a long list of 50, 60, 70 pain points that keep their customers up at night. That keeps your ideal customers up at night, because that’s a very, very important nuance to it, because some of these problems they might bother, other people might have but they don’t bother about them. Once you’ve done that list of problem definition, and that define them in a way that when you hear them and you own them, it gets itchy. That’s where they’re at the right level because a lot of times problem definition is done very ill in a very generic way. And it doesn’t help either. Then you answer three questions on a scale of 1 to 10, how valuable is this to solve? On a scale of 1 to 10, how critical is it to solve? And then a very important question in terms of why you? On a scale of one to 10, what is your ability to exceed expectations? So the first two valuable and critical, they are really important, because if it’s valuable, but not critical, it’s nice to have. And that is a disaster, you don’t want that. If it’s critical, not valuable, then they might deal with it. They don’t do anything either. So you want to have both, because that is high on their agenda. And ideally, this problem should also be high on the agenda of the CEO, because often we talk about projects. So it’s very important, very valuable and critical for the projects, or the domain, for example, around HR. But it might not be as important to the company as well, like it’s not keeping the CEO up at night. So that’s an important thing as well. So that’s two legs of the triangle, both high. And then what you’re looking for in your soul searching is okay, let’s be honest now, where can we… which are the problems can we exceed expectations? If you can solve it, and that’s where a lot of companies make the mistake. If you solve it, you score of 5, because there’s many others that can solve it. But where do you score 8, or 9 or 10? And that’s what I want to have the argumentation behind it. Because in that list, it suddenly then drops from 70, to about 10. That’s where your magic happens. I call it the magic concepts. That’s where you can find your, your what’s the deep differentiated advantage that you have, that you can then start, because you know, the problem to translate into unique value. But that requires a lot of soul searching. And often, what I see is that we do a first round of validating, and then I start… first of all, you see across the company that different people rate it in a different way where you see, hey, they’re not aligned here. So I’m always looking for the the outsiders. But what you also typically see is that the lower part of the organization actually got it pretty well, right. Because they are dealing with the day to day hassle. And top management thinks way too positive about where their strength and that is an aha moment. It’s always refreshing.

Christian Klepp 27:20

Yes, I suppose it depends on who you’re talking to right, in terms of like being refreshing. But yeah, I can totally see that unfolding. I know you’ve given us a lot of tips here. And one of the big highlights of the show is leaving something that’s actionable for the listeners. So if somebody is listening to us, you know, having this conversation here about making SaaS companies remarkable. And they want to take away something from the show, like 3 to 5 things that they can act upon, what would those things be in your opinion?

Ton Dobbe 27:59

Well, I mean, I would always start on the foundational side, because that’s the most valuable part to start with, you know, I can say, I mean, you can start with trait number 10, which is about you know, how do you think about things and how you can hit the right nerve. But it will always be easier if you get the foundation right. So on the foundational level, start having discussions internally, about who you’re for, and who you’re not for. And actually be prepared to put it on your website. Describe on your websites, these products, create most value if you like this, and if you… if it’s it doesn’t create that level of value. If you’re like that. What it does is two things. First of all, it will make your ideal customers see and recognize themselves. But once you start describing the customers that are not such a good fit. They also go on to kind of take notice of that and say wait a minute, that’s also how I feel about it. Or yeah, it’s good that you’re against that. So you stand for something. And this is really a tough one because like I said, people fear of missing out. But like in my illustration, the moment you get super clear on that, it works like a magnet for the right customers. And you credibly detract customers that are not going to be a good fit. That’s fine. To give you an example to make that practical. Very often you got… imagine you got two organizations. They are in the professional service industry. They are both 1000 people in number of employees. They’re both in the UK, and they sell to the government so on the outside of the building and on the demographics or firmographics. They are actually identical. So that could be something that you’re going after. I found almost every time I’m looking at my customers at that picture, that’s where we end up okay this is what it is. And then we find that they are on the inside, they’re radically different. Because one is, for example, going after speed, where another one goes after and cares more about quality, radically different things. One goes for compliance, and they want everything to be compliant. But the other one is more about competitive advantage. So in describing those types of things, you don’t dismiss the other that they’re stupid, but you just acknowledged that, okay, if you’re only here for checking a compliance box, you shouldn’t be with us. There’s plenty of solutions out there that does the compliance. We do as well. But you’re not gonna get heavy from us. And I think that’s where the honesty needs to start playing. Yeah. And then from there, once you got that, then go work on trait number two, which is really start defining what value that you create that is actually extremely desirable for your customers. And then last, the last trait that you can start to think about, okay, how can you actually be fundamentally different versus incrementally better from competition? And what is required from your organization? What needs to be true? I think that’s a good question that a lot of that opens a lot of ideas. Because a lot of people always say that it’s impossible, but it’s not. And I think it’s the combination of the three, that you’ll find the answers. At least, that’s where I always find the answer in.

Christian Klepp 31:35

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, so just let me quickly recap that for the benefit of the audience. So start on the foundational level. Alright, so having those discussions internally, number two, is start defining what value you create that is desirable for the customer. And the third one, I hope I captured this correctly. What makes you fundamentally different versus incrementally better?

Ton Dobbe 32:00

Exactly. The first one is part of the foundation, but it’s about who you for who you’re not for, because it’s really about looking at your customers with an honest face.

Christian Klepp 32:08

Right. Right. Right. Not not always easy to do at times, I would say, right.

Ton Dobbe 32:14

No, no, no, no, no, it’s like I said, it’s especially because of that complacency and the blind spots and the blur. The bias, you get blur.

Christian Klepp 32:23

Absolutely.

Ton Dobbe 32:26

Yeah, for a lot of people, it’s like every customer that is paying is a good customer. But it’s not.

Christian Klepp 32:30

Right. Right. Yes. I think we all know that from experience that sometimes isn’t the truth, or sometimes isn’t the case. Right? Absolutely.

Ton Dobbe 32:42

I’ll give you an illustration of that. I’m not sure how we’re doing time wise.

Christian Klepp 32:46

We’re good. Keep going.

Ton Dobbe 32:47

I came from the ERP world, like I said, and at some point, we repositioned and I was starting to do some work with the Benelux like the Belgium and the Netherlands at a region where I was living at that point in time. And I started working with those teams to get it, make it part of the DNA of sales. They picked it up and other regions didn’t pick it up automatically, at least not by free will so to say because they have always done it their own way. What we saw is that selling the same product to the same industries. It was the same functional scope to similar type of organizations, in the Benelux we started to get to raise the win rates from 20% to 80%. We’re not as stuck at 20 and sometimes even dropped to 15 or 10%. So explain that. Right. The other thing was also that not only did their win rate increased to 80%. They were also selling faster, like months were cut off the normal sales charge cycles because of the perfect fit. And the word discount disappeared. And the good part, a good anecdote around that one is that our competitors, and these were Oracle and Microsoft and SAP very often at some point in time, after a couple of months, when they realized that we were in, they qualified us, because they realized we have no business here. It’s one of those again.

Christian Klepp 34:25

Interesting.

Ton Dobbe 34:25

So that’s, that’s how powerful it can be. And it’s the same organization. That was that was so powerful for me to see the difference. Because it is something that you have to believe in.

Christian Klepp 34:36

Well, you have to believe in it. You have to substantiate it, of course, and you have to act upon it. Right. And I think that’s at least one of my takeaways of the things that you’ve been talking about in these past 30 minutes or so. And, Ton, I believe, like throughout this conversation, you have already been on your soapbox and I would like to kindly ask you to stay up there a little bit longer. Here comes the question. So specifically on this topic that we’ve been discussing today, okay, what is the status quo that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Ton Dobbe 35:12

I mean, I got a number.

Christian Klepp 35:14

Just pick one.

Ton Dobbe 35:15

If I think about it, and it’s I think it’s actually grown recently. It’s this whole notion of “at scale”. I mean, I have nothing against scale. I think it’s a good… companies have to scale. But I think what scale needs to be about is creating leverage about the things that really work that are remarkable. And that work. Because once you got that, that’s where you can drive scale about it. What is misused for, and there’s so many solutions out there these days that if you look at my websites, it says personalization of email, at scale, and, 50 different varieties of that. That means we don’t believe in ourself. But now we can spam the hell out of people, wherever they are. And at some point, some people will stick if it’s 1%, perfect. If it’s half percent, also good. I think we go in completely the wrong way there. Because it’s is the opposite of being remarkable. It’s actually being irritable. And I don’t like to see that at all. That’s my soapbox there.

Christian Klepp 36:21

Yep. No, nope. 110% agree with that. And I think there was another guest on the show, who I interviewed probably two years ago, now two or three years ago. And he posted something on LinkedIn, which really drives this point home of this whole mass emailing, or email blasting or whatever you want to call it. And the you know, everybody’s trying to sell that as like you’re trying to, to reach people at scale and try to do outreach at scale. And perhaps maybe you’ll get three people that are interested, and you’re pissing off everybody else.

Ton Dobbe 36:59

True. And the stupid thing is, that’s another… It’s kind of like, I’m extending the soapbox. I mean, the bulk of my customers are sales at SaaS companies. So they sell to mid market and enterprise. For them to have a good year. They’re often… if they close 30 new deals, 50 new deals, sometimes maybe 100 new deals, depending a little bit on where they are in the market, they got a fantastic year. Going back to the notion of okay, if you can get to a close rate of 60%, 70%, 80%, but you only need for 30 customers, you need 40 leads, why would you go after them at scale? And still they do, because marketing has to kind of go out and they have to find leads. And, anyway.

Christian Klepp 37:48

That just does not make any sense at all. Yeah, but yeah, exactly. All right. So here comes the bonus question. So some of the listeners might not know this, but you’re originally from Holland and you’re now residing in Spain. And so the bonus question is, what is your favorite place to go to in Spain and what makes it so special?

Ton Dobbe 38:09

Well, I mean, I would say the town where I live. It says the small town called Jávea. And maybe not doing myself a favor because now more people will come to Jávea. But it’s one of those little pearls. It’s in microclimates on the east coast of Spain, between Alicante and Valencia. I already think Instagram has already spoiled it because a couple of the beaches are in the top 10 of Spain. But the summer is not too hot, Celsius… it’s 32 At the moment, whereby in other parts of Spain, where everybody’s going at the moment, Madrid and Seville, it’s 42-45. And in winter, it’s also pretty mild. So it’s like San Diego. The differences are not too bad. So that’s one. And I think if every time I speak to people from outside of Spain, the first thing they say I love Spain, I love to go to Madrid I love to go to Barcelona until people have actually been to, for example, a city like Valencia. And then they say, Okay, I was wrong, because this is something that feels, it feels… it’s a city, but it feels like a village. And it’s the pedestrian area. It’s just a vibe there. And the atmosphere is fantastic. So that’s one of my cities that I favor the most.

Christian Klepp 39:39

Wow. You’re really selling it man because I have bought in. Fantastic. I can imagine. I can imagine. I went to Spain many years ago and yeah, I’m sorry. It was very cliche. We went to Barcelona. Yes. But in my defense, we also went to other towns around Barcelona. So we can see the Catalan countryside. And that was truly amazing. And yes to your point, we were there in December and it was 20 degrees Celsius. So sunny blue sky, very pleasant weather. So yeah, it was a very, very memorable experience. But indeed, I would love to talk about sunny Spain and sunsets and beaches for another three hours. But in the interest of time, I would like to thank you so much for coming on the show. And sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. Please a quick introduction for yourself and how SaaS founders or anyone interested out there can get in touch with you.

Ton Dobbe 40:38

Oh, okay. Oh, that’s, I mean, if you if you’re not bored with me already. If you want to know more about me, I think the best way to kind of connect with me is on LinkedIn. I don’t think there’s a lot of Ton Dobbe. But find me there, my website valueinspiration.com. This is where you can download my book. And a number of other goodies that I have for free there. But just say hi, and let’s have a conversation.

Christian Klepp 41:08

Fantastic, fantastic. Ton, once again. Thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Ton Dobbe 41:13

Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Christian Klepp 41:15

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Leverage Measurement Marketing for Better Results

As Peter Drucker once said: “What gets measured gets done.” Too often in the world of B2B marketing, there’s a lot of confusion and conflict that arises from not knowing what to measure or what purpose the data brings. It’s important to start with a solid strategy that will tell marketers how they’re going to use measurement to address challenges.

That’s why we’re talking to measurement marketing expert Chris Mercer (Co-Founder, MeasurementMarketing.io**) about how B2B marketers can effectively leverage data in a way that’s actionable and generates better results. During our conversation, Mercer highlights the pitfalls to avoid and walks us through the process of developing the right measurement marketing approach.

https://youtu.be/SDphsHNCmwU

Topics discussed in episode

• What is measurement marketing? [2:23]
• The biggest mistakes most organizations are making with data [6:12]
• Mercer talks about how to handle client push-back [14:33]
• The “Measurement Marketing Framework”: [19:00]
  • The “Results and How” questions [19:28]
  • Information needed to answer those questions [21:36]
  • What actions to take to optimize results [22:12]
• Key metrics of measurement marketing: Journey-based metrics [33:10]
• Mercer explains why trends and patterns are more important than accuracy [34:49]

Companies and links mentioned

• Chris Mercer on LinkedIn
• Measurement Marketing
• Measurement Marketing Framework course
• Microsoft Clarity
• Google Analytics 4
• Tag Manager
• Looker Studio
• Wicked Reports
• Hyros

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Chris Mercer

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, welcome, everyone, to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to… hold on folks, track behaviors, measure progress of the customer journey, and make the right user see the right message at the right time. So coming to us from Austin, Texas, USA. Chris Mercer, welcome to the show.

Chris Mercer 01:13

Thank you, Christian. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:16

Absolute pleasure to have you on, and Mercer is I believe how you’d like to be addressed. Correct?

Chris Mercer 01:21

Ever, there’s always another Chris in the room, it helps keep us all straight. Exactly. Right.

Christian Klepp 01:25

Fair enough.

Chris Mercer 01:26

In this case, there’s a Christian. So it’s close enough, right?

Christian Klepp 01:28

Yes. Otherwise, I’d be like, Hey, Chris, and we both be looking at….

Chris Mercer 01:33

Exactly, Chris. Yes. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 01:37

Really looking forward to this conversation, Mercer, because man, not only is this pertinent, but it’s extremely important in B2B marketing. So let’s just dive in. Alright. So you’ve been on a professional mission, see what I did there. You’ve been on a professional mission to help marketers, their teams and agencies understand and leverage data. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, how to create an approach to measure marketing that’s actionable, and generates results. And quite frankly, who doesn’t want that? Something that’s actionable and generates results, right? So I’m going to kick this off with two questions and happy to repeat. Number one is define measurement marketing. And number two, is why do you believe many B2B marketers fall flat with measurement marketing.

Chris Mercer 02:23

Love that. So this goes back to how you introduce this entire podcast, which is a way to think differently, right? Christian will think differently. Here’s how we think about measurement marketing, I think most organizations have their data people, they are very comfortable with spreadsheets, they know databases, they can get access to any sort of number that anybody in the organization wants. And then they also have the marketing team. And the marketing team is out there trying new offers, new hooks, new angles, new ways to get booked calls, scheduled, or whatever the behavior is that they’re trying to acquire, right, new leads new sales. And however they need to do that. In theory, these two sides of the company are totally working with each other, speak the same language, and are helping each other, make each other better. In reality, I think in most organizations, that is not happening. And that is why measurement marketing exists. So the measurement marketer isn’t necessarily the person who is the data analyst. They are not necessarily the ones who are talking about linear regression to go figure, if we can figure out the mean, or the average or whatever, they don’t care. They’re also not that creative marketer who’s coming up with like, Oh, here’s what the next headline should be. Or here’s how we should pitch our offer. They are the person in the middle, that is listening to the conversation that’s happening between the website and the users, right. And measurement is how we listen to that conversation. They’re the ones who are setting up that measurement, they’re listening to the behaviors that are coming back, they’re seeing all those numbers come through, but they understand what those numbers are telling them. And then once they understand the story that those numbers are telling them, and they’re able then to translate that and say, Hey, marketing, here are the actions you can now take in order to improve these numbers. So just a real quick example might be booked calls, right? We want to make sure that book calls there so we can get qualified prospects on the line. Well, if we’re getting a ton of booked calls, and the measurement team say, Hey, I’m getting absolutely thoughtform, like 80% of the people are filling out that form. But then they find that only 4% of the people are showing up, we clearly have a problem with the quality, we clearly have a problem with what that form is doing. We need to restrict it a little bit, maybe clean it up, change the traffic source. So they would go to Marketing and can say listen, here’s how things are working right now, here’s the result you’re actually getting from all of this. And here are the changes that we recommend in order to improve those results. So that’s the measurement marketer, that person who is in the middle. And I think the biggest mistake that people have around measurement marketing is they just think, well, I have a data side. Well, I have a marketing side. Shouldn’t those two get together and the problem is they don’t understand one another. Data people do not understand creative marketers, creative marketers do not understand data people. And what happens is the marketer will ask for a report, the data person will give them the report exactly what they asked for. It’s just that it’s not at all what they needed. But the marketing person doesn’t understand what to ask for because they don’t know data. And a data person doesn’t know why the marketing person is asking for it. So they’re not actually getting what they want. And there’s that huge disconnect, hence the measurement marketer in between.

Christian Klepp 05:09

Absolutely, absolutely. Would it be fair to say that it’s almost like you’re trying to like, bridge the gap there? Right? Like as a measurement marketer, right?

Chris Mercer 05:17

That’s essentially it. It’s the person again, they’re not going too far down the rabbit hole of, of arguing about how what last Wednesday looked like, at a certain point, I think, data people do that too much. We’ll talk about that later, too. But they’re able to say, okay, based on the current trends and patterns, and what’s happening, here’s what’s going to happen next week, if we take these certain actions. So if we spend $1,000 on ads to book calls, here’s how many book calls we should get. Here’s how many of those should be qualified, here’s how many of those should show, here’s how many of those should buy, here’s what the average ticket should be. And here’s how much total revenue, like that’s the power of a measurement marketer, the person in the middle who can really make things happen, and help to unlock the rest of the company, to be honest, like they touch a lot of different departments in that way.

Christian Klepp 05:18

Fantastic. So I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And you’ve kind of alluded to it already. But like, you know… oblige me here for a second. Talk to us about some of the pitfalls that these B2B marketers should avoid with measurement marketing, and what should be done to address them.

Chris Mercer 06:12

I think the the biggest mistake with data right now. And I’m gonna separate out measurement marketing kind of as a thing. Because I think that is a skill that most organizations don’t necessarily have, again, they have data, and the mistakes that they’re making, just to sort of reframe that question. The mistakes they are making with data might be common ones, like, well, let’s just collect it. Like, we got to have it. Well, what are we gonna do with it doesn’t matter, we might want to do something with it later. So let’s just collect it just in case, right things like that. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see,, collecting data for data’s sake with no real purpose. The problem with that, if you think about it, kind of like Scrabble tiles, you know, the game of Scrabble, we have all these different tiles, you spell a different words. Well, it’s like collecting a bunch of Scrabble tiles, because eventually, you might want to spell a word or two out of it. But if all you’re collecting is a bunch of Z’s letter Z, right, Zed for those of you International, so when you’re just collecting these different Z’s and Q’s and U’s, it doesn’t matter how much of that you collect, it’s never going to spell out a word that you can use, it’s never going to be useful information, right? They won’t be useful tiles, just like a lot of the data that you’re currently collecting isn’t ever going to be useful data. And the reason that is, is because it’s not collected with a purpose. And that’s one of the primary tenants of measurement marketing is when we think about the steps to measurement marketing, you first plan out your measurement, what is the information that we’re trying to collect? Why are we trying to collect it? What actions are we going to take when we get it collected? Right? What are we going to do with it and all of that being thought out ahead of time? Most organizations don’t do that. They skip it, because it’s so easy to just collect it. But that’s a huge mistake, because you’re not thinking about it, you didn’t collect it with a purpose. And when you go back into that database years from now, to think that magically it’s going to have all these answers, it won’t, because it’s never been organized to do anything. It’s never been organized for a purpose. So it ends up just being a bunch of ripped up pieces of data, much a Scrabble tiles and a bag, that might just be a bunch of Z’s and U’s and Q’s that you never really took a look at until it was too late.

Christian Klepp 06:38

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s it’s having that intention, right. Like it’s being intentional. Having that purpose. I use this analogy with a client the other day, and she kind of like just hopped on the bandwagon and added her like two cents on. It’s almost like building a house. And then you don’t have the architects blueprint. Yeah. Even jumping. Jumping ahead of that, or taking another step back route rather, is even before the blueprint. What’s the vision? Right? Yeah. Where do you want to go with all of this? Right? Yeah.

Chris Mercer 08:49

It’s fun to use that example. Because that’s, that’s how we talked. A lot of lots of companies want to pick out the furniture of this new house before they’ve even laid the foundation. And it’s like, now’s not the time, furniture will be a conversation you can have later, it’s just not now, right now you need like you said you need what is the vision? What do you want the view to be? What direction is the window gonna be pointing, and that kitchen that you’re about to build? You know, all of these are important things. And that foundation. And if you think about it, going back to your house example, is the thing that takes the longest. And it’s the worst to look at. Imagined set… You know, you set these video cameras that watch houses get built. The foundation is like the first three months and hardly anything happens. It’s just a bunch of scraping off the land, digging out the land, letting cement dry. But why is it so ugly? It’s because there’s so much thought that goes into that. And you can’t see all that thought all you see is the result of all that thought that the certain pipes are in the certain places in the certain way, because they know that eventually this one little hole that’s in the ground, it’s going to be a kitchen sink, right and they’re planning out for that and data is very much the same way when it’s not collected with a purpose, when it’s not collected with that vision to kind of use that word… When it just shows up, people go and this is a symptom of most reporting. This is how you can tell if you have this in your in your organization. People are getting reports and they go, Okay, I have no idea what to do with this. I got the numbers, I have no idea what to do. I don’t know what they’re telling me. So then they just throw them out. And they do what they were going to do anyway, they are going to do what they’ve already decided they’re going to do anyway. Because the numbers that like, well, maybe this tell me some, but I can’t read it. So then it goes away. Well, how come that number was even there? If they didn’t ask for it? How come that report even showed up if nobody planned for it? But this happens all the time. So much. So I’d say it’s the status quo. Most organizations are doing this. And it ends up being social proof. And in reverse, everybody has this problem, but because everybody’s doing the same thing. They all go, yeah. Do you also have that problem where people are getting reports, and they’re not using them? And they’re too complicated, and they don’t have to take action off of them and ever goes, Yeah, us too. And everyone goes, Okay, well, I guess we’ll just do the same thing again tomorrow. When in reality, it should be like, well, maybe there’s a different way we can do this. So we can get rid of the symptom. But I think a lot of times, everyone goes well, as long as everybody else also has this problem. I’m not that bad. So it’s okay, because everybody else has a problem, too. But that’s a silly reason to keep a problem. Just because everybody else has the issue does not mean you need to keep the issue.

Christian Klepp 11:11

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, like, you know, how often have you been in a, in a meeting room where you’re showing data, you’re showing graphs and charts and somebody in the room says, okay, Mercer, What am I looking at here? Right?

Chris Mercer 11:25

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. Right. It’s exact when you think you’re describing a pure story, and they go like, okay, and so what do we do with that? Yeah. What’s the action step? Yeah. how is it not trivia? That’s exactly right. And that’s because there wasn’t, if that’s happening, it’s because there was not a proper plan for it. They didn’t plan for it, the team didn’t help them plan for it. Nobody knew what to do with it. And that’s, that’s kind of the exact opposite of the measurement marketing model, that framework that we have is to is to really focus on that plan first, because once you plan, what you’re going to do with the number when that number shows up, right, when the number shows up in your report, you already know what to do. So it eliminates the question. You will never have that I’m not sure what to do with this, because you’ve already planned what to do with it. That’s the whole point. And if there was no plan of action for that information for that piece of data, the data is not collected, or at least it’s not reported. Because it’s not useful. Right. It’s not answering questions. It doesn’t lead to natural action. So why gum it up in a report? You don’t need to do that.

Christian Klepp 12:19

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Speaking of having the right plan, that’s such a great segue into the next question, which is the role of strategy. Why do you not just charge into a battle? All right, yeah.

Chris Mercer 12:33

Yeah, really, really good. Really good question. Because I think that’s, again, it’s a challenge with a lot of organizations have this issue where the tools are so freakin easy to get. Think about even a tool like Google Analytics 4, it’s free. You put the code on the page, and Google Analytics 4 starts collecting data. So it looks like it’s working, right? Microsoft Clarity, same way throw Microsoft Clarity, bam, starts working, it’s collecting data. And then everybody goes, Okay, well, the tool obviously is working. So now I’m going to go into the data. And I’m going to go hack through the mythical data jungle, and I’m going to find the magic thing, magic insight, that’s going to turn me into a super marketer, right, which is a huge myth. But everybody expects that’s what they’re supposed to do. You have to go learn how to analyze data, which I don’t think you should, I think if you have to analyze data, your reporting is too complicated. And that’s a problem. So instead, the reason that we talk about strategy first is strategy should dictate the tools. Google Analytics 4 as a tool has a sort of pre-purpose strategy that Google thought about when they built this tool. Microsoft Clarity has one too, so is tag managers. So is Looker Studios. So is Adobe. So is Hyros, Wicked Reports, or Pipeline, all these other tools that are out there that measure stuff, they all have these different strategies they were pre-installed with. So imagine, if you’re using four of them, you have four unique, distinctly different strategies that are going to collide with one another, because the tools are starting to dictate your strategy.

Chris Mercer 13:18

So instead, when we talk about measurement marketing, and specifically the measurement marketing framework, which is the strategy that we recommend, is that you have a strategy in place of how you’re going to use measurement, right and total Guiding Light strategy that dictates everything. That strategy then tells the team, tells the company how and which tools to use and how to use them. So maybe certain things you’re going to collect with GA 4 but certain other things you’re going to use another tool for because it’s easier, right to get the answers from or it’s a better option to get the answers from, you’re not just saying well we use GA 4, I guess GA 4 got it. I gotta get everything from GA 4. This is not at all the case, your strategy should dictate your tools and not the other way around.

Christian Klepp 14:33

I totally agree with you. But I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate now cuz, man, you’ve probably dealt with this more times than you care to count. But how do you deal with pushback in terms of clients telling you well, Mercer, we get all that but like, you know, we’re, we’re about in the clock here and you know, time is of the essence. So we don’t have time for all that strategy stuff. Right? Okay. Can we can we just jump in and collect the data and just do the work and analyze it because we really need to get going with this. How do you push back on that? And tell clients, it’s in their interest to start with the strategy first?

Chris Mercer 15:10

It’s surprisingly simple. In that example, I’d be like, Well, isn’t that what you’ve been doing?

Christian Klepp 15:15

Right.

Chris Mercer 15:17

Isn’t that what you’ve been doing? But you are here. So you already know what that is. Yeah. I’m just suggesting a different way. You can absolutely do what you’re doing. If it’s working for you, if it’s giving you something useful, I would never ask you to change it. But my guess is what you just said, Hey, we can’t do it like, this is exactly what you’re doing. How do I know that? Because I can look at the symptoms. And I can see, oh, you’re using this type of recipe. So this is why your cake has grit in it. Why does it have grit in it, because I can tell you’re putting sand to the recipe. That’s why yours has grit. And that’s why mine doesn’t because I use sugar. You think sugar looks like sand right now. And you’re like, ah, but I don’t wanna have to go to sugar. I want to be able to use sand. So how do I use sand but not have grit? You can’t. One is the other. So that’s how I answer that. If you’re happy with your results, you don’t have to listen to the rest of this podcast. But my guess is anyone listening to this podcast is going Yeah, totally. That’s exactly what happens. I can predict what a lot of numbers look like. And I can predict the misuse of numbers, I can predict how much energy is being spun in an organization based on the system that they’re using, or in particular, the lack of system, because what they’re doing is just chaos. It’s just urgency is just memory. It’s whatever most recently was important to me, or the highest paid person’s opinion, that actually gets the attention. And that’s just that’s a ridiculous way to run measurement. That said, it’s how most organizations run measurement, because people do not take the time to figure this stuff out. And instead, they’ll take 10 years to realize they have a problem, then they want it fixed in 30 seconds. But they don’t want to have to change anything they’ve ever done. It’s just not going to happen. And honestly, if a client really insisted be like, Yeah, that’s exactly right. We want to do everything the same, but have magical different results. I would be like, listen, go for it. Go try it. And in six months, come back to us. If you still haven’t solved the issue. Maybe you can, but I would bet money against it. They’re just gonna waste their time. And they know, everybody knows.

Christian Klepp 17:12

Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. But that’s kind of like the definition of insanity. Isn’t it… like expects… Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Chris Mercer 17:23

Yep, that’s exactly what, but that’s what happens. And again, I don’t think it’s their fault, because I don’t think they see it like that. They’re going to everybody else. They say, Well, how do you do it? They jump on LinkedIn, how are you doing it, and everyone’s doing it like that, they go, Well, that’s how it’s done. That’s not true. That is a way to do it, it is the way that most people are doing it. But does just because most people are doing something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, there could be this new way of doing things a slightly different way, going back to the beginning of this conversation, a different way of thinking about something that can produce wildly improved results. And if you’re the type of company that isn’t willing to look at that, that’s totally cool. I think after a certain period of time, those companies get smaller and smaller with time because the market is not going to respond to that. But other companies will. You’re gonna see competitors start adjusting and figuring stuff out and moving around you. How are they doing it? Because they have a better understanding of how their machinery works, and how their marketing engines work. Right. And when they know that because they know measurement, they understand how everything works in the organization, that customer journeys and how everything is supposed to flow and how the dots are supposed to connect, which domino hits which domino hits which domino. When they know that stuff. And they can forecast that stuff. It’s a completely different world, they’ll never go back ever go back to the old way. But they also don’t go out there on LinkedIn and start talking about either. They’re too busy, you know, improving results.

Christian Klepp 18:41

Yes, yes, there are some clues.

Chris Mercer 18:45

Exactly right.

Christian Klepp 18:46

You’ve brought some of these up already in this conversation. But let’s try to unpack that and walk us through the process of developing that right measurement marketing approach. What are the key components? What do you need to put in there?

Chris Mercer 19:00

Yeah, good question. So this is the framework. And this is the part where I would say, you know, write this stuff down how to think about it, there really are three steps to this. But there are specific keys to each step. And we can go through all of those. So the three steps, so you plan out your measurement, then you build out your measurement, and then you’re going to launch the measurement. In other words, we’re going to use it. I’m gonna talk about the specific ways you do this, because it’s not just planning, it’s planning properly. So here’s how we plan properly. We call this QIA stands for three keys here.

Chris Mercer 19:28

The first is questions. So we list out the questions that we’re trying to answer. And just to talk briefly about that. There are a lot of the students that will come to us, they’ll say things like, I’m just not sure which questions I should be asking right, things like that. So what do they do? They go to Google, and they say, what are the you know, B2B marketer, what are the questions that every B2B marketers should be asking? And they get a million blog posts that all start with like seven questions or 11 questions or 35 questions or if you really want to be contrarian, the five questions never to ask and they get millions but now they’re just overly confused, right? And that is completely the wrong approach, I will give you the answer to figuring out if you’re asking the right questions. And there’s really only two types of questions ever, ever that you can ask. One is a results question. So what I mean by that is what is the result of this user journey? Right? So what are average? How many sales do we get? How much revenue did we get? What our average cart value is? Those are all end of journey. How many leads do we get? booked calls? Maybe. Those are end of user journey, types of questions. What was the result of the journey, of the behaviors being completed that we want to complete? The most important question, I think a lot of people ask results questions by default, the most important question that’s being missed are the how questions. And so if you want to just make it easy for like a sale, right? How many sales did we make? That’s an important results question, how did we make those sales? How many people showed up want to the book a call? How many of those booked? How many of those actually showed up? How many those shows were qualified, actually could buy if they wanted to? And how many of those did we close within the seven days for the average amount that we wanted to do? So we made that revenue? When you understand the how you got your results, you literally know the recipe. So now you can say, Okay, well, here’s how things work. Now that we know how the marketing works, we can then start to use it for predictions, right, which we’ll talk about later. So that’s results in how questions and the answer to like, I’m not sure if I’m asking the right results, or the right questions, I would just say, are you asking results in our questions? Yes, then you’re good. Just keep doing that you will naturally get better at asking results and how questions as long as you keep asking results and how questions, it is natural, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to try, it’ll just naturally start to happen. So results and how questions.

Chris Mercer 21:36

Second thing in the plan, you list out your questions. The second thing is the information. What information do we have to gather in order to get answers to those questions? So let’s think it’s something like a book a call link, right? Like some sort of, some other opt in right, get our white paper or whatever you’re doing to get a lead. So then we’ve got Okay, I need to know how many people are opting in. So I might know, I might have to measure the number of thank you pages that we have after the people that are successfully opt in. And I want to measure the number of people who could have opted it, who saw that page who could have opted it, that’s going to tell me that conversion rate very simple way, very simple way to explain information. And that’s where measurement skills do come in. Because you’re starting understand what behaviors are that you want to try to measure on the site.

Chris Mercer 22:12

Now, the third thing is we have a questions, we’ve got the information, the third step of a plan and it cannot be a plan unless you do the step. And this is the secret sauce to this step of the planning step. Actions. Talked about it before, you have to think to yourself and I would do it in this specific way. What am I going to do when this answer comes in within range? What am I going to do if this answer comes in lower than what I expect it to? What am I going to do if the answer comes in higher than what I expect it to? And you do all three directions. So what am I going to do if the answer is just right kind of in the range that I expect it to be? What actions am I going to take if it’s lower? What actions am I going to take if it’s higher? And you do that in the planning process before you open a spreadsheet. Before you look at Google Analytics before you go to Facebook Ads Manager wherever the numbers are, before you think about any of that you’re doing this at the planning stage, when you do it at the planning stage, it eliminates the possibility that anyone’s going to get a report that they don’t know what to do with because they’ve literally already planned what to do with the report before they even asked for it to be built. That’s the whole point. So questions, information, actions, that’s the secret to that planning stage. Once you’ve got the planning stage, at that point, then you move into the build. And this is where you’re going to use tools, whatever is not a perfect one. They’re all great. And they’re all bad, right? This is they’re all pros and cons. But let’s say Google Analytics 4 because that’s one that most people have access to, it’s the easiest one. So I would say the first thing to do with a platform like Google Analytics 4 is you have to make sure that it understands what results you were trying to get. And you’re going to see a pattern here what I’m about to do in this strategy, the results we measure not just the end result of the user journey. We’re not just measuring leads and sales, right leads and purchases, we don’t just care about those, those are important. But that’s not the only conversion we really care about. That’s not the only result from our marketing. What our marketing is really doing is it’s also telling us how many people are asked to join the journey in the first place. So we know the number of people that we asked to even start that journey. And it also can tell us how many people actually continued. In other words, how many people showed a behavior that was where they’re going, You know what I’m considering finishing this journey? Right? So we call it this act model where you measure how many people you asked to join the journey, how many of those are continuing the journey, and what percentage of those are actually going to end up transacting. ACT. So when you’re setting up your results in Google… let’s say a platform like Google AdWords for you might set up a bunch of conversion events are key events, as they now call them. But when you set those up, you’ve got well I can tie traffic sources now to which ones are really good at asking people and making people aware of things. Which ones are better at transactions and closing the deal, which ones are better engagement along the way. And you can start to measure that because you’re measuring act right again, Ask, Consider and Transact. And if you think about it, you’re gonna see this pattern because in questions, what are we talking about results and how, right, that’s the end result plus how do we get the result. What are we measuring for when we use our platforms and set up and properly set up our platforms, not just put the code on the page actually set up the platform, well, then we’ve got Act, which is another way of results and how. Here’s how many people asked, how many, what percentage consider, what percentage will transact. And then next to that, once you’ve got your result set up, it’s about the traffic, making sure that you tagging your traffic properly. And anybody can do this little thing is called UTM. If you’re not familiar, you can Google the letters UTM. And there’ll be a million things that will show you how to use those. But a parameter that identifies who is sending us traffic, what type of traffic is it sending and why. And the why is the piece that people miss. So a way to explain this might be let’s say, I’m in my Google Analytics 4, I should be able to go into it and say, oh, and it’s and I’m going to tell this in a story, right? Just so just to kind of help you visualize it, it might be like, Hey, listen, I’m a Facebook ad. I am the Facebook ad with a picture of a horse with a wide open territory. I am bringing this audience of people who like your free Facebook group, and we’re trying to get them to become a lead, please let me know how I did compared to the rest of the Facebook ads that are trying to do the same thing. Then the next traffic source might be like, listen, hey, I’m an email. I’m email number three of the 12 part autoresponder series, I am taking somebody who’s already been what we what we are currently calling a hot lead. And they should be booking a call right now based on this email that I’m sending, please let me know how I did compared to all the other emails that are trying to do that. When you set that up, you start to see a natural story. And that’s the third step of the build stage, we have our results, we make sure our traffic is tagged properly with the who, what and why. So that we can start to see a natural story between which traffic sources are causing which of those results. At that point, you now have eliminated the whole multi touch attribution issue that people will have problems with. Because you can see, you can predict, you can forecast which traffic sources are really good at awareness, which ones are good at where that consideration phase engagement stuff, and which are really good at completing the user journeys. So you’ll see that. So we’ve got our plan, Question, Information, Actions (QIA). When your measurement plan is done, you move to your build, we have the results defined, we got our traffic tagged, we have a natural story starting to appear. At this point, we move to that third phase, which is the launch phase that is actually using measurement. And here’s where again, companies I think get kind of a little… they just get used to doing what they did yesterday. And that’s honestly because they learned it from somebody else who did it yesterday from somebody else who did it 10 years ago that way from somebody else who did it 50 years ago that way. So I would be able to hesitate on some of that. But that’s why a lot of the old thinking is out there. So when you launch something, the first thing you do is you listen, and we use that word listen on purpose, because what we’re listening for are the trends and patterns that are happening on the site, the trends and patterns of all those different behaviors, how many people should go to an opt in and convert, I would love it to be 100%, it’s not going to be right, it’s not going to be. It’s going to be between probably 25-35% if it’s cold traffic, 35-45% if it’s warmth, 55-65% if it’s super hot. This is just how it’s going to be – trends and patterns, right, we start to listen to the trends and patterns. Now. We’re listening in those trends and patterns. Where those trends and patterns coming from, they’re coming from our users, from all the behaviors that they’re leaving behind on the site, right, all those behaviors that we’re measuring for. So in a very real way, we are listening into their side of the conversation using measurement. That’s how we hear the user side of the conversation, because we can’t obviously be there and stare at them all day long using the site. So we have that first step Listen, second step Forecast. This is the piece that most people don’t do properly, or if at all, with our measurement systems. And you should. It’s a firmly measurement thing, because measurement done well doesn’t just tell you what’s working, and what’s not. It tells you what’s coming next, when it’s done properly. So forecasting, so what you do is you build a forecast, and you say instead of saying things like what happened to the $10,000 we spent last week on Facebook, you start asking questions like because you understand trends and patterns and how your machinery works. Because you’ve done your build, you have a proper measurement plan, you can start asking questions like, well, what’s going to happen to $10,000 we spend next week, what should our CPMs be? What should our cost per click be? What percentage of those should let’s say book a call? What percentage of those should show? How many of those will be qualified? How many of those will say yes to the pitch? And then when are they going to close? And how much money should we get by when?

Chris Mercer 29:02

And then you measure against all of that. And that’s what leads you to that final step of a measurement when you’re using your measurement system. And that is the Optimize step. And that’s where you’re actually taking action to improve the numbers right to improve thing. So if you get it back, and you’re like, hey, actually our CPMs we thought we’d be $10. It turned out there were 50 bucks. Okay, that’s where it is. But did the opt in rate show up? did the call showed? Everything else work? Yah, everything else worked fine, but the CPMs are heavy. Okay, so do we change the salesperson script on the call? No, because that’s not where the break is. The break is on the Facebook side or the traffic side. CPMs a little high, maybe we can do some targeting. So clearly, because we measured and we’re comparing against our forecast, the measurements sort of dumping us out and saying, Hey, marketing, if you focus your resources somewhere in this area, you’re more than likely going to move the needle now. But if again, if let’s say CPMs were fine, cost per click was great. The opt in rate was fine, but the show rate was bad. Then we might be like, Okay, what’s the problem here? Is… maybe there’s no emails that are following up? Trying to get them show… we will do some of that, let’s pretend all of that’s in place. You’re like, this used to work, how come it’s not working, I still say it’s traffic, because you’re getting people to show up, but they’re just not, or they’re getting to fill out the forms. But that’s ultimately not what we want. We want them to buy something. So maybe they’re just not qualified, it’s the wrong target, you would know that, right? If everything is coming in there on the call, they’re qualified, but they’re just not closing. Well, maybe there’s a salesperson script there, whoever, whoever that person is, it’s actually trying to close the deal and get, well maybe the follow up system isn’t in place properly to get them across the finish line, maybe the objection script has to be handled a little bit differently. But now the marketing team knows, okay, we’re not going to focus on traffic. Traffic is not the problem. It’s converting that traffic. And we’re going to help the sales teams with that if that happens to be what your particular model is. So that’s the kind of the overall framework we plan things out by asking the results in our questions. We gather the information of the behaviors that are needed to answer those questions. And we already know the actions we’re going to take if the answers are just right, if they’re a little higher, if they’re a little lower, and we go into our build, we make sure that our build is set up with the results using act right, how many are we asking to join the journey? How many consider? How many transacted again? We make sure our traffic is tagged. So it identifies who it is, what type of traffic it’s sending, and why and what’s the purpose of that traffic is. And then we have it stitched together in a natural way that tells a story, which is understanding why we are so important, we have to learn how to use these tools, then we use the system itself when we launch our measurement system. At that point, we’re listening to the trends and patterns, we have a forecast for how those trends and patterns should be working. And it’s what the conversation should be. And then we’re measuring against that. That’s what will tell us what to optimize. And if you think about all the optimization steps we’ve already planned for in the action step. So we already know what to do. So all of a sudden measurement just leads to effortless action, and things improve a whole lot faster. So that’s the whole measurement marketing plan, build, launch framework in a nutshell.

Christian Klepp 31:48

Give me a second here.

Chris Mercer 31:49

Ohh that was a lot. There will not be a quiz afterwards. That’s why these are recorded. This is where people are going back. Wait, let me skip past it.

Christian Klepp 31:56

Let me get the transcript. Yeah, the answers are right there. (laugh) Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. And thank you so much for I guess this must be like 15 years of like, industry experience that you’ve like, kind of compressed into 5 or 10 minutes now.

Chris Mercer 32:17

Yeah, almost in the thinking that, like if you just change these core components, it’s going to give you the most leverage to get the most difference in your world, right, to impact the results that you’re trying to get. If you change that thinking, you almost cannot help but get a better result and profit. No matter what tools you’re currently use.

Christian Klepp 32:35

Yep, yep, that’s right. That’s right. So just quickly recap: Step one was plan. Step two is build. And step three is launch. And for all the other details, you’re just gonna have to listen to the recording, or you can look at the transcript. I’m gonna move us on to the love it or hate it question. And for you, you’re gonna have no problem answering this: metrics. Now, granted, we don’t want to go down this really deep rabbit hole of 100,000 metrics that we need to look up. But what are some of the key metrics when it comes to measurement marketing, that B2B marketers have to be paying attention to?

Chris Mercer 33:10

It’s all going to be journey based metrics. I would point out of that what we talked about with the measurement framework that it will be, you know, in your Build step, when you’re trying to measure results, we talk about ACT, ask, consider, transact. When we’re talking about the questions about results and how… the whole point of that is to get you thinking about the journey. It’s not just the one sale that you’re trying to measure, there’s 400 different sales that are happening. That’s just the last one, one where they give you the credit card is just the final sale. But there are a lot of other sales that had to be made along the way. You know, those of you familiar with we call it micro conversion, same concept. There’s lots of conversions along the way before that final one is there, you need to be aware of those and ask about those. So that would be my absolute best advice on the metrics that people should be loving, but don’t. And it’s just because they haven’t thought about it. Once they do when they see it. They’re like, Oh my God, how do I not think about that ahead of time, but always measure how many people started the journey, then you would measure of course, how many people finish what you probably already are, and then measure those engagement steps along the way. Some journeys might have one little middle stage step, others might have a more complex amount of engagement steps, but when you measure the journey steps, you are seeing the drop off and you will start to see how different traffic sources can influence the journey going through. It becomes so much easier when you do that. So ACT is the the model but Ask, Consider and Transact. Measure for those multiple steps. Absolutely the love metric that I would give.

Christian Klepp 34:32

Fantastic, fantastic. All right, we come to the soapbox question, so please get up on your soapbox, Mercer. A status quo that you passionately disagree with and why.

Chris Mercer 34:46

So many!

Christian Klepp 34:47

Just one.

Chris Mercer 34:49

I know. I know. Okay, I’m gonna pick the one. I’m going to pick the one that I think would be the most useful if people will just stop saying this word. It’s so powerful. We call it the “A” word here. And that is word is when somebody comes to us and they say, Oh, I just need this to be more. I even have a problem saying it. Hang on, I gotta think myself through it. I just need this to be more accurate. Oh, God, that word accuracy. I’m so tired to hear that actually, don’t get me wrong. I understand why people ask it. I did too. When I was starting out, I asked it because why? Everybody else I learned from asked it. But then I started going wait, is there such a thing as accuracy? I started really going to measurement going, there’s not, you’re never going to have accuracy. The only way to have accuracy is to have half the world hired to follow the other half around to report on what they’re doing. And even then you would get their version, not what actually happened, just an interpretation of what happened. There was no such thing as accuracy. Stop thinking about it. Accuracy is not important. Usefulness is, so we call it the useful truth. So here’s an example. If I said to you listen, your Google Analytics 4 says that you made $900,000 this week. But if I go to your cart system, it says you made a million dollars this week. Could it be possible that I figure out setting up a measurement server or doing API calls or whatever else I need to do to make sure that Google Analytics matches dollar for dollar your cart? Sure. totally could. Is it worth those resources? Maybe might be. But let’s continue the journey. Let’s say next week that Google at DGA forest says hey, you sold 1.8 million, almost 2 million. Your cart says yeah, you actually sold 2 million, exactly 2 million. At this point, this is where my trends and patterns kicks in. And I go, Well, wait a second. They’re both saying things doubled. That’s the trend. That’s what they’re saying. They’re not saying you made 800,000, you made them up, they’re saying you doubled your sales. That’s the useful truth: sales doubled. If that was the intention I was supposed to be getting from the marketing. And the results happened like that I would be measuring. And I would know how that happened. I got a useful truth, I can predict. And I was like, Oh, if I want to get sales to double again, I need to maybe take these activities. And I’ll do that the week after next or next month. And we should see them both go up again. It’s not worth my time and getting the team all tied up in circles, to track down pixels to get all the reporting platforms to say the same thing. They never will. They all look at it differently. They all measure differently every day, there’s new tech that makes it harder and harder. Every day more users forgot what an ad blocker is, right. So there’s less likely you’re gonna be measured every day, there’s going to be less data, I think in five years, you’re gonna have about 20% of the data that that’s out there can be measured, the 80% won’t be. It’s just you won’t, you won’t have access to it. So you kind of get really good at getting off this accuracy gravy train, because it is not important. It’s important in a bank account. It’s important for my paycheck, I get that accuracy has its place. When it comes to marketing and measurement. Accuracy is not important. Trends and patterns absolutely are.

Chris Mercer 37:47

Soapbox time.

Christian Klepp 37:48

Yes, Mic drop. No, I mean, you know, that’s a fair point. I mean, I can imagine that there’s a camp out there that might disagree with that point of view. But that’s only because… like, to your point they’re just so obsessed with: it has to be accurate. But a lot of marketing, at least from my experience is an inaccurate science. Because it’s constantly evolving.

Chris Mercer 38:11

It’s exactly right. Yeah. And we really… and the whole point of that is, is if the metric gives you the action that you need to take, right, then I’m already done with that metric, making it more accurate unless it’s changing the action isn’t going to be more useful, right? So they both tell me I sold about a million and my forecast was about a million. I’m done. If one says 900,000, and one says 1.1. It doesn’t matter. They’re both saying about a million, I already had the action in mind for what I was gonna do with a million. It doesn’t matter if I get the other one to say a million, other one is a million. All that work would still get me to the same action. I already know I can take now or so why do the work? Just take the action in improving, get the 2 million or 3 million and 4 million. That’s the idea.

Christian Klepp 38:28

All right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Bonus Question time. So rumor has it or I should say I have it on good authority that you started your career in radio advertising. Alright. So if…

Chris Mercer 39:11

Someone’s done some research, all right, all right. Here we go.

Christian Klepp 39:15

Other people call it stalking. Alright. (laugh)

Chris Mercer 39:18

I’ll take it. I’ll take it, it’s fine.

Christian Klepp 39:21

If you were given the freedom to choose to read a whole spread ad for any brand in the world. Who would it be for and why?

Chris Mercer 39:30

To read an ad for any brand in the world? Oh, that would be a good one. And I’m not going to just keep it and be like, well, any of the ones that I own already, because I clearly do that. But to be able to represent a brand I think would be… I would want to go outside the industry I think for sure for something like this when as I’m thinking through it. What I would like is to be like in a World… like that guy. Yes. You know where it’s like movie trailers, like “in a world where measurement marketers are…”, you know, or whatever and just have fun with the voice and twist it. Like one of my favorite radio commercials ever was where I made up this old gravity column old text line of comedian stories just like that. It was like, oh, gravity guy was like 85 years old smoking for 20 years talking about beer specials. And I made up that character. And I remember, I remember the customer, the client was like, who’s doing that? I’m like, that’s mine. But it ripped up my voice for three days, but it was a lot of fun. So it’s some sort of character would be where I would definitely play. That would be cool. But I like the announcer concept, because there’s lots of variety. You got a different movie every time you can play with it. You know… Yes. Good.

Christian Klepp 40:41

No, fantastic. I did a little bit of voiceover work back in the day. And one of the characters I played or I was supposed to play was a dying General. Right. So he’s this older guy, and I had (cough) into the mic right, and “you must…”, and I guess I suppose I just say it with a British accent say, “you must carry on without me. The mission is what matters”, you know? (laugh)

Chris Mercer 41:09

Oh, I love that! It brought me to the moment. I’m there with you. Man. “Don’t go don’t go General.”

Christian Klepp 41:15

Yes.

Chris Mercer 41:16

“Well, I’ll never forget.” I love that. That’s cool.

Christian Klepp 41:18

“We can’t go on without you sir.” Mercer, fantastic. I mean, I’d love to continue talking about voiceovers. But in the interest of time, thank you so much for coming on the show. And you know, for unpacking what is, you know, it can be a very highly complex area and thank you for all these actionable tips and hopefully the listeners walk away from this, knowing what not to do and what they really should be thinking about. So please quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Chris Mercer 41:52

Absolutely. So my name is Chris Mercer. Everybody calls me Mercer. I am the co-founder of a company called MeasurementMarketing.io. And you can find out more about us including getting a free course to the measurement marketing framework that we train over at measurementmarketing.io/B2Bmarketers.

Christian Klepp 42:10

Fantastic. Fantastic. Once again, Mercer thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Chris Mercer 42:16

Thanks, Christian you as well.

View Details

How to Leverage Podcasts as Part of Your B2B Marketing Strategy

For the most part, podcasting is still a largely underutilized component in a B2B company’s marketing strategy. With a good strategic approach and consistency, B2B podcasts can help companies build relationships with ideal customers in ways that cannot be achieved through conventional methods.

That’s why we’re talking to B2B podcasting expert Robb Conlon (Founder, Westport Studios) about how companies can incorporate podcasts into their marketing strategy. During our conversation, Robb discussed why there are still so many untapped opportunities in B2B podcasting and which pitfalls to avoid. He also explained how to get buy-in from senior management for podcasts, the importance of understanding who your ideal listeners are, and provided some actionable tips.

https://youtu.be/AdDywK0QeuA

Topics discussed in episode

• Why podcasting is still a largely under-utilized component in B2B marketing [2:30]
• The top 3 pitfalls to avoid when it comes to B2B podcasting [8:29]
  • Naming the podcast
  • Picking the right host
  • Opening the podcast episode correctly
• Robb talks about how he deals with the question of ROI [24:10] and when to expect ROI from podcasts [30:06]
• Researching and coming up with the right strategy for B2B podcasting [36:33]
• Actionable tips: [39:40]
  • Create a list of potential guests
  • Reserving the ‘naming real estate’
  • Set the right expectations

Companies and links mentioned

• Robb Conlon on LinkedIn
• Westport Studios

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Robb Conlon, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk, marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to build better B2B relationships through podcasting. So coming to us from Port Washington, Wisconsin, USA, Mr. Robb Conlon Welcome to the show.

Robb Conlon 01:09

Great to be here, man. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:13

It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Robb, I think there’s been several months in the making, if I’m not mistaken, but man, really looking forward to it.

Robb Conlon 01:22

Definitely, several years, if you really think about it from the from the long term perspective, you and I have known each other for quite some time. So…

Christian Klepp 01:30

True, true. But Robb, I’m really looking forward to diving into it today. Because not only is this a topic that you and I are extremely passionate about. I would even go a step further to say this is a topic that is extremely relevant and pertinent to B2B marketers out there, some of them just might not know it yet.

Robb Conlon 01:48

Absolutely, I think that’s a… the lack of knowledge around about how this can be incredibly useful to a business strategy is well known, but maybe not as well known as we think.

Christian Klepp 02:01

Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s kick off this conversation with this, okay, you’ve created a business and what you refer to as a beacon for B2B relationships. So let’s focus on the specific topic today that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how you can leverage podcasts as part of your B2B marketing strategy. Let’s kick off this conversation with the following question. And that is, why do you believe podcasting is still a largely under-utilized component and accompanies B2B marketing strategy?

Robb Conlon 02:30

I think it’s underutilized because I think it’s not done correctly. In the most, in most cases, a lot of folks are out there, and they’re going, oh, we need to make something like the Joe Rogan experience or This American Life or something like that. But they’re not seeing it as a well what you described, what are my little slogan is a beacon for relationships. It’s not about going out there and getting 10,000 downloads an episode or anything like that. It’s out there, getting out there and finding your right audience, that you can actually build relationships and talk with. Being in a lot of niche industries with our shows, I think that’s one of the things that bigger industries miss is that folks are not utilizing podcasts in the correct way, because they’re trying to do it in a B2C, or a D2C sort of manner. And I think that’s what, you know, my mission of helping folks figure out how they can create the best B2B relationships really has a poll for folks and that we can make sure that they they understand that going into podcasting, it is underutilized from a relationship standpoint, not necessary from a content standpoint, but from a relationship building standpoint.

Christian Klepp 03:42

Yeah, no, that’s a fantastic point. Would you say that podcasting is something like a mechanism, a vehicle to build relationships at scale?

Robb Conlon 03:52

You know… I would not. It’s your going. It’s one of those things, you know, you’ve had this show for, you know, 100 and… how many? 140, 150 episodes somewhere in there if I recall…

Christian Klepp 04:01

Yah, we’re releasing episode 141.

Robb Conlon 04:04

Okay, so 141 episodes, it’s not a… in the way that most marketing, you want marketing to scale, obviously, you want to make an ad or something like that, and you want it to be seen by more than one person. Podcasting is the opposite of that. But whereas that ad might just scratch the surface of a relationship with somebody. Imagine taking like a… gardening, and you need to move quite a bit of dirt. You take a troll a, you know, a garden hand shovel, a little guy, boom scoop of dirt. That’s what like advertising and other methods do. But if you really need to move a significant amount of dirt, you go and get a shovel or a backhoe or something bigger like that. And that’s what podcasting is relationship wise. It takes that bigger scoop for people and as much as you can. As much as it’s not a scalable thing, it almost can be a little bit… after a period of time. The first bits that definitely aren’t scalable, that’s just, you know, shovel after shovel, one person at a time. But once you develop your niche audience, and once you develop actually a following in your industry, which I should mind for most listeners, I just find the following is only a couple hundred people. That’s not a very big audience in this case. But the trick is, is that it’s the right kind of people. To give an example for folks out there, we work with the show in the higher education marketing space, doesn’t actually work directly with universities on our side. But they have folks on their show that are in this tiny industry that helps universities and colleges get more students. There’s only 4000 institutions of it like that sort in the United States of America. And many of them are small, they have one or two people at the marketing department help. And so if you’re making a podcast for people in the higher ed marketing space, your maximum audience is maybe only 4 to 10,000 people. And that’s not a Rogan experience or anything like that. That is a very small, very niche audience. But if you can get that little segment rallied around your show, because that shows for us, that show is ours. That’s where the real paydirt comes relationally, and sometimes financially.

Christian Klepp 06:24

It’s a really good point. It’s a really good point. And I tend to agree you can’t compare this to like Joe Rogan, or even Gary Vaynerchuk. I mean, like, that’s just a scale that’s, at least in B2B, it’s not it’s not realistic. And it’s, and I think the second point is like, why would you even compare it to that, right? Like, to your point, it’s focusing on these micro niches right? Having these few hundred followers that are relevant, not only to your audience, but to the show, to your industry and so forth. Right.

Robb Conlon 06:53

Right. And it’s the, it’s the folks who stick around. It’s the folks who come around and say, Hey, I listen to this show every week on my commute. And yes, there are plenty of people in the B2C or D2C spaces that say, Hey, I listened Joe Rogan all the time, or I listen to whatever my favorite podcast is, all the time. I’ve got plenty of those myself that I that I do. But when it comes to learning, when it comes to B2B, when it comes to building relationships for sales and marketing, and all of these things that B2B Podcasts can enable, having that small niche audience where you really know that person or that person takes the time to write an email to the host and say, Hey, man, I really enjoyed episode 127. That conversation you had with John Johnson, wow, that we implemented that at our, our business or at our school, or whatever it might be, that is where you really can have the rubber hit the road. Again, it’s not about making this mass consumption stuff. It’s not about making things that go viral on YouTube. It’s about making this niche content that helps people in the business space, but also builds that relationship with them in the business space.

Christian Klepp 08:00

Exactly, exactly. You brought up something already, that was such a great segue into the next question about pitfalls to avoid, and I know that you’ve got like a treasure trove of pitfalls there. But like, try to narrow it down to maybe the top three to five pitfalls that marketers should avoid, especially when it comes to podcasting.

Robb Conlon 08:19

Sure, number one, and this this is probably like, almost step zero for most shows. What you’re going to name your show. It’s one of those things that can be really well done, or it can really sink your show. A lot of times folks think you have to be ultra clever. If we take your show B2B Marketers on a Mission. It as the British say, it tells you what’s right on the tin mate, you know, things like that. It’s one of those things where you read the can and you know exactly what’s inside it. You read the podcasts, you know exactly what’s inside of it. A lot of times, I had a gentleman who I talked to on LinkedIn the other day, and he’s… this was a couple months ago, and he’s like, oh, I want to call my podcast and he was the inkwell. And I’m like, okay, and he sold something along the lines of writing services for blogs or something like that. And it’s like, okay, I can see where you’re going with that. Because yes, it’s clever. It’s, it’s very brandable and things like that. But I have no idea what it’s about. The inkwell, is it poetry? is it an English literature podcast? I don’t know what it is. So when folks build their shows, they need to be exceptionally descriptive in a short amount of time, B2B Marketers on a Mission. That is what this show is about innovative legal leadership. That is what that show is about. The higher ed marketer. That’s what that show is about. Very short, usually three, four words at most, another great one, Toolbox with the trades. You know exactly what each and every one of these things is about. So when somebody’s naming their podcast, that’s again step zero almost.

Second most important pitfall is I would say picking the right host. A lot of folks think and this is, if you’ve ever seen the movie Ratatouille, there’s the chef in there, who is… anyone can cook. And I don’t think anyone can podcast and I’m sure I come across as maybe the, you know, the villain of that show, you know, Anton ego in this case, but it’s, uh, I don’t think everybody should podcast, I think you have to have a certain amount of charisma, you have to have a certain amount of capability in a broadcast space for hosting one of these and in order to draw the right questions and draw the right reactions out of people. The other thing is, you know, he needs some sales background in there as well. So selecting the right host for a show, I think is step I’m gonna go with two now, since we kind of call the first 101. But that is the other pitfall is not selecting the right host. Just because you’re CEO, just because your marketing director, just because your VP of Sales doesn’t necessarily make you the right person to host the show. I’ve seen tremendously successful people who are frontline salespeople with podcasts that a great example of this is Tom Alaimo, who used to work for Gong a long time ago. But he had a great show, where, you know, he’s a frontline sales guy and his show, out of this world, he asked incredible questions. Super, super happy to have produced that show at one point in time.

But the third Pitfall, and this actually goes back with the host here is this one I’ve been on a bit of a crusade for lately, is opening your podcast correctly. And you did this correctly in this episode, you introduced me. A lot of times hosts go out there and they say, Hey, this is XYZ show. And I’ve got Christian Klepp as a guest. Christian, tell us about yourself? No, please don’t do it that way. That is…

Christian Klepp 11:47

I hate those.

Robb Conlon 11:48

I know. It’s horrible. And I hear it’s still far too much despite my ire against this, this opening style. The host’s duty is to support the guest. And when you say, tell us about yourself, that does not support your guest being a good guest on your show. There are no rails. If I say to you, Christian, tell me about your career so far. You might because there’s no rails, you might tell me about the time you worked fast food in high school. Because I didn’t tell you don’t go back to high school. I said, Hey, man, tell me about your career. And that’s part of it. If somebody asked me, Robb, tell me about your career. I would probably start more recently because I again, I’m passionate about this question not being, not being asked. But the old Robb five years ago, Robb, Robb, before he became passionate about this question, would have probably started with at least 10 or 15 years back, going… This is what I did. I used to work for in Major League Baseball for a little while. And then I went and worked in the nonprofit in the fitness space and like…. None of this is important to what we’re doing here on your B2B podcast. So ditch the question of Tell me about yourself, number one, and then as a cousin to that, ditch the opening question of how are you today? Nobody cares. Get to the content.

Christian Klepp 13:15

How’s the weather in Seattle? You know, those kinds of questions.

Robb Conlon 13:18

Oh, that that’s close third, it’s a close third, man.

Christian Klepp 13:25

Man, those are some great points. You know, all of these, like struck a chord with me, as you well know, because we’ve had conversations about this more times than I care to count.

Robb Conlon 13:32

Yes. Oh, yes.

Christian Klepp 13:33

But picking… Let me go down the list here. Okay. So name your show. Absolutely. We’ve talked about it. I’ve written an article about it. Picking the right host, is certainly an important component. I’m going to ask a follow up question here. Because this is probably something that a lot of people out there are struggling with. You might not be the perfect host. But there is a way to become that better host correct? So you’re gonna start out as good one. Right.

Robb Conlon 14:03

Right. There’s a great quote from Zig Ziglar, one of my favorites that has actually helped fuel my life in many, many ways. You don’t have to be good to start. But you have to start to be good. Yep. And that is, I think, a major thing that most folks, and I think it’s why podcasts tend to die around Episode 7. If folks don’t know that, most 60% or so of podcasts, never make it episode 8. And I think it’s because people face the roadblock of oh, gosh, this is actually like something I need to do it day in and day out. But also, they don’t feel or see that personal growth as a host. So yes, while not everybody should have a podcast. Folks have to start somewhere, obviously. And I want to make sure that people understand that yes, you need to practice just like a piano just like a guitar just like anything that is worth doing. Practicing podcasting is huge, and I can tell you the one step to get ahead of the rest of the crowd very easily is to just like elite athletes do, just like the Lebron James’s and the Tom Brady’s of the world. You know, obviously, they’re both either retired or passed the career, but the people who are at the absolute pinnacle of their sports, or their craft, they watch their game tape. They watch how they played in the football game. You know, here in Wisconsin, Green Bay Packer land, you can bet Monday morning, Jordan Love and the rest of the Green Bay Packers are sitting in that locker room, and they’re reviewing the tape from that Sunday’s game. And it’s all over the NFL, hockey games, baseball games, coaches make people watch tapes, because that way you as a player, you as a host, in this case, can have a critical eye towards your performance. And I will tell you that sometimes that process is uncomfortable. It makes people cringe. People hear their voices. I used to work in a call center and people with quality audit, that we would have some of the phone agents would really have a hard time hearing their voice on, you know, being played back to them for quality assurance call sessions. And getting over that, I think is one of the biggest things to be able to say, oh, man, I really botched that question. And the other thing, and it was just had a LinkedIn post about this the other day, is the variance of how you host and getting better as a host involves having a vocabulary bigger than Awesome. Great. I love that. Awesome, great. I love that. I love that. I love that. It’s one of those things where you want to and I think I think I actually I just identified one that I’ve had in this. I say one of those things a lot. I know that. But it’s up here and I’m working on it. So and then here’s another one. That being said, another one I use very frequently. The capability to increase your skills as a host is there, you have to be cognizant of what you’re doing. And not just slapped down. Slop, if you will, from your mouth and microphone on to a podcast and think that it’s fine, long term. You can do that for the first couple episodes, get your sea legs like seriously, don’t. Don’t go out there and be like, oh, man, we recorded episode one. And I do deep dive on this… Nope. Like, get used to it at first. But once you have that swagger, once you have sort of that familiarity, take a look back at your old episodes, because that’s the one thing that differentiates good hosts from great hosts is watching game tape.

Christian Klepp 17:41

I love that. No, I’m just kidding. Thanks. Thanks for sharing those insights.

Robb Conlon 17:46

It’s great.

Christian Klepp 17:48

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. The other one I want to point out was you killed it, man, you killed it. (laugh) But um, you’re absolutely right. In fact, I do that a lot like I listened back to, because I do. I’m responsible for part of the post production, at least of this show. And I listen back to the recording, and I listen back to the way that I interview people. And the way that I asked questions or, I try to keep tabs of how many gap fillers I use, and try to eliminate them in the next interview. For example, I used to be notorious for constantly saying, you know, you know, you know, alright, and once in a while, a little ahhh still creeps in. And I tried to like get rid of that by just taking a deep breath and opening my mouth without having any sound coming out of it. So there’s lots of different techniques, as you will know, right?

Robb Conlon 18:39

Right. And the other thing I will tell folks too, that they that I don’t think people say this enough. And this is funny coming from me as a fast talker, midwesterner. Slow down, slow down, it gives you not only the ability to have your listener, think about what you said, it gives you time to think about what you’re saying. One of the things I found that kills vocal pauses the um’s, the ah’s, err’s, that the most is slowing down, and learning to pause rather than say ahhh. And that’s another huge, great host tip that I think folks can really resonate with. Slow down, we talk fast, especially when we like somebody or know somebody.

Christian Klepp 19:26

Absolutely, absolutely. The other thing, and I just want to go back to this very quickly before we move on, but one of the things that you mentioned, which I think is so important, right, that hosts need to do their homework on the guests. And that goes back to the thing that you were mentioning in the beginning, you don’t kick off the conversation by saying Okay, so we’ve got Robb on the show today. So Robb, why don’t you tell us a little bit about us? Because for me that I mean, if I were the guest that would send me a a very bad signal, which means that the host doesn’t know anything about me. Right? They kind of just had somebody booked this, booked me on the show, he’s gonna go and do the interview, he’s got his like boiler plate like, list of questions and etc. And there’s not much else to be had in that conversation. And more often than not, at least in my experience, those conversations will run dry very quickly, there’s not going to be much chemistry. And you’re just going to be part of this, excuse me, to everyone out there that’s doing this, but this content churning assembly line.

Robb Conlon 20:29

Yes. And I think assembly line was actually the exact term I was going to use. When you take an interview, and you don’t prepare for it. It’s like taking two people, or, say, taking two kids, two children that are eight or nine years old, and putting them in a room together and saying, play together, you too. And those kids are at an age where like, they know how to make friends, and they know how to be, you know, social and stuff like that. And you’re like, Well, you’re a kid, and you’re a kid, play, like, and they kind of look at you, No. That’s, that’s a real challenge with a lot of B2B podcasts is a lot of hosts, treat themselves as that eight or nine year old, and they just have their booking agent, or whoever is managing that, or maybe they’ve done it themselves. They’re just picking it another, you know, metaphorical eight or nine year old to be in the room with them, and they hope that they have a good time. So that’s, that’s why I think you nailed it, there was so much of the preparation. And you can tell when somebody prepares for an interview, and when somebody doesn’t. That’s the other thing too, especially from the host’s perspective. And that is the most telling thing I find that keeps me engaged in the podcast, does the host know their stuff when it comes to the guest. And I firmly believe that there are plenty of things in plain sight for most guests that are incredibly easy to help you build deep relationships with them. Great places to find this, if you are a host, look at the bottom of their LinkedIn profile. There are volunteer opportunities from their past careers, there are things that they are passionate about, there are things that they follow. They may not be passionate about. I think it’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is always what I find there. I think that’s one of the LinkedIn defaults. But chances are, you’re going to find other things that they’re passionate about on their LinkedIn profile deep in. Make sure you dig, I have found some incredible things from people that I’ve been able to ask them about during their podcasts. And there’s these little secret nuggets. And when people hear you talk about that their faces light up. I was in a job interview once and the research I did, now it’s not a podcast, it’s a job interview. But this is where I found out this concept, the research I did on the HR manager, I dug deep into his LinkedIn profile, I found out he’d written a book at one point in time. And I looked it up it was on Amazon and it seemed like it was a decent read. And so when he asked me during the interview, you know what questions you have for me, I asked him, Hey, man, I saw you wrote a book. What’s it about? Tell me about it. And he told me months later, after I’d gotten the job, that it was incredibly valuable to him of like, man, you actually looked into who I am and what I do and what I enjoy. And taking that and applying it to your podcast hosting. That’s a way to build a deep and effective B2B relationship.

Christian Klepp 23:28

Absolutely, man, I think you hit the nail on the head there.

Robb Conlon 23:32

Yeah, that there’s always there’s one nugget. There’s one thing in everybody’s LinkedIn profile that they’re really proud of. And if you can find that, and talk to them about it. Oh, yeah.

Christian Klepp 23:43

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And I’m pretty sure that you will have no problem answering it because you get this more times than you care to count. How do you get buy in from senior management to invest in podcasting? And how do you deal with pushback or questions like, gasp! Robb, what’s the ROI? If we’re going to invest in this, what’s the ROI? How is this gonna get me more leads? Off you go.

Robb Conlon 24:10

Right. So that is one of the tough parts of podcasting, because it’s one of those things that until you see it, sometimes, upper level executives don’t believe it. And that’s okay. I understand it is their job to be skeptical. I understand it is your job to watch the management of the finances of the company. The thing that I would put towards them is when it comes to ROI, the ROI of a good relationship can be worth vastly more than the ROI of a a not so good relationship, a company that has an email list and sends an email every day or three saying buy our thing, buy our thing, buy our thing, tends to burn its audience out and tends to have short term customers that don’t really give a crap if they are in business with this person or not. They don’t have that relationship. So when talking to executives about ROI, it’s one of those things to say. Do you want customers that stick around? Do you want to reduce customer churn? Do you want to keep people who are rabid fans of your business at this business? And I talked to you, I think you may know her, Candace Edelen, she’s on LinkedIn with us. I adore her, she’s fabulous. One of the things she mentioned is that about 3% of any market is in a buying window. So if you have an email of 10…, email list of 10,000 people, that’s what 30 folks, I think that… what, no 300 printer folks that are in a buying mood at any given time, if you email those people three times a week, four times a week, five times a week, for a year, 97% of that list hates you by like week two, because you’re just spamming the living daylights out of them. But if you took those same 10,000 customers, or even a fraction of those 10,000 customers, and spent the time with them on a podcast, you would build deeper relationships with people that were far more likely to buy your product, and far more likely to stick with your product for the long term, especially when you have a product or service that is higher than six figures, think specialty software, think marketing engagements, think all of these things. It’s one of those case studies. And this is one of my favorite case studies that has been had been done with this, of a show out there that we work with in the legal space. They they hunt down, if you will for their guests, the general counsel’s of fortune 500 companies. Now, what I tell a lot of folks here is that if you try to cold call a GC, or cold email a GC, you know that things either go in right into a spam inbox or a trash can, or that gatekeeper Secretary person.

Christian Klepp 27:00

It’s a prayer in the wind, essentially.

Robb Conlon 27:02

Right. Exactly, I think you could call 100 times, you know, pick your favorite fortune 500 let’s pick McDonald’s, because right now, nobody can afford McDonald’s. And say, hey, I want to talk to your general counsel about our legal software. And that gatekeeper is going to be put you in some voicemail that’s never checked for the legal department. And you’re going to call that number all day, every day for a year, and nobody’s ever going to pick up or get back to you or anything like that. And podcasting allows you to circumvent that by saying, Hey, would you like to come make some content with us? There’s no strings attached. And for the executives out there who are like, and then you sell them, right? It’s like, No, this is a relationship building tool. Get people to know you, like you and trust you. And that’s when you pull the trigger on saying, Does it make sense for us to work together? And again, it’s not a hey, buy my thing. It’s, does it make sense to us to work together, given the relationship that we’ve built, given the time that we’ve spent together, you’ve mentioned that these things are hurting or damaging your experience in business. Did you know I can fix one or two of those? And if the answer is yes, and if you’ve done a good job of making this thing here, that particular relationship can be worth $400,000 a year, I’ve seen it done with this exact legal podcast, that was the number that it took for them to sign MasterCard, as a client, which is awesome. And the nice thing is, is that their platform is a yearly recurring subscription model. So every time MasterCard has to come bid their cases out in the platform that my customer sells. They, they shell out almost half a million dollars a year, that is an incredible return on investment when you are spending, you know, 1 to 2% of that on production every month. So you know it would if you close one of those. That’s huge. And again, the other thing I usually tell most executives is for ROI. This is big game hunting. This is not getting your if you have a customer that you know, oh, yeah, they spend seven to $8,000 a month with us. That’s cool. That’s great. I’m super glad. But if your ideal customer is somebody who’s bigger by three or fourfold, use the podcast, to build relationships with those folks, get better customers, get bigger customers, get customers that are better served by you and that are dreams to work with. And that’s how you can do that with podcasting.

Christian Klepp 29:40

Absolutely. And I think just to add on to that point, something that you and I have talked about many times in the past. You’ve got to be in this for the long term, right? This is just as a long term game, so called right? This isn’t something where okay, you launch a podcast, and then three months down the road you start asking Okay, Well, how come we haven’t signed anything yet? Right? Like you’ve got to put in the time the effort, right?

Robb Conlon 30:06

Yeah. And that’s one of the things that I’m so glad you actually asked this follow up, because as I ended my previous response, like, Oh, should we get to talk timetables? Yeah, I tell most folks, that podcast ROI does not even start until month 6. Now, there are some exceptions to that. I have seen tremendous conversations come from shows at episode 8. But that is the that is the wildcard fluke, holy cow once in a blue moon kind of thing. It is incredibly…

Christian Klepp 30:35

One in a million.

Robb Conlon 30:38

At least one to 10,000. I mean, it’s, it’s the long shot, it is not impossible. But it is the long shot. And I think a lot of folks in the executive space need to understand that that when you make a podcast like you have barely started with podcasting, and to have somebody who is interested in what you’re doing in the first 8 episodes is just short of miraculous in this case, because you’ve timed it right, you found one of that 3% of your market that’s in a buying mood, which is great. And that should be taken and run with, which is outstanding. But the big thing to remember is that relationships, and relational sales, take time, I tell most folks that the expected window, we should start to see an uptick of traction around month six and things like that. But for most folks 9 to 18 months, that’s you know, three quarters to a year and a half of constant weekly production, to build your show in its niche and to start to become an authority there. That’s when you’re going to start to see the results of saying, Hey, I am getting ROI from this. And keep in mind that if somebody just to use my own company, as an example, this is probably a $50 to $100,000 investment, in that case with your production studio and things like that. So that’s where I would, would start with that. And then look at how those relationships, those 100 relationships if you do this, especially if you do it for two years, there’s 104 weeks in two years, those 104 relationships are going to be incredibly more valuable to anybody than the email blasts you’ve done in the same time. Because these will be people who will not only respect your brand, respect who you are, but they’ll also introduce you to their networks. And that’s the other aspect of podcasts. And that is it’s a hidden aspect. It’s kind of like Dark Web is that people will talk about your show to other people. Yeah, she’s on a podcast the other day. Yes, this guy, Christian Klepp. And, and yeah, we talked about B2B marketing a lot. It was great. And I got a chance to, you know, explain what, you know, podcasting is good for and things like that. And I had a really great time. And that sort of interpersonal relationship that comes from the second tier, that can be incredibly valuable, as well.

Christian Klepp 32:58

Absolutely, absolutely. I had a kind of a follow up question now based on what you’ve said in the past couple of minutes. And I should have brought this up earlier, the role of conducting research and having the right strategy when it comes to podcasting and leveraging that as part of your B2B marketing strategy. Can you talk to us about that?

Robb Conlon 33:18

So research in this case is a little tough, because it’s one of those things that you have your own market research. But a lot of the data that would make for great podcasts market research is actually held by Spotify and Apple, and they don’t share it in this case. So when we look at the research that it takes to say is, does there need to be a podcast in the space? The answer that I would give to most folks is yes, so long as your B2B show, can, you know fit those criteria of being quality and making sure that it’s a niche show, and it stays close to its, its title and what it’s all about. But if somebody is looking to say, like, how many listeners are out there for marketing podcasts right now, nobody knows that, which is really a bummer. And it’s actually one of those things that is… that I hate about this industry, that the data is held number one by really big corporations who don’t care about the rest of us. And number two, that it is tightly held, and that there’s this anonymity out there, that the average Joe or Jane can’t access. So back to your question about you know, research and things like that as far as how people should be researching, researching things. What I do for folks when creating a show concept for them, is I go look and I go hunting in their niche for how many shows are out there and I count I describe what I’m trying to look for in the search bars in very, in very different ways sometimes, to give you an example, we used to have a show that was in the environmental, social and governance space ESG which hopefully you folks will know. And when we created that show here, I had to take a look through a lot of different areas to say, okay, is this a niche that we should even touch? The good news was when we made that show ESG, as a concept was sort of on the rise, and we saw there was a definitive lack of podcasts in that space. So we said, Okay, this is something we should go into. So when folks are looking at their research, for their podcasts, paying attention to how full the niche is, is important. At the same time, if you’re in a really crowded niche, like this one is, B2B marketing and B2B sales. At the end of the day, your podcast is not necessarily an audience tool, it is a sales tool. And the research and the marketing research that you do around that should not necessarily be for getting it to a wider audience, but for converting your guests into customers.

Christian Klepp 36:00

Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think where I was going with that question, Robb, was more of like, you know, when when a client comes to you and says, Okay, we we want to launch a podcast, and it was more about like, defining, like, going back to… think something as basic as okay, what the name of the podcast is going to be. And also what the show is going to be about, and who the ideal audience or listeners are, right? I mean, for that, I think, like some kind of strategy and some kind of research would would be helpful in a way.

Robb Conlon 36:33

Right. I agree. And that is, you know, back to the point I made earlier about, like, looking to space, number one. But number two, I think the question that you’d want to look at is like, go to the keywords that your website shows up for, like, hey, what are we ranking for? And can we bake that in to our podcast, there is a concept that is coming kind of to the surface now. I’ve seen it not only with our platform that we distribute shows with, but with other ones, too, called podcast SEO. And that is something I, as a professional in my space have to learn more about. By trade. I’m a salesperson, not marketer, in this case, so I’m pushing for my own learning on that. But taking a peek at how you how you brand, your show, how you build your show is going to be incredibly important. The strategy I would give to folks about that is to have a master strategy document, and to take a look at what’s in your space already. And by doing research, by listening and watching other shows, that are in your space, take the pieces of those that you like, and put them into kind of this cooking pot, if you will, if by chance you like the way that let’s say I open my B2B show, it’s a very short little, usually 12 to 30″ intro, we have the show music, I tell a little story about why we’re, you know, metaphorically visiting the city we’re going to, because you don’t have kind of an airplane theme in the show. If you like that, write it down, jot it down as part of the ingredients that you want to do to make a marketing plan for this podcast as to how it feels. The other parts of that is, you know, find out what works in your space. Who are the top shows when I type in B2B. In Spotify search thing, what shows up? Is that close to what I’m looking for, if I am a, a trades based podcast, if I just type that, if I type trades in there, what shows up? If I type higher education in there, what shows up? If I take banking in there, what do I see? Do these little keyword researches to see what folks are going to look at because if, from my experience, listeners tend to search around one or two terms for a podcast, they say I want to listen to a podcast about banking, you know, or whatever, whatever it might be, I want to learn how to if I’m in the higher education space, student enrollment, or something along those lines, and those those little search terms are what I would get together of the shows that you like, and what your shows show is potentially going to be in the future.

Christian Klepp 39:17

Fantastic tips there, man. And the next question was going to be about actionable tips. And you’ve given us plenty already, but let’s just try to summarize it to like maybe the top three to five. If somebody were listening to the show, you know, this conversation between you and I, what are three to five things you want them to walk away with in terms of leveraging podcasts as part of their marketing strategy.

Robb Conlon 39:40

Number one thing I’d say walk away with is create your big game hunting list. What I usually tell folks when they start a show with us is I want you to create a list of potential guests. And it is 65 people long and you’re going Robb, This is episode one. Why is it 65 people because I want you to have the ability to book a lot of folks and get this going. So your first 50 on this list are customers that are an ideal fit for you. That is strategy number one. These are people who are the right price point, have the right, like social fits all of these things, they’re great, you’d love to work with them on a scale of one to 10. They’re like solid 8s across the board. So that’s one to 50. The next 10 people that I want you to book or to look at booking are the big guys, those are the people who you who are not only incredible fit customers, but they could change your business if you were working with them. And I want you… I usually call these conquest accounts, from my sales days do these things where if you said, All man, we are doing business with MasterCard, your CEO would give you a promotion and all sorts of things like that. That’s sort of step 1.2. And then step 1.3 here, the last five are people who are friendlies to you, people who can help you start the first one or two episodes of your show, and get you off the ground or fill a hole when you need a guest and can bring good content. They like you, they know you, they trust you. And they’re making sure that that your show is staying afloat. So that’s strategy one, I would I would say for folks to when you’re kicking off a show, get that big guest list and reach out to them right away, get that stuff scheduled, get that stuff on your, on your calendars.

Robb Conlon 41:20

Second thing I would do is make sure that you’re reserving your, I guess I would call it naming real estate, if you will. If I start up a show, called B2B Marketers on a Mission, well, one of those already exists. And it’s right here, making sure that you don’t have a show that’s already out there. And again, it can be tough to do, because there’s only so many combinations of certain words and things like that, I would reserve your real estate really fast for that if we take an example, like this show, in particular, looking at where it should be. If this was a brand new show, I’d say okay, Christian, I want we’re going to take a… we’re going to make sure this is available on iTunes, and Spotify. And if it’s available there, it’s probably available everywhere. And it doesn’t have to be available, you could have a clone, but I would make sure that you don’t have them actively producing at this time, I usually say if a show has not actively produced within two years, it is Open Season for that name, with a little asterisk there. If you find out that show is owned by somebody big like Spotify, or wondery or something like that. Don’t touch it in this case. So there’s that, gets your name down not just for your show, but get it on social media to get that LinkedIn page, get that Twitter handle, I refuse to call it X, get the Instagram, get the Tiktok. Pile that all together and make sure it is as close to uniform as possible. B2B Marketers on a Mission you know this show, I think there’s pretty much only one way to write that in a social media handle. You may want to add you know, podcast if it’s taken already or something like that. But like, keep it real tight. Keep it real close.

Robb Conlon 43:07

Third thing I would say to folks when they’re starting up their show getting this going is to set your expectations right. There are so many executives out there and executives this one is this is particularly for you guys. You’re gonna look at this from the beginning and you’re gonna go this isn’t doing anything. This takes a ton of time. There’s a guy on LinkedIn that I follow. He’s been a guest on a couple of shows that that we work with here at Westport. His name is Rob Clark. You may know him from Tik Tok as the patriarch of that tall family he and his entire family are like six foot eight or better. It’s like wow, you guys are huge. But that’s their stick. That’s their thing. Well, Rob had been publishing content on YouTube for about eight or nine years before he got picked up by the YouTube algorithm and Tik Tok and things like that, again, two different platforms. But he has over 1.5 billion views as of earlier this year. And it started after 8 years of flatness. Now I will say for the executives. Do not spend eight years making your podcast, that is that is a colossal Sisyphean task waste of money if things are not showing efforts by you know, month 24. Man, that’s you have truly given it a shot. But looking back at what we were talking about earlier Christian with the speed with which relationships develop. Think about the last time you networked with somebody at an event. You met them in person, you shook their hand, things like that. You’re not immediately going to go take your business to them. You got to get to know them better. You got to you have to like them, know them and trust them. So, executives were looking for traction at month 2 or 3 with the podcast. I’m sorry, my friends, but you’re wrong. You’re objectively wrong because you’re not understanding the concept of making a podcast

Christian Klepp 45:00

Correct, correct. Fantastic, man. Okay, let me just quickly recap that a give a first one is create your big game hunting list. Second one is reserving naming real estate and that’s really just making sure that when you come up with a name for the show that hasn’t been taken yet, right?

Robb Conlon 45:17

Or that it’s, it hasn’t been. It’s not in active use. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 45:21

Yeah. Or, or, or it’s not owned by like Spotify or one of the big corporations, right and in which case, you should just stay away. And the third one, which I think would be, like, really, really important is like setting the expectations right from the get go. Yes. All right. Fantastic. Robb, I got two more questions before I let you go today.

Robb Conlon 45:45

All right.

Christian Klepp 45:46

So please stay on your soapbox a while longer. A status quo that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Robb Conlon 45:54

Yeah, the one that I think that I’ve seen people put forward lately is that, oh, the interview based podcast is dead or dying or, or there’s too many of those. And I think that everybody’s consistently trapped there like trying to push like whatever’s new and hot. And that’s cool. I don’t mind innovation. But I really think that there is something that you know, for 10s of 1000s of years, human beings have sat down across from each other, and they’ve had conversations, and they’ve had, they’ve told stories, and they’ve done all these things that are really face to face that when you look at it, Christian, you and I are meeting via a virtual platform over something called the Internet, that is probably one of the seven modern wonders of the world. But at the same time, you and I are having an eye contacted face to face conversation… you know, we live 700 miles apart. But this kind of thing… and our entire relationship is built on that. I think the status quo of saying we need something new and hot, really needs to go in the podcasting space. And I think other people need to understand that just because something is not exciting to you doesn’t mean that there’s not somebody out there in the world who hasn’t experienced that or doesn’t need that knowledge. And that’s where I really think B2B podcasts, like the ones that we produce at Westport studios shine is that they’re learning tools also for it’s for small industries. And they’re also things that are, you know, you don’t have to have this earth shattering like, Oh, we did all of this work on this. Because you know what, at the end of the day, I don’t think the listener cares. What I found with B2B podcast listeners, is that oftentimes, they’re searching for the gemstone at the bottom of the mind shaft. And when they find that thing, they grab it and they run and they go show what they found. You know, it’s a, it’s kind of very, you know, 10,000 BC kind of thing, monkey finds shiny rock, monkey goes and shows his friend shiny rock, in this case. So that’s where I, what I’d really like to dispel is that the status quo of innovate innovate innovate is… it is good to innovate. But innovation for no reason or innovation that doesn’t make sense, needs to get out of here.

Christian Klepp 48:05

Absolutely. I totally agree with that. This whole like innovation for the sake of variety…

Robb Conlon 48:11

Yes, I like how you phrase that innovation for the sake of variety, like..

Christian Klepp 48:16

Just seeing too much of that you know.

Robb Conlon 48:18

Yeah, and I think AI has contributed to that too, where people are just throwing a bunch of things against the wall and see what hopefully sticks. Seen some really terrible content lately. I miss old LinkedIn, like 2021, 2022 LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp 48:34

You and me both, my friend. You and me both.

Robb Conlon 48:36

… much less authentic.

Christian Klepp 48:39

Okay, and here comes the bonus question. Okay. Hold on to your seats. You leave a lot of clues on your website about your love for all things nautical. All right, so the question is, if you have the privilege and the opportunity to sail anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Robb Conlon 48:58

Now are we talking sail as in like cruise boat ride, are we talking sail is in like ….Like the gardens fishermen?

Christian Klepp 49:04

Yeah, yeah, the second one.

Robb Conlon 49:06

Reeling in ropes and things like that. I think, you know, here in the little town I live in there used to be a tall ship, you know, with masts and sails that came to town called the Dennis Sullivan. It was owned by Discovery World… was a children’s museum here in Milwaukee. It has since unfortunately been sold. But I think I would love to jump on a ship like that for a week or two. And just get out to you know, there’s two places I think I’d like to go. I’d like to go someplace that’s kind of stormy cold, you know, the Northeast or you know, kind of towards Newfoundland just to be like, you know, we’re, we’re in very sailing type weather or, you know, kind of the Great Lakes here a little stormy too. But I’d also like to see that sailed into the Caribbean into that that hot, warm, you know, you’re working on deck and you have that that old timey drink that they used to have which is four parts water, one part rum and a whole bunch of lime squeezed into it. You’re hauling ropes and doing fun stuff like that. I’m a landlover as it is, but the time I went on that Dennis Sullivan ship, and we’re hoisting sails and stuff like that, I’m like this is… this is just like working out. This is just like all the things that I kind of enjoyed doing. Then we’re on the boat, we’re out in nature, and all of life’s cares have melted away. So that’s where I think I go, I think I go someplace either super, super, like, grit your teeth into the wind, or maybe a little bit tropical.

Christian Klepp 50:31

Yeah, like North Atlantic or something like that.

Robb Conlon 50:33

Yeah, I get now let’s make sure we got lifeboats no icebergs. But you know. I can’t get swept over the side. So…

Christian Klepp 50:40

Yes. Absolutely.

Robb Conlon 50:42

Hopefully, like theme park danger. There we go.

Christian Klepp 50:45

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the in the man, Robb, this is such a fantastic conversation. So thanks, again, for coming on the show and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. I have one last question. And it’s quick intro to yourself and how folks can get in touch with you?

Robb Conlon 51:01

Sure, well, best way to do it is on LinkedIn. You know, I love getting on there. And I try to create very authentic content. There’s a lot of things you can follow me on there. Whether it’s my B2B podcast journey, whether it’s you know, what’s going on in life or, you know, I actually have this other little channel I started called a Face gain, spot my fitness journey, that’s going on other platforms than LinkedIn. But yeah, those are the three main areas you can find me I’m open to pretty much any connection as long as you’re not going to pitch me. That’s the big kind of like, no, no, I’ve got, but there’s that. And of course, you can always if you want to catch more of my voice and things like that. There’s B2B Business Class, wherever you get your podcasts. It’s fun time. And we’ve, we’ve had you on the show, and we’ve had some really great conversations with a whole bunch of folks around the industry. So feel free to reach out and connect up because that’s what I found has driven my life to amazing new heights.

Christian Klepp 51:48

Fantastic, fantastic. Robb once again, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Robb Conlon 51:55

Can do my friend. We’ll see you later.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Build Greater Trust

Many B2B companies talk about trying to have some kind of strategic differentiation, yet they resort to creating content that is generic and not insightful. How can they turn this around and provide a perspective that’s truly differentiated and helps to build them as an authority in their space? The answer lies in how content marketers can leverage the company’s subject matter experts (SMEs).

That’s why we’re talking to B2B content marketing and AI expert Jeff Coyle (Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, MarketMuse) about how companies can utilize SMEs for strategic differentiation. During our conversation, Jeff explains why “the rise of the SME” is already here and what pitfalls marketers should avoid. He also talks about how to get buy-in from SMEs, and how they can shed light on key insights that will be instrumental in creating the right marketing assets.

https://youtu.be/8IdsjmKKwGQ

Topics discussed in episode

• Jeff explains why SMEs are key B2B assets for organizations [5:14], and yet many companies hesitate to leverage them [10:34]
• The rise of the SME is already here – signals of Query Deserves Expertise [15:51]
• Why you have to clean up your content – Helpful Content Update [22:28]
• Jeff shares his experience working with AI and recommends everyone to learn about knowledge graphs [28:49]
• Some actionable tips [37:32]
  • Retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
  • Don’t dismiss that AI can’t do something
  • Learn about knowledge graphs, semantics, and linguistics
• Jeff’s view on Correlation SEO and zoning [41:14]

Companies and links mentioned

• Jeff Coyle on LinkedIn
• MarketMuse
• LavaCon
• AI Con
• Marketing AI Conference (MAICON)
• Knowledge Graph Conference

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Jeff Coyle, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. All right, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to set the standard for B2B content quality. So coming to us from Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Mr. Jeff Coyle, welcome back to the show. I’m gonna say,

Jeff Coyle 01:09

Hey how are you? It’s so great to be back. I’m looking forward to the discussion. I love how you added B2B, typically, I’ll say I’m on a mission to set the standard for content quality, but I started in B2B. And you know, that’s been so ingrained that now I’m doing all content but B2B has always been, you know, the sweet, sweet spot for me.

Christian Klepp 01:30

Your first love, so to speak.

Jeff Coyle 01:32

It was, it was my first. B2B technology before people were even… I was trying to convince people to have content on the internet, in the year 2000 for their products, and they’re like, Oh, what do you mean? Like, like a summary? Should I list this module? And I’m like, Oh, y’all don’t get it. You all don’t get it. That was me, 25 years ago. Wow. Now, now, like, life’s a little different, but I think everybody knows they need great content.

Christian Klepp 01:58

Yeah, no, that’s wild. That’s wild. But you know, once again, it’s a pleasure to have you back on the show. And Jeff, I was just trying to think about, I think the last time you were on the show… must have been about 2021, if I’m not mistaken. And it was interesting. And we’ve had this conversation, the things that we were talking about then pertaining to generative AI and whatnot. And it was almost as if you prophesied what is to come.

Jeff Coyle 02:25

It’s scary. You think you think that I could like, get some lottery numbers on this or somehow hit it big, right?

Christian Klepp 02:32

Yes.

Jeff Coyle 02:32

No, the things we were talking about. I mean, I went back and listen to it when we were connecting on email. And I was like, oh, yeah, wow, that’s that’s a lot. And so much, even since we caught up for this show, yet again, with Google making quality standards updates, it’s, it’s pretty wild we predicted it.

Christian Klepp 02:55

Much needed standard updates, in my humble opinion.

Jeff Coyle 02:59

Well, they’re, you know, they’re always gonna go through… And if anyone’s not familiar, they did both at the same time, just to make it slightly confusing. They did a big spam update, where they identified new characteristics of what makes something, you know, pure spam, as they’re calling it. And then at the same time, they tweaked some of their evaluation of quality, just to make it a little bit more confusing for everybody.

Christian Klepp 03:25

Yeah, because why not? Right, like…

Jeff Coyle 03:28

Right. Whenever they do something like that, there’s always gonna go through periods of tweaking. So right now, I think we’re in a heavy handed moment, and there’s gonna probably be some, some tweak back on that. But it’s a, I’ve already seen that happen there. You know, a lot of people are saying, Oh, this is all about Reddit, which also happened at the same time, but all that was them. They used to devalue, and not value that type of content as much. But it’s not just them. It’s other forums and user generated content is being it’s being valued, in my opinion, appropriately, maybe a little bit too much. You’ll you’ll you’ll continuously see that get dialed to and fro as they look at the data and the activity data so…

Christian Klepp 04:13

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, without further ado, let’s let’s dive into the conversation, because we’ve got a bit of ground to cover today, my friend.

Jeff Coyle 04:22

Let’s go.

Christian Klepp 04:24

So, you know, we’ve always had great conversations, but it was something that you said in the previous conversation that really resonated with me. So you said just for the benefit of the audience that wasn’t there, right? You said that the subject matter experts within an organization are the most important B2B assets. So for this conversation, let’s try to narrow it down to one of your professional missions. I’m going to say. I’m going to use the plural here, right. But how B2B companies can leverage their subject matter experts or let’s call them SMEs for short, right? For strategic differentiation. So why don’t we kick off the conversation? I’m going to do a two-pronged question here. So why do you think that SMEs are key to using AI? And why do you think that they’re key, like B2B assets, for an organization?

Jeff Coyle 05:14

Gosh, those are great questions. I’ll answer the second one first. They, and it’s funny, you mentioned this because I had a presentation that I gave in October, that was called “The Rise of the subject matter expert”. Right. And I was looking at it for, for one that I delivered last month, and I changed it completely. And I said, the subject matter expert has officially risen. And… Why is that, from especially in a B2B context, it’s because there is no differentiation in the generic in B2B. And so what we found was there was a, there was a correction almost to try to get templated, in B2B, online marketing, where you saw, you start to see very medium to low quality, standardized structures. And then there was silos with the content marketers, and like product, right. And so if you’re in B2B, you probably have seen a site. And it’s like, Oh, those are the product pages. And those are the blog. And they weren’t, never the two shall meet, they get… it gets interesting. And when your business has a subject matter expert, who is driving and integrated into that content strategy, you can make both of those things better, certainly. But what we find is that the teams that are most successful, are using the subject matter experts to weave all of that together, to make sense, to tell the story that they actually understand the reader journey, the prospects journey, the buyers journey, the post-purchase troubleshooting, the post-purchase champion development, building content at all stages of that buyer journey and purchase journey all the way through is something that the content strategists, and the subject matter expert, oftentimes, the same person, sometimes as a product manager, they can navigate that well. And they’re the only ones that typically can. And so when you have that subject matter expert, or the collection of subject matter experts integrated, they can see the vision that connects the “why is our definition for this topic unique”. What unique value are we bringing with this seemingly standard, generic article, we have to bring unique value. And they’ll be able to tie that all the way through the product content, the blog content, the buyer journey, the temporal, the news, and like nobody else will. And the teams that aren’t integrating or using subject matter expertise are tend to have more siloing. And the content they create. They all know it, if you ask them, what’s your good, what’s your good stuff? What’s your bad stuff, they might call some of it? The SEO content, right? It’s just not getting the same credibility as the other ones. So that’s where the subject matter expert can do the most damage is when their input is woven into the fabric of everything that we publish.

Jeff Coyle 08:26

The second piece of that that same part of the answer is they often are the origination of what I would, you know, you might hear some, some people say blue ocean, or blue sky content. It’s content that only those organizations can build. The subject matter expert, and, you know, talented marketers, they are looking at each other. And they’re ideating, on content that only we can build. So at MarketMuse, right? We evaluate content quality, we build content strategies, so content that we can build that’s blue ocean, is let’s use our data to inform content, right? Let’s actually build content, using our own product, you know, so those are things that only we can do. Right? And so for you, or whomever in a B2B context, the subject matter expert can typically drive and be the fuel in blue ocean content, like no one else, we can use… do this live case study, we can build content that only we can build using our data to inform that practice. So that in summary, I’d say, breaking down silos, making sure expertise is woven into every page. And then number two is identifying product-lead content opportunities and blue ocean opportunities. So I mean, I’ll stop there, but those are the reasons why they’ve got to get involved in if they don’t want to, even if they don’t like writing, even if they don’t like content, at least they got to start getting them involved, and I can get into some more techniques for that.

Christian Klepp 10:03

Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, we will definitely get some later on in the conversation. I did have a follow up question for you, Jeff. I mean, this is great stuff. You’ve probably seen this more times than you care to count, why do you think there’s a lot of B2B companies out there that hesitate to leverage their SMEs?

Jeff Coyle 10:23

Well, gosh, well, you actually asked me two questions before and I didn’t answer one of them. So the answer to this question is being exaggerated by that question, right. So they hesitate, because they’re busy, honestly. But those people are typically I mean, so I’ll give you the most obvious busy person is, let’s call it a one person law firm. Right? That’s not necessarily traditional B2B. But that’s like the most busy person in the world. Imagine trying to ask them to write content for the blog, right? You have that in various shapes and formats. First of all, writing is not my day to day, typically, if I’m, if I’m going to be the subject matter expert, most of the time, that person isn’t sitting in writing every day. So you’re asking to do that they’re asking them to do something that’s not in their sweet spot. And you almost have to act like a journalist, as well as you have to champion the idea of they spending their time on this and not that, right. So you got to be very, very crafty. That’s number one.

Jeff Coyle 11:29

Number two, is… you know, shame on content marketing, shame on search engine optimization, it’s very difficult at certain business types, to make the case that this is a internal thing. This isn’t just something your agency deals with, right, that this is expertise required. And we do need this time. Have we made the business case, you know, that’s something that I’ve been working on for years is how to get more predictive with our content. So what you’ll tend to see in in an organization that hasn’t gotten sign off throughout the org, is, you know, they’re debasing the content, maybe they’re calling it SEO content. They haven’t made the business case that this is predictive, this has a valuable outcome for the whole business, right? So they’re not going to get the lead product manager, who can either spend his time his or her time doing the product work, or are they really going to spend their time writing drafts or working with doing a product interview. It’s a very, very tough time, especially now, as industries are so disrupted, disrupted, it’s tough to get people’s time in there. But what I’ll say is what what you see is teams that exhibit that signal, are also making mistake number two, which is using artificial intelligence, in ways that make their situation even worse, and not making it better. So you would ask like, why why subject matter expertise with AI? Well, it is because A) those people who are experts are being given draft content that’s generated without expertise included, and they’re being asked to review it. Oh, my gosh, that’s like asking, you know, Einstein to review something that pops out of AI, right, like, Yes, this is awful, they’re always gonna say it’s awful. And what ends up happening is they start throwing their toys on the ground, and saying, oh, AI can’t build good content, or, oh, gosh, it’s never gonna be you know, that… We just can’t use this, it’s not going to be good, right. But the reality is that they’re not using it to their best advantage. A subject matter experts input can be extremely important, using your existing product documentation, using your existing, you know, knowledge base, to inform methodologies, or create even agent driven outputs can be quick wins. And then that expert can bring their own mass, their own mastery in a more productive environment. So what you’re seeing here is, teams are kind of spinning out of control. They’re like, hey, this was so devalued. And we’re siloed. Let’s make it worse by getting…, maybe they’ll want to get involved in that. And that’s, it’s just it’s eating itself. Whereas you do see the sharp teams, they’re using their own, maybe even sometimes hidden content, assets, you know, knowledge bases, post sale documentation. Like, you know, every article, every content item talked about at LavaCon, for example, you know, like, like all of that, using that to inform, you know, and using their experts wisely and not asking them to actually draft like, figuring out how to get their voice transcribed and weaving all that together with their artificial intelligence implementation. That’s the key. I mean, that’s what I’m doing. That’s that’s the stuff that, you know, we’re building amazing content, you know, at scale predictively with teams, it will always require there’s some human in the loop that expertise. It’s just how you get them in that loop. That becomes the elegance and the art.

Christian Klepp 15:26

Absolutely, the elegance and the art, I love it, man, you almost inadvertently came up with the title for this episode. (laugh) I’m gonna move us on to the next question, Jeff, and you kind of alluded to it already, the rise of the SME. So why do you believe that that rise of the SME is already here, this isn’t something that’s happening, like 10 years down the road, it’s already here.

Jeff Coyle 15:51

It happened. And we were talking about it. And I, you know, I was seeing, I saw the trucks coming. And yeah, you know, and the shark, the content sharks did too. And the waves that I saw were, when I thought that the written, the mediocre content word was going to be, you know, …we were gonna go to infinite supply of the mediocre content word. That was when I was talking about guys, who is going to rise from the ashes, who is going to come out from this, you know, you know, and catastrophic explosion. Right. And this was, right, this was where, you know, there were entire industries rocked, you know, content, writing services, that were writing bulk, or writing, medium quality, are now zero, right, all of those businesses had to adapt. Some people haven’t come to grips with that. And they are still trying to operate and thinking they’re going to come without building great content. But the, the practice I went through was to say, who cannot be immediately replicated, who cannot be replicated ever, who can become the master operator of pipelines of these processes. And those are the people with the access to the knowledge, you know, the single sources of truth, and a subject matter expert, who has the unique experiences, they have the expertise, they understand not only how to say, hey, that doesn’t, you know, JBL, or just doesn’t look right. But they also know why and how they have that experience. What we’re now seeing is the bar for quality going up, up, up, up, up. So the only stuff that’s hanging out and living on is when it is uniquely differentiated. You know, there was a there was a update long ago, which was is that SEO is a call QDF, it was query deserves freshness, right? We haven’t had this declared. But there’s things happening where I’m seeing signals of query deserves expertise. And query deserves experience, where you’re actually… your site is no longer okay, unless it’s showing that you actually have done something right, within this construct. And it’s not just people saying naturally, they understand that if you’re talking about, you know, reviewing the best mouse, right, it’s, it’s how are you exhibiting expertise and exhibiting experience throughout all the content that you create? So we know you aren’t, you know, some sort of, you know, I’m not, I don’t say robots, because I build content with AI all the time, and I build better content than I can ever imagine with it, but where you aren’t mediocre. Alright, and the next wave after that is going to be not just defining quality, it’s gonna be defining mediocrity and sameness. And that’s what’s happening right now. So if we’re talking about what we’re predicting right now, it’s going to happen real real fast, it’s going to be announcements of almost the declaration of a requirement for being the first to act to bring information to the world. Right? Because that is going to be that the precious diamond, the precious gem, is that you brought this information to the world first, and in a way that is always going to be thumb printed to you. It’s always going to be connected with you because you brought it to the world in a blue ocean way. So I can say one plus one is two, and I can put that on a webpage. Everybody can write that. There’s no redeeming connection to me. Right? But when I bring a, you know, a content brief walkthrough of the way that I build content briefs, and part of my content brief is that I am able to show you concepts that would truly differentiate your page. Right? I’m getting a little meta here. By doing that, I’m actually differentiating myself by telling you how to differentiate yourself. But you have to come up with that, you know, I love seeing websites that are using their, what makes them special, what’s in that subject matter experts head to accomplish a task that a mediocre B2B team would accomplish generically? I’ll give you my favorite example, because I used to manage whatis.com, one of the most powerful websites in the world, right. And a definition is my favorite exam. Because anyone can write the definition for what is a Boston Terrier. Right? How is yours special? That’s the thing, the subject matter expert brings in the creative marketer brains, and creative uses of artificial intelligence can tip you to say, Hey, Jeff, when you write that definition, make sure you are picking up your dog and showing him on, right. And yeah, he for some reason, he came over there.

Jeff Coyle 21:43

He just sits here waits for me to put him on camera. But um, you know, make sure you have the dog in the picture, it might not be enough, maybe the query requires expertise, such that you need a veterinarian, you know, to chime in, maybe you need an interview with a veterinarian about brachiocephalic, which is the thing that makes those dogs breathe and snore in your face when you’re trying to sleep. And, you know, and so the, you know, what I just did was a little bit of a parlor trick, because in my response, you know, what I did? I exhibited expertise and experience very naturally, because I picked up the dog, and I mentioned the vocabulary word brachiocephalic. Right. So you got to do that throughout. And you got to do that all the time. Not allowed to have crappy content on the site. The time has now if you don’t know how HCU works, helpful content update, you can no longer silo the crappy content over there and say, and it’s okay, that’s our SEO content. It’s all of your content is working together. And the bad stuff creates a sandbag, that pulls your hot air balloon down so that even your best article will underperform. So all your garbage is no longer okay, being garbage over in the corner, you actually have to clean up and a lot of these companies don’t want to clean up. That’s my biggest challenge. Number one challenge 2024 that I’m hearing is these teams thought they were just going to get away with it, they thought they were going to get away with not having to clean up the house. And a lot of those companies, sadly, have had really bad Q1s. If you look at the traffic to a lot of the companies, you can drive a lot of it back to over monetization, aggressive affiliate, low quality content.

Christian Klepp 23:41

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I guess that’s part of your professional mission, or I should say your crusade right to fight against that mediocrity, right? …

Jeff Coyle 23:56

No, it is. I want I want to… My first thing was I wanted to give people a way to quantify it. Right? And I’m actually writing a present, a narrative right now called the evolution of content quality. And so the first wave was, Can I evaluate this solely based on the world of information? And that was what you know, our first patent, you know, and this doesn’t come score organically. I was an SEO who built a network that was generating 10s of millions of B2B leads a year, right? For a company that we got sold to a publisher. And then I worked with a company that had hundreds of writers and I had to learn how to give them recommendations and not have them shot back at me. They’re like, don’t telling me what to write… You know, I’m like, and they were the experts. But shame on me. I should have given them all hugs and love them from day one, but I wanted them to do what I wanted them to do and at the time, you know, you could get away with a lot weaker content. What I recognize now is those people, those amazing editors, those amazing subject matter experts could have been embraced and amplified and sped up because they are they’re slow. They’re slow, right? You’ve got to speed them up, especially now. Right? We just call them the SE slows, right? They might get to SEO, but it’s going to be slow, right? Yeah. And you know how they’ll do an SEO edited at the end of their process. But gosh, oh my gosh, so slow, you might get two articles out a month. You know, you gotta pump, you gotta pump and you got to be fast. And you got to be great, right? So you do need, you need the helping hand, you need the machine acting as like I mentioned, the elegant, adding the art because you know, the AI content in its current state is art. It’s masquerading as science. But there are the artistic aspects are what make this uniquely special. But the evolution has gone farther than just linguistics, farther than certainly farther than comparing to one’s competitors. It was never there, people thought it was that you know, to copy your competitors. So we go, we go through the evolution of compare yourself. Think about linguistics. Now we’re getting into extraordinarily advanced linguistics concepts. And the intangible, which is the human experience, and the human expertise, and your point of view. So when you weave those three or four things together, that’s, that’s how you define quality today, in a way, you know, 10 years ago, when I started, you know, when I was co founded MarketMuse. I was, I was actually a year late, my co founder started it and built the original technology, and I was the person who did all the workflows. So I got brought in as a late co-founder. But this was my mission, I found him. And he was already working on it amazingly. And, but the big difference in 10 years is, at one time, it was done by just competitive references and basic language modeling. Now, it’s this much more complex linguistic science and the addition of the requirement to have unique differentiated value.

Christian Klepp 27:43

Absolute Absolutely, absolutely. I love that how you brought that up about linguistics. I saw a post on LinkedIn a couple of months ago, and the name of the AI escapes me right now. But the guy conducted an experiment where he’s kind of doing something like this, and he’s saying a sentence in English. And then he has the AI translate whatever it is he said, into German, and Spanish. And I got tagged on I got tagged on the post, because I speak German. And somebody said, Christian, well, what what do you make of the translation? And I said, I can understand what he’s trying to say. But no German speak or whatever, say it that way. So I think they, the AI got the got the idea. Right. Right. It was the intention was there. It just lacked that human element that okay, this is we would never use that expression in my language. Right? Yeah, for example. So it was almost like a direct translation.

Jeff Coyle 28:41

Right. And that’s where it shows. So I mean, you can’t think of a market more disruptive than translation right now. Right?

Christian Klepp 28:48

Right. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle 28:49

And it’s it is, again, it’s another level of ignorance. And I had that ignorance when I wanted performance marketing first, editorial second, right. And we needed to be the… it didn’t need to be a severed allies. It needed to be a combined alliance. And it could have been even more magical than was. In this case, you’ve got to, if your translation and localization, you can’t be anti-artificial intelligence, you got to be the one that figures out how to use it, to do magical things. Because then that moat you create is real hard for someone who thinks they’re going to do at all with machine translation, right? And that’s where we are now maybe three years from now, two years from now, one year from now. You’ll start to get better translation. It is a… that is a beatable game. As sad as people might not want to hear it. I’ve seen it. Just like mathematics. You hear people say, oh, you can’t do complex math with AI. I’m like, Yeah, it can, just not the one You have on your phone for 20 bucks. Trust me, I’ve seen some complex, amazing AI doing, you know, college and university and better mathematics that were beyond my paygrade. And I went to Georgia Tech, you know, and I’m like, holy cow, that’s amazing. But what you mentioned, is fun because it brings you back to linguistics. language models have this amazing power to understand language, the way that language actually works. And what it brought me to do was go back to my linguistics, training and the kind of rebuild my own knowledge, I had always been focused on these things, because part of what we do is building knowledge graphs, and topic models and graph analysis. But I recommend anyone right now, learn how semantics work, learn linguistics, learn knowledge graphs. The big breakthroughs that I’ve had in the past two years, and I’ve been working with natural language generation, NLLMs, and NLMs, before they were ILL, you know, for for now, you know, 6, 7, 8 years, I’ve touched them all. I released, we released our own before GPT, around the same time as GPT3, when it took five days to make a draft, and it cost like 30 bucks, where the compute time now that can be built for you know, fractions of fractions of a penny instantly. But with the breakthroughs that I’ve had have been, where I’ve learned something about the way that language works, and then able to apply that in ways nobody else can. And so I really challenge everybody to, to learn about, and it may sound boring, but it’s not. No, it’s not if you’re me, might be to you, but how you can build structure out of what might feel like it’s unstructured, right. And that’s the future, the future, you’re going to hear the word knowledge graphs, if you’re a marketer, you’re going to hear the word knowledge graphs. So much in the next few years, your brain is going to want to throw knowledge graphs in the garbage. But you got to know what you… that’s something that’s, it’s going to be a you know, kind of a day one thing in the future, because making structure where there is no structure, it’s the way that you can control this magic that we now have on our phones. I mean, it is truly magic. I can do. You know, I personally can do about 10 times the amount of work that I used to do. I know that’s going to become, you know, 10s of x’s for the average person. And I am, I love the fact that I can do that without jeopardizing quality, but I see people all the time. And they’re doubling their productivity, but they’re they’re jeopardizing quality. And so you’ve got to be like, No, I don’t want to do that. I want to learn what it’s going to take for me to improve my velocity without impacting quality, because it can happen. And a lot of it has to do with being passionate about something and also being a subject matter expert, which thankfully, I am on SEO, kind of been doing this for a while. So, you know, I’m able to kind of have a leg ahead on that. And most times, all I do is sit around and look at search results. But no matter what you’re good at, no matter what your focus area is, you know, you can bring that to the table really creatively and magically right now.

Christian Klepp 33:52

Absolutely, absolutely. You reminded me of… It’s not an adage. But he was, he was the former CEO of a big advertising agency called TBWA. And he basically… he wrote a book called How disruption brought order. Right. I mean, you’re talking about an oxymoron, right? Yeah, but that’s but but just to your point, that’s exactly what it is. Right? It’s it’s it’s basically taking something and disrupting it to create a better version of that end result. Right?

Jeff Coyle 34:24

It’s still chilling. I mean, it’s still chilling, and it’s still horrifying. I mean, there’s entire, I mean, go to G2, you look at how many categories of software there are and B2B. Many of those are a jeopardy of being wiped out, and that… nobody wants to hear that, right. They they don’t want to think that that’s possible, but it’s, you know, it is real. It’s happening. It’s happening as we speak. You know, teams may pivot, they may put on a happy face, they may burn a lot of cast that you can’t see, to try to fight against that disruption. And they are, some of them will succeed, and some of them won’t. But there’s entire sectors, and I’m talking, you know, mega billions dollar sectors, with Fortune 500 companies in them, were those entire sectors, you know, one major multi multimodal release, and the sector’s gone for in jeopardy, one, you know, major shift in the way that, you know, in the way that a particular branch of AI works, right, and you’re gonna have tremendous disruption again. So yeah, that’s, uh, you know, I hate to end with doom and gloom, I see it. As you know, I see it as a situation where you got to think blue ocean, where is your moat? The moat could go away. And then you got to think of another mode. Just to be blunt. I mean, I build the first content brief in software. And I let it sit around too long. And then there was 40 other briefs on the market. Right. And you know, you can’t let your stuff sit on the shelf. And so what did I do? I just built a new with my amazing engineering team, built a new content brief technology, that is a year ahead of the market. And I’m so excited about it, if you can tell. And it launches, and launches in the next few months. But I might have bought myself a year. I don’t think that I bought myself six years. And I might have bought myself a year with that. So you know, that’s why product management has changed so much because you can’t sit around and talk about something for six months anymore. Because there isn’t something that isn’t likely to be obsolete in a year. And that scares the heck out of people. A lot of times larger teams are spending that long just writing their specs. Well, that world is no longer.

Christian Klepp 37:06

Absolutely, absolutely. That’s, that’s amazing. Jeff, we get to the point in the conversation, we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty, you’re gonna have plenty of these past couple of minutes, you know, but if somebody were listening to this interview, and you’d want them to walk away with three to five things that they can take action on right now specifically on this topic, right of leveraging SMEs within the organization, what would you want them to do?

Jeff Coyle 37:32

I think step one is retrieval augmented generation is not a three or four letter word. All right, even though it’s a it’s a complicated one, you’ll hear it called rag or RAG. What you need to do is learn why that’s special for you. So how can you get your experts knowledge to be a data source for an agent, or for some of your some of your advanced stuff. If you think that AI can’t do something, ask all your friends, get in a Slack group. Get in and go to an event like an AI con, or MAICON, which I’ll be speaking at it this summer, go to that event, ask people. Can I do this? And guess what? Most likely they’re going to have an answer that it can, it just might not be the way you think it is. So don’t don’t dismiss that AI can’t do something because it’s just probably the thing you have on your phone, not AI in general. And number three, if you’ve never thought about knowledge graphs, semantics, linguistics, at all, or whether you do, you’re a casual learner, go watch a few videos, read a few things about them. Just get a 101 understanding of how that stuff works. Spend a few hours, see if it’s something that you’re interested in. There’s a conference called the Knowledge Graph Conference. It’s actually in a couple of weeks, I can’t go which is terrible. I usually go. I have a conflict. It’s up in New York. And just read through and understand what those people do. See if it’s gonna help you. But if I were to take three things, it’s Rag. It’s don’t dismiss that AI can’t do something. And it’s trying to figure out who in your company cares about structured data and cares about knowledge graphs, and maybe it’ll be you.

Christian Klepp 39:43

Faster, fantastic. When in doubt, contact Jeff Coyle.

Jeff Coyle 39:47

When in doubt, jeff@marketmuse.com Jeffrey_coyle on Twitter. I give you my cell phone if I could, safely I really do. I answered everything, I answer everything I know I love this stuff. And, you know, if you are having a bad time with your website, don’t pound sand right now. A lot of people are like, Oh, content doesn’t work anymore. Crunch. It does, it’s, this time could be hard for a lot of folks. And I’m going through it with a lot of customers who maybe cut a corner here and there. And, you know, some friends who, you know, I don’t work with who have commented, is this dead? You know, and you know, my, my, my response is to say, you’re in a really tough spot, you’ve got a lot of work to do. And, you know, you got to make a decision if, if this is the path forward, if you have been wrong, though, you know, find someone you trust, who will evaluate your site and give you honest feedback.

Christian Klepp 40:51

Fantastic fantastic. Jeff, I’ve got two more questions for you before I let you go. All right. So get up on your soapbox, I kind of have a feeling you’ve been up there already, but just just stay up a lot longer, please. Oh, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with. And why?

Jeff Coyle 41:14

Oh man. Correlation SEO. Correlation SEO is the idea that you can copy your competitors and derive meaningful recommendations only and isolated ways, just by looking at correlations. I feel like there’s some merits in correlation, there’s, there’s you can learn a lot from it. But it is a component of the overall story. So that’s one where I tremendously struggle with it, it’s been kind of… it ebbs and flows in popularity, and every time the the beast sticks his head out, you know, I am certainly one of the folks trying to swing a blade at it. Because it can cause pain, it can cause companies to go out of business, it can be very, very devastating when done inappropriately for business, if you have an affiliate site, and you did it, you’re using that kind of snake oil, right? And it goes up and then it goes out of business. You go make a new site, try again. But if this is a 50 year old B2B brand, then no, do not do that. Another one is similar to that, but not the same is identifying zoning. So in our world, different websites get evaluated in different ways based on the concept or zone they operate in. And so one thing we see in our industry is people professing case studies, but the websites in the case studies are coming from zones that are regulated differently than yours. So I mean, as crazy as it sounds, I saw a person saying that they were going to emulate the strategy they got from a poker affiliate site case study on their B2B software site, on their B2B software site, and…

Christian Klepp 43:34

Talk about gamble eh!

Jeff Coyle 43:37

Ultimate gamble. That’s my response. Good. Oh, yeah, great minds think alike. And another nutraceuticals you know, body creams, you know, beauty products, gambling, gaming, you know, board gaming, video gaming, pornography, you know, none of those things. You can learn from them. Right, you can learn what is aggressive, you can learn what is, you know, on the edge. You can learn maybe what not to do in some cases. But watch out for those case studies. Because once those sites drop, the case studies magically disappear. And people think that there is no archive.org. But there is you can go look and see the case study, then you go find the site and guess what, it’s gone. It’s like magically gone. And so the two things really all tie back to quality. You know, there isn’t a magical, right, for you in B2B Tech. You know, it’s gonna be hard, you’re probably gonna have to clean up a lot of garbage. But AI on mass ain’t your magic bullet. And that’s what’s calm. People are advocating that right now. And that’s the new hot thing is, we’ve got the secret sweet spot for this. And this is coming from a person literally automating content strategy with AI, which is what I’ve done. Right? And I’m the one telling you do not do this unsupervised, and I’ve got all the pieces that would enable you to do it unsupervised. And I’m saying, Please drive this Lamborghini carefully. I’m really hard to be in that zone, because I’m trying to solve the problem. And but it’s to your cool point, though, who was when you said, Hey, translated German, no, German would actually say that. Right? They got that. And, you know, you don’t want to put out content that when someone or when something reads this, that go unnatural. Not an idiom in use. You know, I’m looking around my room to find out their props. But I collect I collect poker chips, in case you’re wondering. So I’m usually I’m usually, to your bank. So like, this chip is called, if only only an expert would know that’s called a fractional. Oh, what? who in the heck would know that’s a fractional, right. Who would know that this other one is called a snapper. And then other things called a lammer. These are things that only only people in the biz would know. Yes. That’s what you got. That’s what your site’s got to do. It’s got to show them, you have to show them, you know them. And that is my last word.

Christian Klepp 46:31

Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. Last question, which is a bonus question. Let’s just assume that after this interview, right, you get a, you get a phone call. And it’s I don’t want to say Elon Musk, but somebody in that caliber who’s not overly controversial, who’s got tons of money. And he says, Hey, Jeff, you know, listen to the interview, love what you do, I’ll tell you what, I am going to finance your next project. And you can build whatever technology you want, for the purpose of improving humanity. So I know that that’s super broad. And I guess that was kind of the objective of the exercise, right? If you had this mystery benefactor that said that I am going to finance your next technology project, right? What technology would you build? And why?

Jeff Coyle 47:25

Well, when you expanded it to be like, for the greater good of society? I get crazy, but until you said that, I’m going to keep my scope. My answers. Absolutely, here it is to perfect my fact checkers. The disruption, and the wars and the societal construct the chaos that’s going to come from the American election this fall, a lot of it comes from the inadequacy of fact checking. And fact checking is a very difficult discipline. It isn’t refined with technology. But I’ve shown through linguistics that it can be done. And I’ve gotten pretty far. With the right investment, a perfected fact checker is possible. And I feel like the good that that will bring to the world is very difficult to measure. But I know in my heart that and I dream about the day that somebody puts that out whether it’s me or not, because I think it’s going to make the world a better place.

Christian Klepp 48:49

Without a doubt, without a doubt. I couldn’t have thought of a better one myself. But that one, I mean, fact checking. I mean, you look at beyond you look at everything in the news now and how many times do you see a report or a video or an interview where they bring on somebody to fact check? what somebody said, Alright, congressional hearing and somebody said something, okay. Was that… how much of that was true? And how much of that was not? Right, right. Or somebody made a speech. Talk to us fact that you know, separate fact from fiction and how I mean, I lost count of how many times how many times you hear that right.

Jeff Coyle 49:26

Well, it’s not just that though. And this is the part that and I love it. So yes, everything you said is it resonates. But what I’ve learned about this, and I by the way, I’ve been building something in this space, it launches the next few months. If you want to preview of it – jeff@marketmuse.com Christian, I’ll give you a preview.

Christian Klepp 49:48

Please, please.

Jeff Coyle 49:49

Well, when, when you’re thinking about this, sometimes, things stated, can’t possibly be true. That blew my mind. Just by the way, it was stated it can’t possibly be a good qualifiable thing. There’s an entire book, I forget who wrote… bloom, maybe you’re at, you have to look it up. It’s like 60 pages, and it’s all fact checking process. It’s the manual work that people have done. Go through this process, right? Well. When you listen to or read an article, it’s interesting that we just naturally say things that aren’t great sentences, no matter what you do to them, they’re not going to be defendable. And that that really blew my mind. About a year and a half ago, I remember because I was in a, at a conference and I was in an airport. And someone said to me, what you just almost did, and they said, I’ll give you a bunch of money to do this, to fund this whenever you want, because you’re the one person that can solve this problem, because I’ve seen it. And I was like, I’m kind of already starting to build pieces of it. I don’t know if I can get it to this eclipse without you know, 100 million bucks, which is, you know what I think you would need to do this right… you’re listening. Let’s do it. I’ll ride that cyber truck around you want to drop 100 mil for this for me. But yeah, I’m a stockholder, too. But no, the, the, the, the way, what I learned was a lot of your writing, a lot of one’s writing. And no matter how good it feels to them, it’s just not good. And I never knew that. And I never knew why. So I was like, literally sitting there diagramming sentences. And like going back to elementary English to be able to get here. But just know, like, there’s there are ways that you can evaluate content that you never imagined. And it really comes back to linguistic science. So if you’ve got a linguist in your life, send them send them some, send them some, you know, a gift and tell them they teach you stuff because luckily, I have a few in my life. And I’ve learned like, immeasurable amounts from them in the past few years. So Yeah.

Christian Klepp 52:22

Fantastic, fantastic, Jeff, as expected, and this was such an awesome conversation. I hope the audience also walks away with, you know, something that they can take action on. You’ve already given us your contact details, and I’ll be sure to drop them in the notes. But I just want to thank you again for your time and for coming on the show again.

Jeff Coyle 52:42

Thanks so much. I love this stuff. And you know, we’ll get another one recorded in a little bit. We can talk talking about the what’s coming in 2026, who knows.

Christian Klepp 52:55

You got yourself a deal. Thanks so much Jeff.

Jeff Coyle 52:56

Bye bye.

Christian Klepp 52:57

Take care.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Build Greater Trust

In many B2B organizations, the C-suite inherently distrusts the marketing department. There is this ideological disconnect between marketing, the C-suite, and the rest of the organization. One side is thought and process-driven and then there’s marketing which requires unconventional thinking, experimentation, and a deep understanding of human behavior. How can B2B marketers bridge the trust gap and build credibility inside and outside their organizations? How can they effectively get “buy-in” from the C-suite?

That’s why we’re talking to B2B marketing expert Gee Ranasinha (Founder & CEO, KEXINO) about how marketers can build trust with senior management and other business units. During our conversation, Gee discussed the pitfalls marketers should avoid, the importance of understanding your audience, and why it’s imperative to find those internal champions within the organization.

https://youtu.be/gKjLMRiWKCc

Topics discussed in episode

• Gee explains why the C-suite and senior management distrust the marketing department [1:52]
• An example of how marketers can improve their communication with the C-suite and other departments like finance [15:13]
• Gee elaborates on the role of research and strategy in building trust [19:59]
• How marketers can find their internal champion(s) and collaborate effectively with them [29:42]

Companies and links mentioned

• Gee Ranasinha
• KEXINO

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Gee Ranasinha, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to deliver better B2B marketing solutions for startups and small businesses. So coming to us from Strasbourg, France, Gee Ranasinha, welcome to the show.

Gee Ranasinha 01:06

Delighted to be here, Christian, thanks for inviting me.

Christian Klepp 01:10

Glad to be connected Gee. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Because ma’am, have we got a lot of ground to cover. So let’s dive in. So Gee, you’ve got quite a distinguished background in the world of B2B marketing, but for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that has become part of your professional mission, right. And we spoke at length about this in the previous conversation, how marketers can build trust with the C-suite and the rest of your organization. So I’m going to kick this interview off with something we talked about previously, the C-suite inherently distrust the marketing department. And shocker, it’s marketing’s fault. So why do you believe that?

Gee Ranasinha 01:52

I think there are a number of reasons Christian and I think it’s primarily due to the nature of work that happens within the C-suite, business departments compared with marketing. So I think there is a ideological disconnect between the C-suite senior management and marketing for a number of reasons, one of those reasons being that pretty much every other business silo within the organization operates in a very cause and effect. Let’s call it mathematical, almost Newtonian, in its approach, you know, two plus two is always four, everything follows logic, process and rigor. You think of it like engineering, or mathematics or something, okay. And just by happenstance, the vast majority of people in the C-suite, or certainly senior managers seem to have reached that position within the organization, through a route which takes them through economics, finance, engineering, science type métier, subjects, were like I say, Everything’s very Newtonian in its approach even economics, you know, the basis of economics assumes perfect information, perfect utility, perfect trust, right. And to be able to make the decisions and assumptions within the categories. And all of that is great. As an example, within manufacturing, for instance, supposing you’re making widgets. Now, the object of the exercise is to make those widgets as efficiently and as cost effective as possible. Right. And if you can save money on automation, or raw materials, or, you know, more streamlined processes, or you know, whatever it may be, there is a direct correlation to the efforts that you’ve put in and the resulting output, obviously, up until the point where, you know, you’ve reduced the cost of the materials to the point where it’s no longer fit for purpose, right. But if we excuse that, it’s all very, two plus two is four. Great. And then you get marketing, where the object of the exercise within marketing is to affect change, change in circumstance, change in environment, but usually, in terms of a change in memory structures or thought behaviors within an individual or individuals. Okay? So, this whole economics, finance, sequential logic process breaks down when the target of our efforts are anything but logical in their outlook. People are not logical, people do not behave in a certain way consistently, constantly devoid of context. Right. And so because of that, effective marketing requires certainly out of the box thinking, but it requires experimentation. And it also requires an understanding of human behavior, and how that human behavior changes within context. And we do not in marketing operate under the economics fallacy of perfect information, perfect trust, or perfect utility. Because the units of measurement that govern the output or influence the process of creating a marketing output, do not always have a defined value outside of our own little bubble, for example, there is no such thing as an SI unit of trust, of fear, of regret, of frustration, of anger, yet, these are all variables that can have a positive or negative effect on the likelihood of purchase. So, this is why I say there’s a fundamental disconnect, where you’ve got a bunch of engineers or engineering thought processes individuals on one side of the table, and then you got us on the other side of the table. Right. So that’s number one.

Gee Ranasinha 07:23

Number two, all that what I’ve just said, is made even worse, exponentially worse. Because as marketers, we don’t do ourselves any favors. Okay, firstly, how often do you actually have someone in marketing at a C-suite level within, having a boardroom seat, it’s very rare. And the tenure for CMOs is getting shorter and shorter. I think the last time I read it was about 14 months. Right. So why is this? I think, you know, the example I just listed is certainly one of those reasons. But the other reason is, like I said, we don’t do ourselves any favors. And what I mean by that is, let’s go back to let’s go back to marketing 101, right, marketing 101, know your audience. Yeah. Which means adapt your message and articulate it using verbiage and language and meaning that resonates to the cohort that you’re looking to attract. Basic marketing right now, there’s nothing, no surprises there. And yet, marketers will go into a board meeting, and wax lyrical, using all of these marketing terms that they know and love and enjoy between themselves. And they’ll be talking about salience and resonance and excess Share of Voice and all of this stuff, which scares economists, or finance people to death. Right? It’s like Oh, my goodness, what’s all this woowoo West Coast tie dyed stuff, we might as well go off and, you know, believe in the power of the crystal. So that’s what I mean, by we don’t do ourselves any favors. Marketers need to adopt the language of the boardroom, which is the language of finance. We don’t do that.

Christian Klepp 09:43

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you really hit the nail on the head there with… it’s something so basic, but yet I see we see marketers violate that all the time of not knowing their audience, and we’re talking about internally as well as externally. And that’s such a great segue into the next question about, you’ve brought up some of them already. But talk to us about some other pitfalls that marketers should avoid if they’re trying to build trust.

Gee Ranasinha 10:09

What… as a marketing professional, whether you’re a manager or a CMO or VP of marketing, it doesn’t matter, what you don’t realize is that your best friend needs to be the CFO, needs to be the accounts person. Because much of what you’re saying to them, and using finance terms, like ROI, which is a totally wrong word to use, term to use when you’re talking to a finance person, because that does not mean… ROI does not mean ROI when you’re talking to a finance person, right. And the thing is, it comes back to, you know, marketers are from Venus and finance peoples are from Mars, maybe, you know, on the one hand, marketing brings insights based upon our understanding of what customers perceive as the value the business brings to them, right, of which they’re prepared to pay for, while finance brings efficiency in the operations of the business with ways to deliver the customer value at the lowest possible cost. Right. So obviously, we’ve got two major contradictory approaches to business. Right. And this is where the, the source methodology, if you like, and the certainly the processes of finance and by marketing sufficiently and significantly diverge, okay. If from a marketing standpoint, I don’t think many people who have been in marketing for any length of time would, who would disagree that typically we over promise and under deliver, right? Putting up business costs against a return that doesn’t sufficiently justify its position, right. Which obviously, you’ve taken to extremes, cost ends up being too high. And, you know, in the worst case, you could do damage the business. Unfortunately, finance goes too far the other direction, okay. They’re looking to engineer business cost structure from an assumption that all costs are bad, right, and all costs should be avoided. So ultimately, they under deliver on the customer value component, right. So the result for reducing costs by too much as the value added element of the deal is eroded, the customer no longer sees the product or service that you’re sending as being worth the purchase price, so the business no longer becomes sustainable. Okay. So it’s a different approach. But at the end of the day, you get to the same point, as I said, what was lacking is marketers’ adoption of the language of the boardroom, which is the language of finance, is the language of the business in general, you know, based upon underlying strategic goals and measurements, usually set up by the CEO, the numbers person, the CFO, the accounts person, their job is to communicate information in those business terms. And that’s where, you know, we hear all these wonderful finance terms like balance sheets, profit and loss, ROI, cash flow, you know, EBITDA, EBITDA, I mean, marketers can’t spell EBITDA. They don’t know what EBITDA is, right. Now, clearly marketing’s message to the C suite should be seen as equally important. But since we use a different set of language terms, must have it go straight over the head of the average C… CFO. Okay. Maybe finance sees itself as being driven from the head, while the classical view of marketing is that is primarily driven from the heart. Right. But, you know, the fact is that there’s no one size fits all and endlessly repeatable model for delivering marketing results. And because of that, because you’re having to reinvent the wheel each time almost. It puts finance people on edge, they get very uncomfortable. Okay, it’s a bit like placebos in the medical profession. Okay. So some people in the medical profession have issues with the placebo effect. Okay. It’s not that, that doctors don’t believe the placebo effect exists. Because obviously, there’s plenty of all you know, empirical evidence that shows it it does. What they don’t like is they have no idea how and why it works. But it does. Okay. And in the same way, I think finance has an ingrained discomfort with marketing, not because they don’t think it brings results but because they can’t make an Excel pivot table out of it.

Christian Klepp 14:56

It’s you hit the nail on the head there, I can I can just Imagine or just, I’m just trying to enter the mind of a finance person where this type of talk is driving them insane because they can’t, they can’t quantify it somehow. They can’t put that on a spreadsheet somehow, you know?

Gee Ranasinha 15:13

That’s how they think. But more importantly, that’s how they work. Let me give an example. Okay, so suppose it marketing puts together a successful content marketing campaign. Okay. So they, they put together a range of communications, collateral, they’ve got some articles, some ebooks, some videos, some podcasts, maybe, okay. And it’s all supported by a targeted social media campaign and some emails and sent out to a handful of carefully selected audience segments, okay. The result is a success as far as marketing is concerned, okay, page view metrics for the articles are through the roof. You know, there’s ebook downloads going out the wazoo. There’s millions of video views, you know, as gazillions of likes and shares on social media, everybody’s going around patting themselves on the back. Right. Okay. And as a result of all of this work is translated into increased site visits, reduced bounce rates, you know, maybe your SEO goes up a bit, you know, we’re all super happy. Except the CFO hasn’t got a clue what all this actually means, in real terms. OK, what finance is looking for, is how all of this translates into what rocks their world, which is cashflow. Right, that’s what we’re looking for, revenue. Okay, sure, they’re happy with the extra traffic and visibility, and you know, all that’s great. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in their mind anything tangible to justify us, you know, opening a bottle of bubbly or something. Okay. So what, what the CMO forgot to factor into the equation was something that we all need to consider and know your audience, to get the CFO more enthusiastic to report those results in, in, in finance terms. So, for example, the CEO maybe wants to hear something along the lines of… based on our experience with similar campaigns that we’ve run in the past, we conclude that if the business spends X amount of dollars on this marketing initiative, we will increase revenue by Y percent over the course of the timeframe. Okay, so now we’ve changed things around and presented things in a way which finance people can get excited about. And we’ve got something that the CFO could work with. Of course, there’s more details like that, you know, in his process, and metrics and implementation and so on. But we have all of that, okay, we just need to show it in a different way, you know, show how we, how we decided on customer segmentation, from the research that we do from the interviews, qual and quant, you know, work data mining, buying lists, so whatever. And then we show how the segmentation work leads us to design, the value proposition and how we define channels and how we do the targeting, the positioning and all the rest of it. So we educate the finance team on how we see these decisions, and actions influencing customer buying decisions, okay? Now, that’s at the highest level, sure. And we need to sort of drill down into you know, time spent per visit, time bounce rates, click throughs, all that sort of stuff. But once a purchase changes and measured were pretty close from calculating the true cost of those purchases, acquiring those customers, most importantly, comparing that to the status quo. Too often, we go into a an efficiency frame of mind, and we say cost per click, cost per view, cost per whatever. But we don’t compare it to anything. We don’t compare it to not doing anything. So attribution goes straight out the window. finance people know this stuff, because they’re clever. Right? So we can’t do things like that. Right. So it’s ultimately what we’re talking about is pivoting this marketing centric data view into something easy to digest for the finest of Bob.

Christian Klepp 19:44

Absolutely, absolutely. And that kind of like, is a nice lead into the next question about research and strategy and how you can use I mean, essentially like data, right to build that trust. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Gee Ranasinha 19:59

It’s not very fashionable at the moment or the last few years, to be honest. Too many people who call themselves marketing is a term I use for the people I’m talking about. Because I don’t consider them marketers. They jump straight into the tactical execution and don’t do their homework. They don’t do marketing with an uppercase M. And from a process driven perspective, you know, there are sort of basic tenets that need to be achieved and gone through at various levels, depending on the particular you know, the business that you’re offering, that you set the product, the business, the audience, the environment, the category, the complex competitors, all the rest of it. But at the most basic, it starts off with looking at the business problem, not the marketing problem, but the business problem, diagnose, call it diagnosis stage, working out what the hell is going on. Okay, what’s working, what’s not working, find out where the pain points are. And it’s not just within sales, we’re not just within what management say it’s going to be. It may be further afield, it may be pre sales may be product management, it may be R&D, it may be support, it may be at a reseller stage, we don’t know. But diagnosis is key. Because often what happens, from my perspective, is I’ll get a business owner or senior manager come to us and say, I just need you to do X. And they’re self diagnosing. Right? And it’s like, oh, okay, so you’ve got no education in marketing, no experience in marketing, your only exposure to marketing is seeing somebody create a, a branded stress ball of tote bag or, you know, print some brochures, but all of a sudden, you know, what the marketing problem is, that needs to be addressed? Is, is that what you’re saying? And this is a common problem, self diagnosis, okay. You know, if, if I, if I go to my mechanic and say, I need a new transmission? And after looking at my car, the mechanic says, Well, no, all you need an oil change. What am I gonna do, I’m not going to believe me, I’m gonna believe him or her. Right? You, if you’re paying an expert, you know, it generally makes sense to go with what their conclusion is. You’re free to go to his go see another expert. But the idea that you know more than these guys, does seem to be a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it? So diagnosis is crucial, absolutely crucial. Because if you don’t know the problem, you can’t come up with a solution, right? You have to have insights, to drive your approach, because otherwise, you know, you’re not in marketing, you’re running around waving a finger in the air, you know. So diagnosis is a practical thing. And to be honest, it’s not hard, it’s not rocket science. I have a bit of an issue with people who are a bit precious about data and try to raise it in something, you know, almost biblical in its veracity, when it’s not. It’s low down dirty. Hands in the mud kind of work, you know, there’s a standard way of generating insights and data, you know, generally speaking to a greater or lesser degree, we start off by doing qual, right. So there’s initial qualitative research, which takes the form of it can take the form of interviews or focus groups, so ethnography or you know, whatever makes most sense for your particular business. So that you can, you know, truly understand the market, get the market orientation side of things, you know, being humble about what you think you know, right? Yeah. Understanding the market and the businesses placed within that market. Yeah. Then once we’ve done that, we channel those insights, the qual into quant data, quantitative data, which takes the form tangibly, usually is some kind of survey with a list of questions in or NPR is, you know, one of the most popular quant exercises is a list of questions that you ask to a representative sample of the market. And he asked him, you know, what do you think of this on a scale of 1 to 10 or whatever else. And can you explain, you know, it’s about as standard as it gets in the industry, really. And it doesn’t have to be expensive this stuff, you know, especially with things like social nowadays, email, you know, you could you can get that stuff done pretty cheaply. It’s not like you have to spend 10 have 1000s with a market research company like we used to have to do. These things can be done, affordably. Now, obviously, it makes… the trick here is to actually get the insights from the data. And it’s not… because it’s not about the data. Okay? It’s about the insights from the data. Data is done. Okay. Too many people, I think there’s a, there’s a famous quote by a famous person whose name eludes me at the moment is, and the quote was something like, people use data, the way a drunken man uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination.

Christian Klepp 25:42

Pretty much, right?

Gee Ranasinha 25:46

So after that, the traditional next steps after the research and diagnosis are ST&P, segmentation, targeting and positioning. So you do the market orientation stuff, you know, identifying the needs and desires of consumers, and the related products and services that satisfy them. Which is something 99% of businesses all already think they know, but they don’t know anywhere near to the level they need to do. Because they’re biased in their assumptions, because they are not their customer, I don’t care who you are, what you sell, the very fact that you sell it, you are no longer your customer. And you need to be okay with that. Right? The drivers, the behaviors, the commonalities, you know, all of that sort of stuff are skewed, because you’re on the other side of the counter. So once we’ve done all of the ST&P, that segmentation targeting positioning, and we get to strategy, we evaluate the targeting choices we have, you know, we need to make some decision on what we’re doing, but and then position ourselves to those targets. What are the objectives. And the hard thing about strategy. And the reason why so many business owners, especially founder business owners, push back hard on strategy is because strategy is as much about what you say no to as what you say yes to. And entrepreneurial business founder owners don’t like saying no to anything. But you have to say no, in order to actually make sense and being able to create some differentiation, that new buyers will be able to understand. And the messaging can resonate with them. Once you’ve done all that, then we get to that icky, dirty, horrible, tactical nonsense, which is what most civilians think of when they think of marketing. Right? So that is social media and advertising and websites and videos and…, whatever else it may be. But regardless of industry or business, even size of business. That’s pretty much it, you know, yet, what I’ve just outlined is not the reality of at least 90% of the businesses that I speak with pretty much every week. This just three stages, diagnosis, strategy, and tactics. And they’re always in that order. And even more importantly, each stage to take up equal amounts of your time. And they’re also multiplicative. So if you get the diagnosis wrong, you’ve screwed up your strategy, and you screwed up your tactics. If you get your diagnosis, right, and you screw up your strategy, then your tactics are screwed. So each one is as important as the other. And tactics, you know, generally speaking, they’re split into four execution elements. And some people call these the four P’s. But you know, some people call it 5Ps, 6Ps, 10Ps. It’s like, it’s, you know, it’s like somebody’s got cystitis or something, they made a Ps out of everything. Right. But you know, which, regardless of how many Ps there are, it doesn’t really matter. But the point is that what most people see as being marketing is actually just Promotion. It’s one of those P’s. And it’s a fraction of a fraction of what marketing is all about.

Christian Klepp 29:31

Talk to us about the importance of finding that champion to build trust, so people within the organization that can be your advocate, so how can marketers collaborate effectively with that person?

Gee Ranasinha 29:42

I think it depends about how deeply ingrained marketing is within the organization today, okay. If it’s a marketing-led organization, then the work is I don’t say a relatively easy but certainly easier than if it is something that you have to sort of bow in new to greenfield site. And there’s two ways of looking at this, you know, that internal champion, the most important advocate that needs to be persuaded and be actively demonstrating their support or what’s going on, has to be the person at the top of the tree, it has to be the CEO, or however, the company is structured. If it’s a company, where it’s a founder/CEO, you know, so it’s a person who actually founded the company and is now running the company, it becomes even more important, because just like pretty much any leadership role, you are, as you know, as much leading by example, as anything else. And so if subordinates look over and see the actions not being adopted by you, that they are being asked to adopt, it’s not gonna stick. It is never going to happen. And so, it’s vitally important that we convey the reasons why the CEOs in a senior manager, founder, whatever needs to review their place within the organization and their priorities within the organization to include a marketing centric Data View. And communicate that to the rest of the organization. Because if they don’t buy into it, it just not, it’s not going to stick the other person at a senior level that needs to be an advocate, which is probably as hard if you’re coming from a position of weakness, which most marketers are, is, as I outlined before, is the finance guy, or lady. The the CFO needs to be your best buddy. And it’s about, you know, as I explained on that example, you know, pivoting the marketing centric view into something that is easily digestible into the finance department, okay? So, it may be something simple, like, you know, the number of newly acquired customers this quarter, against the cost of acquiring those customers this quarter, versus the status quo, versus not spending the money, and what the customer numbers would have been otherwise, okay. Or it may be breaking down the customer lifetime value of newly on boarded customers versus existing ones. It all depends on the particular business concerned, right. As obviously, also with the stated commercial priorities of the organization, okay. But it’s important to connect marketing efforts to financial results, because not only are we then presenting the marketing plan, as a business use case, but we’re presenting the work in the report in ways that the finance can understand and all of a sudden, the CFO gets what’s going on. They have a newfound appreciation, I was going to use the word respect, maybe that’s too early to strong, but certainly an appreciation to the work that marketing team is doing. And if they understand the logic behind the illogic irrational approach, then the finance people are more likely to fight for the marketing department when budgets are being set, since they have a clearer a working understanding of what goes on over the other side of the wall. Because at the end of the day, I don’t need to say to you, you know, marketing is everyone’s job, right? It’s not the job of the marketing department is the job the entire business. And it becomes even more crucial today as businesses seek to adapt to a new engagement model, okay. So the better that finance and marketing can work together, adapting their local datasets and verbiage and expectations to each other’s world, then the easier it becomes for the organization as a whole to make valid business decisions. So those are the things, the two main champions advocates that we need to work with. And if we have the those things in place, by being able to express the marketing requirements in words, and terms that the business understands. The finance can disseminate that, the sales can disseminate that support. You know R&D, all of that it filters down into their own interpretation versions of that basic ethos.

Christian Klepp 35:11

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I cannot stress that enough that the CFO has to be your friend. And I think there’s, there’s an art and science to that, or how the marketers approach these people and forge that necessary alliance, the very necessary allies. Right. Okay.

Gee Ranasinha 35:26

I mean, marketing gonna get a look into these sorts of things. Supposing they are having a conversation about pricing. Right. And somebody around the room says, Well, maybe we should get marketing involved. They get laughed out of the room.

Christian Klepp 35:42

You know, it’s an unfortunate truth. But yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, we’re gonna move on to the bonus question. So, Gee, rumour has that. Rumor has it. Aside from running a successful marketing agency, you’re also an adjunct professor. I’m gonna repeat that I just completely tripped over my sentences. Here comes the bonus question. So Rumour has it. Rumour has it that aside from running a successful marketing agency, you’re also an adjunct professor at business schools, in France. So here’s the question. Let’s just say that somebody after this interview, perhaps it was even that person that called you just now, let’s just say somebody calls you after this interview and says, Hey, listen, I’ve heard a lot about you. And I would be very honored to pay for your plane ticket to fly you to any business school in the world, where you can teach marketing. So if that if that ever happens, where would you go to? And why?

Gee Ranasinha 36:47

Wow, Christian you’ve totally floored me with that one. Totally floored me with that one. I couldn’t name a school. But I could I could tell you, it wouldn’t be one of those exclusive highfalutin Ivy League type August institutions. Okay. It would not. It would be, it would be someone somewhere, which is a lot more accessible. It will be like a community college type environment. Because the problem is this the sort of stuff that I think should be spread far and wide, that is not being spread far and wide, is being restricted because of accessibility. You know? Yeah. And you know what I’m saying, and it’s not just me, there are plenty of other people who… coming from a similar position. These things need to be said, Because. And the answer is two things. Number one, it’s never been as easy as it is today to start a business. And that is exactly the problem. We’re having far too many people, starting businesses, adopting an attitude of, you know, if we build it, they will come. You know, remember that movie from a few years ago? Quite a few years ago, 30 years ago, I think it was right. People who are starting businesses who haven’t got a friggin clue about business, zero, they don’t know the difference between revenue and profit. And I’m serious about this. They don’t know the difference between revenue and profit. And yet, they think they can run a business. And this is why I strongly insist and maintain that marketing should be about solving business problems, primarily. And, because that’s, that’s what we’re talking about. And everything needs to be framed, as in relation to the business because what’s marketing about? Marketing is about generating revenue, marketing sells, marketing is selling stuff. That’s the reason why businesses spend money on marketing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother with it, we won’t need it. You just you just opened, you know, turn the open sign on your door, you know, physically or virtually. And all the orders would come in at 5:29, at the end of the evening, you turn everything off and start counting your cash. And everybody would live happily ever after. You know, the sun is shining, the birds are singing in your kids will marry millionaires. Wonderful.

Christian Klepp 39:40

Right? And then you wake up (laugh)

Gee Ranasinha 39:42

And then you wake up and smell the coffee. Yes. And that’s why I think that’s the sort of institution that I would want to, to go to, to be able to spread these ideas and these basic precept, precepts even far and wide.

Christian Klepp 40:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s fair enough.

Gee Ranasinha 40:07

I know it sounds like a little bit of… like a Miss Universe type answer, you know? I don’t mean it to you know, you know, wishing peace on the world and all the rest of it. I don’t quite mean like that.

Christian Klepp 40:16

Oh, I get it. I got it. No, but that’s a, that’s a good answer. Good answer. But you don’t, you don’t have it nailed down to a specific institution of higher learning. That’s fair enough. Fair enough.

Gee Ranasinha 40:27

To be honest, I mean, up until I was sort of shanghaied into this other part of my life, I was very much against formal educational structure, because I just felt it was, it was the whole ivory tower thing. And it was devoid of any practical application, because 99% of people who are teaching, haven’t done anything at the coalface in the real world, since the days of black and white TV, right? And we’re trying to churn out students fit for purpose in an environment that these state teachers have absolutely no experience of. And that’s why I do it. Because I’ve got, I’ve still got a foot in both camps. So I don’t, you know, relay my experience as real world experience. And something that is practical, it’s not come out some book written in like 1983 or something.

Christian Klepp 41:27

Yeah, yeah. You have the privilege of traversing both worlds as such.

Gee Ranasinha 41:32

And I think if I lose that I don’t think I’d be doing as… I’ll be doing a disservice to my students. Because all of a sudden, you’re in the academia bubble again, which nobody wants. You end up with, the machinery is churning out educated fools. We’ve got enough of those in Congress.

Christian Klepp 41:54

That’s another podcast interview. But yes, absolutely. Probably not this podcast, but somebody else’s (laugh).

Gee Ranasinha 42:00

Probably something else. Yes. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 42:01

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Gee. This has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for your time for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. And quick Introduce yourself on how people out there can get in touch with you.

Gee Ranasinha 42:15

Sure, yeah. My name is as you know, is Gee Ranasinha. I’m CEO / founder of KEXINO, a small business marketing agency. We’re based in Europe, but 90% of our clients are in North America. Apparently this internet thing really works. Who knew? Anyway, you want to get ahold of me. You can get it get me at kexino.com. The best and fastest way to get ahold of me is to find me on LinkedIn. Put my name in LinkedIn, there is only one Gee Ranasinha on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp 42:46

Yes, last time I checked.

Gee Ranasinha 42:48

Absolutely. Doppelgangers wanted to be me, which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, that’s for sure. But finally, let’s have a chat.

Christian Klepp 42:58

Fantastic once again, Gee. Thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Gee Ranasinha 43:02

Thank you. Delighted to be invited.

Christian Klepp 43:04

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Create Truly Differentiated B2B Content

Many B2B companies need help with developing content that resonates with their audience. They tend to focus more on features rather than moments in the buyer’s journey. This is why conducting customer research and creating the right target personas are paramount. When done right, personas can help you craft copy and content that converts and generates better responses from the target audience.

That’s why we’re talking to B2B SaaS copywriting expert Naomi Soman (Founder, Storylogick Consulting) about how B2B marketers can develop the right personas to adapt the B2B messaging across the funnel. During our conversation, Naomi highlighted the pitfalls to avoid and how marketers can leverage customer research to create personas that are actually useful. She also talked about the importance of mapping B2B messaging across the customer journey and at different stages of the funnel.

https://youtu.be/4DDTd7wRkIM

Topics discussed in episode

• Naomi talks about why many B2B SaaS companies fall flat when it comes to personas and messaging [2:17]
• What should marketers avoid when developing personas and messaging [7:30]
• An efficient way to conduct research for persona development [9:13]
• Naomi provides examples to explain how marketers should use personas to develop and adapt their messaging across the marketing funnel [12:58]
• The right way to use FAQs [17:05]
• Some tips on using social proof [17:53]
• Naomi provides some actionable tips: [23:37]
  • Listen to sales calls and turn them into transcripts
  • Write down what customers are saying: Their struggles, ideal situation, and concerns
  • Reference these when you write any copy
  • Talk to the customer success team to learn more about customers
• Key metrics that B2B marketers should pay attention to when developing personas and messaging across the funnel [27:18]

Companies and links mentioned

• Naomi Soman on LinkedIn
• Storylogick

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Naomi Soman, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B SaaS marketers make every dollar go further with copy that converts. So coming to us from Tel Aviv, Israel, Naomi Soman, welcome to the show.

Naomi Soman 01:11

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:13

Thank you so much for being on the show, Naomi, and I’m really looking forward to diving into this conversation, because it’s a really important one, especially for marketers that have to either contend with copywriting and content marketing. I wouldn’t say anyone listening to the show, I would say that was that would be a nine out of 10. Right? In terms of people that have to deal with that. So um, yeah, without further ado, let’s dive in. So you’ve been a professional SaaS copywriter, or messaging strategist for some time now. And so just for the sake of this conversation, we’re gonna zero in on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to build the right personas so that you can adapt your messaging across the funnel. I know that sounds like a handful, and it probably is, but it’s super important. So let’s dive in and start with the following question. Where do you see a lot of B2B SaaS companies fall flat when it comes to both personas, and messaging?

Naomi Soman 02:17

So I think that the reason why SaaS companies usually fall flat is because they’re too zeroed in on features, and not enough on moments. So SaaS company, SaaS products are very complicated, they have a lot of really interesting features. And the initial instinct is for people to say, here are the features that we can offer you, here’s why they’re really cool. Come take a look, come try it. But when it comes to building a persona, you want to think more in terms of moments, you want to think what was going on in their life that led them to search for our solution. So for project management, it’s not that they are having a hard time organizing, it’s that they have a huge email thread, and they can’t find the information they need, or they have a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open. And when you shift the conversation from: here are the features we have to let’s paint a picture of the moments in this person’s life, that as they go through our marketing funnel, then you can really bring that persona to life in a very colorful way that’s not cheesy or over the top or off brand, but is still nuanced, and easy to relate to. So you feel like you know this person, because a persona is person, a person’s life is made up of these very visual, very tangible moments.

Christian Klepp 04:00

Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. So just basically to address the question, you feel that not enough SaaS companies are giving this particular aspect enough airtime, so to speak, they’re not focusing on that enough? Is that what you mean?

Naomi Soman 04:17

Yeah, exactly. Because you sort of have two different camps, you have the sort of traditional campaign marketers, demand gen user acquisition, and they’re more likely to think of a persona as… Okay, we are dealing with men between the ages of 25 and 35, with this income level, and maybe this family situation. And then you have more product marketers who are very, very focused on what are the features that people are using. How are they using them, because they’ll go and talk to customers, and the customers will say, this is how I use this feature. This is how I use that feature. And that’s how they’ll build a persona. And neither of those camps really get at what a persona is in real life. And how do you use it. And more importantly, how do you translate that into copy, because there’s sort of an old adage, no one reads the Wall Street Journal, because they have an Ivy League education, a golden retriever and make six figures, right? Like those are maybe correlated, but there’s no causation there, the reason why somebody might read the Wall Street Journal is related to what they are getting out of it, and maybe what kind of qualities they associate with the Wall Street Journal. And the same is true for SaaS. People, a middle manager doesn’t just buy a project management tool, because he needs a solution, he buys a project management solution, because there are all of these things going on in his life that are driving him to look for that tool. And if you can, if you can pull out all of those examples, then you can actually write copy that stands up off the page and makes people to pay attention. Rather than just getting caught in these buzzwords and getting caught in this jargon. So instead of defaulting to the sort of obvious copywriting examples like improve your ROI, or save time, save money, be more efficient, those are sort of bland, they don’t go beyond the surface level. You can, maybe it’s they want to hear they want to see their publications name across all other… they want to see their company name across all of the top publications. Or maybe they want to hear from their team members. Wow, you are one of the best managers that I’ve ever had. You’re so efficient, and you really help bring the best out of our team. That really helps people see themselves in your solution, as opposed to just this is the feature, this is what it does. This is the benefit that you can get out of it. It makes it more like jumping into a story.

Christian Klepp 07:15

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And I’m sure you’ll have no problem answering this one. Talk to us about other pitfalls. Right? That marketers should avoid when they’re developing personas and messaging.

Naomi Soman 07:30

So I would say the main one that I see is not mapping it across the funnel. A lot of times marketers hate these golden rules, like show benefits, not features. And the truth is, sometimes people need to see benefits. And sometimes people need to see features. So when you think about a persona, you have to think about what message are you delivering them right now, if this is very, very top of funnel, maybe it’s an ad, maybe it’s a blog post, maybe it’s a podcast, you really want to focus on the benefits of your solution, because they haven’t really learned all that much more sort of in that solution aware stage, but later on, like, let’s say they’re comparing you versus your competitors, you want to zero in that features, because then they’re already ready to understand the need of the issue understand how you really different from your competitors.

Christian Klepp 08:31

Fantastic, no, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. They need to take the different stages of the journey, the different stages of the funnel into consideration. That’s absolutely right. Okay, um, we talked about this in the pre interview call. But we all know that research and strategy are important. I mean, some people use those two terms very loosely. But um, talk to us about how marketers should use this type of research and strategies to create personas that are actually useful. So I’m not not naming names, but we don’t want to come up with personas like Marketing Marion, Frustrated Frank, right. I mean, we’re way past that now.

Naomi Soman 09:13

Yeah, so that’s a great question. My favorite way to do this, and I think this is the most efficient way to do this, as opposed to running surveys that might take a long time or trying to find customers that you can interview and hoping that they remember everything. What I do is I go straight to the sales calls. So typically, SaaS companies will have some sort of recording tool, like Gong, for example. If they don’t, it’s super easy these days to just hit record. So if your SaaS company is not recording calls, ask the BDRs, SDRs, AEs if they can just hit record on several of their next sales calls and send them over to you when they’re done. So I say go right into the discovery calls typically at the beginning of the sales process, the salespeople will interview the potential customers and users to see if they’re a good fit. And if they’re worth going on to the demo, that’s where you’re going to find the gold. So listen to those and note down all of their concerns. If you can take the recording and put it into descript, or some sort of transcription tool, then you could even put it through ChatGPT. And get all of the examples of the stories that they tell. And you can just write those down. And I take those examples and put them almost word for word into my ad copy or into my landing pages, especially those really great phrases where you’re like, Wow, what a great way of describing that. I take those, I do copy and paste and use them to build more interesting copy. So in a landing page, for a, for example, that I wrote recently, instead of saying the word foundational, I heard a user use the word phrase, meat and potatoes, and I took that copied it and put it right down there on the landing page. And it’s sort of sparkled as opposed to the very things I suppose to copy that just fades back into the page.

Christian Klepp 11:14

Proprietary award winning technology, and you know, all that kind of like generic stuff, right? I mean like, the objective of the exercise is to get rid of that and make it more customer centric. And I think what you were saying also there, Naomi was using the customer’s language in the copy, like, not necessarily like verbatim, but like almost taking what they said, and then you know, using that as a, as an important component in crafting copy that will ultimately resonate with them as well.

Naomi Soman 11:47

Exactly. If you use the customer’s language, they’re much more likely to feel that you understand who they are and what they’re going for. And we can measure that actually, the more closely we use the language or the more accurately we use the language of our customers, the better the landing page will perform. And I’ve seen this work at like $20,000 a month differences, that if you pick the exact word that they’re using, and this could be as different as like Task Manager versus task management tool, it can make a huge difference in the performance of the page. This is a concept psychologist called mirroring, sort of reflecting back to customers, the language that they themselves use.

Christian Klepp 12:31

Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re gonna talk about metrics in a second. But before we do, so, we’ve done the research we’ve gone through all the due diligence as such. So once marketers have developed these right personas, how can they use these to develop and adapt their messaging across the marketing funnel? And where you can please provide some examples?

Naomi Soman 12:58

Yeah, for sure. So again, I think of it in terms of, at what stage are they going to see a specific asset. So typically, on an ad, I will focus on the problem. And I’ll sort of hint at the solution. But I’ll really double down on if this is the problem you have, then you need to try us. Then if you think of in that same, in that same funnel, if they click on an ad, they’re gonna land on a landing page, that’s when you can start getting into the solution. And you want to say this is the solution laid out very basically, and then talk about what it provides. And then sort of hint at the product, and how the product works, some of the details, some of the more complex workflows, that it empowers, and, and then you can start to think about, okay, if they’re hesitating, if they’re a little bit concerned, maybe I can give them a little bit of something, to get them over that hurdle, reduce the friction. Now, it’s not going to be all about reducing friction, it’s not gonna be all about their doubts. But you can sprinkle it throughout the page, like under the CTA, if they’re concerned that it’s not going to have a specific integration, then you might put that like, right underneath the CTA. Or if they’re concerned that they’re not going to be able to figure out how the software works. You can advertise your knowledge base, or talk about the customer service. And make sure to put that at the bottom of the page. So if they’re concerned, which you’ll find out if you listen to a lot of these sales calls and these discovery calls, you can include that on the page. And then you can you can bake that into your social posts. A lot of people are getting really into organic social media, social selling. It is a really great tip: Ask the customer service team, ask the sales team, what are people concerned about? Spin each of those into a social post. So you’re advertising this even further up the funnel, so they can get over their concerns. So they can have their questions answered before they even talk to a salesperson. So I would say that, when you’re thinking about creating these personas, first think of it in terms of when are they going to see this in the funnel, the earlier on in the funnel, the more you want to focus on problems, the later on in the funnel, the more you want to focus on solutions. And then even further down, you want to talk about overcoming people’s doubts and concerns. And if you’re doing more organic content, more podcasts, blog posts, social posts, then you can create content around each one of these persona areas. So that you are giving people as much information as possible in the earlier stages of the funnel.

Christian Klepp 16:09

Fantastic, fantastic. Those are some great insights. I have a follow up question for you on the topic of reducing friction across the different stages of the funnel. Naomi, would you say that it would be helpful, I mean, besides the points that you’ve just raised? Would it be helpful also to include an FAQ section, either on the product page or on the solutions page? And, you know, going back to what you mentioned a couple of minutes ago about like listening to sales calls, right? And listening to those recordings and taking down or observing those genuine challenges or questions or even objections, right, that potential customers have, what did that make sense to also, like, incorporate those insights into an FAQ section and that way, you can already address some of these issues or these questions that they have up front. And that will that will also save, perhaps in future, the sales… The trouble of answering these in discovery calls?

Naomi Soman 17:05

Yeah, 100%. I think that on product pages specifically, like on the website FAQ, that’s where you want to put those FAQs. I would say in a landing page. If it’s a Google campaign, LinkedIn campaign, a long FAQ section might bog down the page, it might, you might be giving them too much information right away. They don’t need all of that information and they are not ready to digest it yet. But on a website, where they have the time, they’re really considering what the product is about and whether it’s worth the investment. 100% FAQs are great. And again, pull those from the sales calls, like take them directly from the customer’s mouth.

Christian Klepp 17:44

Okay, great. Um, so that was the first question. The second question is, what are your thoughts on social proof to help reduce friction?

Naomi Soman 17:53

That’s a great question. I think social proof is great. However, in today’s climate, people are so savvy that they are not trusting social proof the way they were at one point. So I use social proof very strategically, I don’t flood the page with social proof, I pick out the best social proof that I can find, the best testimonial, the best ROI, the best statistics, the best case study, the best logo, customer logos, and I’ll put them on the page, I’ll make sure that they are as trustworthy as possible, include an image include the person’s job title, include the company’s logo, show that you have actually worked with the person, they are a real person. And so that’s number one, make sure they’re very reliable. Pick social proof strategically. Number two, I would say choose social proof that proves the point you’re trying to make. So if you’re trying to prove that the solution can improve ROI, choose social proof that proves that point, not just any social proof because people get excited about social proof. And they just put it all on there. No, be strategic about what it is you are trying to convince your users of. And then third, I would say try to choose a few different kinds of social proof. So company logos is a good example. Maybe G2 badges or stars from… or Capterra badges or Capterra reviews. And maybe a testimonial, maybe you have Forrester reports that they did on you and you have some statistics that you can pull. If you have… people make decisions in different ways. So you want to have a few different kinds of social proof, depending on what they need to take that next step, what what kind of angle is going to convince them.

Christian Klepp 19:55

That was such a fantastic answer. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s… what I’m taking away from this as be strategic, but also be intentional in terms of like, what are you trying to tell people through the testimonials, through this type of social proof beyond trying to like glorify yourself, right? Because how often… often do you go to websites where you see the same testimonial sprinkled throughout the website, even in sections where it might not necessarily make sense? Or okay, it’s the same social proof on the pages of different like products or different services. So is this company like using all of these products? Right? It makes you want to step back and think about that, right? Or my favorite one is like all the clutch badges, right? or whichever review platform you have, right, and then that that also is sprinkled throughout the website. And you’re absolutely right, I think, I think the reality is to be strategic and be intentional about it. But that also requires quite a bit of thinking on the part of whoever is putting together all of this copy, right, and putting together the website, right? For instance, if this person had, you know, gave the company a testimonial about, okay, they have this challenge, and then this is how the company helped them overcome it. And then they put it in the section of the website where that testimonial may not necessarily make sense. That would make you as the potential visitor to this website either have doubts about how genuine this testimonial actually is, or think, okay, well, this company is just singing, you know, its own praises here. So it doesn’t necessarily, so there’s no correlation between the social proof and what’s on the what’s on the page itself, right?

Naomi Soman 20:21

100%. And on top of that, you may actually convince the user that your solution is not intended for their demographic. So I’ve heard users go through pages through sort of user testing. And the company put, like the, the biggest logos that they had, so like Coca Cola, and Mattel, and all of these huge, huge enterprise names. And actually, the page was intended for small businesses. So people were like, you know, maybe this is not for us, maybe this is too expensive. And they didn’t even look at the pricing yet. But they’re like, maybe this is just too robust for us, we need something a little bit smaller. A lot of SaaS companies can cater both to small medium businesses, and to enterprise corporations. So you want to make sure that the social proof that you’re using is speaking to the person you’re talking to. And most of the time, if you’re setting up a campaign, you know who that person is, you know, what size company they work at.

Christian Klepp 22:51

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Naomi, we get to the part in the show where we talk about actionable tips. And now look, you’ve been doing this for a while you understand that copywriting, especially copywriting that delivers results. It’s a process, right? This isn’t a button that you push, or an AI tool that you use, and bam, it gives you this like award winning copy. Right. But if somebody were listening to this conversation that you and I are having who is struggling with these challenges that we’ve been talking about. What are some of the things that you’d like them to take away from this discussion? So walk us through that process of what marketers can do to develop the right personas and adapt their messaging?

Naomi Soman 23:37

Yeah, 100%. I think I alluded to this before, but I’ll say it again, because I have found this so so, so helpful. Get your sales team to record their calls. Then listen to those discovery calls. They’re usually not more than 20 minutes. And you can even take the transcription and/or you can take the recording, turn it into a transcript and use ChatGPT to do this. But find three pieces of information and write them down, find all of the examples of the times where they were struggling with a problem. Find how they described their ideal situation, what they were looking to get to, and what their concerns were, and copy it down word for word. Then when you’re writing something, go back to that. I create like a dashboard or a spreadsheet for myself with all of these examples, go back to that, copy and paste it into whatever copy you’re writing. If you’re writing ad copy, if you’re writing a headline, if you’re writing the title for a blog, if you are writing landing page copy, web page copy, whatever it is, it’s always relevant. Take the customers words, copy and paste them onto the page. And then right around it to round it out. And if you can do that over and over again, you’ll start to think and sound like your customer, it’s super easy. It doesn’t take long. And if you spend an hour or two, just listening to these calls and copying and pasting what they say, then you can use that over and over and over again, for at least as long as your product is, and your market is functioning the same way.

Christian Klepp 25:21

Fantastic, fantastic. You know what? I don’t know what your experience has been. But it blows my mind how many marketers don’t do that. How many marketers don’t actually listen to the sales calls or get recordings from sales. And there may or may not be friction between those two departments. And I suppose that’s a topic for another podcast interview. But, but it’s so important, right? It’s so important to listen to those conversations between the sales and the potential customer or the prospect and to listen to, I think one part of the spectrum is listening to the questions and the objections and the concerns. But the other one is also listening to how the sales address each of them.

Naomi Soman 26:05

100%. And if you want like an extra golden nugget, go to the customer success team. Everyone always goes to the sales team, sometimes Customer Success gets forgotten. Because they work with these clients on an ongoing basis. So they know all of the good stuff. And they know what success looks like and what success doesn’t look like, so you can get some gold. If you go over to the customer success team and they love talking to you. People don’t ask for their opinion nearly as much as they should. But ask them what their opinions are, what clients want, what clients don’t want. That’s a goldmine of information.

Christian Klepp 26:44

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Moving us on to the Love it or hate it question around metrics, right? So I mean, at some point, and this probably happens to you more times than you care to remember. But like, at some point, you’re gonna have to prove that what you’re doing is working, or you have to show some kind of indication of progress, as I always like to say. So what are some metrics and just give us some top level ones that marketers should be paying attention to? Especially when they’re creating the right personas and developing that respective messaging across the funnel?

Naomi Soman 27:18

Yeah, 100% focus on the basics: Conversion rate, do people click? Do people sign up? Click through rate and conversion rate. Do people click on the ad that you’re promoting? Or the podcast you’re promoting? Or the white paper you’re promoting? Do they convert? Do they read the white paper? Do they read the blog? Do they click on to the landing page? And did they sign up for a demo? Start with that, those are the basics. If people are clicking, and they like what they see, if people are signing up, then you’re giving them the information that they need to get there. There’s a lot of others that we could talk about. But I would say that we’re just starting out, that’s a really good place to start. And I think once you have the basics in place, and you have traffic coming in, then you can start to think more seriously about quality, like what quality leads are these. And people measure that in different ways. Sometimes you measure in CAC, sometimes cost per lead, sometimes whether it’s an MQL versus an SQL versus an opportunity. And I would say that those are all good things to focus on. Once you have a lot of people coming in through the funnel, say what quality are these leads? But just to start with, are people clicking? Are people signing up? And if you’re testing a lot of different forms of copy, and you’re seeing where the clicks are, you’ll learn very quickly whether the persona that you’ve created is accurate or not.

Christian Klepp 28:46

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, metrics is one of those topics where people tend to go down this really deep the rabbit hole. But especially if you’re starting out, you’re absolutely right. Like, start with keeping it simple is one thing, but like find the most important components or metrics, you know, as attributes that you want to measure, I think that’s your point, right? Start with those and then build from there. Right? Because if you start out with like, Okay, we’ve got 40 things to measure… So overwhelming.

Naomi Soman 29:20

Yeah, 100%. Don’t, don’t drown in a sea of of numbers. Don’t go down a rabbit hole in Tableau. Are people clicking? Are they signing up? That’ll give you at least 65% of the story. And if you’re focusing on copy, that’s mostly that’s enough to get you.

Christian Klepp 29:41

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Naomi, please get up on your soapbox. What is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Naomi Soman 29:56

So I think there’s a common belief among a lot of Marketers, especially more brand marketers, that copywriting is super creative. It’s a business form of poetry. It’s a form of self-expression. And I really, really passionately disagree with that. I’m a very creative person. And I love bringing creativity into my work. But I think ultimately, copywriting is about figuring out exactly what the customers need, and putting in on the page in a way that they can easily digest. And a lot of that information comes from the customer’s mouths. And the other half of that information comes from understanding the data and knowing what message people need to hear at what point. Are they at the top of the funnel? Are they at the bottom of the funnel? Are you targeting small leads? Are you targeting large leads? Are you focusing on quantity? Are you focusing on quality, because copywriting is really, really simple and really strategic, and can be very scientific and reliable if you can follow this path. And I think that creativity has its place. But a lot of times, it’s just not a super reliable way of building a marketing engine. And if you’re spending $30, $40 $50,000 a month, you can’t just rely on creativity, you have to have a proven process.

Christian Klepp 31:25

That’s a fair point. But um, let me ask you this, would you agree that you would need a certain level of creativity to have that differentiation as well? I mean, surely you can get that also from analyzing the data and addressing the problems of the customers. But would you would you agree that you need a little bit of creativity there as well.

Naomi Soman 31:46

I think that there’s definitely room for creativity, especially in some of the words that you use to express things or the scenarios maybe that you choose. But I think that it’s overstated in the industry, that people believe it’s the be all end all. And I think that it takes a smaller role than people think.

Christian Klepp 32:11

Okay, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Okay, Naomi, here comes the bonus question. All right. Get ready for it. Rumor has up, you’re quite a salsa dancer. I don’t know. Somebody whispered that in my ear. So I’m just passing the message on, right. So if you had the opportunity to dance salsa anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Naomi Soman 32:36

I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, and dance salsa in Havana, because there are two different kinds… There are a couple of different kinds of salsa. And my favorite kind is Cuban salsa. I don’t know how popular it is there today. But in my imagination, they’re just dancing in the streets all the time. So I would love to go there and verify that.

Christian Klepp 32:59

Like in the Havana Club commercial? (laugh) I’m curious because now that you brought it up, what’s the difference between Cuban salsa and the rest.

Naomi Soman 33:10

So Cuban salsa is… it has more of an African flavor to it. And it has a… it has more of an African beat to it. It’s also the for example, LA style salsa goes in a straight line, you keep the same line, where Cuban salsa often goes in a circle. And there’s also a counterpart to Cuban salsa called Rueda, which is done in a group. So everyone, there’s like a series of couples and a circle and they all dance together. And there’s somebody who calls out the moves. And everyone does it at the same time. Which is also very cool.

Christian Klepp 33:13

Interesting, interesting. You know, if this wasn’t a video call, I would have asked you for an actual demonstration. But you know, in the interest of time. (laugh) I’ll just have to take your word for it. I mean, like you’ve gone to great lengths not to describe it in great detail. So I’ve just have to use my imagination to like figure out okay, but that’s the difference between a and b. But yeah, Naomi, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. And I really do hope the listeners walk away with from this conversation with some actionable tips. So thanks again for your time. quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Naomi Soman 34:37

Yeah, so again, my name is Naomi Soman. You can find me on LinkedIn or via my website is storylogic.com. That’s storylogick.com. Yeah, feel free to get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.

Christian Klepp 34:56

Okay, fantastic. Naomi. Once again, thanks so much for your time today. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Naomi Soman 35:02

Thank you.

Christian Klepp 35:03

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Create Truly Differentiated B2B Content

There is so much pressure for B2B marketers to produce content consistently that much of it ends up being uninteresting, generic, and not very helpful. A lot of content also immediately starts with SEO and this leads to marketers drowning in a “sea of sameness.” How can marketers break out of this mold to produce content that provides a unique perspective?

That’s why we’re talking to copywriter and content marketing expert Joe Sweeney (Content Marketing Strategist, The Content Marketing Commute) about how B2B marketers can develop truly differentiated content. During our conversation, Joe highlighted the pitfalls to avoid and why boring B2B content is a thing of the past. Joe also discussed the importance of conducting research and why B2B marketers should build relationships with subject matter experts (SMEs).

https://youtu.be/agJ_1e-Gh74

Topics discussed in episode

• Why so much B2B content is not differentiated [2:47]
• How to navigate internal politics as a content marketer [6:51]
• How to avoid the common pitfalls when developing content that provides a differentiated perspective [8:50]
  • Write a good brief
  • Extract the insights from the subject matter experts (SMEs)
  • Integrate those insights into the content
• Joe explains how AI makes a content marketers’ job easier [11:23]
• Joe shares how he conducts research: [14:59]
  • Use your proprietary data to build content strategy
  • Focus on the Voice of the Customer (VOC)
  • Leverage the knowledge of subject matter experts (SMEs)
• How to convince SMEs to share their experience and expertise [20:03]
• Joe shares an example of how he helped his client to come up with more creative content [28:03]
• Actionable tips: [31:24]
  • Conduct a competitor audit
  • Identify SMEs in your company
  • Extract some specific points of views
  • Together with the personas, list out topics and create content pillars
  • Test the content out on social media

Companies and links mentioned

• Joe Sweeney on LinkedIn
• Content Marketing Commute
• Gong
• Salesloft

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Joe Sweeney, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission. Hold on to your seats, folks, because this is a handful: to make B2B content helpful, educational, entertaining, interesting, valuable and insightful. I hope I captured all of that. But coming to us from Avignon France, Joe Sweeney, welcome to the show….

Joe Sweeney 01:16

Hey, Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:17

If we’re going to try it in French: Bonjour, bienvenue.

Joe Sweeney 01:20

Merci beaucoup. It’s good to meet you. Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:24

Great to have you on the show. Joe, unfortunately, I was hoping that you would be on a bus with your microphone with your son in your lap. But you know, it is what it is right? (laugh)

Joe Sweeney 01:33

It is what it is today, I’ve managed to make my space a bit quieter. I know on our prep call, my son decided to come and be part of it. Lucky. He’s not here today. But he’s a great guy.

Christian Klepp 01:45

He’s a great guy. And I really would have wanted to hear his take on the topic we’re gonna get discussed today. But you know, let’s dive right in. Because I think that this is a very pertinent topic to anyone in B2B marketing, specifically dealing with content creation, right? So let’s say that you’ve been a professional B2B writer for a bit and you’ve been on a content marketing commute, no pun intended for several years now. Alright. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to create great content for B2B with a unique point of view that truly differentiates you. I think that it’s worth repeating how to create great content for B2B with a unique point of view that truly differentiates you. Let’s kick off this conversation with this following question. Why is there so much B2B content out there that’s not differentiated?

Joe Sweeney 02:47

Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think a great topic, Christian. And I think the answer to your question is, you know, there’s many angles to it. But one for me is just the fact that every B2B company knows that they need to be doing content. And I think a lot of B2B companies know that but haven’t thought through the “why” behind it. So they see all their competitors doing content, writing articles, whatever it is, making videos, but it’s like, are we just doing it because everyone’s doing it? Or what, you know, what are we actually trying to drive with this content we’re creating. And another big part of that, when, you know, when I was thinking about this was that kind of sense of content marketing, a lot of times gets very linked to SEO still in B2B. So when you mentioned you’re a content marketer, a lot of people’s first thought is to talk about SEO and go down that route. And in reality, content marketing is much wider than that. But the fact that it’s linked to SEO, for me really makes the content that’s undifferentiated, because what we’re trying to do is rank for keywords that are often quite, you know, popular, and we’re all trying to rank for the same keywords, which therefore means we’re creating the same kind of content as other people, other companies, for, you know, for the same keyword. So that for me is kind of a race to the bottom, if you’re going on the super SEO-lead approach. If you don’t do it right, and you don’t add your own point of view, and you don’t try and differentiate it, it ends up that all these B2B companies are writing the same, same articles about the same stuff. And that’s kind of where we’re at today, I guess.

Christian Klepp 04:30

Absolutely. Absolutely. I had one or two follow up questions for you Joe, just based on what you’ve said in the past couple of minutes. I tend to see this a lot in bigger organizations, and I’d like to get your take on it. But do you feel also sometimes that the reason why B2B content is not differentiated is because, well, they’re using the play it safe approach A. But B, they’re also creating that content, I’m going to say, for lack of a better description for political reasons. Please everybody internally, not necessarily to high five each other internally, but to make sure that they don’t rock, rock that departments’ boat and make sure that they maintain that balance and harmony internally as such.

Joe Sweeney 05:15

Totally I absolutely agree. And, yeah, it’s a mind boggling thing to think sometimes that content and a lot of marketing actions in companies at the end of the day, it becomes not about the audience. But it becomes about internal politicking, and even things like, you know, trying to attract investors, or like trying to impress the board, or, you know, a lot of times the marketing actions we take can become kind of like divorced from the audience that we’re trying to reach. And that’s when you sit down and think about it, you’re like, that just makes zero sense. Like, really, we should be the people, especially content marketers that understand their audience better than anyone. And that, you know, that’re fully 100% focused on like, on delighting them. So, yes, I fully agree with what you’ve said, there, I think if you can be in a company where you’re trusted to do your job to take the time to understand your audience, and just consistently delight them. That’s the kind of place you want to be as a content marketer. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 06:24

Absolutely, absolutely. So here comes the follow up question, Joe. So based on that unfortunate reality that sometimes these content marketers have to contend with all these internal politics, how would you… I wouldn’t say maneuver that, although you could say that, but how would you deal with that kind of challenge, right? To put out better content, you’d have to outmaneuver or deal with a politics? How would you deal with that?

Joe Sweeney 06:51

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, the reality is, in a lot of companies you’re in, you’re not going to overcome, you’re not going to get rid of, I guess, internal politics. And my vibe in the past has been like, ah, you know, I don’t want to be part of that, I just want to ignore it. And I want to just get on with my job and do a good job. But I think as I’ve been, you know, longer and longer through my career, you kind of understand you got to play the game, in some sense, you’ve got to kind of, you know, depending on the company, not all companies like this, but a lot of times that the reality is that I think that the approach needs to be like, figuring out who, you know, who’s going to help you get to where you want to be, and who’s going to help you, more do the work that, you know, is valuable for the company, right. And, you know, potentially, I think the way to do it is like to if you’re early on in the company to get a few quick wins to build rapport or build some like good relationships. And you know, that might require doing some things that that are a little less interesting or potentially valuable in your own head. But if you can do that you build up the trust to to actually go for it on your on your own. And I’ve always found that, you know, getting those quick wins, showing that you’re good at what you do, gives you the space to then innovate, innovate in a bigger way.

Christian Klepp 08:16

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s almost like an internal customer service, if you will.

Joe Sweeney 08:21

Totally.

Christian Klepp 08:23

It’s building that trust or finding those I suppose those advocates, those champions, people in that ecosystem, let’s just call it that. Right. Okay. Fantastic. I want to move us on to the next question, which are these famous pitfalls that B2B content marketers should avoid. And specifically on this topic of creating content that does provide a differentiated perspective?

Joe Sweeney 08:50

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there’s a few things to this. So I think a big part of it comes down to the brief. So kind of like when I say brief, I mean, like the outline or the plan that you put together for a piece of content before you get started. And if it comes back, you know, coming back to point of view, I love that we’re talking about that today, Christian, because, for me, this is a huge part of what makes great content, like, as I said earlier, you can search any keyword, you’ll find 20 articles around about the same, but the great ones kind of have a different take on a topic or a different angle, or kind of like even some kind of contrarian approach in some ways. So I’ve always found, starting with that brief and that plan around the piece of content, whatever it is, and having as part of the brief, what it like a section that says what is our point of view on this topic, like really getting it extremely clear, in terms of we’re talking about this big topic that everyone talks about, but what is our unique take on it, is it that actually that’s not true. It’s the opposite or is it that it’s slightly different or whatever. And I think a huge part of that which is linked to this as being close enough to those subject matter experts in your company, to actually be able to pull that insight out of them. That will give you a strong point of view. Because that strong point of view can’t be coming from your own head as a content marketer, that’s not your… that’s not your role. You’re not supposed to be the expert in everything. But you need to be excellent at collaborating with people who are. And people like the CEO, are pretty well known for having strong opinions about things and the space that they’re in. So I’ve always found if you can get close enough to them and just hear those things, you can start to like, integrate it into a lot of your content.

Christian Klepp 10:46

Yeah. No, that’s excellent. That’s excellent. I was gonna try really hard to avoid this topic. But if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna talk about pitfalls, AI.

Joe Sweeney 11:00

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 11:01

And granted that there’s a lot of people out there that, like myself that don’t feel threatened or intimidated by the presence of AI and but over to you in terms of, if we’re going to like talk about the pitfalls to avoid specifically with AI, especially when it comes to content marketing? What would that be?

Joe Sweeney 11:23

Yeah, well, speaking of a point of view, this is huge, because AI is not going to give you a strong point of view about a specific topic, right. So I think I’m in the same boat as you. I’m quite excited about the reality of it, but probably for a different reason is that it’s going to, I think we’ve already found it… it’s put a fire under like, terrible content. And a lot of people putting out a lot of bland stuff. And so almost being able to stand out, becomes even a little bit easier. So I kind of look at it that way. And it’s like an opportunity. If so and so is pumping out 20 blog posts a day on this thing that are all like, very bland. And I can do content that’s, you know, high quality with an actual point of view. I think that’s great. And, you know, I think when it comes to AI, what we need to think about is, it’s amazing how it can be a tool for us to to go faster, and to do things that are like, tedious and manual and a pain in the butt right now like for for us to do. But it’s not for, you know, for coming out with a point of view or for actually creating quality content. It can get you started, but, you know, people who say they’re just writing x 1000 number of blog posts, it’s not the answer. But they can do it because it makes my job easier.

Christian Klepp 12:49

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you hear every now and then people like creating articles using ChatGPT. Yes. To your to your point that the danger with completely relying on AI. A is the, you know, copyright issues because like, for example, ChatGPT doesn’t cite sources. Yeah. And B it’s aggregating data from all over the internet. And you know, this information was probably like, pinned by a different person. Right. So you can get into a lot of trouble there. Right. And to your other point, it creates this, like vanilla content, where you’re like, Okay, there’s, there’s no differentiation here. Right? Yeah. So I subscribe to that school of thought, where I’m not completely dismissive of AI, I believe that there’s a time and place for it. As you’ve said, I see it more as a tool. It’s something that you can use, for example, to help you to save time when you’re conducting research, maybe something that took you previously several hours, you can do it, hopefully in a shorter time now. Right. But to rely completely on AI, to develop content, this is the part where I’m not freaking out just yet. I think there will be there will be a need for quality content and quality writing. The likes of which cannot be replaced by AI. Not yet.

Joe Sweeney 14:17

Not yet. Yeah, just keep watching this space.

Christian Klepp 14:21

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m gonna move on to and we know that this is super important. It’s about conducting research. But what I want to specifically dig into here, John, you’ve kind of mentioned it already. When you’re conducting research in order to create that better content that differentiated content that content or you have a different point of view or a unique point of view. Talk to us about like, what content marketers out there should be looking for so that they don’t go and research aimlessly. And on the topic of SMEs as well. Like how do you leverage those?

Joe Sweeney 14:59

Yeah, Oh, yeah, great questions. To your first point, I’d say one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And whether this fits into research or if it’s a slightly different mindset is thinking around really data-centric content, like what I’d call it. So, you know, right now I’m freelancing, and I’m working for a FinTech company. And there’ll be a lot of, you know, companies, whether you’re in tech or or some other space, where essentially your product or your platform has data within it, because of the way customers use etc. That is almost proprietary to you like, and I think that is an absolute goldmine to build your content strategy around, because if we’re talking about differentiated, this is data that is not publicly available online. And using it as the core of, of your content strategy is such a great opportunity, because it allows you to, to show that you have insights that no one else has. So for example, with this FinTech company I’m working with, we’re going to start to produce like reports around the state of B2B finance teams and, and how they’re using our tool and etc, etc. And I think, yeah, anyway, just starting with that is kind of like a perfect way to be, like differentiated because you’re not just going to 25 different sites through a Google search and pulling, you know, old stats from different things, which is generally how I’ve worked in the past. So that’s really, really important.

And then I think research wise, what else is important is, is hearing the voice of the customer, I think, as a content marketer, it’s almost like one of your biggest challenges and one of your constant battles, needs to be hearing the voice of the customer and getting close to the customer. Because if you’re not careful, and I’ve done this before, you start to get quite siloed, you’re kind of away from the customer, you think you know them, because you have it written down on a persona document, but really, you never talk to them. And you never, you know, see them. So there’s a lot of ways these days that are really amazing to do that, I think tools, you don’t necessarily need to be in a meeting or need to be face to face, there’s tools like Gong, for example, that I’ve just been able to start using, which is so brilliant in terms of being able to listen to calls, sales calls, or customer success calls that are recorded, and just like, just kind of like, breathe that in every day almost and try to understand how these people are thinking, I think if you can go back to like, really, truly understanding who the audience is beyond kind of like what is written on a paper, and not just ticking that box and saying yes, I understand them. But like, just regularly doing it, even if you think you know them. That’s my number one tip I’d say in in that research space.

And then working with SMEs like us, Christian, I think, I think this is massive, because like I said earlier, if your whole content strategy, and your whole kind of approach to content is coming out of your head, you’re definitely doing it wrong. And you and you really, really need to be thinking about your role as a kind of facilitator for the expertise that you have in your business. And I think if you’re starting a new role, kind of trying to identify who are those people who really, really know their stuff in this company, who are kind of like the thought leaders, I know, we overuse that term, so much a thought leader, everyone’s a thought leader. But like, you know, some of these companies I’ve worked in, they’ve got people who’ve done a PhD and the topic that we sell a product on. So getting close to them and using your skill sets in communication together with their skill sets and expertise in the space. That’s just the best way to work.

Christian Klepp 19:06

Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, I have a follow up question for you, Joe, on the topic of SMEs. Yeah, we know that it’s important to identify those thought leaders and those experts, right, because they’re going to really be helpful to craft that differentiated content. But I’ve run into these situations before, and I’m sure you have as well. Suppose you approach the SMEs, and they’re a little bit hesitant to talk to you for whatever reason, right? Even if you are not an external contractor, but even a member of the marketing department, and they’re kind of like, well, I’m not entirely sure I have time to talk to you, and why should I talk to you and et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. So how do you how do you…. I wouldn’t say deal with that. But how do you convince them that it’s also in their interest to share their experience and their expertise with you?

Joe Sweeney 20:03

Yeah, it’s a fantastic question. Because there’s gonna be, I think, just to start off the answer, there’s going to be some people who don’t want to do it. And that’s fine. I think sometimes you can spend a lot of time trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to do it. And that is… the way I’ve always approached it, you know, for example, showing people, showing those people, other people like them online, maybe it’s in a different space, but say, on LinkedIn on other spaces, that are sharing their insights, and trying to like package, you know, here’s so and so who’s an expert in AI, and look what it’s done for their business, like, look at the following, they have look at how many people commented on their stuff, you know, tried to sort of package like what this might mean for their business. And I think that’s quite a good way of, of kind of convincing people. And then and then just try and start baby steps, like, try to be like, you know, don’t, don’t be like, Hey, we’re going to meet every day, and you’re going to talk to me, like, just start baby steps be like, Hey, maybe we could start to put together one little piece together, and then show them, I think what we always… we often lack is showing them the outcome, right? Because you’re always trying to get stuff from these SMEs. But you need to close the loop on it, you need to show them, hey, you gave me your time, you, you helped me do this, and this is what’s come out of it. And you’re not going to change the world with every little piece of content, but just show them that that is actually worthwhile, you know, send them the comments, or send them little snippets of information of what’s coming back. And I think if they, if they get it, if they start, if they understand the value in that, they’ll start to think, oh, yeah, I can, you know, I can easily talk to you for 20 minutes, it doesn’t take me much time. And you can produce something that actually is of value to me into the business. I think that’s the way to do it. And you build from there, you definitely got to make sure it’s it’s not a heavy lift for them. Like don’t ask them to go away and write a white paper or something themselves, like, you be the one to facilitate that and to do the heavy lift. But that’s always… that’s often worked for me. Not with everyone. But if they start to see the value, then it’s great.

Christian Klepp 22:26

Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. So let me just reiterate what you’ve been saying here. So I suppose it starts with being intentional, right? Like you have to go in there with a plan. Clearly communicate, you know, the classic, like, what’s in it for me, right? Like, well, what do I get out of sitting here and talking to Joe Sweeney for an hour? Right? So it’s that, okay, this is the reason why we’re doing this. Perhaps one approach could be we’d like to feature you or we’d like to, we’d like to showcase your expertise, right? So make it about them versus like, oh, you know, we were we were told to, you know, write a white paper and just ask your opinion on it, because you are your subject matter expert, right. So turning that the other way around and packaging it in such a way that hey, listen, like, you know, we’d like to feature you and this is where it’s gonna go. And these are the as you mentioned, like the format’s right, we’re going to create a white paper out of this, will this be a video snippet? Or where or what are we going to turn all this stuff into? Right? Yeah, where is it going to be distributed? And I think I love the bit where you said, show them the outcome. So it’s kind of like an indication of progress. Right. So this is what’s going to, this is what’s going to happen to it, I find more often than not, with some marketing folks that I’ve worked with in the past. They’re not very transparent with the subject matter experts about what what they plan to do with all this information. Right. Yeah. So there’s that lack of communication, there’s that lack of transparency, and hence the hesitation from the other side to well, set aside half an hour of their time to actually talk to a marketing department.

Joe Sweeney 24:14

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think it’s, it’s like anything in life. If you kind of, if you’re asked to give something you want to know, you know, where’s it going? Or what’s it going to lead to or whatever. So that’s just yeah, that’s just common sense. I think and, and also, just, I feel as marketers, we’re so focused on the next thing, a lot of times, we’re so busy, and we’re just like, get something done, moved to the next thing. Whereas working with SMEs, I think it’s really important to go back and, and you’ll have more success by really kind of like, yeah, closing the loop on it, I think.

Christian Klepp 24:48

Closing the loop. That’s exactly, that’s exactly. Okay. I’m gonna move us on to the next question that you and I talked about, I think before I hit record, there’s a camp out there on platforms like LinkedIn. And who still adamantly believes that boring content in B2B wins the day. Agree or disagree? And why?

Joe Sweeney 25:09

It’s an interesting question because I’d struggled to understand like, it depends how you’re defining boring because if we’re human beings, we all know what boring is. And very few human beings like boring, like, my boring might be different to your boring and to someone else’s boring but generally boring is not good. So if the question is sort of like, boring content for me as a marketer, but for the audience who’s in finance or something that’s super interesting, then yeah, boring content might win the day, because it’s, it’s not boring to them. But it’s boring to make, you know what I mean? So, so I totally agree with that. But I think if we come back to the, you know, to the, maybe the real thought behind this is like, there is a sense that business to business has to be really professional and kind of clean cut, and like, all this sort of stuff. And I think more, you know, this is not a new thing, but more and more brands in B2B are showing that that’s not the case that you actually can entertain, and you can, you know, make someone laugh, and that actually can be part of B2B. And I think there’s, if you think about, if you want people to engage with, say, a post on LinkedIn, or, or with a piece of content, making them laugh is like one of the very best ways to engage, like, if you can see something in your feed, and you kind of crack up on it. Like that. For me, that’s even more powerful than learning something from it, like, Sure, there’s, there’s learning but then there’s like, I’ve literally had a reaction in my face that’s like, Oh, that’s funny, you know, and the fact that that can come from your brand, and there’s more and more B2B companies leaning into that, I think is brilliant, like, yeah, I’m really big one for like, pushing the boundaries, you’ve got to be brave enough to do it. Because chances are, majority of your competitors are not doing it, because it’s kind of this race to the bottom of like, let’s play it safe. But that makes it even more powerful. If you can step out of the box and do something a bit different. Potentially funny, or, you know, more interesting. That’s how you that’s how you really win, I think in content today.

Christian Klepp 27:30

No, I think you just inadvertently opened the door there to a follow up question. (laugh)

Joe Sweeney 27:35

Yes.

Christian Klepp 27:36

I mean, on that, I totally agree with you. And my follow up question would be what could you give us an example of, you know, from your past experience, or any current experience… Where you’ve been able to get a client to buy into a… I’m not gonna say an outrageous idea, but something a little bit more creative? A little bit more unconventional? You know, where you’ve helped them to call Gandalf the Grey, give them that nudge out the door?

Joe Sweeney 28:03

Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a good example lately of this company I’ve been working with in the FinTech space. So we did you know that, you know the whole concept around “celebrities read mean tweets”. So I think it was a Jimmy Kimmel thing where it’s kind of like, celebrities sit down, and they literally take camera read nasty tweets about themselves. I saw, I saw a company on LinkedIn, do the similar thing. So I just, you know, there’s nothing new under the sun, I basically copied their idea with a twist. But it’s essentially, employees read negative reviews. So from G2, and essentially, we just got some of our employees to sit down and read some reviews from G2, to that are like, you know, it doesn’t have this feature, or I don’t like the colors or kind of funny, funny bad reviews that that were on there. And that was really fun. And I don’t have like a, I don’t know, I don’t have necessarily a silver bullet to how I convince someone to do that. I think a lot of times, it’s about finding someone who can trust you to do it. And the only thing I’d say is, you know, getting some quick wins under your belt before you put an ad like that forward. And if you know, if you’ve shown you’re good, and you have good ideas, and you think through things well, it’s not just some random, funny, weird thing. I think the right people will trust you to do it, even if they’re not marketers. And there’s more and more examples online as well. Where you can show big brands doing stuff like this, like, you know, sales loft, for example, as a sales software. They literally employ a guy. I think he’s called brand awareness manager to just make funny memes and like funny videos of himself on a green screen and stuff. So there’s like serious big brands who do this stuff now, and it’s becoming more and more not this, like, out of the blue thing so you can also show your uplines that type of thing.

Christian Klepp 30:11

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I do. I do remember the mean tweets from I think it was Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah. And people like… and all these people like, I even think Obama was on one of them as well. Yeah, if I remember that correctly.

Joe Sweeney 30:27

It’s really good. It’s really well done.

Christian Klepp 30:29

Yeah. No. Fantastic. Fantastic. I originally had two different questions set up, I’m going to try to roll these into ones for the interest, you know, in the interest of time. So we get to the point in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already. I mean, I’ve been writing furiously, this past half hour, and I’m like… but let’s just appreciate that, you know, especially when it comes to developing a differentiated perspective and content marketing, that’s not something that you can actually do it in a hour. Alright, that takes time. But if somebody was out there, who is struggling with coming up with this differentiated content marketing… Someone, someone out there is listening to this conversation. What are like maybe three to five things that you’d like them to take away from this that they can take action on, right now? Not in six months. Not in six weeks. Like right now?

Joe Sweeney 31:24

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So I think, first of all, I’m thinking about creating differentiated content, I would look at… I would take a quick look at what my competitors are doing. And there’s different schools of thought in this space of like, you don’t want to focus too much on what competitors are doing blah, blah, blah. But I think there’s still value in doing a little bit of an audit on, you know, who are those main people in my space? And how are they presenting content? Or how are they presenting their point of view? Hopefully, they’re pretty bland, and they’re pretty basic. And that’s going to help you find kind of your niche, or like, where you might be able to differentiate yourself. So I think doing that kind of audit initially is really helpful. And then, and then a second step would be getting close to those SMEs, like I said before, so once you’ve identified say, you know, 2, 3, 4 people in your company, who, who really have strong opinions and strong expertise around your space, it might be the CEO or other C suite people, I think trying to define and get it down on paper, like, what are your specific point of views, points of view, sorry, on the topics that you’re going to address, and I would always include it in my content strategy planning, like, the way I would do it is kind of, I often have my personas initially. And then I list out my topics and kind of bundle that into, you know, content pillars, and against my content pillars, I make sure that planning stage to have, you know, what am I… What are my strong points of view on those content pillars? Like, if we’re in HR software, for example, and we’re talking about hiring, like, what is what is broken in hiring today? That’s often a way to frame this as like, what is the enemy? Or what’s not working today? And how are we the… how are we the solution to that? So I’d get that down on paper. And then, and then I think the third thing is like, don’t just settle there and say, that’s, that’s it forever. That’s our point of view forever. I think it’s really important to test how your point of view, kind of, is it compelling to your audience, maybe internally, you’re like, This is amazing. But as soon as you communicate it to your customers and your prospects, they’re a bit like, that’s not very interesting at all. So I think social media is a fantastic way to test messaging, and probably not used in that way enough to be honest, like, you can actually get almost real time feedback on on messages that your company is pushing. And like worst comes to worst you delete stuff. Like that’s the beauty of it as well. I think a lot of people don’t use it in that way. But say you had point of views based on your on your themes, you could start to put together, you know, some test posts on like, try to communicate that in a strong way. If it’s really engaging for people, you’ll see that and you can sort of build on that. So that would be my kind of key advice on those.

Christian Klepp 34:37

Yeah, no, that’s super helpful. Super helpful. And I I agree with you, I’m a true believer of testing out what works, right. Both be tempted to be like working in a silo where everybody again is high fiving themselves internally. Yeah, this is great stuff, and then you put it out into the world and completely tanks. Right?

Joe Sweeney 34:57

Totally.

Christian Klepp 34:58

We had this conversation before I hit record, but I was interviewing this respondent for our client last week. So it’s basically part of the customer research. And we did some testing on brand messaging. So I’d actually, like taking the customers current brand messaging and come up with different options. And you know, we ran them past these respondents and then get their points of view. Right. And it’s amazing how much interesting feedback was generated from just that exercise. Right? Well, yeah, sure. They’ll rip into the work. But you know, I mean, it’s part of the research, right? Like don’t take, you know, the thing is, you shouldn’t take it personally right, it’s all because the thing is that respondents were saying, Well, okay, that doesn’t resonate with me, because of this reason, or that’s too generic, because I saw that somewhere else, yeah, cetera, et cetera. That one resonates with me, because of this reason, but perhaps you should change the wording, because I feel like in my space, somebody would look at that and not be entirely sure. Whether that is, you know, whether that message is being communicated to them or somebody else, you know, and I think that was your point, right? It’s just so important to get that kind of feedback from the actual customers.

Joe Sweeney 36:08

It is, it’s so important. Yeah. And, you know, as a marketer, you got to be so comfortable with feedback. It’s probably one of the, it’s probably one of the jobs where you’re gonna get the most unsolicited feedback, ever. So just lean into it and embrace it.

Christian Klepp 36:23

Yeah. And leave your ego at the door, as they say, right.

Joe Sweeney 36:26

Yeah. Totally.

Christian Klepp 36:28

All right. Joe, I have a feeling like you’ve been on your soapbox throughout this entire conversation. But I’d like to ask you to stay up there a bit longer.

Joe Sweeney 36:38

I’m feeling good up here. Don’t worry. Christian. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 36:41

Fantastic. Because this is a soapbox question. Actually. It’s a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with. And why?

Joe Sweeney 36:52

Yes. Yes, I think, I think maybe going back to something I said earlier in the episode was around the link between SEO and content. And I personally, I’d see myself more as like a social media-led content person, if that makes sense. And I think for many people, SEO is like, what it is to be in content marketing. And for some companies, that’s, that’s cool. But I think that’s gonna change a lot. I think, given AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, all the stuff, search and search engines are about to get like… already, we’ve just seen Google change a bunch of stuff to kind of limit the impact of AI content on search and improve quality. But I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of how search is going to change. And so this whole piece around point of view and quality, and actually thinking through like expert content, is going to become so much more important. And I think, and I think I’m so I’m so excited to be to be playing that game and to be in this space right now. Because like you said, the status quo is just about to explode, I think.

Christian Klepp 38:17

Fantastic. Fantastic. That’s a that’s a really interesting perspective. It’s an… actually also great segue to the bonus question. So I don’t want to give too much away here. But you know, short of stating the obvious, you have a bit of an unconventional way of interviewing people for your own show. Right? Yeah. And for the benefit of the audience that’s not aware of how you do it is basically you know, you go out on the street with your equipment, or you ride a bus or you’re riding a bike. So it’s, you’re not in this, like me, for example, you’re not in your inner sanctuary in the recording studio, where nobody’s bothering you. Right. So the question for you, Joe, is that if, you know, given the nature of your own show, if you were given the opportunity to interview somebody, anywhere in the world you like, right, in that kind of open environment, what place would you pick and why?

Joe Sweeney 39:19

Wow, that’s such a good question. (laugh) Man, what would I pick and why? I think it’s such a good question. I think maybe… what I loved about it is the fact that it kind of has people a little bit off guard. And, you know, it kind of puts people in a context. They’re not maybe used to doing an interview. And so maybe like skydiving or something, you know, like you’d have to be high enough to give yourself a good amount of time. But like, I think if people are like terrified, they’re going to give you an amazing different answers to the questions that they’re thinking about. You know? Yeah, it’s a really mean thing to say. But…

Christian Klepp 40:05

It’s a huge logistics exercise. So I’m just trying to think about how to make that work. You probably have to hold each other’s hand because otherwise he’s gonna like, that person’s gonna drift off and then figure out the answer. Right, like… (laugh)

Joe Sweeney 40:16

Yeah, totally. I might have to become like a, like a skydiving guide. So they were like, strapped together.

Christian Klepp 40:23

Yeah. Tandem.

Joe Sweeney 40:25

Tandam yeah, and then… but you’d have to have some really big like, you know, muffle things over the microphones. I’m sure that would make a lot of noise. Anyway, we’ll deal with that at the time.

Christian Klepp 40:36

Yeah. I was kind of hoping that you’d say you’d be like on a on a rowboat or something like out in the middle of the lagoon in French Polynesia or something like that.

Joe Sweeney 40:45

Oh, it does sound nice to the person would be way too relaxed.

Christian Klepp 40:51

Yeah, that’s… they’ll have to roll their own boat in the water. So you know, they have to pay attention.

Joe Sweeney 40:57

Yeah. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 40:59

That’s fantastic. Fantastic. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. quick introduction of yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Joe Sweeney 41:10

Yeah, well, it’s been fantastic being on, Christian. Yeah, I’m Joe Sweeney. I’m a content marketing strategist Freelancer, live in the south of France. As you mentioned, I run this podcast called Content Marketing Commute, where I interview experts essentially on the way to work, whether it’s on the train, bike, bus, whatever, has been really good, fun. Best way to get in touch with us on LinkedIn. I’m, I’m literally on there all the time. You’ll always see the green circle on my face. So let’s get in touch.

Christian Klepp 41:43

Fantastic, fantastic. Joe, once again. Thanks for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Joe Sweeney 41:48

Thanks, Christian.

View Details

How to Market Complex Products to Engineers

In B2B, there tends to be a huge disconnect between marketers and engineers. This gap can be bridged once marketers understand how engineers think and work, how they search for information, and what resonates with them. When done strategically, they can also capitalize on the knowledge, experience, and expertise that engineers have to develop assets and campaigns that will help to differentiate their B2B company in the market.

That’s why we’re talking to SaaS marketing expert Dr. Masha Petrova (CEO, Nullspace) about how B2B marketers can market complex products to engineers. During our conversation, Masha talked about the pitfalls to avoid and how marketers should probe properly to extract better insights from engineers. She also talked about the importance of finding an engineer who can be the subject matter expert and advocate for the company.

https://youtu.be/0zUF_D8GARE

Topics discussed in episode

• Why most marketing that targets engineers falls flat [2:18]
• How to avoid the common pitfalls when marketing to engineers [9:36]
  • Masha shares some specific guidelines and advice to the two groups of marketers [10:48]
• Masha helps us understand engineers and how to work with them [22:01]
• How the disconnect between the engineers and marketers created a disastrous marketing ad [26:07]
• How to get buy-in from engineers [28:48]
• Actionable tips: [37:35]
  • Find your technical champion
  • Find your corporate sponsor
  • Internal marketing – deliver your message in a way that’s easier for your audience to consume
• Masha’s thoughts on AI [45:10]

Companies and links mentioned

• Masha Petrova on LinkedIn
• Nullspace

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Masha Petrova

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies focus on the human aspect of B2B marketing. So coming to us from Orange County, California, USA, Marsha Petrova. Welcome to the show.

Masha Petrova 01:09

Hi, Christian. So good to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Great to be connected, Masha. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because I’ve been doing this for about three years now. And I think you’re the first person that is going to talk about this topic. So I am really looking forward to it.

Masha Petrova 01:25

Oh, exciting. I’m thrilled to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:30

So Marsha, you’ve got quite the interesting, magnificent professional background. If I’m gonna say it loudly, right? As you’d like to put it, you’re the creative who became a rocket scientist, and then a marketer. I don’t know if that’s the correct order. But like, let’s, let’s go with that. Right?

Masha Petrova 01:46

I guess. Right. And now a CEO, so the whole gamut. That’s right,

Christian Klepp 01:51

Exactly. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And it’s super, super important. I cannot stress this enough. Because we’re gonna get into this in a second, a lot of people get this wrong, how to market a complex product to engineers. So yeah, now we kick off the conversation with this question. Why do you think a lot of marketing that targets engineers falls flat?

Masha Petrova 02:18

Yeah, so it’s such an exciting topic to talk about. So I am an engineer, recovering engineer, I should say, My PhD was in aerospace engineering. And then I pretty quickly went into the dark side of sales and marketing and sort of stayed there for quite a while. But I still was always in the space of very deep engineering software. So the products that I typically would market was software for engineers, and a lot of times PhD level engineers. So like, as engineering niche as you could get, I was preparing for this podcast, and I was looking at some statistics. And it looks like there’s about 5% of all of the professionals in the United States are engineers. And so it’s pretty small area, right? Small piece. And then if you look at PhD engineers, that’s like less than 0.1%, or something like that. So it’s a very small space that we’re all sort of fighting for. And as you know, B2B marketing is different from consumer marketing, because in the consumer space, you’ve got basically the world is your oyster, and the competition is fierce. So there’s a ton of money goes into marketing, well, most money, most company budgets go into marketing, nobody is going to blink an eye when Coca Cola is dumping millions of dollars into marketing or, you know, great example is Liquid Death, the water brand, if you’re aware, I’m sure you’ve probably discussed it on your channel, it’s water, the product is literally comes out of the faucet for free. And the company was just valued at something like $1.4 billion, or something like that, the evaluation. In that space of consumer marketing, everyone’s used to spending lots of money on marketing, upping their marketing game, and really treating marketing as a profession. And B2B space, when we’re talking about, you know, lower competition, you’re not really vying for the masses, you’ve got a much more focused group, you know, sales is leading a lot of times, you know, personal relationships is leading a lot of times, and in engineering software space, there’s only like, three competitors at any given time that you’re trying to like, you know, that’s who’s you’re trying to claw your market share away from. So it’s a very small group of users that you’re going after, and you’re only competing after with a very small group of companies. And so, the marketing techniques that work for the masses do not work in such a small space at all. And so, I think what happens is there is a big discrepancy between you know, typically in marketing schools you know, if your traditional marketer you went to school for marketing or business development or something like that, or PR or advertising. You typically learn consumer techniques, and maybe there’s some B2B courses that you might take. But it would probably be like, you know, more generic B2B, not such techie niche, niche areas, you know, marketing to scientists and engineers. And so when marketers like that come into an engineering organization, there’s a huge disconnect between engineers and what they’re used to, what they expect and the marketers. And sometimes, you know, there’s just, it’s such a huge disconnect that organizations give up and go, you know, what, we’ll just take some engineers and tell them to do marketing, because how hard could that be? Like, marketing is just colors and letters, like anyone could do it, which obviously, is really not the case, for the most part. And I think that’s, that’s the issue that we face in this space.

Christian Klepp 05:49

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you’re talking about like, a niche of a niche of a niche, or I like to call it niche cube. Like, you’re really going after a specific segment of your niche. Right. So you’re talking about, like multiple layers down, right?

Masha Petrova 06:06

Yes. Yes.

Christian Klepp 06:08

Seeing that, like, what was? What was the statistic you mentioned? So it was about 5%…?

Masha Petrova 06:13

5% of professionals in United States in 2017 are engineers.

Christian Klepp 06:20

So considering the population, the entire population of the country, that percentage is quite…, you’re talking about minority within a minority…

Masha Petrova 06:27

Yes, yes. Yes, for sure.

Christian Klepp 06:29

Yeah. No, certainly there are challenges. And as you mentioned, there’s this big disconnect between the engineers themselves and the marketing people that well, don’t see things from the engineers lens. So we’re gonna get into that in a second. But where would you say, and I know, there’s two camps out there. And I’m curious to know which camp you belong to. But there’s people that say, you should totally ignore the emotional aspect in B2B marketing, right? It’s all factual, logical, information, social proof, I could go on and on and on. But what’s your take on that? Do you think the emotional aspect should be completely dismissed?

Masha Petrova 07:05

Well, no, of course not. Absolutely not. We’re not robots, people still buy from people and engineers still have emotions. Now, most of them will look at you like they don’t if you ask them about feelings, or emotions, they would literally look at you like a deer in the headlights, but they still have them. It doesn’t mean they don’t have them. They’re just, they’re just not focusing on them for the most part. And they will still buy emotionally because that’s how people buy that’s been proven over and over again, there’s, you know, statistics and research around that. So you know, it’s not my opinion, that’s just facts, however, and then in the space where I typically market, which is engineering software, right, selling to engineers. Trying to explain that doesn’t work. Because if you’re trying to… it’s like trying to explain to a fish how to fly, right? And you’re just like, well, you’re just flapping your wings. And the fish is like, what’s wings? What are you talking about? Well, they flap my fins, I swim, like, What are you talking about flying, you know. So, that doesn’t work, however, there are common points between engineers and marketers that you could sort of latch on to, and build some really cool successful marketing campaigns and projects. And I’ve done that in the past that worked incredibly well, for both engineers and marketers, but it takes a lot of sophistication, a lot of work to get to it, right. And so that common ground is, you know, facts are facts. And engineers love facts. And that’s what they do all day long. And they rely on numbers and figures and facts. And if you as a marketer can accept that and say, Okay, that’s what they understand. So let’s build my whether it’s marketing campaign, an ad, email blasts, whatever it is that you’re building, with your marketing product, focus on the facts first, and because it will resonate with engineers, and then you can embellish, you know, like, maybe on the colors and the branding and all the like fun aspects of marketing. But make sure it doesn’t change the underlying facts of what it is that you’re trying to convey, if that makes sense. And that works. But to get to that point, it’s hard.

Christian Klepp 09:14

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we’re gonna unpack that in a second. But before we do, and I’m not trying to get all religious on you, but talk to us about the Deadly Sins of marketing to engineers, and you brought up some of them already. But talk to us about these pitfalls of, for lack of a better description, these pitfalls to avoid, right and what should be done instead.

Masha Petrova 09:36

Yeah, and I love talking about this topic because it happens over and over again. And I think not enough is talked about it and there’s a lot of it could be avoided. And so if we just have more education, so first let’s talk about, there’s sort of two groups that we can kind of bucket are: marketers who are doing B2B marketing in engineering or science oriented type field like very technical field, right? That typically would be your standard marketing person who’s maybe done B2B marketing and other space that’s not so technical, who is now like, dropped into the space of like, I’ll just talk about engineers, because that’s what I know, this, this engineering space, and they are trying to do things and nothing is landing. And you know, they feel like a failure because nothing seems to….that work before is not working anymore. And they don’t know why. So that’s one group. And the other group is the engineers who were now kind of like, usually shoved into marketing. I mean, some of them every once in a while want to do marketing, but that’s rare. It’s typically like, Okay, we got to do some marketing, let’s take this engineer and make him into marketer, right. And so a different set of rules, applies to them, or not rules, guidelines, I should say.

So I have some very specific guidelines, because I know you like your guests to give specific advice to your audience. So I have some specific advice to whoever’s listening. So if you’re a marketer, and you are now in having to market to engineers, and you come into the space, and you’re like, what is happening, like, I can’t get my footing, like nothing seems to be working, I recommend a few things. Number one is your common ground with engineers as facts, focus on facts. So I’ll give you even a magic, some magic words you could use that almost guarantee that your marketing will be will start to resonate with engineers. So what you want to do, let’s say you’re designing an ad, you’re designing a marketing campaign, email blast, banner ads, whatever, a website. And you’re having to do it for engineers, and you’re working in an engineering organization, first step is to write a short summary, short, of what is the purpose of what is it that you’re trying to do? And what is the thing that you’re trying to design is supposed to… is meant for doing. Is that a product announcement, if it’s a product announcement, where the key messages that you want to get to the customer. If it’s a lead generation type of campaign, like what kind of leads or you’re trying to get, you know, some just basic good Rules of Marketing, write it down in the short paragraph, and then find a group of like, I recommend three to five engineers in your organization, or possibly customers, if you have that relationship with customers, but engineers in your space, and run that paragraph by them and say, Hey, I’m designing marketing campaign, email blasts, whatever. This is the main message. And then this, here’s a key magic phrase, okay to ask an engineer, “is this a technically accurate statement?” Okay, so I’ll repeat it again, it’s that important. Mr. or Mrs. Engineer? Could you read this? This is for my marketing campaign, this is underlying messaging from my marketing campaign or purpose of my marketing campaign. Is this a technically accurate statement? Because that triggers an engineer to look for facts and look for technical facts, because what happens a lot of times, and this is probably one of the biggest issues when marketers tried to design marketing products in an engineering environment. They will try to solicit feedback from engineers, and they will go to them with full ad, or the full, you know, banner ad or whatever an email and say, Hey, what do you think? So an engineer will tell you what they think. They will tell you, they don’t like the color red, they tell you there’s not enough words, they tell you that you’re not explaining things enough, engineers always want to explain things a lot more than marketers ever do. Always, that’s just default, they’ll tell you to put more words in that. They’ll tell you to make the font smaller, they’ll tell you to put equations in there, you know, all the things that are irrelevant, and you know as a marketer will not work. So that’s a that’s a bad way to ask for feedback. So when you go to an engineer and ask for feedback on whatever it is, your marketing piece is, the magic phrase is, is this a technically accurate statement? And if they say no, then pry more, ask more questions, why not? Like what would make it more technically accurate? And you kind of have to fish out that… those answers might take some fishing because engineers will tend to give you every detail they possibly can to be as accurate as they possibly can. And that’s your job to kind of like fish through that and get the main message. Right. But that’s probably the biggest key, I would say, and then communicate with them. It is your job as a marketer to get engineers to nod and say, Yes, this is, this is technically accurate. And you know, this doesn’t offend my senses as an engineer, it is not their job to come to you constantly and tell you that something’s wrong with your marketing products. So remember that and be humble about it. And know that you will never know as much as an engineer from the technical perspective, even if you worked in an engineering field for 10 years, unless you go and get your engineering degree in that space. Just accept that the engineers will always know more on the technical side of things and get their feedback. And then they have an advanced technique for your listeners, if you would like. So let’s say you listen to this podcast and you’re like, Oh, this is great idea. I’m going to do it and you start asking your engineers is this technically accurate, and you started getting feedback and responses and you’re listening to them and you’re adjusting your marketing campaigns and they seem to be working better. And you’re like, oh, cool, what else can I do? So here’s an advanced technique. Gotta be careful with this. This is only if you already build trust with engineers, they already are listening to you. Okay. You could ask the same group of two to three engineers, let’s say you already have your final product. Let’s say it’s a banner ad, just to make it simple. You designed the banner ad, if you already know, it’s technically accurate. And you go to them and say, Hey, how does this ad make you feel? Now, this I’m saying it’s an advanced technique, because most likely you will get a deer in the headlights stare from an engineer, because engineers don’t do feelings, period. Like… I know, it’s a stereotype. But it’s a very pervasive stereotype. And it just happens all the time. The job requires an engineer to be very introverted, to be very focused, to be very focused on details, to be very focused on safety and be very conservative, and to be very internally focused to process and think through things systematically, right. So they don’t typically focus on other people’s feelings. Whereas marketers, that’s literally all we do all day long, right? So you might just get kind of like a blank stare, in which case, you can ask, okay, looking at this ad, do you feel compelled to do the call to action? Whatever it is… literally press the button, learn more. Yes or no? And then why? Like, why do you feel compelled to press it? Why do you felt not compelled to press it? If you were our customer, would you feel compelled to press on the Learn More button? Right? If you get engineers who can either talk about their feelings in which case you’ve struggled, this is your go to technical resource, you go to them to ask all kinds of questions about marketing campaigns, or they give you some good responses on like, Well, I would press on this button, because, you know, I like, you know, the sentence is compelling to me. And it makes me want to learn more, for these reasons. Great. That’s another technical resource that you could go to. But if you’re just not getting anything from them, then maybe ask other engineers. So hopefully, that’s, that’s helpful.

Christian Klepp 17:12

Yeah, no, no, it’s absolutely helpful. I’ve just been furiously writing notes as you’ve been talking. Thanks again for that. So I’m just gonna, like, try to quickly summarize what I’m hearing you say, right, like, so basically, you’re saying that there’s generally two groups, right. So there’s marketers who are doing B2B, and they might have been in another industry that is probably not as technical as like, say, if they’re working with engineers, but that’s one group. They’re trying to do things and nothing is landing. The second group, our engineers, and I’ve worked with some of these too, engineers that have been pushed into some kind of marketing role. Right? So and I totally agree with you, you gotta find some common ground, right? I find more often than not, the resistance comes when you go in there and say, Well, you’ve been doing it wrong all this time. And this is the way you should be doing it, the engineers will most likely fire back. Right? Yes. Asking questions, asking the right questions, I would say is like, you know, things like, where you hope to elicit a more insightful response or something to the effect of, is this a technically accurate statement? Yes or No? And why not? And then you probe from there, communicating with them on a regular basis, I found this to be very useful and approaching them with deep humility, you know, that’s my interpretation.

Masha Petrova 18:31

Yes. Yes.

Christian Klepp 18:34

Advanced techniques, so asking them about, like, how they feel, but not like, Okay, does this make you feel happy or sad? Not that kind of feeling like, if you read the ad, and you see the call to action, would you be compelled to respond? And if yes, fantastic. And if no, why not? You actually made me think of something because, you know, we had this discussion in the pre interview call. I worked with companies, and I’m not going to say who they are. But like, I worked with teams of engineers, that were basically, let’s just put it this way. They were wired to identify errors.

Masha Petrova 19:07

Yes.

Christian Klepp 19:08

Yhey’re wired to identify problems. I mean, it’s an occupational hazard. It’s part of what they do. Is that permeates across everything. Right. That means yes, probably also their personal lives, but also, also when you present them with marketing assets or marketing materials. So in my case, for example, we were coming up with a storyboard for corporate video. And a lot of these guys were wired to identify what they thought was wrong,

Masha Petrova 19:32

They will tell you everything that’s wrong with your marketing campaign first, so just assume that’s what you’re gonna get. And that’s totally fine.

Christian Klepp 19:39

It’s totally fine. But I think the way that I manage that situation, which they were very receptive to is, first of all, I came with a flowchart and a diagram.

Masha Petrova 19:47

Yes, there you go.

Christian Klepp 19:48

These are the project milestones. I could see their eyes sparkle already like wooo, right. This guy totally gets us, right.

Masha Petrova 19:55

Yes. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 19:56

The other thing I did, and I’m just gonna give a very specific example of one of the components of the video included talking about these particular type of engines. Right? They kept going on about it right? And they gave me all the product specs. And I’m like, Okay, well, we can’t, we can’t put like 10 pages of product spec on the video right (laugh). So just walk me through it, I will go with you to the factory if I have to. But explain to me how this engine works and why it is better. Right? So not necessarily compared to the competitor. But why would somebody go to a shipyard and see that and say, like, Yes, this is the kind of engine that meets our technical specifications. So that’s exactly what they did. Right? It wasn’t even an hour, it was 30 minutes walked me through, okay, this is this is how it works. Right? Then they sent me an explainer video after they, after they walked me through it. And then it’s like, okay, so from there, I was able to extract three to five key points key benefits of why this product is better. Right? So I suppose, and I know, I’m oversimplifying it now, but like, it’s something to that effect, right? Because….

Masha Petrova 21:08

No, I mean, you hit the nail, I would love to work with you. If I was still an engineer and you’re a marketer. You know, it sounds like you hit the nail on the head. You’re, and I think being humble. And sounds like you were in that situation is so critically important. So absolutely, that that sounds like… I approve of your approach. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 21:28

Well, I think it was also to your point about like, you know, you can argue about marketing, however you want, but there’s an art and science to it, right? Yeah. For me, the, for me, the art and science, especially when it comes to engineers is okay. Going back to that point I brought up, how do you take this 10 page or 50 page instruction manual, right, that has these technical specifications… And how do you extract those insights that make it… as my teacher and school used to say, make it long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting?

Masha Petrova 22:01

Right. So because as a marketer, your job is to elicit a certain feeling that will drive a certain person to act, right. And so a 10 page instruction manual may be factually accurate, but it’s not going to elicit any feelings except, like, either read this manual and understand it, but don’t feel compelled to do anything. Right, or just frustration. So, so you’re absolutely right. And you know, I think a good thing to think about and that this helps me as well, if you’re a marketer, and you’re just trying to understand engineers, and how to work with them, you know, think about like the saying of an engineer, a goal of any engineers career is to avoid any major disasters. Right. So like avoiding disasters, engineers have a thing called a safety factor. So when you are building a car, a bridge, what or designing, I’m sorry, designing a car, a bridge, as an engineer, there is all kinds of safety factors, these are numbers that you… multiplication numbers actually multiply by your forces and et cetera, to make it so that there is multiple ways that if your car fails, you will still not die, you know, like it will be a minor failure, as opposed to a major failure. So that’s something it’s very unique to engineering. You know, you don’t hear that in marketing, we don’t have safety factors built in. We’re, you know, the so the opposite of that, I would say like an entrepreneur. So think about Mark Zuckerberg, motto or slogan for Facebook, you know, a few years back, move fast and break things, literally opposite of avoid any major failure, and then your success as an engineer, right, so just think about those differences. And know that engineers, again, very fact based, they will look for failures first, they will look for all the points where your marketing campaign will break down, and they will tell them to you. So don’t get offended, just assume that’s a way of communication, you know, and fix the things that you think need to be fixed that are not technically accurate. But then know that you are also the artist, you are also trained visually. So engineers typically are not focused on the visual aspect of things. They’re just not trained their eye, a lot… I mean, and again, this is generalizing and stereotyping, and I apologize, but it is a very common stereotype in engineers because they are so internally focused, or they’re running through a lot of processes. They’re trying to avoid errors. They’re trying to avoid problems and major disasters, right. They’re not particularly looking at how things look, is this, you know, is this code line like pleasing to the eye, you know, for the most part, and so when you’re working on brand campaigns, like as a marketer, that’s what you’ve been trained to do. You have a good eye, right? Like you’ve been trained to… I worked one time with an amazing art director for one of my campaigns who I will be… I’ll look at a font, right like we’ll do an advertising campaign, where we did like a series of YouTube videos, and then we’re trying to come up with thumbnails, right? And that he would give me options for different fonts. And I would look at a font and I go, You know what I, this doesn’t work for me like, I don’t think it’s going to work for our customers, but I don’t know why. And he would literally break it down and say like, Oh, do you see the letter R are like, there’s a little curly Q at the end that you can barely notice. And that maybe instills, you know, like too much femininity in this particular, you know, whatever or too much uncertainty or this, this letter is slightly slanted, leaning to the right, and, you know, you’re expecting it to lean to the left and I go, Oh, my gosh, yes, exactly. And so, you know, he’s been trained, he’s eye has been trained in a way that engineers are trained to debug code, or, you know, write out and solve linear algebra equations. And so engineers don’t have that training, your eye has not been trained like that. And so as a marketer, and especially if you’re working on branding, it is your…, just remember that you still have the power, and you still have that training and some very special skills that engineers do not have. But you do not have the technical expertise, and the factual basis for whatever it is you’re marketing. So just like you said, be humble about it.

I have another like, fun story for you if you’d like. So, at one point, I worked at a large public company that was developing engineering software for PhD level engineers. And there was a marketing team there, that was not great. So they were not great marketers to begin with. But they also were… there’s a huge rift between. Engineers hated them, and they hated engineers. And there was a small group of them, you know, it was an engineering centric company. So marketing, which looked down upon to begin with, so it wasn’t a great place for them to be in. But they also weren’t respected. And in return, they also did not respect the engineers. So I at the time was running product marketing for the one product they had. A product line that they had… was for additive manufacturing, or 3d printing. So 3d printing software for engineers. And I went to the marketing team and said, Hey, we need to take out an ad, full page ad in this particular trade magazine, very specific trade magazine that is read by engineers, right? And so they said, Okay, give us like a brief. So I put together a brief, like, here’s where it’s targeting, there’s the main message, here’s some images to use, you know, and then they did not come back to me with any feedback, they didn’t ask me for feedback, they didn’t have any lines of communication open, they just went and printed the ad. So the magazine came out, you know, we haven’t seen it. Like at the magazine in the mail, I opened it up to a full page spread of this advertising. And what they did was, they essentially said, it was like some sort of, they’re trying to make a joke, but it didn’t land, like some lame joke about 3d printing. And then the image was like a dirty, grimy, dumpster, full of metal parts. So our software was supposed to manufacture, additively print metal parts. So full of metal parts that are just clearly not 3d printed. These are like gears and random stuff from cars that are, you know, an engineer would look at it and say, like, this literally doesn’t make sense. And then some sort of something like some attempt at a joke that also didn’t land with engineers. And the whole thing was just awful. It was like, you felt dirty looking at it, and grimy and like, you certainly did not want to learn more. Yeah. So don’t do that. Like, don’t do that.

Christian Klepp 28:07

I’m glad you… I’m really glad you brought that up, because that’s such a great segue into the next question about conducting the right research, right?

Masha Petrova 28:18

Yes.

Christian Klepp 28:18

Probably part of the reason… I mean, I don’t know enough of the details about that particular case, except for what you’ve just told us, but like, I would assume that they probably didn’t do their due diligence.

Masha Petrova 28:29

That’s right.

Christian Klepp 28:30

So let’s talk about that a little bit. Like when it comes to marketing, complex products for engineers, let’s try to look at this from the engineers lens, and conducting the right research, what do they look for? What are their preferences and objections? And you brought up some of them already. And what can be done to get their buy-in… So if you can give us a little bit of pitch on that?

Masha Petrova 28:48

Yeah, I think it just all goes back to engineers are very fact based, factual based, right. So I recommend as a very first step, do a short paragraph describe, it doesn’t matter what you’re creating, whether you’re creating an ad campaign, YouTube video, you know, email blasts for lead generation, online banner, whatever it is that you’re designing or developing as a marketer. First, create a short and I don’t recommend like two page brief, like, that’s not… because engineers will get stuck in the details, they will nitpick at every single thing and the whole thing will fall apart. Do a one, short one paragraph description, you know, we’re trying to reach automotive, you know, engineers working in automotive industry, we’re trying to showcase that the newest release of the software is five times faster, or like it has this particular exciting feature that allows engineers to blah, blah, blah, you know, that’s it, that’s your overview. And then we’re trying to get them to learn more, or we’re trying to get them to sign up for a webinar or like whatever your call to action is. Do that little description of fact, and then go to group of two to three engineers that you are now trying to develop as your sources essentially in the engineering space and ask them is this technically accurate, you know… If they ask you more questions, tell them. Engineers are curious. And if they are, you know, friendly towards you, and they’re open towards learning more, tell them like, this is what we’re trying to do you know, what do you think? If they start giving you feedback on, well, I prefer blue over red, and you need to add more facts in there. And the ad should have like a paragraph long description, you know, like you said, a manual technical manual, you know, and not a one liner. Ignore that, that’s just them being engineers. But if they’re telling you, you know, what, this is not like, factually accurate, actually, our software is not 10 times faster, it’s like, you know, five times faster, or actually, that’s not the main point of the new release. The main point is that it’s, you know, has this new feature that does this. And that’s now a lot of times it’s a process, because engineers will give you details, technical details that you will not understand because you’re not a technical person. And that’s normal. Just keep on digging, and keep on asking more clarifying questions to get to the core, you know, until you could say, okay, so what you’re saying is, the main point, or the biggest feature of the new release that automotive engineers would care about is that it has this feature that allows them to, I don’t know, simulate a combustion engine, and they didn’t have that feature before, correct. They, the engineers will say, Yeah, overall that’s correct. Great. That’s it, you got your key, like you said, you got your key message. But it just takes work. And it takes being humble. And it takes understanding that you are not an engineer, you will not understand the technical details, don’t try and assume it. And don’t try to write the technical details for the engineer. Right.

And the other really cool technique that works for me is, you can also go out, go back to the engineer and try and either record them, ask them if it’s okay to record, do a zoom recording, if you want, get as much of the like words that they’re saying, the details that they’re saying down first. So you might get pages of description of, let’s say, a new software release, right? Because that’s easy, or whatever the new part that’s being developed, you might get pages, it is much easier to go in and like, pull out the key message out of that, then go to an engineer, listen to what they’re saying, not really take notes. You’re not a technical person. So you’re probably not going to remember a lot of the like, main technical words or words, you will remember them with a wrong meaning. And then try and rephrase it with your own words. That’s the worst, do not do that. Do not do that, do not make up your own technical terminology, do not try and be creative and describe things in the way that an engineer didn’t describe it to you, you’re not gonna be able to do it, you’re not an engineer, that’s not what you’re good at. You’re good at, like I said, pulling out that key message without distorting the facts. Right. And then there’s another caveat, if I might say on the… on the flip side, right, if you’re an engineer that’ve been now put into the marketing role. Or perhaps you want to be in the marketing role, right? Same thing, you have to be also humble and understand that marketing is… so I’ve done both, you know, I’ve got my PhD in aerospace engineering, and I have 20 years of running marketing teams and being a chief marketing officer. And so I could tell you that putting together a solid marketing campaign is just as hard as getting a PhD in engineering. Okay, so as an engineer, if you think that marketing is just colors and letters and how hard could that be? And anybody could do it? Absolutely not. I mean, it’s crappy marketing. Sure. But that’s not gonna get you results. So also be humble and learn from assume you’re gonna have to learn a lot. Learn from what I recommend, learn from b2c marketers. Learn from… follow some of them maybe certain cars that you like, look at car brands, look at clothing brands, look at liquid death as an example. That’s pure marketing. And see what they’re doing and start asking you questions like, Oh, why did they do that campaign? Why did they do an ad like that? What are they trying to do with it? Why did they spend a billion dollars on this crazy campaign? Where are they trying to do? And, you know, why does it look like that? Because again, as an engineer, you’re probably not trained to be very visually picky. Right? You’re not probably not trained on color theory, you’re probably not trained on symmetry, like in terms of like visual effects. So just understand that and understand that, that takes also years to perfect and learn and get your marketing champion. Get someone who understands that stuff, and reverse roles, right, like the same thing and also understand you’re gonna have to deal with feelings, like marketing is about triggering feelings, to get people to do certain things. And as an engineer, and when you have tried to, like, avoid feelings altogether, you’re gonna have to start tapping into that.

Christian Klepp 34:43

Yeah, exactly. No, I love it. I love it. Exactly. Like you said. It’s a process right? Like it… Yes. It takes a lot of back and forth. I call it like, it’s two way traffic, right?

Masha Petrova 34:54

Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 34:56

Recording I think is such a great suggestion. I’ve done it many, many times, of course, with a person’s permission, right? Because sometimes they get very technical, they’ll go deep down that technical rabbit hole. But sometimes, especially as marketers, it’s important and all that, right. The trick is like, you don’t have to regurgitate everything they’re saying, but the art lies and trying to like, as I said before, like summarizing that, or paraphrasing it correctly. Right.

Masha Petrova 35:22

Right.

Christian Klepp 35:22

Correctly. And then again, the deep humility part, I can’t stress that enough. Because, you know, I’ve had, I’ve worked with some marketers that go in there, and, and they just assume they know everything, right? Yes. And as a former client of mine, who’s an engineer, who’s British used to say, that won’t do at all. Right.

Masha Petrova 35:39

Exactly. But you know, can I just say, you know, one thing, what’s even worse than marketers trying to be technical people, what I’ve seen, like even more disasters and with engineers going in and not being humble, not honoring the fact that marketing is a whole profession and requires a whole different set of skills, and trying to be cute or funny, and trying to be cute and funny, and there isn’t any kind of like controls over them. And they’re just spewing it out there. So you know, whatever social media posts or ads or things like that, and it just, it comes off all kinds of wrong, and all kinds of ways, they’ve just offended a whole bunch of people that you really shouldn’t have be offending. And so I think a guideline for if you’re marketer, oh, sorry, if you’re an engineer turned marketer, I would recommend for the first like year or two. Don’t be cute. Don’t be funny. Don’t try and be creative. Focus on facts. You’re an engineer, you’re really good with facts, engineers trust you, right? So keep your whatever it is you’re creating as a marketer. Keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep it fact base, it might not be the most creative thing anyone’s ever seen. But it’s going to resonate with engineers, and it’s not going to affect people. Do not try and go like, Oh, I’m a marketer, I’m going to create all these kinds of things, because you don’t know basic principles of marketing. You are gonna screw it up. Don’t do it. Not until you learn more on the marketing side.

Christian Klepp 37:03

Okay, fantastic. So Marsha, we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us a lot already, but let’s just assume there’s somebody out there that falls into one of those two buckets that you were talking about, right? So somebody that’s in B2B working with engineers, or an engineer that’s a marketing person, if they’re listening to this conversation, what are three to five things that they can act upon right now, to help market those complex products to this very technical target audience?

Masha Petrova 37:35

Yeah, I think you mentioned, you know, one of the important things, and I think you brought it up on your podcast before is finding a champion for you. And I’m going to talk about finding two champions, one is your technical champion that will help you make sure that your marketing lands with engineers, and is technically accurate, and that might be a few. So that’s one. The other one is your corporate sponsor, executive sponsor. So that’s, if you’re not… yourself are not the CMO. Right. And typically, in these B2B engineering organizations, you might not even have a CMO or VP of marketing, you might be reporting to product or you might be reporting to the CEO directly, or whatever it is, right. But finding someone an executive sponsor, who will make sure you have budget, because that’s very important for marketing, and you’re not gonna see results right away, right. So if you don’t want to just do lead generation, all day long, you actually want to focus on brand and, you know, more advanced forms of marketing that take time to come. You need someone champion for a budget for you. Right? So that’s an executive sponsor. So let’s talk about the kind of easier one first, and that’s finding your technical champions. So I would say number one, look, internally, look at your engineering department, your development department, and you’re a marketer, you’re hopefully probably extroverted, or the very least are used to working with people because you’re, that’s what you’re doing as a marketer. So do that, go talk to people talk to your engineers. Sit in product meetings, if you can, I will always sit in product meetings even after I went to marketing. If… you know ask, Hey, can I sit in this product meeting I’m not gonna interrupt. Do not interrupt, do not give any guidance, just listen. Ask to sit on sales calls. So salespeople are usually extroverted and are willing to give you information. So ask to sit in sales calls, ask to go talk to customers, ask to go to sales meeting or ask to sit in quarterly business reviews with salespeople. So be very proactive about getting feedback from your internal engineers and your customers who are also probably engineers or technical people. And just by being in that soup and your internal engineers, you can ask a lot of questions, you know, communicate with them as much as you can. And remember, that is your job to carry the burden of communication and to gather feedback. It’s not the opposite. It’s not their job to come to you and explain things to you. And like you said, Be humble. So that’s one.

The second one is getting your executive sponsor, whoever is a corporate person that’s going to help you get the budget for marketing, right. So what I would do, I’ve worked in, I think, eight or nine different organizations, engineering organizations, I always had to, as soon as I would come in, I typically build a marketing team from scratch, sometimes I inherited a team, and then I would expand it, I would instantly have two marketing tracks. One was my typical external marketing, like the job that I was put out there to do as VP of marketing or CMO. The second one was internal marketing, internal marketing starts as soon as you start your job, internal marketing is just as hard as your external marketing, it should be just as much of a focus for you. Meaning if you put out a successful campaign, and you get a successful result, you will make sure everyone in the company, including your engineers knows, and you don’t do it by just blasting an email out, you talk to them, you print out pictures, you print out numbers, and you go to them and say, hey, look, we got 200 people signed up for this webinar, where before we had five, you know, because we did these things differently, and you engineer helped me a lot to do that, because you made sure it was technically correct. That is an ongoing effort should be about 30% of your time. That’s a lot. But that’s how you’re gonna get money for your marketing campaigns. And so get if you have anyone in the C suite interested, you make sure you update them and show them pictures, a picture says assign 1000 words, you’re a marketer. Market internally. That’s my other guideline.

Christian Klepp 41:29

That is such incredible advice. And I’ll tell you why. It blows my mind how many people I talked to who don’t do that. Right. Like, have you? You know, have you spoken to your engineers? No. Well, have you told the salespeople about like, the recent campaigns and initiatives that you’re rolling up? Well, we sent them an email, I’m like, that’s not what I was asking. Like, have you actually told them because, you know, in a lot of… Not, not every company, but a lot of these B2B situations, you know, especially when it comes to marketing, out of sight, out of mind. Right? If I don’t know anything about it, then that means it’s not that important, which is a dangerous assumption. But unfortunately, it’s the reality of a lot of these, you know, these marketing folks have to contend with. Right? So it really is a bit of a balancing act. And I totally agree with that. It’s a lot also about… I call it internal customer service, right?

Because you have to rally people around the flag, not to not to sound revolutionary here, but you know what I mean, right? Like, just get everybody to rally around your cause, get them to understand what it is you’re doing, and get these champions internally to say, hey, these marketing people are doing a great job, because we are working together with them. This is what they’re rolling out. And this is the kind of, the kinds of results that they managed to generate. And as a result of that, we think that we should be able to approve their budget for the next quarter or the next fiscal year or whatever. Right?

Masha Petrova 42:19

Yes, yes.

Yes. And I have to say, you know, for the most part, so I understood early on the importance of that, and it is hard, it’s not easy, you know, I would work nights to send out… you know… make sales emails, pretty and effective to send to the salespeople, because I knew the importance of internal marketing. So when you think about like, oh, I’ll just send an email out talking about what we did. That’s the easiest thing for you to do. But you should not be doing what’s easiest for you, you should be doing what’s easiest to consume for your, the people that you’re trying to get to. Right. So they don’t read. Salespeople generally have very short attention spans, they will probably not read your long email. So unless it’s a one liner…

Christian Klepp 43:35

Can you repeat that again, please? And a little bit louder please.

Masha Petrova 43:38

A little bit louder for the people in the back. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 43:43

Please, please repeat that last sentence. Because it’s so important, please.

Masha Petrova 43:46

Yeah. So when you’re doing the internal marketing or internal marketing campaign, it is difficult and as time consuming, but it is important, your paycheck depends on it. Your promotion depends on it. How cool of a marketing campaign you could put together, it depends on it. So your job is not to do what’s easiest for you and to send it an email like every quarter saying, Oh, this is what marketing did, because it’s just okay, you got it. It’s off the checklist, right? You checked it off. You’re done job is to make sure it actually lands and the people who you’re trying to get to actually hear it. That means you might have to say it multiple times. You might have to print out, physically print out pictures and stand in front of their office, catch them when they’re going to get a coffee and say, Hey, let me flash this image. What do you think? Right? Like it’s work. It is not what’s easiest for you. It’s what’s easiest for your audience to consume.

Christian Klepp 44:39

Right, right, actually. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that that in itself was interview gold. Thank you for reiterating that. Marsha. I get the feeling that you’ve been on your soapbox this whole time but please stay up there a while longer.

Masha Petrova 44:56

I have multiple soap boxes. I can jump around. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 44:59

Take your pick. Whichever one, whichever one you want to get on. Yeah. So what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with. And why.

Masha Petrova 45:10

So maybe we can shift gears a little bit. Shift gears a little bit from marketing, and it’s still kind of marketing. But I think the status quo in my space right now is all the hype, all actually in everybody’s faces the hype around AI, right? We all hear I mean, it’s honestly, it’s like tiring, I can’t even hear about it anymore. I think a lot of people are tired of it. And so to me, the frustration about is I’ve been in the space of Engineering Simulation. Engineering Simulation, is something that started you know, maybe 50 years ago to really take shape and to become commercial, commercially accessible tool. Essentially, Engineering Simulation is simulating real physical processes in the computer, right. So simulating how water flows in a pipe, simulating how external combustion engine works, so that you could test those physical things inside of a computer. Right? I know the amount of brainpower, PhD level brainpower that goes into these tools, and I know that it takes sometimes decades to develop a solid software that will, more or less accurately simulate how your car will drive down the road, or how it will when it crashes into something how that crash will, how that will behave. Right. I’m now in electromagnetics side of things. So my company and all space does electromagnetic simulation, that stuff you can’t even see, that’s all the waves flying through the air. We can’t even see that’s how things communicate with each other through Rf and, and electromagnetics. And having to simulate that is extremely difficult and requires, again, less than point 1% of the world’s population has PhD in Engineering, and will understand all of that or be able to develop that right. And then we go to AI, where all of a sudden, everyone’s claiming is that we can simulate the human brain, which I would argue is a lot more complex than the car or airplane, you know, and I can build this AI up in a weekend. You know, as a Stanford dropout. Forget Stanford as a high school dropout, we took a three month, you know, AI development course. And all of a sudden, I create an app that is, you know, simulating the human brain process. To me, it is such a inconsistency between the two and what I’ve seen, like what it takes to simulate a physical process of a fluid flow, or a car mechanics or electromagnetics. And then all of a sudden now like, we’re developing all these, like apps that are simulating the human brain, you know, that’s such BS. And I would say that’s my soapbox for the day.

Christian Klepp 47:37

Yup, no, I totally agree. Totally agree with that one. Okay, here comes the bonus question. Okay. Oh, here we go. Okay, you were able to learn a new skill. What would it be and why?

Masha Petrova 47:54

…Able to learn a new skill, you know, I used to draw a lot in high school. I never was great at it, but I loved it and paint. And I found that with age and with stress, and with the infinite to do list, I can’t do it anymore. I like when I try and sit down and paint something or draw. There’s not enough creative juices to do it. So I would love to have the brain space, to be creative and to learn to draw better. Okay.

Christian Klepp 48:22

Wow, that one really resonated with me because I don’t know if I told you this in our pre interview call. But I I started drawing again, during pandemic, after decades of not doing it…

Masha Petrova 48:32

Yes. that’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Christian Klepp 48:34

I was in the same headspace like, Y’all, I’m building my own business, I’m running this podcast, I’m, you know, raising a family, etc, etc. So it was all these, I wouldn’t say that were excuses. But all these reasons that I would put it off. But um, I’m taking this course online on a platform called Domestika, you know, you just learn at your own pace. It’s not like one of these. Oh, shucks, I missed the class, right? Um, you just, you just switch it on, you just log in. And I’m following a couple of people on Instagram. And a lot of them are saying like, even if you set aside 15 minutes a day, right? So instead of like, watching another Netflix episode, I switch it off and I draw.

Masha Petrova 49:12

Oh, that’s amazing. That’s a great idea. I’ll have to get that program name from you. Maybe one day?

Christian Klepp 49:19

Absolutely. And I can send it to you in an email but Masha, wow, we could have gone on for another 10 hours I think (laugh). But being respectful of your time, and thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your expertise and experience that the listeners. I learned a lot from this conversation and I hope the audience does too. Quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Masha Petrova 49:40

Sure. So I’m Dr. Masha Petrova. I’m a recovering engineer turned marketer and the CEO of a company called Nullspace, and they’ll space develops software for simulation of electromagnetic, electromagnetics for electrical engineers.

Christian Klepp 49:55

Fantastic, fantastic. And how can we get in touch with you?

Masha Petrova 49:59

So my LinkedIn is probably the easiest way MarshaVPetrova on LinkedIn, or our website is nullspaceinc.com

Christian Klepp 50:08

Marsha, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Masha Petrova 50:12

This was a blast. Thank you so much Christian.

Christian Klepp 50:14

Thank you. Bye for now.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Build Relationships with Industry Analysts

Many B2B websites fall flat because they’re often designed for someone’s ego and internal opinions. When you’re able to shift that mindset, you can turn your website into an incredible revenue-generating machine. Design it for your ideal customer and ensure that the content addresses their problems, motivations, goals, frustrations, and how you plan to help them.

That’s why we’re talking to B2B website and SEO expert Sam Dunning (Founder, Breaking B2B) about how companies should create websites for revenue, not vanity. During our conversation, Sam highlights the “deadly sins” of B2B websites, how to fix them, and which SEO pitfalls to avoid. He also leaves us with some actionable tips on how to build SEO from scratch for your website.

https://youtu.be/gQA9p9HM2Yk

Topics discussed in episode

• Sam talks about why most B2B website fall flat [1:50]
  • Crafting the website for ego and internal opinions
  • Lack of research on the ideal customer
  • Unclear function(s) of the website (Lead-generation, trust-building, inbound, conversion, etc.)
  • Not able to craft messages that resonate with the target audience
• The one question you should ask your ideal customer to help you craft a better website [10:49]
• Sam shares his learning from interviewing 300+ B2B executives on their expectations for B2B websites [12:09]
• Why B2B companies should share their pricing on their websites and the best practices [14:42]
• Sam talks about the biggest SEO mistakes he has seen [19:27]
  • Not building for bottom of the funnel SEO
• Sam explains when B2B companies should use SEO [22:46]
• How to build website SEO from scratch [25:31]
• Actionable tips: [31:23]
  • Interview target clients
  • Include the ‘must-have’ pages
  • SEO quick wins

Companies and links mentioned

• Sam Dunning on LinkedIn
• Breaking B2B
• RevenueHero
• Calendly

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Sam Dunning

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:45

All right, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies up their game with SEO and web design for revenue, not vanity. So coming to us from Yeovil England, Mr. Sam Dunning, welcome to the show.

Sam Dunning 01:10

Hey, Christian, thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to it.

Christian Klepp 01:13

Really looking forward to this conversation as well, Sam, and shout out to Linda Malone, thank you so much for the introduction. So let’s just dive in here, because I’m gonna say that Sam, you’ve got, I’m gonna call it a superpower for B2B, right? So it’s in the realm of building websites and SEO. But for this conversation, let’s narrow down to a topic that has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to create a B2B website for revenue and not vanity. Let’s try to kick off this conversation with this question. Where do you think most B2B websites fall flat? And why?

Sam Dunning 01:50

Yeah, yeah. So there is so many angles that they do, typically Christian from my experience, and folks in B2B Tech, Software as a Service, technology in general, specifically guilty of this, but probably one of the main reasons I see websites fall flat in the B2B realm is because they design, they build them out, they craft sites for ego, for themselves, their own opinion, or maybe their execs opinion, or even the C suites opinion, dare I say it. And the reason that that means that the website falls short, is because when you build out your site, no matter what your offer is, whether it’s a service, whether it’s a piece of software, piece of tech, you are not the one that’s buying your offer, you’ve probably got a warehouse full of your stuff, you’ve probably got a fair old supply of it, you don’t want to buy it, you need to build it out, to resonate with, to attract, build trust with and convert your ideal client profile. So the folks, your dream clients, the folks you actually want to connect with, you want to build trust with and you want to close business with. So that is the that’s the biggest issue I see. And that comes across in so many different parts of the website, whether it’s the messaging, whether it’s initial research, the design, even comes through into the content and the marketing, but happy to dive into that deeper as you wish.

Christian Klepp 03:18

Absolutely. And you’ll forgive me for like, having the sinister grin on my face as you were talking because it just brings back all these like, funny memories of website projects I was involved in the past, and everything you said just resonates with me. I mean, take your pick, you know, call it whatever you want, decision by committee, analysis paralysis, dare I say opinionitis. So everybody internally saying, well, that’s not how we should be communicating our key selling point to the world, etc., etc. And there was just so much of this internal, these internal discussions going on. And then you finally released it into the wild and it falls flat.

Sam Dunning 03:57

Yeah, yeah, that’s it. It’s the old story that gets told time and again. And it’s usually one of those ones until companies make that mistake, and realize that their website isn’t working as hard for their business as they’d like, then they have to go through the painful route of kind of realizing it for themselves usually.

Christian Klepp 04:14

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That is a great segue into the next question. And I’m not trying to get all religious or Catholic on you, but talk to us about the Deadly Sins of B2B websites, and how to resolve them.

Sam Dunning 04:30

Yeah, yeah. So that’s plenty. There’s so many ways that websites can go wrong. But likewise, there’s so many ways that they can go right. So kind of continuing on that first point. So designing for whether it’s an ego of your own yourself, maybe your marketing team, maybe it’s you CEO founder. So basically, the main thing is B2B websites, great B2B websites that drive a steady flow of qualified leads or demo requests or build revenue for business, they’re not built on guesswork. So the only time that you should be throwing up a website kind of relatively quickly, and it’s going to be quite lightweight on content, and it’s gonna be quite basic, is if you’re a startup and perhaps you’ve Bootstrap, perhaps you’ve got limited cash. In that case, I understand that you might skip the research phase. And you might just throw up a semiprofessional homepage, maybe a pricing page, case study page and a contact page. And that makes sense, right, you need to get something moving fast, you need a professional presence. But if you’re a somewhat established company, or somewhat funded company, and your website is going to be the heart and soul, really of your marketing efforts, that needs to basically be a workhorse, as it’s no better salesperson than a website. It’s live 24/7. And whether you like it or not, it’s either acting as your best sales rep by telling sharing what you do, problems you fix, how you help, building trust, qualifying prospects in and out and converting, or it’s being your worst, and it’s repelling folks and selling them to your competitors. So to dive into the first point, lack of research is one of the biggest killers. So what I mean by that is lack of understanding, I suppose first and foremost, exactly what you want to get out of the website. Is this going to be a tool to generate leads? Or is most of your efforts perhaps going from referrals or networking events? Or maybe outbound they’ve got a team of STRs doing cold calling, etc? So it’s more of a trust building piece? Or does your website need to actually do a lot of that work? Maybe you’re going to be investing a lot into SEO or ads or demand generation campaigns. So it needs to be more of an inbound engine. So really setting it, setting the scene for what this website needs to do. Is it a trust builder? Is it a converter? Is it perhaps a mix of the both? Is it maybe enabling sales answering some of those questions that folks are going to have to speed up sales cycles, which you can dive into? So that’s one of the first things. Then understanding who is this dream client that we want to kind of resonate with on the site? What are those dream clients’ key problems that they want to fix? What are their main motivations that they actually care about? What are their goals? What are their jobs to be done? What are their frustrations? What are we going to help them fix? And other things around pain points around what they care about seeing? So the point I’m getting across is if you’re going to invest a decent amount of cash, or your own team’s time and resource into a website, we want to make sure it resonates with the folks who want to convert on the site. So we probably want to spend time interviewing, I don’t know, 10 or so of our recently won customers, or 10 or so kind of folks that fit our ideal client profile so we can understand kind of what are their juicy problems? What are their key goals? What’re their jobs to get done? What are the main things they care about learning, seeing and quickly taking action on a website in our sector? What are some of the main competitors and then the reason we do this is so we can analyze those discussions, whether they’re over zoom calls or similar. And start noting down the patterns and what folks are saying. So if we say that this is one of the most common frustrations and problems that they’re facing, this is one of their main kind of goals. This is what they typically want to see on a vendor in our sectors website quickly. And then we can leverage that to our advantage when it comes to perhaps website headlines. So when it comes to homepage messaging, I mean, this could be a website, this could be a podcast episode itself, homepage messaging. So many B2B companies just go terribly wrong. So understanding, doing that research piece means you understand what your target clients care about. So you’re basically with something when someone lands on our homepage, there’s something we like to run called the grunt test. And that basically means could a caveman sitting in his cave, pretty quickly fire up his laptop, see your website for the first time ever? And it’s blurring his eyes. He’s thinking what’s going on, he first sees your homepage for the first time, it could be within three seconds of firing up your homepage, see your hero area, your top banner area, and quickly grunt exactly what you do, how it helps them. And then thirdly, how to get in touch with your take the next step, and you’d be surprised how many websites are as clear as mud. So super unclear in terms of what their value proposition is. So you’ll land on that homepage hero and it’ll say something like supercharge your revenues with a cutting edge only 136 degree platform for tech enabled wizardry. And you’ll, you’ll be scrolling through the homepage, you’ll be like, What the hell do these folks do? And then you’re scrolling through, you’re trying to click through more page and you’re still none the wiser. So you bounce off and head to a kind of competitor site that gives you a clearer idea of what they do or the problem they fix, and, and so on. So you’ll see why research is so important because the biggest thing your website can do is resonate with target prospects, their problems, their jobs to be done, their goals, their ambitions, and homepage hero areas are just a critical way that they can either hit home or fail terribly. But I’ll take a pause there.

Christian Klepp 09:59

Absolutely. similarly, it’s funny that you mentioned that because I’ve been talking to a couple prospects in the past few weeks. And you know, you go on their website, and it’s really going back to your point. I spent about five minutes on their homepage, scrolling up and down, I still couldn’t figure out what they did. Right? And, yeah, that really, that point that you’ve highlighted really hits home. And I also have some follow up questions for you. So on the topic of research, and how important is it to also understand not just who benefits from the product or service you provide, but also what their user experience online is? So for example, you might you might have brought it up a couple of minutes ago, but if they go on a website, what is it that they are looking for? Right?

Sam Dunning 10:49

Yeah, yeah. So it’s… one of the good questions to ask is, “What do you care about quickly, learning, seeing and taking action upon when you land on a website, in our in our sector, in our industry in our space?” Because if you’re talking to your target client profile, probably when you ask that question, they’ll probably go on a rant. So they’ll probably be like, usually, I hate seeing XYZ on a website in that space. So typically, I quickly want to get an idea of exactly what you do, how much it costs, see some proof of results like client testimonials, case studies, recommendations, then, if I check those boxes, I’m gonna book a call or request a demo. So you will unpack quite a lot just for that one question alone. And it can help kind of steer, obviously, you want to make sure you’re going for pattern. So if you’re interviewing 10 or so, folks, you don’t just want to go by one answer. You want to make sure that there’s a consistent kind of response in the majority of those interviews that you run. But yeah, that’s probably quite a good way to, to unpack that one.

Christian Klepp 11:50

Slowly, absolutely. Um, I didn’t coined this phrase, but I read it somewhere that try not to make the visitors to your website, burn too many calories to figure out what it is you do, or find that information they’re looking for. Right? So you don’t want them clicking through seven different layers of your website to find to find stuff, right?

Sam Dunning 12:09

Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Exactly. I mean, in B2B, I kind of touched upon it then. But from my experience, I’m sure you’re the same Christian, like interviewing tons of folks on the show, I think we’ve interviewed maybe 300 plus B2B execs. And from that data that I’ve gathered, typically, if they’re landing on a B2B site, it’s not really that complex, what they want to see, like they usually want to land on your site, it needs to load quite quickly on their mobile or their PC, whatever they choose to view on. Search it doesn’t need to take the world to load, which is sensible. And the design needs to look good, whatever their idea of good is that your research will back that looking at competitors, understanding what they care about seeing, it needs to quick, quickly share what you do, or the problem you solve, or how you help them. And it needs to share some proof of results. So that could be case studies, client review videos, testimonials, walkthrough videos, etc. It needs to show your offer and action. So if you’re a SaaS provider, maybe a live demo trial before you book the demo. Maybe if you’re a service provider, a video walkthrough of your services, some proof of impact. So we talked about that just then. Price, regardless of whether your tech or service-based, your price should be on there. If not a tiered section like in traditional SaaS methodology, it should be some kind of indication ballpark of starting rates. Your website should give answers to common questions. So if there’s FAQs that you’re constantly getting on calls, let’s have those on relevant service pages that we can dive into in a sec. And then on the basis that you check all those boxes, it should be super easy for someone to schedule time on the sales reps calendar with a calendar booking tool be at RevenueHero, Calendly, or, or similar. So that’s what I found from kind of interviewing a ton of B2B execs that they care about seeing. There is nuances in there. And there’s a lot to dive into around the design, around the messaging and how that’s laid out on certain pages. But a lot of the time, B2B sites get a bit too overcomplicated. And when you strip them back, that’s the main thing people actually care about.

Christian Klepp 14:13

Yeah, yeah, Indeed, indeed. That, you just give me an idea for another podcast interview, and I might have you on for that better design, or the definition of good design. Because as you said, like good design is subjective, isn’t it? And I have another follow up question for you, Sam, on the topic of pricing, particularly in SaaS, like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, should folks publish that on their website or not?

Sam Dunning 14:42

I think there is no reason not to share your price. So usually for SaaS, when you’re low ticket… it’s usually quite easy, because you’ll typically have maybe three tiers, like a standard edition for one seat, maybe up to 10 seats, so you have like a standard price. One seat 20 bucks a month up to 10 seats are 50 bucks a month, enterprise speak to sales team and discuss custom pricing for 100 seats plus whatever. So low ticket SaaS is quite easy. You can break down the features between each. Enterprise SaaS gets a bit more difficult, because usually it’s more customed to the organizations. That’s when folks tend to get a bit scared about hiding their pricing, because they’ll use the argument which will be, oh, everything’s custom, we need to have a conversation with the prospect first to understand their goals, their problems, what they want to get out of it, what the issues are right now and how many people in their organization, what they’ve tried so far, what did work, what didn’t work, what their budget is. True, but people determined value on their own side. So it’s up to them to determine the value not for you to ram it down their throat. So with that said, give an indication. And this could apply to technology companies, as well as service companies, because service folks in the B2B, B2B space also get the same argument. So let’s say you’re providing I don’t know, in the B2B space, I don’t know maybe you’re doing logistics for huge warehousing companies B2B. And you might say, well, everything’s super bespoke, we need to measure it up, we need to get more information, we need to get all these details to give a bespoke quote, well, you can give a starting from range. And even let’s say you have three tiers. So you say like Tier one is from 10 to 20k. Based on the specifications, tier two is from 20, to 50k. and tier three is maybe enterprise from 75k plus. But the good thing about a pricing page is it has so many advantages. So first and foremost, by sharing that price, you save everyone’s time. So you immediately qualify folks in or out, and it saves a conversation with a tire kicker that wastes 30 to 45 minutes of your salespersons time. Likewise, with the prospects time, it might leave a sour taste in the prospects mouth, they might even land on that pricing page, tried to get a price, they don’t see anything. And they think this company is not transparent, I’m just gonna head to a competitor that is. But you’ll find that if you had a pricing page will be one of the most visited pages on your website along with your homepage, probably your about page, maybe the book demo results page. And the good thing about it is it can work super hard. So as well as sharing to qualify people in or out, you can then share some social proof. So you can then have some relevant customer review videos, testimonial, videos, walkthroughs, etc. But one of my favorite hacks for a pricing page is to have an FAQ section at the bottom, which is basically covering all the objections and questions you get on sales calls. So as an example, on nearly all of my service pages, I literally have FAQs with questions that I get on sales calls, like for example, an SEO. So we provide B2B SEO, I’ll have questions like, isn’t it faster to invest in Google ads? And I’ll say yes, it is. But you’re paying for every click. They’ll also say, Sam, why are you so expensive, compared to freelancers or other agencies? And I’ll say, well, I’ll talk through our setup, and how we build up campaigns. Another question might be why does SEO take so long? And I’ll address that. So literally, if you make a list of all those questions, your sales folk get every week, address them upfront on the page, you’ll save everyone time, people will think this company is transparent. It’s going to save your sales reps time on calls. It’s basically providing enablement, it is going to speed up build velocity. So yeah, there’s a lot of ways that pricing pages can work in your advantage to show transparency, build trust, and actually speed up deal cycles. So I think by hiding pricing, it just does not to me, yes, you’ll get more quote unquote, inquiries, leads or MQLs. But of those, a ton of them won’t be able to afford what you do. And you’ll be wasting everyone’s time.

Christian Klepp 18:50

Absolutely, absolutely. I totally agree with that. Like FAQs are definitely a time saver, especially like it’ll save your point on the sales team time answering those questions or objections in the discovery calls, right? Because people can just go and research that themselves. Let’s stay on the topic of pitfalls to avoid for a little bit longer if we can. Sure. Talk to us about the biggest SEO mistakes that you’ve seen out there that B2B companies make and what they should be doing instead. And I know you probably have a thousand that you see, but just come up with… Just tell us about the top level ones.

Sam Dunning 19:27

So you probably… If you’re connected to anyone in SEO or marketing on LinkedIn, you’ve probably only got a scroll your LinkedIn feed and you’ll see one of these crazy graphs like we took this website from 10 visitors a month to 10,000 visitors a month in organic views, and then someone in the comments would be cool. How many qualified leads or demos did they get, how many of those who convert into one revenue and there’ll be crickets, no reply. And the reason being is so many companies have misguided strategy for SEO. What I mean by that is they build out pages that are going to get a ton of traffic. And usually that’s articles that are maybe addressing common questions in their industry like how to articles, maybe their listicles best ways to do something, that kind of stuff. So they’ll have a bit of a random strategy, they’ll maybe watch a Neil Patel video, no hate to Neil. He comes up with some great stuff. But he’s one of the big guys in SEO. He comes up with some really cool stuff. But they might have just seen a fly on the wall video could have been Neil’s, could have been someone else’s. And I think we’ve got to produce all these articles to get tons of traffic because my SEO tool SEMrush, Href said this article keyword gets loads of traffic. So build out these random articles, they’ll start driving traffic to their site, then they’ll be wondering why that none of that’s actually converting into qualified leads or revenue. And the marketing manager will have probably been tasked to do this job. A few months later, the founder or the C suite execs will be like, Well, what’s this produced, and they’ll show them a chart, that’d be great traffic, but nothing would have come of it. And the reason being is they’ve produced all this top of funnel content. And at best, someone’s flicked onto the website to get the answer from the article how to do something or best way to do something, maybe at best, they’ve then signed up to your mailing list, or they’ve then gone to consume your podcast, which is still fine. But they haven’t become a customer, they haven’t requested demo or call. And that’s because you’ve started the wrong way for SEO. You haven’t started at the bottom of the funnel by folks that needing your offer right now. So bottom of the funnel SEO. And that is where most folks go wrong. They go for the traffic, instead of these bottom of the funnel keywords aka, if you’re in the SaaS space, let’s say you provide calendar scheduling tool, it might be best calendar scheduling tool or best calendar scheduling tool for construction or calendar scheduling software, these terms that show intent, where someone’s ready to have a sales conversation. And then you build out these kind of typically those go to relevant solution pages or similar. So it’s just a bit of a backward strategy that a lot of folks take not by their own fault, just by doing a bit of a random kind of play.

Christian Klepp 22:14

Right, right. Exactly. So I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate here a little bit, right. Like to say like, Okay, we get what you’re saying, Sam, you know, bottom of the funnel is important. But what do you say to those that feel that SEO is a complete waste of time? You’ve probably heard these people ramble on about this on platforms like LinkedIn, they’re like, Oh, you don’t need that SEO, you just gotta keep coming up with quality content, and provide value to your target audience. I mean, like, every time I hear that, I just start to cringe. But over to you.

Sam Dunning 22:46

Yeah, I mean, usually, that’s like someone screenshotting like a Twitter quote. And then the LinkedIn posts will be good content. That’s the key to B2B. And it’ll get 1000 likes because they brand it through a pod. And then I’m just putting a sick emoji in that LinkedIn comment. Anyway, with that said, I won’t hate on anyone anywhere else. So with that said, SEO to be blunt, SEO is not for every B2B company. The reason being SEO works best as a demand capture channel. So if folks are actively searching for your offer, your solution, problems you fix, then it’s probably going to work well. But if you’re in a somewhat new category, that’s maybe not that recognized. i.e. you’ve built out something fairly fresh, people aren’t aware of your solution, the problem you fix, maybe you’re in a SaaS solution, that’s kind of a brand new idea, then SEO is not a good idea. You’re far better hanging out on the channels that your target clients are already on, and educating them around the problems you fix, that your solution even exists. And that could be through targeted LinkedIn ads. That could be from YouTube, that could be podcast, I don’t know, wherever your audience hang out, you’re way better doing spending time there, or even doing targeted outbound. But on the flip side of that, if you’re in a somewhat established category, which most B2B companies are, then SEO does make sense, because then you can capture that demand. i.e. You can research what folks actually typing on Google when they have high intent to buy your software, your solution, your service or your niche. But a lot of that is by understanding kind of two levels to SEO really customer research. And kind of identifying with the classic SEO tools, kind of what they search and then building out best in class content to match intent. Like you say good content is relevant. Because a big part of Google’s ranking factor is something called E,E,A,T, which means Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust, so your pages, whether they are a solution page, a service page, an article page needs to send all those signals to Google i.e. that means that someone with relevant expertise and authority in the subject should craft out. But good content is a bit vague. Doesn’t… could mean something could thinking different to you than it does me. Very subjective, but happy to dive into any of those points as you wish.

Christian Klepp 25:08

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Let’s dissect that a little bit more if we can, like from your perspective, from your professional experience define good content, because like you said, it means different things to different people. Like I hate saying the term adding value, because again, that’s just as generic as Ivory soap, isn’t it?

Sam Dunning 25:31

Yeah. Yeah. So when we say good content, when we’re talking from an S… I’ll give you from an SEO lens. From an SEO point of view. I’ll give you an example. So make it more tangible for people watching or listening. So for example, on my website, breakingB2B.com, I started this website one month ago, so exited my last agency, started breaking B2B dot com about one month ago at the time of recording. A completely fresh domain, no authority. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do from day one, really, I wanted to do what I’ve talked about bottom of funnel SEO. So essentially, attracting folks as quick as humanly possible to our main authors around B2B SEO, web design, podcasting. So what I did was I mapped out what we call the money niches. So I encourage you to make a list if you’re going to do this exercise, make a list of what are the main services you want to sell to high ticket that are valuable, deliver results? What are your money niches? What are the industries that you enjoy working with, that can easily afford your solution and have the expensive problems you fix? Once you’ve identified those, you want to build out a page on your website, which is usually a solution page, sometimes a listicle for each and every one of those offers. So in my case, for breaking B2B, we build out pages for B2B SEO company, B2B SaaS SEO agency, B2B FinTech, SEO Agency, B2B SEO for construction. So all those SEO niches did the same for web design. Again, identify those industries B2B website for SaaS, B2B web funnel company, B2B web design for FinTech, those money niches that we enjoy working with that we can deliver value to, and that have the cash to do business with us. And likewise, that might involve a little bit of keyword research to make sure there’s a little bit of traffic behind those. But one thing I would say when it comes to your research is traffic is not the be all and end all. Even if something’s kind of 50 searches or less a month, that’s good. If it’s a high intense search that someone’s typing when they do offer, I’d much rather that it means I can rank quickly. And it means that they’re actually in market for my offer, rather than searching for a blog post. So with that said, when you identify those terms, there’s money niches and you build up those pages. If you want to build out a page, that’s actually going to have a chance of ranking. One of the easiest ways to do so is to literally Google that term, you type it into Google. So in my case, let’s say one of my one of my terms is B2B web design agency. So or B2B SEO agency. So I searched both those, I looked at the top three organic results, I do something called the skyscraper technique, which loads of people say doesn’t work, but definitely does have rank tons of sites doing it. And you look at the top three organic results, but you make notes. So you basically look how these pages formatted. First and foremost, what type of pages are they are their solution page, article page or something else? How are they built out? I usually these pages will have if it’s a service page, it will be like this is the service. This is how it works. This is some proof of results. Maybe there’s an FAQ section. So when I’m reviewing those top three organic results, one of those target keywords, I will make notes on how I can work one up those page and every single angle. Maybe I can start with more depth on the problem. Maybe I can give a walkthrough, maybe I can embed a YouTube video guide that I’ve got on a dedicated topic to that subject. Maybe I can add extra FAQs I’ve heard on sales calls, I can add common objections, maybe I can add some unique stats or research that I’ve done on the topic. And then once I’ve made notes on all the ways I can improve, I’ll build out that best in class page by doing that attacking EEAT. So I’m showing expertise, experience, authority and trust. I’m signaling to Google this kind of one up from every other page, it’s ranking. And then you want to do your technical SEO. So if you’re going to build on, let’s say, yourdomain.com, you’re gonna have forward slash, in my case, B2B hyphen, SEO hyphen agency, you’re gonna have your h1 as the target keyword within there. And you build out your h2 and h3 content isn’t follows over so a lot of companies spend too much time on technical BS as long as you do the basics, you’re gonna be fine. And that’s, that’s it really from there. Once you build out a page for each and every offer. For the more competitive they get i.e. the more search volume or the more competitors that are trying to rank for them. Eventually, you might need to start looking to acquire links, and I’m happy to share quick wins when it comes to building backlinks if we’ve got time. But one other little hack was around that subject is if you do, for each solution page you build out. If you do a dedicated YouTube video, and you embed it on the page that I found is a little tip to ranking faster to increasing your click through rate in the search engine results page. Because sometimes when you search for topics, they actually shows a little video thumbnail to encourages people to click. There’s not many results have that. And also, what you’ll see is Google for some keywords, when you search them, there has a little video section in the search results. So you can rank on those videos, whilst you’re waiting for your actual page to go top three. An example if you’ve searched like B2B, SEO, or B2B SEO strategy, you’ll see two or three of my videos just in that video section alone. So it’s quite a nice way to steal market share on the search engine result pages I found.

Christian Klepp 30:46

I actually did notice that like thanks for bringing that up, like, you know, when you do Google certain keywords or terms, that these YouTube videos pop up. So great advice there. I actually do want to go back to the quick wins, because you know, we were talking about actionable tips in a previous conversation. So you’ve given us so much already, you’ve unpacked a lot, I would say in the last couple of you know, like past half an hour that we’ve been chatting, but if somebody were listening to this episode, and you’d like them to walk away with three to five things that they can act upon immediately, not in six months. Not in two weeks, but like right now, what should they be doing?

Sam Dunning 31:23

Yeah, yeah. So one, build the website to do those things that I just shared. So even if you’ve limited on resources, do… I don’t know, interview maybe three to five target clients and build it up over time. So you can understand kind of what their key problems are, their goals, what they care about seeing quickly on your website, their jobs to be done, and incorporate that, especially into your homepage hero messaging. So it’s super clear on that value proposition. And then make sure you have those pages that I said, So homepage, probably about page, results page, and weave in FAQs on relevant pages. And that book a demo so at the basis, make sure you’re covering those grounds. For the SEO quick wins. Yes. Again, like I said, identify those main offers, identify those money niches, review the search engine results page for each one of those keywords, you want to rank and look two ways you can one up and build out each every each and every page, one of those offers plus the niche. Feel free to take a look at my site breaking B2B dot com and you’ll get an example of what I mean if you go into my service tab. That would be probably the main things from a very, very high level. On our podcast, we kind of dive into those in in more, more depth.

Christian Klepp 32:37

That’s fantastic. All right. Sam, I have a feeling that you’ve been on your soapbox this whole time, but I’m going to ask you to stay up there a while longer for this next question, right? What is the status quo in your area of expertise… So if we’re talking about B2B websites and SEO, what’s the status quo that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Sam Dunning 33:02

Status quo?

Christian Klepp 33:04

Just one. I know you’re I know, you probably have a ton, but just one.

Sam Dunning 33:08

I’m trying to think of a juicy one. Really. I mean, the one I uncovered earlier about the article traffic one is a common one. Like folks just screenshotting their crazy upward trend graphs of articles getting 10s of 1000s of views, and then me questioning how many qualified leads that drove in, they just don’t respond. Because it’s not a bottom of the funnel keyword. Another one was, I don’t know if you saw it, all the AI heists, AI SEO heists posts from LinkedIn or Twitter. And that’s quite timely, because people were saying, like, you can get insane rankings with AI. And now you’ll notice a ton of those sites have crashed because Google just released the march spam update. And sites that are kind of spamming out AI content that’s not ranked deemed as useful or helpful to the end user just getting crushed. So it’s nice to see that kind of, I guess, part handcrafted content by the writers or subject matter experts is getting rewarded again, which is hopefully good for copywriters because I feel like they’ve had a hard time recently.

Christian Klepp 34:10

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I did see your post. And I did read about that update. And I kind of just read the bit of a sigh of relief, to be honest with you. There’s so much garbage out there. Not that I’m entirely against AI, but I’m against AI when it comes to what you just mentioned.

Sam Dunning 34:27

And the other thing is like, yes, even if you did find a loophole and AI got a ton of traffic, it’s like if someone lands on that page, are they actually going to find value in it? Like if I’m a B2B prospect and you provide a high ticket service or high ticket piece of software, if I go on that page, and it just talks about like cutting edge skyrocket 360 degree all in one of these kinds of random AI buzzwords that you see. So is that actually going to build trust with me and encourage me to learn more about your offer or kind of recommend it to my peers and eventually book a demo or call? Probably not.

Christian Klepp 35:00

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Sam, here comes the bonus question. And this is the only one I didn’t tell you ahead of time (laugh). So let’s just say for example, right after this interview, you hear a knock at the door, then you open the door. And it’s Harry Potter. Sorry, I know you’re British. And that sounds super cliche, but I just couldn’t help myself. So Harry Potter says, Hey, Sam, I love what you’re doing. Listen to your podcast, and I’m gonna reward you, I’m gonna give you this magic wand. But you’re only allowed to use it to fix something in SEO. So if you had this magic wand that could fix one thing in SEO, what would it be? And why?

Sam Dunning 35:47

I know exactly what I do. I know exactly what I do, I would remove something called domain authority. So for anyone that hasn’t heard of domain authority, that basically means that website… I’ll give you a tangible example, a site like HubSpot. So they’re basically the creators of inbound marketing to a sense. They’re one of the first folks to say, look, create blog articles, create lead magnets, build an audience in that way. And this is a way to build up your email list and generate leads through content marketing, when people are searching for like how to questions they go to your article, they download lead magnet they get in your ecosystem, they can become customers. But a site like HubSpot has a huge domain authority because that was one of the first players in the game. And that comes from building up reputation on Google, having a ton of backlinks over time. And an unfair advantage about having something called a domain authority is that usually if you publish a new page, or a new article on your website, it can rank super quick compared to a newbie, for example, my breaking B2B dot com site, even though we’ve ranked pages pretty quick, I think, until one month old, I just wouldn’t have a chance against some of those big players. If you remove that. If you remove that authority on Google, by having a website that’s 20 plus years old harbor elder is all these backlinks all that reputation, it might make Google a bit of a wild west, because anyone would start ranking pages against the Giants. So let’s say you search CRM and instead of seeing HubSpot, and Salesforce top as you would for every CRM term, you just start seeing these newbie stuff. So I think that would be I think that’d be super funny. And then if I could get a number two, it’d be a Google drag and drop rankings, which my friend Fareed did once on LinkedIn, which is quite funny. But yeah, I think removing Domain Authority just be a wild west on Google, and I’d be here for it.

Christian Klepp 37:35

So you just chant that incantation, wave the wand and poof, it’s gone. (laugh)

Sam Dunning 37:43

That’d fun.

Christian Klepp 37:44

Sam, listen, we could go on and on and on. But you’ve already unpacked so much. And just in the interest of time, I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. I think I’m walking away from this conversation with a lot of value. And I hope the listeners do too. But for those of us that want to reach out to you and learn more about what you do, how can they do that?

Sam Dunning 38:10

Yeah, appreciate you having me on. Thanks, Christian. So yeah, there’s a couple ways so you can check me out on LinkedIn, Sam Dunning share daily tips on websites, SEO and similar. Check out the podcast, Breaking B2B. We’re interviewing marketing execs in the B2B space and share solo episodes, either on B2B marketing or websites and SEO. Or if you’re perhaps listen to this and thought Sam’s rambled on for long enough and perhaps a bit frustrated that my website isn’t ranking well on Google and competitors above me or maybe my site is failing to drive a healthy flow of qualified leads or demos, then feel free to reach out to us it’s breakingB2B.com.

Christian Klepp 38:47

That’s fantastic. Or if they’re frustrated because AI promised them better SEO rankings, and it did not deliver! (laugh)

Sam Dunning 38:56

True.

Christian Klepp 38:57

Fantastic. Alright, Sam thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Sam Dunning 39:02

Cheers.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Build Relationships with Industry Analysts

Many B2B marketers don’t realize this, but it’s in their interest to seek out and build relationships with industry analysts. Not only are they knowledgeable and influential in the market, but if marketers can nurture that relationship, analysts can advocate on your behalf and mention you to potential clients.

That’s why we’re talking to leading industry expert Robin Schaffer (Principal AR Consultant, Schaffer AR) about how smart B2B marketers can start conducting outreach to analysts. During our conversation, Robin talked about what relationships with analysts entail and why this is important to B2B marketers. She also elaborates on the pitfalls to avoid, the process of analyst outreach and relationship building, and how to craft the right pitch.

https://youtu.be/fjl8yjhdk3I

Topics discussed in episode

• Robin explains what ‘building relationships with analysts’ entails and why should B2B marketers should care [2:37]
• The differences and similarities between nurturing a relationship with industry analysts vs. with journalists [5:11]
• Robin shares how she helps her clients prepare their briefing for analyst outreach [6:57] | [24:01]
• Common pitfalls & misconceptions: [9:49]
  • Don’t just talk about yourself
  • Don’t expect reciprocation
  • Don’t wait until you have a lot of customers to conduct analyst outreach
• How to evaluate progress in analyst relationships [12:44]
• Robin walks through the process of researching and selecting analysts to build relationships with [16:03]
• How to get management’s buy-in [21:07]
• AI’s role in analyst outreach [29:29]
• Robin explains why she believes the impact of analyst relations goes beyond marketing and sales [33:37]

Companies and links mentioned

• Robin Schaffer on LinkedIn
• Schaffer AR
• Magic Quadrant
• Wave

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Robin Schaffer, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies build relationships with industry analysts. So coming to us from Rockaway, New Jersey, USA. Robin Schaffer, welcome to the show.

Robin Schaffer 01:11

No, thank you, Christian. It’s so nice to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:16

Great to have you on the show, Robin. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I was thinking about this just before we hit record. But in the more than three years that I’ve been running the show, I think you’re the first person that I’m going to interview about this topic. So Whoo, let’s keep everybody in suspense a while longer.

Robin Schaffer 01:33

That’s great. I’m so glad you have me on, because it’s an important topic. And one that’s very misunderstood.

Christian Klepp 01:41

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And the objective of the exercise here is not just to educate people, but also to get them to take action, I think is very important as well. So without further ado, let’s dive right into it right? You’re quite the expert when it comes to helping B2B companies achieve what you call radical results, using innovative, pragmatic, and highly effective methods, right. But for this conversation, let’s narrow it down to a topic that I think is part of your professional mission. And that’s how B2B marketers can benefit by building relationships with industry analysts. Okay, I’m gonna kick off this conversation with a two pronged question. All right, I’m happy to repeat. First question is, what exactly does building relationships with analysts entail? Number one. And number two, why should B2B marketers care about that?

Robin Schaffer 02:37

Okay, that’s a great question. Relationships, in the terms of analyst relations is very interesting. I once met an analyst relations expert that bragged about having five analysts at his wedding and having such a great social relationship. And that’s not what we mean, by having relationship. With an analyst, or relationship, as the core helps them understand you and helps you change their perception of you from just an ordinary vendor one in the pack, to somebody that they really understand. They really advocate for sacred things, right, good things. So you want to have that relationship based on mutual respect, learning, talking, understanding, challenging each other. And that leads to that, that kind of advocacy. And the reason you want that is because analysts are among the most knowledgeable and influential forces in the market. And when you have a strong relationship with them, you do well in like the ranking reports, like the Magic Quadrant, and they also get to, you know, other coverage. And they also mentioned you to buyers, because what happens is if you build a strong relationship with industry analysts, they remember you, and they understand not only what you do, but who you serve. And analysts have these consultative kind of conversations with technology buyers. And when a buyer is talking about a problem and talking about needing to solve it, maybe not even talking about a vendor, but talking about the problem, the analyst is likely to think of you because they recognize the problem that you solve, they recognize the audience that you support, and they will mention you, have you ever thought of or looked at this particular vendor. And that is a win win. I mean, that’s really, you know, the brass ring that you’re really trying to get and that comes from developing that kind of strong relationship.

Christian Klepp 04:52

Those are some really great points and thanks for bringing those up. I had two follow up questions for you. Okay. Would you say that you could compare this outreach and nurturing this relationship with industry analysts could one liken that to nurturing relationships with journalists and media?

Robin Schaffer 05:11

Yes, definitely, there’s a lot of parallels, but there’s a lot of difference. Okay. So one of the things is that relationships with journalists tend to be more transactional, okay, they tend to be… The journalist wants a story, the journalist is about now. It is about scooping, it’s about getting that story out there and for the readership, and there’s looking at it from a very current, you know, tell me about this right now. So I can write about it. And the journalist often has a very, very broad understanding of technology, they cover a beat, they cover, you know, they’re not real specific. So don’t go deep. So you don’t generally with a journalist, try to build that kind of ongoing, restrict productive relationship, because with an analyst, you want to get information from them. Also, you want to learn from them. And you don’t do that with journalists. So that is really the difference. The similarity is that you’re telling your story to someone who you want to then convey your story further. You’re right. And there’s a similarity there.

Christian Klepp 06:23

Yeah, no, that’s really that’s really interesting. And yeah, absolutely. So the relationship with a journalist is more transactional. And would you say that one with the analyst is hopefully more long term? Yes. It’s not just a one off like, right? Yes. Okay. And definitely we might, we might talk about this later. But just, you know, as a follow up to that question, is it also important for B2B marketers to craft some kind of, I don’t know if you can call it a pitch, but if they’re gonna do an outreach to analysts, but they have to have some kind of approach in life.

Robin Schaffer 06:57

Absolutely. And that’s something I spent a lot of time coaching my clients about, because they have to, there’s an analyst briefing, as always, with a deck, and you’re always educating the analysts about yourself. And what I do with a new client is I have them give me their sales decks, their investor decks, you know, all the decks, all the ways that they present themselves, so I can get their core story. And then I massage it, and collaborate with them to create the way they would tell their story to an analyst. Because what you want to do is Wow them, you want them to come away and say, Wow, this is a very interesting vendor that I want to know more, I want to have an ongoing relationship with, I want to understand, I want to see a demo, let me know about this, I have questions, I want to get together again. Right? That’s really what a pitch has to do is create that relationship, and you have to give them all kinds of information. One of the things I do in that pitch that I think is a is a strong best practice that I really push with all my clients is you start with just a very, very short descriptor, non-marketing descriptor of who you are in the space you’re in, just so they understand. Very short. And then you say, let me explain that in the guise of a customer story. And you start off right away, telling a story, not a case study, it’s a difference, you tell a story. So we went into this client, and we met with Christian and he had these problems and these emotions, and this was the experience. And this was what we tried to come and bring in and solve for him. And now he was able to take the solution. And he became a hero. And this is, so you tell a story, which is extremely engaging. And through the story, you’re talking about your solution, but you’re doing it through the through the eyes of a customer, which is very engaging to an analyst. And often we don’t even get beyond that story. That story grips them and they want to know more. And you end up telling a lot of what you’re going to do in their formal presentation through the story.

Christian Klepp 09:21

Yeah, that’s very interesting and very pertinent. And, you know, going back to your point, or at least I believe that was your point. Make the customer the hero of the story, not your company.

Robin Schaffer 09:32

So true.

Christian Klepp 09:33

And I’m glad we brought that up because that’s such a great segue into the next question, which is talking about common pitfalls to avoid when building relationships. And you probably have more stories about these than you care to count but just give us some top level wants to avoid.

Robin Schaffer 09:49

Yeah, common pitfalls is, you know, I think you’ve heard a million times is just talking about your product, talking about your solution, talking about yourself. A common pitfall is starting a deck with here are our founders and here are offices and here are, you know, here… us, us, us, us, us. Nobody cares about who you are. And you can’t prove validity, you know, validate yourself in front of an analyst with facts. So that is a common pitfall is starting with that information. And I was putting it at the back after you convince them what you do, why you do it, and that you’re important. Now I want to pay attention to who you are. And you know, that’s those facts. Another thing actually, that goes back to the PR, the journalists comparison. The another pitfall is to expect reciprocation. So when you pitch a journalist, you’re looking for an article, because they’re not… there’s no purpose in doing it unless they produce some coverage. With an analyst, there is no, nothing that’s going to come out of it right away. It’s not you’re expecting them to write something, you’re building a relationship that will lead to some mentions in reports, or in an evaluation report like a magic quadrant or a wave, or buyer mentions and recommendations. But it’s not like I briefed and then I’d get something out of it. It doesn’t work that way.

Christian Klepp 11:24

Okay, no, fantastic. So you brought up a couple of these common pitfalls or misconceptions that people should be looking out for. Is there anything else that you wanted to add?

Robin Schaffer 11:34

Well, I think one of the common misconceptions that I come across all the time with smaller vendors, is thinking that working with analysts has got to be expensive. Because you know, some of these big firms come along and try to get you to do big contracts. And that’s not the way I think you start, you start, there’s a lot of things you can do. Even if you’re just building your MVP, you don’t really have a lot of customers yet, you’re very early in the process. There are ways to start engaging with the analysts early, it does not have to take a lot of effort. It doesn’t have to take money. But I’m often coaching customer, coaching vendors, on how to use analyst relations early in the process and not wait until you can afford, you know, make a big investment.

Christian Klepp 12:29

Yeah, well, those are definitely some really important points, that you know, back to what you were saying it’s almost, there’s so many analogies, but it’s almost like planting something in a garden, and you know, you expect it to grow the next day. I mean, it takes it takes time.

Robin Schaffer 12:43

It takes time, it takes time. I always try to look because, you know, it takes time, it’s not something that busy executives want to hear, right? So I really always say, let’s break down, we know where we want to get to eventually, let’s break down into little things that will get us there that we can measure and show progress. So for example, we evaluate the analyst response. Right, so the speaker is talking and based on the way they ask questions, how engaged they were, you know, clear, hey, this is great kind of comments, we score the analysts reaction to each briefing. So we can see, we know if we keep getting high scores, that’s going to lead to that coverage. So that’s something we can measure right away. And start to coach and train and lead and you know, work towards, so breaking it down. It is long term, but you can break it down into some things you can watch and see the relationship growing.

Christian Klepp 12:55

Absolutely, because love it or hate it at some point. You’re gonna have to prove to somebody higher up that you’re making progress.

Robin Schaffer 14:02

Absolutely.

Christian Klepp 14:03

This is working and you know, the everyone’s favorite questions all you know, like Robin, what, what did we spend all this money on? Like, what are what are the results? Right? What results are you going to generate for us and when and how fast? How quickly? Right?

Robin Schaffer 14:17

And it’s very hard to show that a lot. You have to show it in these small pieces, because the big result is your phone’s ringing because some analysis mentioned you and your that customer is calling to inquire about that and that leads to sales opportunities, coverage and people see your brand and you know different things like that is the big things that you’re working towards. So you want to get aligned with them. And you really want to set your analyst relations plan within your business plan, right? You want to look at what you need to do as a business. So my favorite question or not you know, I always ask every client And what are your must-do’s for the business forget analyst relations, what are your must-do’s in the next 12-18 months? Okay, got those, and then look at what analyst relations can do to move those needles, maybe they can’t hit all of them. But look at everything we do through that lens. Because if we’re not moving a significant, important objective of the business, it’s not worth doing. So there’s a lot of analyst relations activities that are nice to do, I want to do the ones that are really going to make a difference.

Christian Klepp 15:35

Absolutely, absolutely. And on the point of a plan, talk to us a little bit about that. Talk to us about the importance of conducting the right research, and having an actual plan when it comes to industry analysts outreach, because you and I both know that you can’t just wing it, and just spray and pray. That approach is not going to generate the most desirable results for lack of a better description.

Robin Schaffer 16:03

Absolutely absolutely. So, you know, you’re looking at the end game that you’re trying to get to. And it starts with, you know, understanding the business objectives in depth. But then there’s a quite a bit of research that goes on to identify the analysts, and the reports and the outlets that matter. So we do a lot of research to see what people are reading, what people are publishing, who’s reading it, how much influence those people have. And try, we take a guess, at the top tier analysts based on all this research and analysis that we do. So what we do is we might come up with a list of 100 analysts, and then we’re going to that relevant 100, 150, that are relevant to what you do to your space. But then we’re going to do a lot of research to say we think these seven are the ones that matter. And we say we think because we can’t know until we start engaging with them, and start, you know, getting into in more in depth and seeing their futures and so forth. So the reason we do that is because a plan should be around giving a lot of love to the most important analysts and a lot of focus, and we kind of bifurcate or our plan into two things, the tier one analysts get proactive outreach as often as we can make it happen. And that’s through briefings and inquiries, where we are informing them everything about our business, we’re asking them questions or engaging in dialogue, we’re having these, you know, that’s what creates a relationship is that frequent engagement and, and being… showing up, you know, showing up the way you need to show up. And then the other thing is, which reports. Now, the obvious ones on the magic quadrants and the waves, and you know, what you know, try to really identify the reports that are relevant to your space that are out there. And then of course, the analysts that write those reports, you know, get top billing. And then the plan needs to be that proactive engagement with those top analysts where we try to make sure we touch them once a month in some way or another, and then you have everybody else. So what I’ve said, bifurcated, you got top tier, and then everybody else, everybody else you do in a one to many. And you do things like newsletters and webcasts, you know, web briefings, and, you know, staying in touch with them. But you don’t, you don’t do a lot of one on ones with that when they bubble up. And they say, I’m really working on a report, I’m really interested in this topic, I really want to talk about it, then you know, you engage with them. But you try not to because that dilutes your impact on those top tier analysts because your spokespeople only have so much time and energy to do this right. And you want that done right with the top analysts. So then what we do is once we identify those things, we train the spokespeople, all that stuff. We set out the plan of who we’re going to meet with each month and what we’re going to do with them. We also do for those top analysts engagement plans, what’s the relationship? What did they think and what did they do right now? We have no relationship. They think we stink you know, they do nothing. They say bad things about us. What do we want to have in a year and we paint the vision of where we want to be with them in a year. And then in the middle are all the engagements that we want to have with them to make that change happen, because analyst relations is fundamentally change management or perception management, change the perception of the analyst to get those good things to happen. And you need to… what do you need to do? You know, do you need to brief, and do inquiry strategy sessions, work with them on a webinar? You know, what are all the things you need to do to get that time with them to make that change happen?

Christian Klepp 20:26

Well, that’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. I’m glad you brought up change management, that’s such an interesting way to look at it. Change management also probably requires facing resistance or facing pushback, which leads me to my next question about how, and you’ve probably encountered this many times, how can you get buy-in internally to conduct this type of outreach? Because there’s probably people in the organization that A) don’t understand what that is? Yes. B) Because they don’t understand it. This is the dangerous part because they don’t understand what it is they think it’s a complete waste of time. So over to you, how do you address that?

Robin Schaffer 21:07

Well, the thing that gets everybody’s attention is the data that shows that 75% of enterprise technology decisions are made with an analyst, have an analyst involved. 75%. And then they mean reading one of the reports, that may mean consulting with them, it may mean, you know, regular engagement with the analysts to help them make decisions, but they’re involved in some way. So guess what, in 75% of your enterprise deals, they’re involved, whether you’re playing or not. And guess what the vendors that understand that, and develop the relationships, and show up and present and get that analysts to understand their their story, their sweet spot, their strengths, get them analysts to help them solve problems, because guess what, if an analyst helps solve a problem for you, they become an… you know, you do something that they suggested they become your best friend, because how can you not love a company that does what you suggest? It just creates a bond? So there’s all of this stuff that goes on. And ultimately, you want those 75% of deals influenced in your favor.

Christian Klepp 22:28

Absolutely, absolutely. So get the buy-in using data and using well, using facts or selling them that long term vision of what benefits this could bring to the organization?

Robin Schaffer 22:40

Yeah, I mean, I like to bring it down to that. Because one time when I was having a problem, convincing executive, I worked with the top most influential analyst in the market. And I said, of your buyer conversations, how often do you talk to a buyer, where what we do is irrelevant, not where you talk about us. But you know, you may talk to about a about a competitor, you may talk in general about the technology. And he said, I have four to five calls a day that, you know, that meets that criteria. So I said look at all those opportunities that they could be mentioning our name, and talking about us and talking possibly about us. And if we’re not there, we’re missing out on all that activity.

Christian Klepp 23:33

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Robin, you brought this up earlier, but I’d like to go back to it and kind of unpack it, if you will, this conducting outreach with industry analysts, and basically composing this or developing this pitch, for lack of a better description. Talk to us about what should be in this pitch in order to get it right. Well, maybe not get it right. But to have a more effective outreach with better results.

Robin Schaffer 24:01

Yes, yes. So I talked a little bit before about how my preference I think that works… what works well is to tell a story, a customer story right at the beginning, because that captures attention. And that’s great because analysts want to understand the value you deliver. And you can have a million spots about the value you deliver and how you do that but tell it through a customer story. We delivered this value and then maybe you need some slides to expand on that because one story, of course, doesn’t capture everything that you do. So Alice wants to know very much the value you deliver, how you do that, right. So they do want to know what’s behind, what’s under the hood. What is your you know, your special capabilities that you have in your solution. They want to understand that they don’t need to deep dive. They don’t need to go into the weeds, but they do need to know enough to understand what’s different about you, how you’re different than the competition, they do not need an overview of the market. And this is a big mistake that most people tend to make, right? With customers and investors, you need to explain the dynamics of the market. With analysts, you do not need to do that. It’s insulting when you do, let me tell you about this market, which you are, by the way, an expert on, I’m going to teach you about it. So you may want to have a short, almost a head nod session, like Oh, as you know, these are some of the dynamics that we see, I just want to confirm that we’re seeing the same thing. But you’re not explaining them, right. That’s a big thing in the briefing. They want to know your go to market, they want to know how you’re going to get business. And they want to understand your your, your marketing, your sales team. Maybe if pricing is interesting, they want to understand that. And they want to understand the futures, the futures, the roadmap futures, but also as the business you know, we’re going if you’re going into different verticals, or different regions, or building different kinds of partnerships, and then from a product perspective, what’s next, what’s coming. And that’s also a place they recognize them and ability to help and give feedback. So I think those are the major things. I always like to throw in, by the way, before you talk about exactly what you do and your capabilities, to talk about… You can look at it in a couple of ways, like maybe your mission, like why you do what you do, and your philosophy about what the world needs that has led you to developing these capabilities. We believe the world needs this, therefore we develop this. So you’re you’re explaining your solution in the context of a belief system.

Christian Klepp 27:07

Yeah, that’s a very, that’s a very comprehensive approach. I almost like to compare it to back when I was starting out as a junior product marketer. And you know, we have to do copious amounts of market research. And the lady that was mentoring me at the time said, you know, whenever you are presenting, what you have researched, and you’re presenting this compelling argument to get approval, right? You basically funnel it down to two questions that you need to answer. Why? And so what? Right?

Robin Schaffer 27:41

Yes, yes. You know, that just reminds me the one thing that I didn’t mention, when I was kind of unpacking the briefing, so called a briefing, as opposed to a pitch. I mean, it’s just subtle language difference, is I always encourage clients to end the deck with three to five summary points. And that seems obvious, but it’s sort of like, don’t leave it up to the analyst to come to those conclusions, feed it to them, feed to them, what you want them to remember about you. And especially, this goes back to that go to market, who that target customer is that you’re after. And if you can paint a picture of the kind of problems and, you know, demographics and factoids, so that when that somebody comes in the door, they say, ding, ding, ding, they recognize this is a great client for you, and you want that to happen. So the summary has to give them all that. So I’d say, if they remember nothing, make sure you give it all to them in the summary.

Christian Klepp 28:53

Yeah, yeah. 100% agree with that. All right, we’re gonna move on to the next question, which is, it could be slightly controversial, depending on who you know, who you ask, but artificial intelligence, right. It’s kind of unavoidable like it is. It’s spread across different industries in different facets, and it affects almost every aspect of our work as marketers. So here comes a question. Do you think that AI should be used in industry analyst outreach? And if yes, how?

Robin Schaffer 29:29

Okay. That’s a great question. I wrote a book, by the way, analysts on analyst relations, where I asked analysts their opinions about all kinds of things, but I have a whole chapter on AI, because I just… not to answer your question, but just from the owl’s perspective, they’re kind of the ultimate knowledge worker. And I wanted to know, how do you see your job changing with AI? And I got some very, very interesting answers to how they see their job changing and to deliver information in new ways and support AI, the reality that AI is out there in new ways. The question you asked is more about the outreach to the analysts, and how that can be supported with AI. I think the biggest area that I’m exploring with my team is if I had a magic wand, which I do with AI, but I’m not sure exactly how to use it, yet, we’re experimenting with it, I would be able to look at an analyst and summarize all the points he’s made and his point of view on a space, and even on vendors, but really on a space, he believes, or she believes these things based on this research and these inquiries we’ve had in these discussions we’ve had, and I think AI has a great ability, because you’re just plowing through research reports, and, you know, trying to come to conclusions. And I think AI can scan the market to help you understand an analyst, what you’re what you’re, you know, how to position with them, and how to, you know, be there and impress them and talk to them, or understand a little things like what you call an apple, they may call an orange. Right? So how do you use terminology, you know, in a way that fits them if they believe something that is contrary to your beliefs. And you can extract that and come to a meeting, knowing that you can articulate a physician and hopefully change their mind, you know, about how they see that. But you know, analysts are so prolific and there’s so much content out there that I think AI can help in the summary and intelligence that the analyst is offering.

Christian Klepp 32:08

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s definitely very interesting. I mean, it sounds like it can help you save some time in conducting that research, most of which will probably be done online, it will help to also aggregate the data.

Robin Schaffer 32:22

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 32:24

There’s one tool, I believe there’s probably several where you can drop in a PDF document, and it will just extract the insights. Right.

Robin Schaffer 32:33

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 32:34

What would have taken, you know, a member of your team, probably several hours can be done in a couple of…

Robin Schaffer 32:40

And that’s what I, that’s what I see. Because part of analyst relations, an elevated part of analyst relations is not just, you know, building that relationship, but learning from analysts, the whole learned side, and there’s so much knowledge that can be shared within a vendor, which was an accompany based on not about you, but it based on the space and the analysts research, and providing that being a source of knowledge for the organization is a very powerful place that analyst relations can hold.

Christian Klepp 33:18

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Robin, here comes the soapbox question. So get out there.

Robin Schaffer 33:24

Okay.

Christian Klepp 33:26

Just narrowing it down to that topic of industry analyst outreach. What is the status quo in that particular area that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Robin Schaffer 33:37

Okay. I think the greatest one… there’s a lot, but I think the greatest one is when… the status quo is that people only look at analysts relations for the marketing and sales impact that I can give, which is significant. And I don’t want to downplay that at all. But like I said, earlier, there’s this whole learning side from analysts. And if you are an organization that can be agile, and can listen to the feedback that analysts give you. Sometimes they say your baby is ugly. Sometimes they suggest capabilities for your roadmap, sometimes like they suggest new kinds of partnerships or new markets you can go after, they are a source of great wisdom because they sit at the cross currents of customers, other vendors, studies or trends, and they really have a very unique perspective. Not all of them, but the good ones. Right. And your job is to find the good ones. So find the ones that really know. And I think you know, I’ve worked in too many companies. It’s sort of almost a litmus test, can accompany take in that kind of feedback, absorb it and do something with it. So I would say it’s like, listen, learn and act with analysts. Listen to them. And some people just don’t really listen to what they have to say. Learn from it, and act when it makes sense not doing everything they say, but evaluating things and taking action to improve your business, which is what they’re about. And I said before, when an analyst has made a suggestion, as you have implemented, guess what, it helps so much with the relationship. So not only have you gotten improvements in your business, you’ve now got a really strong advocate, and the analysts because you did something they said, and they love you for that. Right? They feel so much pride, and they feel like closeness to you because you, you know, let them in and help your business. So I think just seeing the marketing and sales impact of the Magic Quadrant or something is important, but the most of the status quo misses this whole other side of AR.

Christian Klepp 36:09

Right, right. No, that’s interesting. It’s a, it’s got to be some kind of, like, mutually beneficial relationship. Ideally. Right.

Robin Schaffer 36:19

And that’s what, that’s where I think that the executives that question it, or not recognizing that mutuality, you know, that recognize the potential of that.

Christian Klepp 36:31

Or partly also, probably because they don’t understand it.

Robin Schaffer 36:34

Yes,

Christian Klepp 36:35

Right.

Robin Schaffer 36:36

Yes.

Christian Klepp 36:37

Okay.

Robin Schaffer 36:38

I agree.

Christian Klepp 36:39

Here we go. Here’s the bonus question.

Robin Schaffer 36:42

Oh, boy.

Christian Klepp 36:42

Okay. So I saw you put up a video on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, or you were singing up on stage. Was that your own song? Was that something that you compose? Or was that somebody else’s song?

Robin Schaffer 36:55

That was my song.

Christian Klepp 36:56

That was your song.

Robin Schaffer 36:57

I was very brave to put it up on LinkedIn. But that was my song.

Christian Klepp 37:01

Fantastic. Fantastic. So I’m glad you gave that answer. Because here comes the question. All right.

Robin Schaffer 37:05

Oh boy.

Christian Klepp 37:06

So if you were given the opportunity to perform onstage at a venue, anywhere in the world, and they asked you to sing that song, where where would you perform and why?

Robin Schaffer 37:22

I would probably perform in my living room because I hate performing (laugh)

Christian Klepp 37:31

Of all the answers you could have given!

Robin Schaffer 37:33

Yeah, you know, really, I, I get very nervous performing. And I get very uncomfortable. I haven’t mastered that ability. I actually started songwriting as a creative outlet. And then once I had written a bunch of songs, I kind of said, well, nobody else is gonna sing them, I better learn to perform. So I learned to perform as a consequence of actually writing songs. But where is the best ME, the ME that likes to perform every once in a while? Oh, Carnegie Hall. I would just love to be at Carnegie Hall with that acoustics and that, put that on my resume.

Christian Klepp 38:14

It gets pretty close to your living room, wasn’t at Carnegie Hall?

Robin Schaffer 38:18

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 38:18

(laugh) Fantastic. That’s a great answer. I mean, you know, short of stating the obvious Carnegie Hall is an excellent venue. Okay, Robin, this has been such a great conversation. Thanks again for your time and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. So please, quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Robin Schaffer 38:40

Well, definitely come to my website, SchafferAR.com. And I’m very active on LinkedIn. I love to engage with people on LinkedIn, connect with me as much as you can, and my email is Robin@SchafferAR. And I just love talking about AR, as you can probably sense from this interview. And I love talking with companies with vendors that are you know, trying to figure out if and how they can make this work for them because every situation is different. So I really encourage people to reach out and we can talk.

Christian Klepp 39:23

Absolutely, absolutely. Robin, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Robin Schaffer 39:31

All right, thank you.

Christian Klepp 39:32

Okay. Bye for now.

View Details

How B2B Companies Can Leverage Partnerships for Growth

Creating partnerships and leveraging someone else’s network of followers is one way for B2B companies to scale strategically. Interestingly enough, this remains a largely untapped opportunity that B2B marketers should be looking into. How can they do it the right way? How can you create mutually beneficial partnerships?

That’s why we’re talking to partnership expert Joran Hofman (Founder, Reditus) about how B2B companies can help to build trust through partnerships. During our conversation, Joran discussed the pitfalls to avoid, what is needed for an effective partnership outreach, and why B2B companies should use influencers. Joran leaves us with some actionable tips and tells us which key metrics to pay attention to.

https://youtu.be/3-MIsHmMq8Y

Topics discussed in episode

• Joran explains why affiliate marketing is an untapped opportunity for B2B SaaS [2:56]
• Some pitfalls to avoid [5:00]
  • Doing it too early without the foundation in place
  • Treating it like a ’set and forget’ channel
• How much time it takes to set up an affiliate marketing program and generate results [6:52]
• How to prepare for partnership outreach [10:02]
  • Identify the ICP and who has access to that
  • Define the platform(s) you want to be promoted on
  • Have a clear offering
  • Make it easy for your affiliates to promote you
• Joran shares how to create the offer for the affiliate partners [12:45]
• Joran’s actionable tips: [18:08]
  • Check if the competition is running an affiliate program
  • Check out the content that is already ranking on the keywords that you want
  • Find influencers on keywords and ICP
• Metrics for affiliate marketing [21:38]
  • No. of partnerships closed, clicks, conversion rate, referrals, MRR

Companies and links mentioned

• Joran Hofman on LinkedIn
• Reditus

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Joran Hofman

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Alright, everyone, welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is a show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B SaaS companies to grow their MRR via affiliate marketing. So coming to us from Utrecht, the Netherlands, Joran Hoffman, Goedemiddag en welkom bij de show. I hope I said that correctly.

Joran Hofman 00:45

You did. You did. I like the Dutch there. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:20

Great to have you on the show, Joran and shout out to Eric Melchor from Innovators Can Laugh for the connection. And of course for the community. No.

Joran Hofman 01:29

Yeah, yeah, it’s a nice community to be part of like, if you run your own podcast, you run into a lot of things you never experienced before. So it’s nice to have other people who do it and can help you with things you don’t know yet.

Christian Klepp 01:43

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it’s also always about continuous improvement, at least from my perspective, right? You always… you want to grow and you want to scale up, but you also want to become better at what you do. And you know, for us, it’s not just running our own businesses, but it’s also becoming better at podcasting. Right,

Joran Hofman 02:02

Exactly. And I mean, it’s nice that you learn from others who are something further than yourself, right? Or tried all these tools or tried all these new things, or have processes already created. So like, for me, it’s something I do next to my business. So I want to make it as low cost time effective as possible, basically.

Christian Klepp 02:19

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Me too. Me too. All right, well, let’s dive into this conversation, because I think this is going to be an interesting one. And so you’re quite the expert when it comes to helping B2B SaaS companies, as I said, to grow that MRR via affiliate marketing. But for this conversation, let’s narrow it down to a topic that I think is part of your professional mission. And that’s how B2B companies can leverage partnerships for growth. So why don’t we start this discussion off with this question, why do you believe that this is such an untapped opportunity for B2B SaaS companies?

Joran Hofman 02:56

Yeah, I think a lot of SaaS companies don’t leverage it yet. And I think like, if you go to the basics, right, with partner marketing, you’re basically getting access to somebody else’s network. So if that person or company is going to recommend you, it basically adds a level of trust. So when you look at the numbers, like you can clearly see that partner sourced opportunities have a shorter time to close, have a higher win rate, there’s a lot more trust to it, because you actually come recommended, right? So if you think about your software, your company, people will do a lot of things before they actually reach out to you, they will read content reviews, get opinions from other people, talking to the vendor, or before talking to you as a vendor. So if you can actually have people already recommending you and really create those partnerships from the beginning, then you’re gonna have almost like an army of salespeople, right? So not sure why it’s untapped yet. Like, I think affiliate marketing or partnerships does sometimes have a bit of a dirty mindset to it. When you think of B2C you think of the fraud you think of like, I guess the one off, the coupon sites, things like that. But if you look at it purely from, for example, B2B SaaS perspective, you only pay when you receive a paid client. So there’s a lot less fraud going into that cycle, and you can kick out if it is pretty quickly if they do any far less thing. So I think that’s, that’s my answer.

Christian Klepp 04:32

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s such a great segue into the next question. And we can look at it from the angle regarding what mistakes companies make when they do partnership outreach. And I think you can, can you please talk to us about that? And also, why do you think so the first part is mistakes. And the second part is Why do you think there’s hesitation to do partnerships?

Joran Hofman 05:00

Yeah, yeah, I think the common mistakes we see, for example is that companies try to do it too early. So like, if you, for example, haven’t done something yourself and like the real basics is in, you haven’t sold yourself first, then how can you expect somebody else to do it for you? So this is the most common thing like I see with, with a freemium model, people can set up an affiliate program quickly, and they think, Okay, we’re gonna set up an affiliate program, and people will start recommending us. But that’s not how it works. Like you need to basically have the foundation in place first, before people are willing to recommend you, right? I think the other thing is not a set and forget channel. So like, it’s the same in life, right, the better relationship you build, the more which will come out of it. So make sure you actually onboard your affiliates or your partners, provide them materials, keep engaging them. And in the end, you have to think of it in a way that you need to help them to basically earn money. So I think that’s why a lot of companies don’t leverage it yet. Because it does take time, like it’s another revenue channel, but you can kind of almost compare it to SEO, it takes a lot of time to set up. But once it’s working, it will compound. But during that first initial work, that’s probably holding a lot of companies back basically.

Christian Klepp 06:25

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m glad you brought that up about the time factor. And I wanted to go back to that Joran. And I know you said that it does depend, it’s like, you know, you maybe you can say you handle it on a case by case basis. But just from your experience, how long would it take to set up, let’s say, an affiliate marketing program, to do the implementation and for companies to actually like, see some kind of results?

Joran Hofman 06:52

Yeah, it indeed depends. But I will make it more more specific, like the bigger user base, for example you have, the quicker it will get. So for example, again, if you don’t have any paid users at the moment, then like it will take a long time to actually get paid user from it. But if you’re a company and you have, say 1000 paid users, 10,000 paid users, you actually have a user base, meaning these people use your company, use your product, they already know the value you’re bringing in, they most likely there’s going to be people in there who are willing to recommend you. So if you set up a program like that, you actually invite your own network to it, then you can get quick results. And quick results always depends on the sales cycle, of course. So I can’t tell you how fast you will get money in because basically, you’re adding one more layer towards your cycle, right? So we have to recruit the people who are going to recommend you. They actually have to start recommending you. And then your normal sales cycle kicks in. Of course, as I mentioned, like they might close quicker, but it’s not going to be a magic bullet that they’re gonna close. 50% quicker. So…

Christian Klepp 08:03

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. But umm sorry, just to dig a little bit further, if we were to try to quantify it, right. Are we talking about? Are we talking about 12 months? Are we talking about 24 months? I mean, something in that timeframe. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take three, three months, it might take longer.

Joran Hofman 08:23

For example, we did a case study where they expandi, like they use a different affiliate before us, they got themselves listed in our marketplace, I think they did 25,000 In the first six months, basically. So they have a really clear I think they have a 7 day or 14 day free trial. So when they already have people who are willing to recommend them people like sign up quickly. And you know that time to close is going to be let’s say, 14 or 21 days. So it can go pretty quick. Like it all depends on the tool. To the more I guess, the better the foundation, the quicker it will become. And we have some tools where it takes a lot longer, right. But I think we already had tools where they got their first paid referral in the first month, for example, as well, because they leverage their own network of people who are willing to recommend them from the beginning.

Christian Klepp 09:16

Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And I’m going to try to summarize this as best as I can. But what is the importance and we know that it’s important, but talk to us about why it’s crucial to I’m going to just say do your homework first, and have a game plan before conducting this partnership outreach, because I’m sure you’ve seen this with your own clients. I’ve seen it from my own experience where some companies go and start doing this outreach and they haven’t actually thought it through what the approach should be, what the expected results should be. How to handle objections. etc. So can you talk to us a bit about that?

Joran Hofman 10:02

Yeah. When you’re going to do outreach, I think the first thing you want to get right is your ideal customer profile. So again, get back to the basics. So if you know exactly who you’re targeting, then it’s also easier to identify who has access to your ideal customer profile. So do your research indeed, like it’s going to be important because the better you do your research right, the easier it is to find high quality affiliates. So I think that’s the next thing like go for quality instead of quantity, like, you don’t want to have hundreds of affiliates recommending you, if only 10% is going to be active. So go find I guess… or go define your ICP, and then maybe even define on which platform do you want to be promoted? So is, for example, website traffic, the best for you social media, stack channels, any kind of promotion, I guess you can have right? And then find people or companies who have access to that. And then you can even dig deeper, like, in a way you want to be promoted. So for example, if there’s going to be an influencer, who has access to your ICP, who is, for example, active on LinkedIn, anywhere has educational content, which you love, then why not try to see if he wants to join your partnership. So doing this research would enable you to identify the right partnerships as well and basically, find the best one. So I guess like when you are going to reach out to them, as you mentioned, like you might the good negotiation, or you find bottlenecks, like make sure you have a clear offering. So if you’re going to reach out, like what is it in it for them? So why should they start recommending you? And then if they start recommending you, or if they’re willing to do so, then do they know exactly, I guess how to start recommending you? And what is working, for example, already? So did you run any paid ads? Do you have landing pages? Do you have materials? Do you have thing for them, ready to start promoting you. So the easier you make it for them to start promoting you. The quicker they make money, the more likely they are going to promote you even more.

Christian Klepp 12:16

Absolutely. Absolutely. You touched on something which was a great segue into the next question about offer. Right? So I call this next question, the Lego approach. And why? because you have to break it down into its parts, right? So walk us through from your professional experience, what components are required in order for you to have that effective partnership approach? You talked about offer. So talk to us about what should be in that offer in that approach?

Joran Hofman 12:45

Yeah, yeah. And the offer, I guess it can be multiple things, it depends on, I guess, who you’re trying to target and who you’re trying to get in. So if you narrow down, or if you split the indirect marketing channels into I guess, like referrals, affiliates and partnerships, where referrals often are in our benefits, the dropbox example, I invite you to Dropbox, we both getting gigabytes free. And you have affiliates who are often clearly money orientated so you need to basically have that show exactly what they can earn, right? If you’re in software, it’s often like an X percentage for an X amount of months. So let’s say 20%, for for 12 months. And then with partnerships, if you go a bit higher, for example, with agencies, consultants, then it’s not always about the money. So they, for example, one have like co-marketing opportunities or want to do lead sharing or want to do other things. So depending on what kind of people / companies you’re reaching out to, there will be different benefits against them. So that’s why I guess the research is going to be important as well, like who are you actually trying to reach out? What is in it for them? Or what do they want to get out of it and then adjust the offer accordingly.

Christian Klepp 14:03

So in other words, handle it on a case by case basis, right? Because I mean, I think it’s to your point, like different companies are probably at different stages of their cycle. It also depends on the industry and the target audience or the group that they’re targeting. Because they have different motivations as you said, so all of these things have to be taken into consideration, right?

Joran Hofman 14:23

Yeah, yeah. But at least you can group them right. So for example, you could find affiliates in bulk, you could find like potential partners in bulk, but they won’t all do it for the same reasons, basically. And like if you go even one step deeper, like you would, for example, have affiliates like the typical bloggers or typical publishers, but then they might not just work on on a cost per action model. So they deliver you pay client and get a kickback fee. They might even want to get an upfront payment to place your blog, place your link, things like that. So what that often means is they want to have high bread. So they won’t have an upfront fee, plus the commission, for every paid client they deliver. So the bigger I guess, companies or people you’re going to target, like the more need customer, it will become.

Christian Klepp 15:14

You brought this up a call a couple of minutes ago, Joran, about B2B influencers. So here’s my question. Should companies be using them? Yes or No? And why?

Joran Hofman 15:25

I would say why not? No. Okay. If they have access to your ideal customer profile, right, so don’t use it, because everybody else uses them, like us, the people who actually have access to your ideal customer profile. So if there’s no influencers, in your space, who don’t have access to your ideal customer profile, but everybody says B2B influencers are good to use, it doesn’t make much sense, because in the end, you set up these partnerships to actually get paying clients because that in the end, what you’re trying to get out of it. So I mean, my answer will be use them, but only if they have access to your ideal customer profile. And yeah, they’re the influencer where people take their recommendation, and it’s going to be high value for your company.

Christian Klepp 16:15

Yeah, I suppose it also goes back to what you were saying earlier. It also depends on what your objectives are. And your goals are right, because sometimes it might not make sense at that particular stage to use an influencer? I mean, like the cost the side because we know that sometimes, depending on what type of influencer you’re using, it can be also a significant investment for the company, right?

Joran Hofman 16:37

Yeah. Yeah. And indeed, like, I think, I’m really focused on generating paid clients like that’s what we do, right. But if you go indeed, like towards companies who are a bit further and they want to, for example, generate awareness, or maybe generate trust or things like that, then you don’t always care about attribution of what do you get out of this partnership? But in the end, like, I think, nowadays, it’s all about attribution, right. So you will need to figure out, can you generate paid clients from the partnerships you’re creating.

Christian Klepp 17:13

Absolutely, absolutely. Because at some point, and we’re going to talk about metrics in a second, but at some point, you have to prove to somebody higher up that what you’re rolling out there and implementing is actually working. Yeah, it’s generating results. And if you can’t do that, it’s going to be very difficult to get your budget approved for the next fiscal year.

Joran Hofman 17:34

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 17:35

Okay. So we get to the part in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips, because this is very much what this show was about. So Let’s appreciate Joran, and you brought up earlier on the conversation, there is a time factor in that for the type of work that you do. You can’t do all of this stuff in a date, obviously. But if somebody were listening to the show, and you know, listening to this conversation that you and I are having, what are like three to five things that you would say they can do right now to build and leverage those partnerships for growth.

Joran Hofman 18:08

Yeah, quick wins are often like check if a competitor is running an affiliate program. So basically go for it to your competitor websites right now, scroll down to the footer, is there a partner program or affiliate program in the footer somewhere? If there is, it also means that they’re going to have affiliate links linking towards their site. So if you use any tools like SEMrush, or href, which are SEO tools, you can basically see older backlinks go into your competitor domain. So if we then would type in your competitor domain, in SEMrush, look at the backlinks. And then you can see like all the affiliate links going towards your competitor. So if you want to get affiliates in, those are often like really nice ones to begin with. Because they know the industry you’re in, they probably have content that you’re related to it. And they know the concept of affiliate marketing, so you don’t have to educate them on neither of those two things. That’s one.

The other one I would say is check out content, which is already ranking on keywords you want to be ranking for. So if you have been running paid ads, you probably already did the paid ads on certain keywords. Do them organically and find out who’s ranking on those keywords besides as your competitors and our older review sites. And then reach out to those because often the best 10 CRM tools that list is not created on the actual 10 best tools. It’s often like who pays the most or who has an affiliate link provided towards that blog. So do those searches and you find maybe already like content where you can get yourself ranked in. And if you have something to offer right, a good compelling offer, you might not even have to pay to get listed in it, but you give them commission in return.

And I think the third step I would say is like find influencers and same like find them on keywords, find them on who has access to your ideal customer profile in bulk, and then see if you can arrange some kind of partnership with them. And it could be anything right? Like we have an affiliate for ourselves who had… you only did one YouTube video, and is consistently generating referrals for us, even though I thought YouTube is not going to be interesting for us. Somehow. He nailed it, he doesn’t get a lot of views on it. But people watch that video actually sign up. So find people, again, can be on any platform, who are already creating content and see if you can work with them.

Christian Klepp 20:42

Yeah, no fantastic advice. And again, to your to your earlier point, it’s not about the quantity, it’s the quality. Right? So to get people sign up. Great. Let me just quickly recap that for the benefit of the audience. So first of all, is going to competitor websites to check their affiliate links. And the second one is check out the content, especially the keywords in which keywords are ranking. And the third one is find influencers, you know, with keywords that are being used, and also the ones that have access to your ideal customer profile.

Joran Hofman 21:16

Yep.

Christian Klepp 21:17

Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. And now, we get to the question about metrics. And I know, we can go down this very, very deep, deep, deep rabbit hole here, but let’s just keep it at the top level, right, some top level metrics that B2B marketers should be paying attention to when it comes to leveraging partnerships for growth.

Joran Hofman 21:38

Yeah, yeah, I think in that sense, it’s pretty simple, you can just look at the needs like the entire funnel, so you probably start with number of partnerships you closed, then the number of clicks, the referrals, basically, all came out of that. So you can track the conversion rate between those if you want to, then basically paid referrals, so how many move to paid and then the monthly recurring revenue or money generated basically from it. So in the end, you’re creating these partnerships to make money, right. So that’s going to be the end goal. But before you get there, everything else needs to happen before so I would look at that, and then the conversion rates in between, how does it add up against what you’re currently doing with your own marketing efforts? And is it better or worse?

Christian Klepp 22:26

Okay. Okay. So we’re looking at like, just from a top level perspective, maybe about five, five, like key metrics?

Joran Hofman 22:32

Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Five, yeah.

Christian Klepp 22:34

Okay.

Joran Hofman 22:36

Yeah. As you can imagine, you can make it really complicated. But in the end,…

Christian Klepp 22:42

You just, you just open up your dashboard, and you’re already like, your eyes are gonna like, pop out of your head. And like, Well, where do I start?

Joran Hofman 22:52

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 22:53

Okay, so this one is the soap box question. So please get up there. And tell me what is the status quo, on the specific topic of leveraging partnerships, right. So what is the status quo on this topic that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Joran Hofman 23:15

I might have come back… I guess to the first point we said that it might, is a bit shady, or it doesn’t generate results, or I guess kept people distrust I guess in general. I definitely disagree with that. If you find the right people who are willing to recommend you, then it can be a really growth lever for your for your company. And it can actually compound over time. So when people say like, it doesn’t work, there’s a lot of fraud going on. Partners are not doing what they should be doing. Or they’re not generating anything like, of course, that happens. But that happens with any campaign you’re running, right? Like, at one point, it just stops. But if you treat it well, only if you actually treat it as like setting up good relationships with people who have access to your ICP, then it is going to work for your business.

Christian Klepp 24:09

Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, you know, be concerned about if this is fraudulent, I mean, that basically permeates across different disciplines. That’s not just… I don’t think that that’s unique just to affiliate marketing alone. But I think it’s to your earlier point that there if you have those systems and processes in place to prove that what you’re doing is indeed a legitimate operation, then there’s probably no reason to doubt the you know, the outreach.

Joran Hofman 24:36

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 24:38

Okay, fantastic. Okay, Joran, here comes the bonus question. So this may or may not have something to do with your area of expertise. But here it goes. Okay. So imagine that you were selected to promote the Netherlands abroad, right in a global partnership campaign. Okay. What would you promote about your country? And why?

Joran Hofman 25:02

I think people to be honest, I think, with Dutch people you kinda see is what you get. Or at least were, as far as I always say, like, pretty straightforward, right? But in a, I think always in a good way, like, if you know how to deal with it, you can clearly see if we’d like things or not. And we will say if we don’t like it as well, and we’ll say what we don’t like about it as well. So you definitely get some unsolicited feedback sometimes where, yeah, that’s how I guess a deal with the Dutch people. But that’s yeah. It might not be a unique selling point for everybody. People take like, yeah, I don’t want that. I want just happy people always. But in, in our sense, like, we will tell what we think about things and that’s, that’s what I like, also working with Dutch people, like, you can get some really good direct feedback, which is gonna help you further basically.

Christian Klepp 25:56

Absolutely, absolutely. For a minute there. I thought you were gonna say like, you know, I would promote the people because, you know, you guys just have the best DJs in the world. Like, Armin van Buuren. (laugh)

Joran Hofman 26:09

Yeah, but I don’t think I can say that, because Armin just didn’t show up for a Super Bowl. Right? He just canceled like, a couple days in advance. So I didn’t know where the audience is. So,…

Christian Klepp 26:20

Yeah, well, fantastic. Joran, this was such a great conversation. Thanks, again, for coming on, for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. Quick introduction to yourself, and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Joran Hofman 26:35

Yeah, so quick intro. Founder of Reditus, affiliate management platform. I think we covered enough regarding affiliate management, basically, in the Netherlands in Utrecht. And I think that’s it like, if people want to know more, or when to get in contact with me, just contact me on LinkedIn. There’s only one Joran Hofman. That’s, that’s not a lie. If you search for that, you will find me. Just make sure you mention that you’re coming from this podcast, because I do get quite a few requests. And I don’t see a note or anything like that I won’t probably accept it.

Christian Klepp 27:09

It was 300+ connection requests, if I remember correctly, no?

Joran Hofman 27:13

Yeah, yeah. And I think when you have founder next to your name, then you’ve been targeted by all these automations. So it’s not like being arrogant, but it’s… there’s a lot of I guess, people were trying to sell you right. That’s what we were even discussed before the recording started. So if I don’t see like a clear benefit for myself, and there’s no message then I will like just leave it there.

Christian Klepp 27:35

Sure. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Joran, once again, thanks for your time. Take care. Stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Joran Hofman 27:43

Cheers. Thanks for having me, Chris. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 27:44

All right. Thanks. Bye for now.

View Details

How to Craft Better Demand-Gen Campaigns That Deliver Good Results

When done correctly, demand generation campaigns can help B2B companies generate the right noise in the right channels at the right time. It’s about reverse engineering with intention and positioning your company as the top choice for potential customers. You also need to be open to new strategies and digital channels, and deliver relevant and helpful content.

That’s why we’re talking to marketing expert Eddie Saunders, Jr.(Founder,Speak Friend) about how B2B companies can craft better demand-generation campaigns that deliver measurable results. During our conversation, Eddie discussed why it’s important to start with a campaign audit and which demand-gen techniques he thinks are obsolete. He also highlighted which pitfalls to avoid and which key metrics to focus on.

https://youtu.be/kZieWpWHbfk

Topics discussed in episode

• Eddie explains what “Demand-Gen” is [2:02], and why it is important for B2B [3:21]
• The 4 “Es” of content [4:22]
• Eddie’s view on the value of trade shows [9:16]
• Some pitfalls to avoid: [11:42]
  • Relying only on white papers and blogs
  • Not being open minded to new strategies and tactics
  • Not investing more time and effort into content creation
• Eddie shares his experience in getting buy-in for demand-gen ideas [13:49]
  • Reverse engineer with intention
  • Explain how the tactics building into strategies will have a direct business impact
• Eddie shares an example of “new ideas” that he got approved [15:41]
• Actionable tips [19:43]
  • Figure out why your customers said ‘yes’
  • Reverse engineer with intention to get approval/validation
  • Develop messaging around your value based on findings
  • Define keywords for specific audience
  • Invest in SEM if budget allows, keep track of the KPI
  • Create scalable contents – turn blogs and white papers into audio format
• Eddie shares the top key metrics that marketers should use for demand gen: [23:23]
  • Focus on pipeline creation and velocity
  • Use attribution
  • Connect CRM with activities on your website
  • Synthesize and break down the steps from website traffics, website activities to leads

Companies and links mentioned

• Eddie Saunders Jr. on LinkedIn
• Speak Friend Consulting

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Eddie Saunders Jr.

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by some on a mission, get ready for it, to implement demand generation campaigns that move mountains. Boy, does that sound like a song. Coming to us from Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Eddie Saunders Jr. Welcome to the show, sir.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 01:13

Hey, it’s a great day to have a great day it as well with my soul, and we get to talk one of my favorite things, demand gen…

Christian Klepp 01:21

Absolutely, absolutely, Eddie. So let’s just jump right in, because this is going to be a great conversation. Understatement here, but you’re an expert when it comes to industrial demand generation. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I believe has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to craft better demand gen campaigns that deliver measurable results. So I’m gonna kick this off with a two barreled question, right. Number one, is defined demand generation, because that gets thrown around a lot. And number two, why do you think it’s important for B2B?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 02:02

Yeah, for sure. So there are a lot of ways and a lot of definitions, you know, around like, what is demand gen and all that. It sounds like a new buzzword like gluten free marketing, yada, yada. But to me, there’s, again, lots of ways you can break it down. But in essence, my interpretation, my layman’s terms, is really making as much noise or being you know, subjective or allowing the viewer if you will, to be subjected to your brand as much as possible throughout the entire decision making process, not at just specific points. Therefore, via that compounding branding principle, and that continued exposure in a variety of forms, you can better position yourself to be one of the top choices and options when they do get to that key point where most people try to put the bulk of their marketing, you can have that entire conversation throughout the way. So making as much noise as possible to better increase your chances of getting to that purchasing decision table, specifically, because anywhere from 66% to…, what is the 80% of technical buyers are now using online options to make those decisions. So again, a little bit longer definition there. But it just further says that there’s way more opportunity throughout the entire pipeline, and not just the small pocket towards the end. So that’s my general definition of that specifically.

And like why does it is important for B2B in general? Well, I mean, in industrial, a lot of these tactics are typically three to five years behind. And so it’s really easy to kind of pick apart some of these things that are working in other areas. And it’s super important because buyers are still making huge decisions, and specifically in industrial, they’re making large capital expenditure decisions. And so when you’re trying to put yourself in the perspective of those buyers, having a solid demand gen strategy, regardless of your B2C, or B2B Because everything is H2H, so it’s human to human.

Christian Klepp 03:57

Absolutely. Man. Absolutely. Thanks for that. I had two follow up questions for you, Eddie. One of them is like, I’m going to play a little bit of a devil’s advocate here, when you say make as much noise as possible. I hope you mean it’s noise that doesn’t signify that it’s an interruption to somebody else. It’s actually like, useful noise. It’s noise that the target audience will find useful, or how do you define noise?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 04:22

Sure. So when it comes to just noise, as more can be synthesized into content, and for lack of a better letter example, I like to use my E’s of content. I like it to be engaging, entertaining, educating, and if you can package it all exciting. So that’s the noise that I’m talking about. Now, there are many layers to that specific conversation. But if we go one step deeper from noise, that’s just relevant content and how do we do that, we route that and all of those E’s that I just defined and try to hit as many of those buckets or hit some of those buckets separately, all contingent upon your audience and how they best receive that message that you are sending.

Christian Klepp 05:02

That’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Okay, fantastic. So second follow up question. So you were saying that the industrial space is about three to five years behind other B2B segments. So can you? Can you give us some examples like in terms of like, industrial versus other segments. Would other segments have a faster decision making process? Or how does it work?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 05:26

I mean, there’s a clear changing of the guard in a lot of industries, and manufacturing is no exception to that specific role. And I can confirm that a lot of what was being done previously was based off of trade shows, and building these personal relationships, and honestly, kind of having a literal and somewhat figurative Rolodex, if you will. But as we’re seeing the way that individuals do research and make large purchasing decisions, like all that is changing with all the tools that are continued to be given to us. We have to defy, we have to pivot from those ways of thinking, I think manufacturing is so guilty of, well, this is the way that we’ve always done it. So it’s my mission now to go in there and say, yes, that may be correct. But that is the only thing that is correct, is that’s the way that you’ve always done it. And I think as we can all agree, that is one of the most crippling phrases in any industry whatsoever.

Christian Klepp 06:18

100%. 100%. I mean, you know, going back to your point, these very traditional, if I can call them that traditional B2B segments that were very slow to adapt, and even with a pandemic, and even with this rapid digitalization that we’ve seen across most B2B industry segments, there were others that still continue to resist that. I’m going to call it that tsunami of change, right?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 06:42

Yes, tsunami of change, for sure. You know, and, and I had no coach would tell me, you know, it’s all great, you know, everyone can be happy and respond well, when it’s 70 and sunny. But when the winds of change in the precipitation of adversity fall upon you, how do you respond?

Christian Klepp 06:58

Wow, look at you. Fantastic. Okay, so, moving on to the next question, which we had a little discussion about this before I hit record, but there’s discussion on platforms like LinkedIn, by certain groups of people that say that demand gen is dead. So I pretty much know how you feel about it. But I want to hear you say it. So your thoughts? Number one, and number two, what, if any, what demand gen techniques do you think are obsolete?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 07:33

Right, well, first off that phrase, those are fighting words. So knowing that, but I say that, in jest, demand gen, by all means, depending on your interpretation of it, I would say that that’s typically led by a misunderstanding. Because if you’re not, in essence, as a marketer, trying to capture, convert and create demand, if you’re not trying to do them, then what are you actually doing? And let me guess the answer is probably I’m just doing things that we’ve always done the way we’ve always done it. And there’s, that’s the end of our conversation there. So in all reality, I can tell you that even specifically in a space, like the industrial world, it is well and it is alive. And even if we may be a couple of years behind, when it comes to implementation and execution on a lot of realms, I specifically am making it my mission to speed that up. And I think with all the alarms and sounds that I’ve been making over the past five or so years, it’s made a huge difference in you’re seeing the world of industrial marketing being taken way seriously. And demand gen, I think is a huge component of that, call it a buzzword, call it what you will, but that doesn’t change that some of the strategies and tactics that are that demand gen is really seemed by and rooted in. That doesn’t make them any less applicable, because they are just as applicable. And even so they’re even more than a lot of these traditional methods that I’m sure we will get into here soon.

Christian Klepp 08:53

Absolutely, absolutely. I love that you use the word realms, right? I mean, you know, there’s a little bit of a hint there like Lord of the Rings.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 09:02

A tad.

Christian Klepp 09:04

Alright. And just going back to that second question, I’m like, are there any dimension techniques that you think are no longer relevant, or you think that they’re just obsolete entirely?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 09:16

Sure. So I get a lot of, you know, kickback and thoughts and questions around the trade show conversation, because a lot of individuals feel like, what’s the value there? And I don’t think that it’s the vehicle as much as the problem like as in trade shows, but it’s the drivers. And those are the exhibitors that are going to trade shows because the platform itself still is valid, it still has all of that value there. And I know people who are crushing trade shows, but those who are questioning the value, I would question your execution and your ability to actually strategize about what you’re going to do before, during and after, that’s different than just scanning as many badges as possible and then blasting everybody’s email inboxes when they didn’t even ask you to do that in the first place. That’s a realistic strategy that a lot of people are still implementing to this day, and even much larger companies that would just baffle you, like, you’re still doing that? And so I’m trying to really sound the alarm on that as well, that it’s not the trade shows are bad. It’s how the individuals are executing upon them, and quite literally wasting dollars, because I’ve seen it firsthand. And that what can be a very valuable realm.

Christian Klepp 10:27

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, you know, that was such a great point that you brought up, because it’s, I tend to agree, it’s not necessarily the trade show, but it’s the manner of execution. And to your point, that’s the way that they follow up. I mean, I went to a trade show last year, and it blew my mind that they’re still trying to cold call everybody after the show. And I’m like, Guys, we have to evolve from this kind of like methodology, or move away from it.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 10:59

True story. Yeah, true story, man, for sure. Um, at my old company, I actually had to, you know, push a lot of people away from calling those scanned leads, because we would put them into our CRM as leads, I said, those aren’t leads. Those are people whose badge you scan that may or may not have asked for more information. I hate even putting that in the category of leads, but don’t allow me to digress in that conversation, because that’s a hill that I’ll die on.

Christian Klepp 11:26

I don’t doubt it. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And you will have no problem answering it. Talk to us about some other mistakes that you’ve seen B2B marketers make when it comes to demand gen, and how they should address those, like maybe the top three to five things that you’ve seen.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 11:42

Seeing a lot of individuals rely strictly on like white papers and blogs, it’s kind of a big mistake. There’s not as much marketing mix that I’m really seeing. And I think that’s because there are some marketers that have been in some positions for either entirely too long and haven’t refreshed their knowledge, or newer marketers are coming in trying to implement things, but the C suite, the executives, and the people who are making the decisions, don’t understand it. So they’re suppressing a lot of people. Which leads me to my next point, a big mistake is not being open minded to new strategies and tactics that this next generation of marketers like myself, are bringing to the table. And a lot of us, like myself are bringing raw data. So and it’s silly, but a wise person once told me, you know, God, we trust everybody else brings data, and in the manufacturing industry is no exception to that rule. So that’s another big mistake that I’m seeing. And then additionally, individuals not investing more and putting more time and effort into content creation, or aka just digital avenues and efforts. It’s a huge miss by so many manufacturers, and with that staggering amount of 66-80% of that buying process being done online prior to anyone contacting sales. It’s just if you’re not experiencing or putting yourself in a position to maximise on that compounding branding, that continued exposure and creating high end to end racers, you’re going to miss out on the people that get it because there are definitely people that get it because I’m working with them. And then there are people that don’t get it that are just doing the things the way they’ve always done it.

Christian Klepp 13:18

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s people that don’t get it and you you’re probably working with them, too, or you stop working with them. At one follow up question for you, Eddie, you brought up a really important point. And I think it’s not just relevant to demand gen. It’s really, across the board in B2B marketing. How do you get buy in from industrial customers who are so risk averse and are not open to these, as you said, new ideas? How do you get buy in from them?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 13:49

Sure, I mean, having previous experience and experimenting in a lot of these options and be able to come to them with Hey, I understand why you feel this way, I felt this way at one time as well. But I did this, and this is what I had seen from it. And I’ll go back to a point that I just made you and God we trust everybody else bring data. I’ve very much rooted myself and a lot of the decisions that I made for myself and for my clients with that. And so though there are some gut intuitions and feelings, because you know, you have 14 years of experience, you want to use that to your advantage. But there’s also all of this data at our fingertips. And so if you have that, and you can tie your strategies, break them down into tactics, and then explain how those tactics building into strategies are going to have a direct business impact. That’s the biggest thing that you can do for yourself, because I’ve had to pitch a lot of really broad crazy ideas that I have gotten approved that I never thought I would have gotten approved by simply 1) believing in it, reverse engineering with intention on how I do it, and then also driving how it’s going to have direct business impact. If we really want to reverse engineer with intention and think of what are these decision makers really care about? They care about the bottom line: How can they make more? How can they spend less than if it’s a large publicly traded company? What’s their stock value? If they’re not a publicly traded company, cool, you’ve only got two things that you really have to focus on, the two buttons that you got to push. And that’s direct information with me serving and interacting with a variety of the C suites and enticing them to be able to invest in resources and just buy in of some of these crazy ideas that I’ve had that have ended up really working very well.

Christian Klepp 15:29

Fantastic. And, you know, no offense, so you don’t mind me put you on the spot here. But can you give us an example of… you don’t have to name the company, but one of these crazy ideas that you got approved? Can you share that with the audience?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 15:41

Yeah, for sure. So, uh, starting a podcast, you know, and anybody can do research and look at, you know, my profile and see what I did in the past and no big deal whatsoever. But to keep it semi agnostic, you know, starting a podcast for a large machine manufacturer only specific brands were doing that, that were like personal brands, but I humanized our brand significantly. Kept it very, you know, almost brand agnostic, if you will, because it was still very flex. But there was no major partnerships, or, you know, we weren’t out there, pimpin ads or anything along those lines. And we weren’t even pimping out our product, we were actually just speaking with industry thought leaders on a variety of topics, from robotics, to reshoring, to government affairs, to all types of stuff, it was pretty interesting. And then through that, we were able to leverage that, over time, to be able to open up new relationships for other business avenues. And heck, we even got our entire employee like merch swag store built out for us through leveraging a partnership of that podcast. And that’s just one example.

Christian Klepp 16:41

Fantasic, fantastic. And this is gonna sound super biased coming from me. But yes, absolutely. Podcasts are awesome… (laugh)

Eddie Saunders Jr. 16:49

For sure, for sure. Can’t fight that. And there’s plenty of data as well that technical buyers are also very much heavily heavily into these audio forms of content. So it’s just… there’s again, data behind it. It’s not just feel good, you know, little bit of experience behind it, and obviously fun, but it being fun and cool doesn’t make it ineffective.

Christian Klepp 17:09

No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. All right. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And this one, we probably have to unpack quite a bit. But B2B marketers shouldn’t start planning a demand gen campaign without doing an audit first. So talk to us about some of the best practices when it comes to doing a campaign audit the right way.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 17:31

Sure, you genuinely need to reverse engineer with intention. I have said this a couple times and sprinkled it in the conversation. And it’s not cliche, and it’s not by accident by any means. But reverse engineering. So many people just think, okay, they start with what marketing tactics do I know, that’s not a strategy. That’s just saying what tactics do okay, we want to do some Facebook, okay, well, we’re gonna do a blog, okay, we want to, we want to put stuff on our website, okay, you’re describing like, you know, tactical things you want it, that’s not a strategy. That’s throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks, right and taking entirely too much time. So my recommendation is, we begin with the end in mind. Okay, so what are we trying to accomplish? Nine times out of 10, people are gonna say, Oh, we want more Leads. Okay, that’s cute. So does everybody else right? And but again, but it starts the conversation. So okay, because there are various strategies, and then tactics within the strategies that help you get from point A to point B. But if you don’t have point B defined, you’re shooting at a target with your eyes closed, and you’re taking a shot in the dark for lack of a better term. And so when people come to me specifically, now that I’ve had all this experience from startup all the way to, you know, corporate conglomerates, I get to say, No, I’m not putting you in a box, like we’re gonna build the box around you. Because if you take you and your five best competitors, you’re all going to have completely different conversations with me, because you’re gonna have completely different goals, completely different scenarios. So but if you can define where that end point is, people like myself can help you draw the map, and you can help draw the map a lot easier. Instead of just taking a blank piece of paper and drawing lines all over and hoping you get to a destination.

Christian Klepp 19:09

That’s absolutely right. I mean, like you know, there’s so many analogies out there. The one that I like to use is the real estate one, because a lot of people just almost get that one immediately. It’s like building a house. Right? And you build a house, you’ve got those construction materials, you’ve got the contractor. It’s all ready to go. But you don’t have the architectural blueprint. So everyone’s standing there, like okay, well, what’s the house gonna look like when it’s done? Right? Yeah, so, same story, different characters, but like, yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 19:42

Right.

Christian Klepp 19:43

Eddie, we are getting to the point in the conversation, because this show is very much also about actionable tips. Right. So I’m gonna throw in this caveat here, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. At least to my knowledge, demand gen campaigns can’t be done in a day, in an hour, right, but I think it would be important to say that, you know, that said, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take action right now. So, alright, I’ve set that up quite a bit now. So here’s the question. So if somebody is listening to this conversation that you and I are having, and they’re like, You know what, we’re actually thinking about putting together a demand gen campaign. But we don’t have six months to put this together, we’ve got to like, we’ve got to move with like right now. So what are like three to five things that they can do after they listen to this conversation?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 20:35

First thing you need to do is you need to get a hold of your customers, you need to get in touch with the people that said yes, and find out why they said yes, because there are so many times where we think we do the me, we, us speech, where, you know, it’s all our vernacular, this is what we think are the features and benefits, but go figure out why people said yes, and I can promise you that you’ll be baffled, and some of the information that they will share with you. And the reason I say that is because of a reverse engineering with intention, we need to know how we’re going to create more yeses. So why would we not – If we want to create more yeses, go to those which have already said yes, and find out why. Find out what problems we’re solving. And for the first, at least three weeks of this essential campaign, I would be first routing that because it’s going to save us a lot of time from having to continue to guess and guess and guess and guess. And then from that information and findings, you’ll find out what’s really valuable, what’s really attractive, what’s really scalable for your product. And then you develop messaging all around that. You find out what those real features and benefits are. And then so from that, what do we build from that, we’re now looking at the keywords we can define our specific audience that we need to look into. And then if we’re talking about like platforms and executional tactics, we can just start creating content yesterday. And if we have budget for it, looking into some search engine marketing, more so via Google ads, because the dollar for dollar spend is there right now. There’s a data tied to it, you can track 10 different KPIs and metrics at any given time, it ties in directly to your website via Google Analytics, at all low to no cost. And then through that, again, creating some scalable content, not just you know, blogs and white papers, turn that written form into voiceover, if you get talking head videos, those are the most scalable pieces of content on planet Earth, because that video of somebody speaking can turn into audio form, you can keep the video into shorter forms. And you know, I’m telling you to stack content, and bank and bank and bank and bank all with intention. And that’s all just with a smaller frame. So, hit a couple of points there. But that’s your Quick Fire, hey, here’s what we’re doing. You know, the first six months of this, that would be the beginning, how we set it up, and how we really create a ramp for ourselves.

Christian Klepp 22:42

Fantastic advice. And I appreciate that you were able to like give that big rundown on like just a matter of like one or two minutes. I mean, I’m sure the audience will appreciate that. And I think you know, the other thing that you did just a while ago, Eddie, inadvertently came up with the with the title of this episode, reverse engineering with intention. I love it.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 23:06

That warms my heart because it’s like my mantra and I feel like I say it in decent amount. But it’s just sometimes you hear things in life, and they just slap you in the soul. And you’re like, wow, that’s sticking with me. So that is like, that is a bumper sticker on my soul train for lack of a better term. Like that phrase for sure it for me, so awesome man.

Christian Klepp 23:23

That was great. That was great. And I appreciate how you were able to summarize all these actionable items in such a short, short timeframe. Okay. Love it or hate it, man, metrics. So what are some key metrics, and I know we can go down a very deep rabbit hole here, but like this some top key metrics that B2B marketers should be looking at when it comes to demand gen.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 23:49

Sure, I mean, so a lot of people like to get caught up in impressions, and like to get caught up in click through rate of ads and things along those lines, but, but I’m a big attribution guy. And I’m also huge on running multiple campaigns side by side, specifically when it comes to search engine marketing. And so I like to flip some ideas on their head and knowing that a lot of people also focus on just leads produced. What about pipeline, people don’t focus enough on pipeline creation, right. And so with the attribution that we have set in place, and my obviously recommendation that is so data driven, and tied, as soon as somebody makes an interaction on your website, you can see a lot of your popular activity. And so knowing if you have a CRM that is connected to a lot of these activities, as it should be in 2024 and beyond, but pipeline, like pipeline velocity and pipeline creation, because that’s the end all be all. That’s the person who thinks about leads that gets smarter and wiser. Thinks Okay, what about pipeline, because it’s not as flattering as a number sometimes as those leads, but leads comes as a simple, synthesizing of, okay, how much web traffic did we get and the thing how much web traffic do we need to get to get this many clicks to get this many leads, so you can synthesize and break it down, then you’re going to chip away at that big block of marble. But if we’re trying to really create conversions now we can get convert that demand specifically, I want to know what’s going on the pipeline, and then that pipeline velocity straight up.

Christian Klepp 25:18

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. My friend, I, I kind of get this feeling that you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but please stay up there for a while longer, at least for this next question. Right? So what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why? And I like to ask you to just choose one, One Ring to rule them all.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 25:43

Oh….So one thing that just needs to stop, and I’m going to go back to the trade shows, but I need to be very, very direct. It is not the vehicle. It is the execution, it’s the driver. I think people need to stop expecting that they can continue to treat trade shows the same way. Because the buyers have changed. So why are we not adjusting with that specifically, and then even deeper within trade shows. So we’re keeping it within one lane is that follow up strategy… Like what are we doing to let people know we’re there? What is our engagement while we are there? And then how are we actually engaging with people and trying to convert after the fact, like people just really need to change their mindset. Some people are, and it’s a beautiful thing. And that’s why you’re seeing people just crush it at trade shows and do things that like man’s you see that, oh, you got to go to this booth. And creating demand, like you have to be there, you have to experience this. And then there are others who are just putting up a fold table, putting a plain black cloth, thrown some parts on the table, maybe they got a stand up banner, and they got two guys, two older guys who are sitting around their phones and laptops for a stinking week, and you’re paying them per diem and all that stuff, and you’re wasting so much money and their time.

Christian Klepp 26:59

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, and I think this was your point, you almost have to treat it like its own ecosystem, right? Pre-show, during show, post-show, right? What was the experience of the visitor gonna be like, each step of the way. And I’m not talking about spamming the living crap out of it. I’m talking about like, how do you… How do you, I think that was your point, how do you actively engage with them before they even show up? While they’re there? After they’ve gone? What happens on the next trade show, etc, etc.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 27:32

People just treat trade shows like, like instead of a component of the overall strategy that it is the strategy and it’s just, they put a lot into it because that’s that’s all a lot of people know. And it’s a silly process and, like the vehicle, don’t like the way people drive the vehicle.

Christian Klepp 27:52

Yep, yeah. No, I hear you. I hear you. Okay, my friend, here comes the bonus question. What is the name of Frodo’s sword?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 28:06

Sting.

Christian Klepp 28:08

Boom, there we go. And what’s so special about that sword? What did it do?

Eddie Saunders Jr. 28:17

It turns blue when Orkestra Nair and he got it from it Bilbo.

Christian Klepp 28:22

Bam. Well done. Fantastic, Eddie, man, we could stay on for another hour, you know, talking about demand gen, and Lord of the Rings, you know, concurrently. But you know, in the interest of time, I just want to thank you for coming on the show for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. And I hope they get a lot of value out of this conversation. So please, tell us a little bit about yourself and how folks can get in touch with you.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 28:49

Yeah, so I’m a proud solopreneur and that fractional marketing advisor along with my specific journey, so make sure you check me out EddieSaundersjr.com. So feel free to check on my website. Or you can just hit me up on LinkedIn, Eddie Saunders Jr. I’m ever present, always posting, and you can always find me in the comment section.

Christian Klepp 29:10

Fantastic. Once again, Eddie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Eddie Saunders Jr. 29:16

Thank you.

Christian Klepp 29:18

Bye for now.

View Details

How B2B Companies Can Grow Through Podcasting

B2B podcasts that have been around for a few years have managed to build a credible online presence as well as a loyal audience who tunes in regularly. It would then make sense from a strategic perspective for B2B companies to leverage these podcasts to help grow their own brands. How can they do it? What should they be looking out for?

That’s why we’re talking to marketing expert Eric Melchor (Founder, B2B PodPros) about how B2B companies can grow through podcasting. During our conversation, Eric discussed why he feels this is an untapped opportunity for B2B brands and highlighted which pitfalls to avoid. He also talked about the three ways to grow, the importance of having a good pitch, and which metrics to pay attention to.

https://youtu.be/EhwkyIZyYlY

Topics discussed in episode

• The 3 ways brands that can grow through podcasting
  • Guest-podcasting [3:02]
  • Creating your own podcast [14:56]
  • Podcast sponsorship [17:55]
• Some pitfalls to avoid [6:13]
  • Paying agencies to get you booked
  • Not doing any research on the show
• Eric shares some tips from his experience on pitching yourself to be a guest on podcasts [11:07]
  • Show the hosts that you listened to the show
  • Finding out if you have a common connection and mentioning them
  • Sending reminder emails the right way [26:43]
• Eric explains why companies should use B2B influencers [28:52]
• Eric provides some actionable tips: [33:10]
  • Guest-podcasting vs. sponsoring
  • Go for mid-roll ads
  • Let the host write and read the script
  • Sponsor 7-10 podcasts over 4 weeks to test the results
  • Use a UTM tracking link
• Erics explains why people do not just tune into podcasts to learn something. [41:29]

Companies and links mentioned

• Eric Melchor on LinkedIn
• B2B PodPros
• Innovators Can Laugh Podcast
• Bonjoro
• Optimonk

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Eric Melchor

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

All right, everyone. Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to make podcast sponsorships cool for B2B brands. So coming to us from Bucharest, Romania, Eric Melchor, welcome to the show, sir.

Eric Melchor 01:08

Thank you, Christian for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Great to have you on the show, Eric. I think this one was many months in the making, I believe. And, you know, thanks to you, of course, for introducing me to this wonderful community of podcasters. And we’re probably gonna get to that in a second. And I’m just really looking forward to this conversation, because you are probably the first person I’ve had on the show, who is talking about this specific topic. So yeah, looking forward to it, man.

Eric Melchor 01:37

Yeah, no, same here. I mean, printing right now is the term B2B influencers. And when people think about that, they’re thinking about the people that are on Twitter, or Tik Tok or Instagram, even LinkedIn. Right. But podcasting, no one’s really talking about podcasters. And I don’t know if we fall into the influencer category. But in my mind, we certainly do because we can help elevate a brand through our podcasts. And you know that, you know that as well as I do that we have a very valuable audience. It may not be the 10s of 1000s of followers that some people may have on Twitter, but even just a few hundred listeners who are loyal, who tune in, who like your show, that’s a very valuable audience for people in the B2B space.

Christian Klepp 02:27

Absolutely, absolutely. FYI, um, in terms of Twitter, I think they call that X now (laugh)

Eric Melchor 02:33

It’s cool, man.

Christian Klepp 02:38

I’m glad you brought that up, Eric, because, you know, let’s jam on that a little bit further. Right. Like, you know, in terms of how B2B companies can grow through podcasting, why do you believe, you know, it’s such an untapped opportunity, because it’s gonna sound so biased coming from me, but yes, I think podcasts, you know, there’s something to be said about tapping into those.

Eric Melchor 03:02

Well, I say it because I lived it. And I think there’s three ways that brands can go grow through podcasting, the first, the first exposure that I had to one of these ways was when I worked for Bonjoro, SaaS startup based out of Australia a few years ago. And I was working with Casey Hill. And he is kind of known throughout the SaaS and B2B space. But we had this idea of why don’t we just go as a guest on podcast and talk about how Bonjoro really helps brands elevate their personal customer journey with our customers, and combine the three of us, me, him and Ali, we went on more than 100 different podcasts, talking about Bonjoro. With over the span of about 12 months, we looked at the data, as measured by what did you hear about us, and when people were signing up for the product, and more than 10% of new customers were saying through podcasts. And when we looked at the data, it really amounted to about an extra $300,000 in annual reoccurring revenue that podcasting was, you know, was helping us and we weren’t really paying to go on these podcasts. There’re services out there that you can pay and different agencies and they charge anywhere from maybe $300 to $500 to get you booked on one podcast. We just we just created a system that worked for us. It was very simple. We would listen to the podcast first. So we would actually have something too. We would know what the podcast was about what the host and star was about. And we kept everything in a spreadsheet. And so when we reached out, we could say, hey, we enjoyed your show, we heard this episode, and we think we can add some value to your audience by talking about X, Y and Z. And so we had a pretty good pitch. And over time, we became really successful with that. And then I went to another SaaS startup called Optimonk. And I repeated that same playbook. Guest-podcasting and I went on more than 40 podcasts on their behalf talking about the benefits their product provided. And sure enough, nine months later, once I started doing that, about 10% of new customers were indicating that they heard about Optimonk through podcasts. And it was just the guest podcasting. So that’s one of the ways that I think brands can grow, is through guest-podcasting, going on telling your story, you know, telling your mission, telling your customer success stories about your product, and sure it’s not one of those things that you can scale very quickly. But if you, if you keep at it, and even do maybe one interview a week or something, you know, within six to nine months, you’ll start seeing, you’ll start seeing an impact on the traffic that’s coming to your website, as well as the new customers that you’re generating, that if you can give a decent interview, as well as the new customers that you’re generating from this effort.

Christian Klepp 05:48

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. We’re probably going to get into that in more detail later on. But I’m gonna move us on to a common mistakes. Or let’s say, what are some of the common pitfalls that B2B marketers should be looking out for or try to avoid when they’re trying to grow through podcasting?

Eric Melchor 06:11

Yeah, I think some of the pitfalls are when paying agencies to get you booked, because many times they may get you booked. But it’s on a podcast that one probably doesn’t have a large audience or two is not very consistent. And so when you are researching the podcast that you do want to go on, you should use a search engine, like maybe listen notes, and use their filters, and only look for podcasts that had an episode published within the last, let’s say, 20 days, because you really just want to be on a podcast that’s consistent with their publishing, that’s at least putting out maybe one episode one new episode every other week. So I think that’s a big mistake is hiring an agency that’s not really doing that for you, and is getting you booked on podcasts that are not very consistent, or just not that reliable, just don’t really have a good audience, right. So you want to get yourself booked on podcasts that have like maybe a minimum of 30 episodes that are published, and that have a consistent publishing frequency. So I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes and paying for it too. I mean, this is something that you can do on your own, the money can add up very, very quickly, if you’re paying, let’s just say, $300 to get booked on one podcast, three shows that’s already $1,000. I mean, 10 shows, you know, you do the math. Pretty quickly, you’re talking, you know, three, four grand for just 10 shows. So if you, if you really want to move the needle, you got to get on at least 30 podcasts. And so if you’re paying an agency to do this, this can escalate very quickly into you know, $10,000 or more, versus if you just cut out maybe two to three hours a week and do it yourself. You don’t really have to spend any money out of your pocket, you may pay for a search engine to be able to utilize listen notes for like a day or two. And that’s maybe $20. But for the most part, that’s it. Oh, of course, you want to get a good microphone, because that always helps. But you can find a quality microphone for less than $100 on Amazon, somewhere.

Christian Klepp 08:11

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. I’m just gonna go back to what you said about avoid going through agencies because you know, truth be told a lot of these agencies reach out to me. There’s two of them that I work with, closely, I’m not going to say that they always reach out, but when they do, they do send me qualified guests. And when I say qualified, and it’s not to put anybody else down, it’s just guests are the right fit for the show. Right. But I guess the follow up question to you, Eric, is why do you feel like, cost factor aside… But what why do you feel that this this booking agency business is so lucrative? Right, if people can do it by themselves, and why do they still go to these agencies?

Eric Melchor 08:56

I think they just don’t have the playbook. And one of the biggest reasons is that it’s hard to find the host’s email address, because it’s rarely listed on Spotify or Apple podcasts. 99% of time, it’s not. And a lot of podcasts don’t have their own website. So you can spend a lot of time looking for the host’s contact information. But again, that’s probably one of the biggest reasons why they think, Okay, well, I don’t know who to reach out to, I don’t know who to contact. But again, you could pay a service like listennotes.com a search engine and pay like $20 to have that information that access and you can access the host’s contact information for 95% of the shows that are listed on their, my podcasts, Innovators Can Laugh, it’s on there. If you look it up, you’ll see me and you’ll see my email address. And for 95% of the other podcasts that are on there, you can find the host’s contact information.

Christian Klepp 09:51

Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So besides avoiding or not using these agencies to get you on podcasts. Well, what are some other pitfalls that people should like watch out for and try to avoid?

Eric Melchor 10:08

Yeah, I think some of the pitfalls are not listening to an episode. Because you don’t really know what to expect, right? If you’re going on a podcast and thinking that all podcasts are the same, I think that’s really a mistake. And so, a good podcast host is going to educate you before you even come on the show. But you should still, you should still do a little bit of homework and listen to at least one episode. So you get the style of the podcast host, and you get a feeling of what to expect, the type of questions of what to expect. Every podcast is different. Some may be more serious than others, some may ask you numbers behind your business and get into details about the financial projections. What is your, you know, expected revenue for 2024? How many employees do you have? You know, they may get into the gritty details of like, the stuff that you can pull from your spreadsheet. Other podcasts may be more coffee like casual conversation like, and they want to know about your entrepreneurial journey. You know, can you share stories from your childhood of when you first became an entrepreneur? Or how did you know that you really wanted to be a B2B marketer? You know, can you share some stories about your background, right? So that’s a big mistake is going on to a show, and not having any idea of what the show is, who their audience is, and the type of questions that you can expect. And it just, it really just takes 15 minutes to go listen to an episode, even if you just put it out 1.5x speed. Do that for one episode, and you can get a good idea of who the podcast host is and what to expect. So I think that’s another pitfall that a lot of guests make, is not doing their research.

Christian Klepp 11:43

A little bit louder for the people in the back please, because that is such an important point. And I’m gonna just put that one in layman’s terms. Don’t wing it!

Eric Melchor 11:55

Don’t wing it. Yeah absolutely.

Christian Klepp 11:58

We’ve all been on shows, or we’ve all listened to podcasts where I’m gonna say either or, it’s either the host, or the guest, or both are just absolutely winging it. And it comes off, like it’s very obvious, right, like in the conversation that they both don’t know anything about each other.

Eric Melchor 12:19

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s two things, the host has to do his part, his or her part by asking beforehand, what topics can you talk about, you know, what is the topic you can talk about for 30 minutes, without any preparation? And okay, now, the other part is your part, you know, as a guest, I love it. I love it. And it rarely happens. But I love it when a guest sends me like, Hey, here’s some questions, you probably already have your set of questions you want to ask me. But if you don’t, here’s some questions that you can ask me. Right. And that gives the hosts just sort of like a playbook to follow if he doesn’t have one already. And he knows that, okay, I can go down this journey, go down this path if I ran out of questions to ask or if I didn’t do my homework, right. And most guests don’t do that. I think if the host is not doing his or her part, then the guests certainly should do their part and not just winging it by just showing up on the day of the recording, going inside the studio and saying I’m here. That’s not going to be a good show. Right, Chris? It just says… Not really. No, no, I’ve listened to your show. I’ve listened to a few episodes, I know that the guests provide a lot of value. And I know you always want to go into the details. And so they should have good clear Chris examples of what it is that they’re talking about. So I know that this is going to be a show where Chris you’re going to be holding your glass of wine, or you know, have a few beers already. And we’re just gonna, you know, BS our way through the episode. No, this isn’t one of those shows.

Christian Klepp 13:48

No, no. No alcohol involved whatsoever. Like, I think we all go wild with a little bit of water. (laugh) No, absolutely. Absolutely. Eric, I’m gonna go back to those three approaches that you were talking about, you know, regarding how folks can grow through podcasting. So can you talk to us about the three methodologies again, or just elaborate on them a bit further? And the pros and cons if you can?

Eric Melchor 14:17

Yeah, so the first one I talked about was guest podcasting. You know, the pros there is that you can do it on your own. If you do it on your own, it’s fairly inexpensive. A little bit of time involved, right? The cons are, is that it can take a while. I mean, it could take roughly 9 to 12 months before you start seeing some results. And that’s if you’re consistent, that’s if you’re going on at least 3 to 4 podcasts a month. The other con there is is that maybe the shows that you’re going on, just don’t have the kind of audience that you should be targeting. So you do need to do some research and target the right shows there. Right. The other two ways.

The other second way is actually creating your own podcasts and a lot of brands are starting to do this, the pros and cons of this… The pros is that, okay, it’s like your own media channel. And once you start building an audience, you have an audience of loyal listeners who learn a lot about you, because your in their ear for 30 minutes, right? The con is, is that it can take two to three years to build an audience, especially if you’re a brand that is not well known. Right? If you’re a brand that’s fairly new, that’s only been around maybe three or four years, and unless the owner is hosting the podcast, and even then it that doesn’t guarantee that you’re gonna have this like this big group of listeners right off the bat, because if the owner is not well known, then it’s going to take some time building a podcast. You’re competing with several others that are already out there and in your space. Even if you niche down, it’s still a big ask to tell somebody, Hey, for 30 minutes, go listen to my show, right? It’s not like a blog link that they can click on and they can quickly skim. And within 20 seconds, they know whether or not it provided value. It’s not like a lead magnet that they can go and think, Okay, let me just enter my email address. And I can see what this is about. No, it’s making a conscious decision to put a headset in their ear, and listen to you and give you at least you know, five minutes to see whether or not it’s going to be something valuable for them. It’s a huge ask, most people would rather rather pull out their wallet and give you $5, then say, Okay, let me spend some time listening to your podcast, because it takes time and time is the most valuable resource that we have. And the other cons are that it takes a lot of work. The average production time and I’ve asked dozens of podcast host this question, how long does it take for you from A to Z to produce a show, from booking the guests, you know, from recording the show, editing the show, getting the distribution ready, creating the podcast cover art writing the notes for the show, right? It takes on average, 8 to 15 hours per show, every week, every week. So you got to have somebody that’s dedicated, full time, minimum part time, right. But you have to have somebody who’s dedicated who has the bandwidth and the energy to do this every single week. And that’s why I think 95% of podcasts don’t even make it to Episode 11 is because the host does not realized the amount of work that’s involved. So the cons are real big here. It takes two to three years to start building an audience. And then second, there’s just the production time to put it to show, to create a show. It’s a lot every week. And that’s why most podcasts fail, right? The pros is if you’re willing to have that sort of resiliency, that tenacity and that persistence that in the long run, you can have a pretty good audience and have a good loyal following. But again, it’s going to take a while. Now the third topic, Christian.

The third topic is sponsorships. And this is where I think a lot of brands don’t really see the potential and how powerful it is to do podcast sponsorships. Some brands have done this. There’s been especially in the DTE space, there’s been leafy greens that has actually scaled by podcasting through sponsorships, they started sponsoring Tim Ferriss, along with some other podcasts. And they were spinning. It was their main growth lever and they became $100 million brand because of podcasting. There’s been a few other brands that have done it really well. But in terms of like the SaaS space and the B2B space, haven’t been a lot of brands that have dipped their toe and podcast sponsorships. There’s been a few out there Chili Piper is one of them, Dealfront is one of them. Active Campaign is starting to try to get in on this. But some brands that are fairly well known like HubSpot have gotten into this like three four years ago. It was one of the reasons they came out with the My First Million podcasts. And they said okay, we’re not just going to sponsor one podcast, we’re going to sponsor about six of them. And so the podcast network they created started with six or seven podcasts. Now there’s more than 30 different podcasts in the HubSpot network. And they support these shows. They they obviously they sponsor them, meaning that they do finance the shows, they give the host some financial backing, but they realized that a lot of their customers and future customers were no longer just reading blogs and white papers. And so they want to be in front of an audience where their future customers were and that was newsletters and podcasts. And so they realize the power that podcast sponsorships had early on. And they got in on the ground, you know, four years ago. And I think there’s a lot to be said about HubSpot, a brand that it’s got a market cap valuation, I think somewhere around $15 to $20 billion. And a lot of it has been their innovation when it comes to marketing. They were very quick to come up with different tools early on, like a website grader, they had a lot of different blog posts, a lot of different lead magnets. And then the past few years has been all about podcasts.

Christian Klepp 20:11

Thanks for sharing those man. That was fantastic. Just going back to a couple of things that you mentioned. So first off, speaking of Active Campaign, I had the pleasure of interviewing Casey Hill, and that episode will be published shortly.

Eric Melchor 20:27

Good, good, good. Good. How was he as a guest?

Christian Klepp 20:31

Oh, dynamite man. He handled all the questions and the spontaneous follow up questions like a champ. Right. I mean, it was it was super insightful as I expected, because we had a great pre-interview call. A lot of the tips were very actionable, because I tend to ask that kind of question on the show. If somebody didn’t have two years to deliver, what if they had only six months or three months to show some kind of indication of progress? Like, what would you advise them to do? And he was, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Alright. So it was a great conversation. It’s a great conversation.

Going back to your point number two about creating your own podcast… that really resonated with me, because I can tell you, when I first started out, during lockdown, I had a couple of people, not many, but there were a few that said, like, come back to me when you’ve got 20 episodes. They didn’t want to be interviewed until they saw like, yeah, you’re gonna… let’s see if you stick around long enough. And so yeah, I’m with you on that one that, that it does take time. And it took some time to actually get some guests on that I felt like, okay, these guys are, you know, they’re prominent, I’m gonna say prominent figures in their space. Not necessarily because of the number of followers that they have on LinkedIn, for example, but just really, because they put out a lot of great pieces of content. I’ve listened to a couple of their interviews and other podcasts, it’s like, you know, listening to them, I’m like, wow, this person, you know, I should try to reach out to them. And we’re gonna get, we’re probably gonna get to that in a bit. But cold outreach is not an easy thing to do. There is I think there’s an art and science to it. It’s not something where you… There’s a couple of camps out there. I’m not the kind of person that believes in just you know, templating everything because I think that that type of outreach should be personalized. Case in point, Eric, when you reached out to me, right? It was very clear that you had actually done your homework on me, which I really appreciate it. Right. Because there’s some people out there I got one this morning. Hi, I am so and so forth. Right. And this is the reason why you should have me on your podcast. I’m like, did you even listen to my show? (laugh)

Eric Melchor 22:48

I get those all the time. Oh, man. Yeah, I hate those. I’ve been published in USA Today are all these different like major websites, and I’ve been featured this and I’ve been on this podcast.

Christian Klepp 23:00

Yeah, Me Me Me Me Me Me… Right?

Eric Melchor 23:02

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp 23:07

Cool. Moving us on to the next question. And you kind of brought it up already, but the importance of having a good pitch. So talk to us about that. Walk us through your thought process. And most important of all, for the benefit of the audience. Tell us what you think works and doesn’t work.

Eric Melchor 23:25

Yeah, so if we’re talking about pitching to be a guest on a podcast, right. You get a lot of these every week, I get a lot of them every week, and a lot of them just go straight to my trash bin. I don’t respond or even reply. And the reason why I don’t is because I want somebody who has actually listened to my show. And know what the show is about, knows the show’s format, knows my style. And the pitches that worked really well when I was podcasting, guest podcasting on behalf of Bonjoro and Optimonk, where the pitches were two things: I referenced a previous episode and I talked about what it is that I learned or what I appreciated about that episode. Right. That was number one. And that was the most important thing because it showed the hosts that I actually listened to the show, right, and I got something from it. Right. Another thing that worked out and I tried to do this whenever I could, was that I could reference somebody else who also listened to the show, or maybe was also a guest. Right? So there was a lot of podcasts, especially now when I was at Optimonk. And I would try to get on the show. I could say, Hey, I noticed you recently had so and so on the podcast. And so and so and I actually did a webinar together or we collaborated together, or we share the same views or he turned me on to your show. So just by having that, that reference of somebody else that they knew that I could reference and that we were in the same circles, that helped a lot too. So whenever I had those two things on there, and then finally, is, the last thing was the three topics that I could talk about, you know, I think your audience could benefit from either boom, boom, boom, three bullet points, three different topics. And if the first email didn’t work, then I would send a follow up email. And I would actually introduce a second set of three topics, three new topics that I could talk about, and just say, hey, if the first three topics didn’t interest you, I could also talk about, you know, EDF, as well. But the first two things, were just proving that I actually listened to an episode and referencing that in the very beginning, and then also tying in a person that we had in common that they knew. And that I also knew, that we were in the same circles.

Christian Klepp 25:46

So in plain English, do your homework, please. (laugh)

Eric Melchor 25:52

Do your homework, I mean, yeah, I get pitched all the time, and 99% of the pitches just go in the trash, because they don’t do their homework.

Christian Klepp 25:59

Well, and it goes back to something that you said earlier, Eric, it’s such an important thing, a lot of people out there tend to skip it, they just don’t bother to actually do any background research on you, or the show, or the topics that are being discussed. It’s like, it’s the spray and pray approach. And let’s see, you know, if we get any response to this at all, and they just throw you into an email sequence, right? Because, you know, to your point, plenty of these emails, either go directly to my spam folder, or I just ignore them. And then, you know, two days later, they said, you know, they activate their email sequence of like, hi there, bumping this up, even bumping this to the top of your inbox, which is a phrase I absolutely avoid like the plague, right?

Eric Melchor 26:43

Yeah. Yeah, I had a system where I had a Google spreadsheet. And I have the host’s name, a link to the podcast, and a link to an Evernote. Because for every podcast that I tried to get on, I would create a new Evernote. And as I’m listening to the show, I would jot down my notes in there, who the guest was, what the episode number was, and then whatever takeaway that I could reference in my pitch. And the great thing about doing your homework is that you actually learn a lot. And so as I’m scrolling through the episodes, I’m thinking that sounds interesting, you know, let me listen to that. And usually half the time, I would learn something new that could benefit me. Maybe it was something that I didn’t know that you can do in ChatGPT, or about a new tool that I had no idea of, and so many times, I was actually learning something new, I would write that in Evernote, and then I would put that link to the Evernote in a Google sheet so I could reference. And then if I didn’t hear back. Seven days later, I would go back and send a follow up email. And I would list you know, other things that I can talk about. But I would say my average pitch rate, the first email was maybe 25% that it would work and I would become a guest. And then the follow up, added another 8% to 10%. So my conversion rate probably went up to almost 35% by sending the follow up email. And then sometimes I would send a third follow up, and I would actually get, you know, that conversion rate up closer to 40%. Because we’re all busy, a lot of people are getting dozens of emails every day. And sometimes we’ll mark that and say, I’ll get to that later. And we just never do. Right. So it doesn’t hurt to follow up. I think if you’re in business and you’re selling yourself, this is kind of like sales. You just got to have that… I’m going to follow up. Just know that, okay, don’t think you got ghosted or you just didn’t get a response the first time around. There’s been times where I missed an email. And somebody followed up and I’m like, Hey, I’m sorry that I missed that email. But yeah, I definitely want to do this. People get busy or they just miss email sometimes.

Christian Klepp 28:39

Yeah, well, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. I’m gonna move us on Eric. B2B influencers, should companies use them? Yes or No? And why?

Eric Melchor 28:52

Absolutely, absolutely. Because these B2B influencers, right, they have an engaged following, an engaged audience, and they can reach an audience that your brand probably couldn’t reach, or is going to have a very difficult time reaching and can only do it maybe through paid media. Whereas these influencers, they already have that same audience that’s your ideal target market, your ideal ICP. And so because that audience is already glued in. They are already engaged with that influencer, whether it be somebody on X or podcaster. Right. And anytime that person talks about that product or whatever service they’re using, their ears perk up. There’s been so many things. I bought dried crickets from Tim Ferriss one time. Dried crickets! I was going through a phase where I was making protein shakes. And he was talking about he puts them in his blender, and they have more protein than your average whey protein shakes. And so I ordered a dried crickets. Point is… There’s been plenty of things I purchase from podcasters that I’ve listened to where they talk about a service or a tool or a product and it works with B2B influencers as well. I can’t say so much about people, you know, B2B influencers on X or other channels. But I can tell you, the ones who podcast, whenever they talk about a product, because maybe their show’s 30 minutes and for 30 minutes, you’re not getting bombarded by ads, right? You’re not hearing. It’s not like watching TV or listening to the radio station, where seven of those minutes is going to be ads. No, maybe one of those minutes is going to be about a product or service. And 9 times out of 10, the host has either used that product or service and believes in it and stands by it, and therefore doesn’t mind promoting it. And the audience is going to take note of that.

Christian Klepp 30:44

Okay, fantastic point. I’m gonna play a little bit of a devil’s advocate here, right? Because while I do agree with your point of view, how do you address the doubters out there that say, Well, yeah, but Eric, the cost. You know, some of these guys are really expensive. How can we justify the ROI? You’ve probably heard all this before, right? Like, okay, let’s say, I spent a couple of $1,000 in this one influencer, can you guarantee me like $100,000 in converted leads and sales, etc.?

Eric Melchor 31:14

Okay, that’s a mistake. I believe that’s a mistake if you spend a lot of money just on one influencer. The approach that I advise is that you take a shotgun approach, right, and you do a test. A test with many different influencers. So in my case, my podcast network, I always recommend to brands that we do a minimum of five to seven podcasts that we feature your brand. And then over the next few weeks, you assess the performance. And you find out which podcasts are working, right, because not all five or seven of them is going to be a great fit. Maybe three or four of them will be. And that’s exactly what happens to our clients. They do maybe a three or four week tests, they find out okay, we’re able to track and see that these four podcasts are working, let’s continue that campaign and extend it for maybe another two or three months. And then let’s just do it with those four podcasts as opposed to doing it with the initial seven. So that’s what I advise, I think it’s a smart approach. Just because you believe or maybe you listen to a certain podcast, and you think, Oh, that’s my, that’s the same audience that we want to attract. That may not be the case, you should try to test everything and experiment. But definitely don’t go the route of just sponsoring one podcast. I think that’s a big mistake. The better approach is to do a test over a few weeks, and try to do it with as many influencers or podcasters as you can.

Christian Klepp 32:40

Okay, okay. Well, that’s fair point. That’s fair point. All right. Um, we get to the point in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips. And you know, Let’s appreciate and you brought it up a couple of times already. That it takes time. So all these things can’t be done overnight. Let’s just assume that there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this conversation that you and I are having, what are probably 3 to 5 things that they can take action on right now to help growth through podcasting?

Eric Melchor 33:10

Yeah, I mean, if you’ve got the time, do guest-podcasting. I think that works. And the time is like, Hey, you got at least 9 to 12 months to really test this out. And you got somebody that’s in your organization who enjoys talking about the company’s mission. And the value that you guys provide, by all means, go that route, right. If you don’t have the time, and you’re looking for results very quickly, like within a couple of weeks, right. I say go the sponsorship route. Some tips there, always try to do a host read ad. Host read ad is when the host himself or herself actually reads the script. Don’t do a pre-recorded ad because usually those get skipped over, they just don’t flow as well in the show. Whereas if a person is continuing to hear the same voice of the host, he’s going to continue listening to what that person is saying.

The second thing is, is try to do mid-roll ads. Mid-roll is where it plays within the conversation usually anywhere between minute 5 to minute 15. Those have the highest conversion rates out of the three different ads that you see in podcasting, you have the pre-roll which is at the very beginning. You have the mid-roll and then you have the post-roll. The least converting is the post-roll so I would say shy away from the post-roll ad and stick to mid-roll if you can and then let the hosts write the script. Okay, you can provide talking points. You could provide value proposition for your brand or service. But let the host write it in such a way that he or she would say it naturally. Right. Because that’s going to come across as being genuine. And so I always recommend to brands is like let the host write the the way he or she would be comfortable and would naturally talk about your brand. That’s why you’re paying them. That’s what you pay influencer. You don’t pay an influencer and say, Hey, this is how I want you to say it, this is exactly what I want you to do. No, you’re paying them because 1) they have an audience and 2) they have their own creativity and their own imagination, right. So utilize that, let them do what they’re really good at, right? Same thing with the podcast host. Let them create the ad for you. Right? I think a couple of other tips is like the one I just mentioned, use a shotgun approach, try to advertise or sponsor 7 to 10 different podcasts over a short period of maybe four weeks. And always use a UTM tracking link. Now most people listening to podcasts are like at the gym working out, that’s how I usually listen to my podcasts. Or maybe they’re out for a run. Maybe they’re doing laundry or something like that. And they’re not going to click on the link. But there are some people who will. And when they click on their link to learn more, whatever the call to action is, that link can be tracked if you provide a custom, like a UTM link. And so that way you can measure the performance and see how many people are coming from that link. And so it’s a good way to kind of see which podcast specifically are driving traffic to my website. So always use UTM tracking links for each podcast.

Christian Klepp 36:14

Wow, those are some really great tips. And thanks for sharing those. Eric, I think you’ve been on your soapbox all this while but I’d like to ask you to stay up there a little longer. Just for this next question. A status quo in your area of expertise, but you passionately disagree with and why?

Eric Melchor 36:37

Oh, status quo that I disagree with? Well, I disagree with Okay, I’m gonna throw this one right back at you, Christian. You tell me something that you disagree with first, right? And then, and then I’ll tell you what I disagree with.

Christian Klepp 36:59

If it’s along my area of expertise. So I’m the branding guy. So I’m the branding guy in B2B. And I disagree with that notion… It’s changing a little bit. But I disagree with that notion that branding is not important in B2B. And that’s something that people should be paying attention to… when you know what, when the company, when the company generates more revenue, or when the you know, when the sales are up. It’s not to say that that never happens. But even if that does happen, the funds get allocated elsewhere. Right. And a lot of times, I’ve seen this, you know, people pushing back on branding in B2B because they just don’t feel it’s important. And I always say, you don’t feel it’s important, until it actually becomes a serious issue. And what I mean by that is, your company ends up having little to no differentiation. Your sales don’t know how to answer the question, “what makes you different from the other vendor?” Right? And then they start the, you know, their default is always going to the product features. Right? Yeah. So and I get it, that branding can be a very abstract concept, and especially in industries where it’s all very, you know, we need something logical, and it’s going to be chock full of information and facts. It’s very hard for people to sometimes wrap their head around the concept of the importance of strategic branding. But I’m going to water that down a little bit further, Eric, because, you know, it sounds like a lot of like shop like industry jargon there. Right. So the, the comparison that I like to use to explain the importance of having a strong brand and having a brand strategy is, well in North America, I think, at least, people can relate to this using the real estate analogy. And what I mean by that is, just imagine you’re building a house, right? So you’ve got the piece of land, you’ve got all the construction materials, you’ve got your contractors, everything’s ready to go. But you don’t have an architect’s blueprint. So, while you have the folks there ready to build the house, they don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s done. So what’s that going to end up looking like? Probably a Franken house. So using that, right, using that analogy, and you know, transplanting that to the B2B context, it’s the same for branding and a brand strategy, because if you don’t have a brand strategy, how are you? You know, that will reflect on things like you know, something as as pedestrian as like your website copy. Right? How are you going to differentiate yourself? How many times and you know, you’re in this space… How many times have you been on a website of a SaaS company and you’ve spent five minutes on their homepage scrolling up in down and you still can’t figure out what it is they do.

Eric Melchor 40:04

Yeah, yeah, there’s been a few times I was actually I went today and I couldn’t figure out what they do. I was on a call with it with the owner. And he was trying to explain it to me. And I still really couldn’t get it. And I was like, Okay…

Christian Klepp 40:19

And it’s in situations like that. And unfortunately, it’s it’s not rare. It’s actually more common than you think. Right? Yeah. And it’s in situations like that, where it will pay off to have that brand strategy, to do that homework, again, to do homework upfront, right? Because if you have that brand strategy in place, you have that good branding, it will also dictate the way that you communicate to others about your company, the way that salespeople talk to potential prospects about your company, or what makes you different. And it will also outline what you should do in your marketing. Right? Because at the end of the day, okay, marketing, you pointed out, white papers, blog articles, videos, podcasts, etc, etc. But what’s your messaging going to be around if you don’t have a brand strategy?

Eric Melchor 41:10

Yeah, I agree.

Christian Klepp 41:11

So, I’m gonna get off on my soapbox. So that’s a status quo that I passionately disagree with, right. B2B is not all dry, boring and factual. There has to be some emotion to it, there has to be some clear differentiation that goes beyond mere product features.

Eric Melchor 41:29

Yeah, yeah. Well, on that note, one thing that I disagree with, because a lot of people think… People will need to tune in to podcasts to learn something. And I’ve heard this many, many times. People really believe that. And I tell them, No, you only to tune into podcasts to learn something. There is a lot of people who tune into podcasts because they just feel like they’re hanging out with the hosts and the guests. And they’re not necessarily tuning into to, to learn something, but they just felt like they’re just hanging out. Because they liked the persona, they liked the way that the style, the conversation. They think the host is, is charismatic, it could be one of their friends that they’re hanging out with. And that that’s something always you know, that’s my response, where, oh, no, it’s got to be all value, every episode is gotta be you gotta turn in, you’re gonna learn X, Y, and Z. Listen, I understand, you’re not going to listen to a podcast, because they tell dad jokes, you know, every time, right? That’s just maybe there is a podcast out there that some people do, right?

Christian Klepp 42:29

Oh I might tune in to that one but like…… (laugh)

Eric Melchor 42:32

It may be so right. But some of my favorite podcasts I tune in, because I just like the hosts, he feels like somebody who I would be friends with, right. And every now and then I learned something from the show, you know, he’s got a guest. And I’m like, Oh, that’s interesting, I learned something interesting. But I don’t tune in expecting every episode to where I’m gonna get this value, and learn something new. It’s just isn’t the case, I’ve turned into podcasts that people rave about. And I listened to it. I’m like, I didn’t like that show at all. You know, I just did not like the style of the hosts. So I believe that people are going to give their attention to something. Sure, there’s some podcasts that are great for learning something. But over time, the longevity, they’ve gotta like the host. And that it can’t just be value 100% of the time, they got to see that personality come out, they got to see that human aspect. And that’s one of the beautiful things about our channel is that is that you really get to know somebody, their characteristics, as well as who they are as an individual by tuning into them every week, you know, for 30 minutes over time.

Christian Klepp 43:41

Absolutely, absolutely. I always say and, you know, in an ideal world, you’d have this combination, but you know, it should be a combination of something that’s interesting, relevant, insightful, relatable, and to a certain degree entertaining. And by entertaining. I don’t mean like, it’s got to be a comedy show. Right? Yeah. Because I do think that that’s really hard to pull off in B2B. If you can pull it off, then I mean, you know, hats off to you. Right? Yeah, that’s just my take on it. All right. So two more questions before I let you go, Eric. So this is the bonus question. So this is something I’ve been trying out since the beginning of the year. And this question has nothing to do with podcasting. You’re from Texas. You said you’ll love Tex Mex food. So I thought I’m gonna ask you something around that. What is your favorite Tex Mex dish? And here comes the deeper question. What kind of memories does that dish involve for you?

Eric Melchor 44:45

Yeah, well, I think the famous chicken enchiladas with the verde sauce, right. And I think I like it so much, because my mom used to make it when I was a kid. And it was one of her dishes that she would make. And so whenever I go to restaurants, it’s always is a choice between fajitas and then the chicken enchiladas with a verde sauce. That’s my favorite. We went to this Tex Mex restaurant here in Bucharest, that’s many considered be the best in the city. You could take their worst Tex Mex restaurant in Houston, and you would still blow this one out of the… (laugh) Yeah, oh man.

Christian Klepp 45:25

All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. So chicken enchiladas.

Eric Melchor 45:31

With the verde sauce, or the green sauce.

Christian Klepp 45:33

Fantastic. Fantastic. Eric, this has been a blast. I mean, as expected, I really enjoyed this conversation. And thanks again for coming on the show. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks can get in touch with you. And that quick question, what is a Texan doing in Romania?

Eric Melchor 45:51

It’s the same reason all American men are here. They met a woman. So a woman is the reason I’m here. My wife is Romanian. And we actually met here 14 years ago. I worked here for one year. And that’s where I met her. I convinced her to move to the States. We were there until COVID started. And then with two little kids. Trying to juggle work and two little kids at the same time. It was just really hard during COVID so we moved here so her parents can help out with the kids. Yeah, people can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. Just look for Eric Melchor. And then they can also check out the service that I provide. We make podcast sponsorships cool for B2B brands. You can learn more at B2Bpodpros.com

Christian Klepp 46:32

Fantastic, fantastic, Eric once again, thanks again for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Eric Melchor 46:38

Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp 46:39

Alright, bye for now.

View Details

How to Successfully Market to a Hispanic Audience in the U.S.

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the United States after English. Many people live, operate, and conduct business in this language. There’s also a large unmet need in terms of marketing to a predominantly Spanish-speaking audience across different industrial sectors. How can B2B companies proactively address this untapped opportunity?

That’s why we’re talking to bilingual marketing expert Hugo E. Gomez (Founder/Legal Marketing Strategist, Abogados NOW) about how B2B companies can leverage cultural and linguistic insights in their marketing campaigns. During our conversation, Hugo discusses which pitfalls to avoid and what roles multicultural best practices and data play in his field. He also elaborates on the fundamental differences between marketing to English and Spanish speakers, and why it’s not enough to just translate documents or assets.

https://youtu.be/6dikvQhNMNs

Topics discussed in episode

• Where businesses fall flat when marketing to a predominantly Spanish-speaking audience in the U.S. [1:12]
• Some pitfalls to avoid [6:13]
  • Defaulting to translation
  • Not leveraging marketing professionals
  • Not having a more nuanced approach
• AI as a language tool for marketing to the Hispanic market [11:07]
• Hugo shares some multicultural best practices with data [15:22]
• Hugo provides some actionable tips: [19:56]
  • Have a webpage in Spanish & add a link on the top menu of the website (in Spanish)
  • Generate 10 keywords in Spanish and run Performance Max Google Ads
  • Run some Spanish social media ads
  • Have someone ready to respond in Spanish in near real time
• Hugo shares his experience helping companies reach out to a Spanish-speaking customer base [24:43]
• Hugo explains why he disagrees with the saying that ‘Hispanic market is incremental, and it’s meant for incremental growth’ [29:48]
• The impact of the potential increase in the Hispanic population that speaks only English [33:07]

Companies and links mentioned

• Hugo E. Gomez on LinkedIn
• Abogados NOW
• Gente NOW
• Hispanic Market Power by Isaac Mizrahi

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Hugo Gomez

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to bridge the language and cultural gap in the US market. So coming to us from Los Angeles, California, USA. Hugo Gomez, welcome to the show, sir.

Hugo Gomez 01:10

Thanks so much Christian, super stoked to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Really looking forward to this conversation Hugo because I have to admit, I’ve been running the show for coming on 4 years. And I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone on talking about this specific topic. So I’m really looking forward to diving into this. So you run a very successful marketing agency. And let me see if I can get this right. You help attorneys to advertise to underrepresented communities in the US specifically around the Hispanic market. So Spanish speaking, right? So for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how B2B companies can successfully market their products or services to the Spanish speaking market in the United States. But before I ask you a question, I’m just gonna, like, drop some figures here as I do. This article is a little bit dated, but there was an article written in Forbes back in 2021. Okay, and so these were the stats. So in the United States alone, 13% of the population speak Spanish at home, so that around, we’re going to quantify that further, it’s a little over 42 million. Spanish is also the most common non English language spoken in the US. No big surprise there, right. This one surprised me, though, a little bit. The United States has also the second largest population of Spanish speakers in the world. So Mexico is at the very top of that list. Alright. So now that we’ve stated all those facts, here comes the question to kick off the conversation. Where do you think they mean, specifically, with regards to the United States. Where do you think businesses fall flat when it comes to marketing to a target audience that is predominantly Spanish speaking?

Hugo Gomez 01:12

Yeah, I think this applies in both the B2C and the B2B market, if you will, it’s assuming that marketing to Hispanics is a language exercise, rather than a cultural exercise. And it’s assuming that it’s a Google Translate exercise or that it’s a function of having the Spanish speaking employee, you know, whether that’s an entry level or a C suite individual sort of take responsibility of managing those communications, I think that’s generally where most organizations we work with fall short, but it’s no fault of their own. It’s a fair assumption, that if one knows the language, that should be good enough, right? But it generally isn’t.

Christian Klepp 03:53

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember you and I, having this conversation previously, where I told you about my experience out in China. And that was the assumption, right, that if you, if you speak the Chinese language, then you’re good to go. There’s probably nothing else that you need to worry about. And boy, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yeah. Right. So to your point about there’s a language barrier, and there’s a cultural barrier, and it was something you said in our previous conversation. It’s also the nuances because if I’m going to try to coined this phrase, not all Spanish is created equal, right? I mean, we have that conversation about there’s different variants of the Spanish language. I mean even if you just look at Latin America itself, right?

Hugo Gomez 04:39

Yeah. Like most Hispanics, or rather, all Hispanics are not a monolith. So, you know, in national campaigns, one needs to thread the needle when speaking to all Hispanics, because the reality is that most Hispanics their value systems are defined by how they or their families immigrated to the United States if they even did immigrate, or if they have any history or recollection of immigration. And so I think that that says a lot about how I believe the communication models can be quite different in South Florida versus that of, you know, let’s call it Southern California. So it’s not just a function of, you know, trying to communicate to this vast market in their language, but it’s by understanding their culture, and threading the needle to make sure that you’re you’re addressing as many Hispanics as possible. While not excluding any of them. I would say, marketing to Hispanics is just generally more challenging than marketing to the general market.

Christian Klepp 05:46

Absolutely, absolutely. Speaking of which, though, I’m glad you brought up that point, because that’s a great segue to the next question. Common mistakes that you’ve seen marketers make out there, and you probably got hundreds of them. But let’s narrow it down to like probably three to five of the top mistakes you’ve seen when it comes to marketers targeting the Spanish speaking market. So what have they done? And what should they be doing to address these mistakes?

Hugo Gomez 06:13

Yeah. I think the first one is, is defaulting to translation, right. And again, it’s a very common approach. And it’s very commonly understood as to why this approach is always usually taken. So let’s put, for instance, a tax professional that wants to work with another business to acquire them as a client. Let’s say that there’s an emerging Venezuelan market in New York, have folks that are starting their businesses or have matured their businesses over the last 5-10 years, that tax professional, if they themselves aren’t Hispanic, might just want to throw a bunch of collateral in Spanish, and just put together some flyers and say, Hey, come see me if you need your tax issues resolved. Or if you want me to file your taxes, or if you have any questions about your business taxes, very common approach. However, that’s not generally a mistake, it’s a mistake, if you think that’s your only option. If you really want to get involved in the community, you want to tell the community that you work with immigrant owned businesses, that’s like doubling down on you understanding their story. It’s telling folks that, you know, you support the XYZ community that makes up that local community, I think that’s really strong when you vocalize it, and when you explicitly say that you’re aware of the changes in the markets. So I think that’s the first mistake that’s remedied quite easily just by being you know, a little aware of what’s going on in the market.

And the second thing is defaulting to not leveraging, marketing, rather, you know, marketing professionals that are aware of the Hispanic market. This is something that can be remedied. So, for instance, let’s put another example with a tax professional. So let’s say this tax professional, has a receptionist, right, or let’s say, a co-owner, both ends of the entry level to the more seasoned professional spectrum, that professional might just say, Hey, I’m just gonna hand off this project, this exercise of this, you know, Spanish social media posts, or this Spanish newsletter or something to the Spanish speaker in our designated Spanish speaker in the office, I genuinely think that’s a huge mistake. Because unless they are themselves a seasoned marketing professional, and that person’s abilities are probably just going to be limited to translation. And again, this isn’t just about translation, it’s about making an authentic push into a community so that you are a trusted agent of that community. And it’s important to not just assume that someone who speaks Spanish will also somehow know how to market effectively to your local community. So I think those two are generally the more common mistakes we see. As far as the more nuanced approaches, you know, we see it rather not so much the nuanced approach, the more egregious errors or assuming stereotypes we see this less than less each year. But you know, each Cinco de Mayo I would be lying to you if I said I didn’t see mariachi or a taco celebration or a margarita office party, you know, which, you know, it’s up to you whether you can tolerate that kind of communications. But generally speaking, again, not all Hispanics are monolithic, and to the point about Cinco de Mayo festivities and using stereotypes to try to communicate that you’re part of the Hispanic community. I think that’s an egregious error that I just generally wouldn’t even recommend working in that universe of thinking. There are just more intelligent, much more sensitive ways to market to the community without defaulting to these tropes.

Christian Klepp 10:22

Well, those are some really, really great points. And thanks for bringing those up. I just wanted to quickly go back to like, for example, point number one, just from your own experience that defaulting to translation. How often do you see especially now, I mean, it’s almost unavoidable subject. But how often do you see people defaulting not just to translation, but to AI translation to just get this over the hill, because they think it’s quicker, it might save them a bit of money. But in the end, it all somehow comes crashing down. Because big surprise, AI translated it the wrong way. They probably translated it. That it looks like Spanish, but no Spanish speaker would ever say it that way. For example, right?

Hugo Gomez 11:07

Yeah, precisely. Yeah. I mean, it happens more often than not. There’s a lot of chatter that, you know, AI is sort of the end all be all to all solutions. But you know, we’ve seen as Language Tools, it’s just not there, it totally understands translation. And it’s actually getting better in assessing how humans actually talk. So natural language, I think it’s actually getting a lot better. But we’ve yet, we’re always on the pulse of what tools are available. Because admittedly, we also want to find out ways to reduce our own costs internally, to do this, to do this kind of marketing effectively, we’ve yet to find one, Google Translate is always getting better. They’re sort of like the leading name and translation, they’re getting a little better in natural language translation, but we’ve yet to see even even OpenAI’s tools, they’re just not there. I mean, the direct translations work. But to give an example of how this could be super effective, and let’s say… I’m going to kind of switch things over to B2C for a moment. If a dentist that is marketing to a largely Dominican Republican community wants to say that, hey, we offer service to you know, Hispanics in the market, we have a bilingual friendly staff, bilingual friendly hygenist, dentists, etc. It’s not enough to say that we speak Spanish, like what you really want to say is we’ll work with you, regardless of your insurance policy, and regardless of your documentation status, because a lot of folks that are in the United States may or may not have their documents yet, or they’re in the process, or maybe they just don’t want to disclose those things. Right. And so there are ways to be more direct. In terms of the copywriting, however, that needs to be written by human like, I can’t tell. I can’t I don’t know what prompt I could write to any AI tool that would produce that kind of copy output. Right? And it’s because that’s such a cultural nuance that only a human could know. Do I believe that at some point AI will get better to the extent that it will know how to tweak things for local regional cultural nuance. Yeah, I’m a big believer, I’m very pro tech. And so I think it will eventually happen. It’s just not happening right now.

Christian Klepp 13:31

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, going back to those other two points that you mentioned, I mean, I absolutely agree that, you know, there has to be, it has to be done by a human, but not just a human, but somebody that’s also an expert in that field. And I believe that was your point, right? I mean, I saw this happening out in China. And you’ve seen that in your field of work that you don’t just, you can’t just rely on the intern to post something on social media, because they happen to speak the language and then you know, that it all falls flat, but even more dangerous, which I think is also what all your other points is you could get into some serious legal trouble. If that translation that’s not accurate. And just because somebody speaks Spanish that doesn’t necessarily make them a qualified, not even a lawyer or just qualified to be able to give an opinion on the piece.

Hugo Gomez 14:25

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you’re in a vertical that has, you know, rules of professional conduct and advertising. Probably more stringent in the legal and medical verticals. But, you know, we see this in financial circles, you know, we see this everywhere, that there’s just more rules and more regulations on how you can, you know, communicate anything to a consumer or the end buyer. So, I think that’s only going to get more difficult. So yeah, it poses a risk to your business. If you think that copy or marketing copy is sort of like a trivial aspect of your business, it could actually be something that takes down your business overnight.

Christian Klepp 15:06

Yeah, exactly. I mean, of course, we all hope that never happens, right?

Hugo Gomez 15:10

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 15:12

Moving on to the next question. And this is kind of like a bit of a combo here. What roles do multicultural best practices and data play in your field?

Hugo Gomez 15:22

The best way to get multicultural best practices is by deferring to the data. Like they are exclusively chained to one another. So I’ll mention, for instance, if there’s a… let’s use a bank, for example, that wants to work with other small businesses. This is especially true for the much larger banks that aren’t just regional, that they’re nationwide, the best thing to do is defer to census data on a local level to find out what the immigrant makeup is of your local Hispanic community. And so with that understanding of what that makeup is, at the county level, or the statewide level, or even on the city level, if you’re in a huge Metro, you can design entire campaigns just for that community. And we’re seeing it right now. I can’t disclose certain companies that are the newer line ones that are doing this, but it’s taking the actual population data, gross population, and finding out how to craft messages just for them. And what we’re finding is that very few of those campaigns work nationally. Generally speaking, you want to run hyperfocus digital and traditional campaigns that are quite local, in order to get buy into the community. So I find that that’s the relationship between best practices and data is that you want to look at data as the starting point rather, for these best practices. The starting point is this census data that’s publicly available. And of course, as these campaigns mature, you can get into more like behavior, segmentation, and sort of like repurchasing behavior down the road. But it does really start with understanding the local immigrant makeup.

Christian Klepp 17:18

Yeah, no, absolutely. Those are really great points. And that’s such a great way of looking at it that you use the data to understand how you can maybe custom tailored is not the right word, but like to have targeted campaigns, yes, specifically for that demographic, because again, not all Hispanics are created equal. Probably they might even have different purchasing behaviors, decision making behaviors. They might have some parts of their buyers journey are similar, but others are different. And yes, the data might help you to like understand why.

Hugo Gomez 17:53

Yes, absolutely. Like if you can, if you can understand what the ethnic makeup is of your local community, you can find out what percentage of X Hispanics came from countries for where there are more visa or immigration privileges with the United States. Whereas on the flip side, where are those immigrants that probably don’t come from countries that don’t have those set privileges, and might be more conservative with their savings, might be less likely to invest? Might be less likely to start businesses. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, how you come into the country will dictate your value system, it’ll dictate your likelihood for generational wealth, that’ll dictate all sorts of aspects that we sort of take for granted, you know, living here in the United States. And I do have to put an asterisk that I know I’m talking a lot about immigrant Hispanics, that’s largely where a lot of my expertise falls in line. However, you know, with Hispanics at large, we find that even multi generationally, rather generations after a lot of these values, while not exclusively inherited all the way through. A lot of these values are carried through multi generationally.

Christian Klepp 19:09

Absolutely. Okay, Hugo, we come to the point where conversation or we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given some already, right, and I’m gonna throw in this caveat, just to say, we got to appreciate that a lot of things that you and your agency do. These aren’t things that you can do in 24 hours, right? A lot of this takes time. That said, if somebody were listening to this interview between you and I, that is facing the situation, and they need to act upon it immediately. So what are like, top level like three to five things that marketers can do right now to… And I think that was the point you made in the previous conversation to experience incremental success in marketing to Spanish speakers in the US.

Hugo Gomez 19:56

Right, I think there’s three that come to mind, and they’re very technical, depending on your level of experience it, they’re all generally technical, I think the first thing to do is, especially in the B2B space, you want to have, at minimum, a page in Spanish, a dedicated page doesn’t need to be a fully translated website, you should leave this as sort of as like your proof of concept for receiving traffic in Spanish. And seeing how the consumer, you know behaves on said Spanish page, you want that written by a marketing professional. You don’t need to engage with an agency, you can engage with a local Hispanic or Hispanic marketing expert copywriter to help draft let’s call it like a one sheet, a Tear Sheet, a one pager page on your site. That is only meant to convert Spanish speakers who visit said page. So that’s sort of like let’s call that the destination. We’re talking total costs to put this together less than $700. More or less, let’s just say $500. For copy, design, the deployment of this page, then let’s run some Google ads. This is where open AI or our ChatGPT is amazing, we actually deployed this strategy. Let’s use banks, for instance, let’s say that a bank wants to market to get into small businesses for let’s just say SBAs. You know, we will tell ChatGPT, hey ChatGPT, Here are 10 keywords in Spanish or rather attend keywords in English like phrases that we know English speakers search for when they look for SBA loans, give me different variations in Spanish. And it will give you a quite pretty decent output of keywords. So when we’re talking about AI translation, for like these kind of one off tactical technical outputs, ChatGPT is quite good. So we like that. So to ask ChatGPT for a Spanish set of keywords, and then upload those keywords to assemble Performance Max Google ads campaign, run however many ad dollars you want to it, presumably you’ll be the only one running ads to Spanish speakers with that list of keywords. Similarly, the third point I want to make is on in Spanish, you want to run some Spanish social media ads, Spanish speakers over index for mobile usage for video consumption on streaming videos, and have a high trust factor in social media communications, including advertisements. So I think those three as long as they’re pointed to that Spanish page that we just discussed earlier, you’re probably ahead of 90% of most organizations, especially in B2B that are trying to make a concerted effort to be in front of Spanish speakers.

Christian Klepp 23:07

Yeah, no, those are some really great points. And just to recap, so the first one was have at least one page in Spanish, run Google ads, and then run Spanish social media ads. Right.

Hugo Gomez 23:19

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 23:20

I would assume also, for your first point, like to have that page in Spanish, obviously, that gets funneled to some location and the back end of the company system. And there has to be somebody that has that capability to be able to answer those inbound inquiries to and that like which…

Hugo Gomez 23:37

Great point Yeah, absolutely. So if you have form fills or phone numbers, yeah, make sure someone’s responding to them in near real time. One other point about the dedicated page, put it on the navigation clearly on your website at the very top, and it shouldn’t say Spanish because I assume that the person doesn’t speak any English. And you want to put it Espanol, click Espanol, or Esatalas Hablas Espanol. Like you want to put that super explicitly. So that if that Spanish dominant speaker comes to your site, they see that link, they’ll know exactly to click there without any real confusion. So we just want to make sure that the person who’s reading your site that speaks zero English, which does happen, has a great, easy, nonrestrictive way just to learn more about your company.

Christian Klepp 24:30

Correct. Correct. Absolutely. Moving on to my next question, give us an example of how you helped the company reach out to a predominantly Spanish speaking customer base, and you don’t have to mention the company’s name.

Hugo Gomez 24:43

Sure. So I’ll speak more to the… I can speak to both B2B and the B2C side. And I originally came from, like commercial finance. So a lot of heavy equipment, loans so to speak. And there’s a huge market of Spanish dominant business owners that need loaders, tractors, lifts, you know, trailers, you name it. And they oftentimes, like most business owners need financing to acquire these massive, you know, pieces of equipment, oftentimes a loan value was above $30,000. And it was such an obvious play to say, hey, let’s kind of find a competitive edge here, by reaching out to these over indexed mobile users who are Spanish speaking, by providing them loan options or loan advertisements on their phones, through social, because we know no one else is doing it. The B2B loan space is extremely competitive on Google and in English, super high cost per clicks, that’s, you know, crazy high acquisition costs. So we were able to undercut the market a little bit by finding clients, rather buyers or borrowers in Spanish, so that, you know, I can’t speak to these percentages, but where I used to work before I started my own companies. That was that was a significant lift to the business, it was just addressing the reality that there are a lot of Spanish speakers who may be bilingual, but prefer to speak in Spanish, who are comfortable working with a loan provider that spoke directly to them in Spanish. I think that is, it’s great story, it’s really fun to describe, because it’s not a market that that one would associate to having a lot of Spanish speakers in it. Secondly, and in the B2C… Like, I can speak to the legal space. And it is B2B parallel, because we’re helping a legal rather law firm grow by means of, of consumer share. There are tons of attorneys on our program, that have attorneys who don’t speak any Spanish, but understand the market potential of reaching out to Hispanics. You know, admittedly, we’ve grown firms from, let’s call it low six figures to definitely low to mid eight figures in a matter of a couple of years. And it’s because they’ve trusted, that it’s not necessarily our companies that doing that’s doing a bunch of magic, we don’t have any black box or, or secrets here. But what we do have is just a lot of trust in the data, we trust that the market population. If you invest in Hispanics, they will see your message, they will commit to your message, especially if you’re the only one in a major metro area that’s attempting to communicate with them authentically. So yeah, in B2B and B2C, it’s, I kind of sorted see, I sort of see them the same now. Because the market potential is just there. It’s waiting for someone or an organization to speak to that community, authentically and directly.

Christian Klepp 28:06

Absolutely, absolutely. And they, you know, obviously, that’s an incredible achievement, you know, the way that you help these companies to grow. But it’s also back to your original point was to identify that niche, niches. Plural. And to… I think, something that you’ve done quite well as identify that unmet need. And for you, it might have seemed so simple, okay, they don’t have someone that speaks Spanish, or, you know, you’ve got this group of like, construction companies or contractors, who, while bilingual, might prefer to be able to converse with somebody on the service provider and in their own language. And that’s definitely an unmet need that that needs to be addressed.

Hugo Gomez 28:52

Yeah, I think we’ve barely scratched… the scratching of the surface, like, really, there’s so much potential here. It’s, you know, Hispanics gonna be 40-45% of the market by 2050. So, especially if you’re a legacy business, like this is all you should be thinking about in terms of finding scale, you know, aside from managing the business as it exists today. You know, if you’re a legacy business thinking about the next 10, 20 years, this should be a no bias of our own because we don’t work with every organization and B2B, but this should be the most important pressing thing that you should be investing in for the next generation.

Christian Klepp 29:32

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Hugo, get up on your soapbox here. What is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Hugo Gomez 29:48

The most common conversation in multicultural marketing, even within the agency community, is that the Hispanic market is incremental, is meant for incremental growth. When we’re talking about the Hispanic market in the United States that makes up 1 out of 5 persons in the United States. I don’t think 1 out of 5 persons in the United States is incremental. Right. And now it does that incremental marketing doesn’t require nuance, the US Hispanic market falls by our definitions in our organizations under three buckets. It’s English dominant, Spanish dominant, or bilingual slash bicultural. There are a lot of case studies that we have of copy that’s written just for English speakers, and just for Spanish speakers that identify as Hispanic. And examples of copy that use both Spanglish as it’s known that work really well. So it’s, there’s two things that we disagree with is that the Spanish or the Hispanic market is Spanish dominant only, it’s much more nuanced than that. And that, if you want to market to Hispanics, that is somehow incremental, it’s not, it’s, again, for the most serious organizations, I’ve spoken to a few, you know, marketing leaders in the Fortune 1000s, they’re obsessed with this topic. They actually don’t work with any agencies that even use the word incremental in the conversation of Hispanic market. So to me, that’s really I’m really optimistic about that. Because it’s addressing the reality that this isn’t just, you know, a way to get new business above and beyond what you’re currently doing. If you’re really thinking about significant market share, you have to think about the Hispanic market is sort of core to your business and future state. So, because if you don’t think about it, someone else is going to, you know, whether it’s through an agency or, or their in house, kind of mindset, they’re gonna figure it out. So I think those are, I couldn’t distill it down to two, or rather one, so I had to pick two.

Christian Klepp 32:07

That’s okay.

Hugo Gomez 32:07

But those two absolutely kind of speak to where we sit on our soapbox quite often.

Christian Klepp 32:15

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna oversimplify what you’ve just said Hugo…

Hugo Gomez 32:20

I tend to…

Christian Klepp 32:22

I just think that assumptions are such a dangerous thing to begin with. In my experience, they become even more precarious when you assume things about another language and culture. Right? Because that can lead companies down a path where they not only will lose money, but they could also fail spectacularly. In terms of targeting specific demographics, right?

Hugo Gomez 32:49

The failures don’t have to exist as long as you defer to other Hispanics about these channels. There’s a fine line between…. Rather I’ll just leave it at that. That’s my last statement.

Christian Klepp 33:07

Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, and now here comes the bonus question. Now. I really, I thought about this long and hard. Okay. So you’re clearly bilingual, English and Spanish. Okay. So we’ve dropped a couple of statistics at the beginning of the conversation. Now allow me to drop just one more. Okay, for the sake of this next question. Right. So according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center, 54%, of people that were interviewed said that they cannot speak Spanish fluently, even though they are Latino. Right? So the assumption there, I mean, it might fall into a couple of buckets, right, the assumption there is that they’re probably already they’ve been in the United States for several generations already. They’re more American than anything. They might be the children of immigrants, who have been, you know, through the school system, et cetera, et cetera, right. And now they’ve become adults. And it might even depend on which industries they eventually enter. And they are working in fields where Spanish is not necessary. Right. So my question to you as somebody who’s bilingual, and you know, clearly, you’re very passionate about the Spanish language. What would you do if you had the power to make it make a change, right, based on this statistic I just gave you, right? We’re not even talking about the decline of the language. It’s not the decline, but it’s just the probability that more and more speakers might grow up, eventually just becoming monolingual. So what is the one thing that you would do to convince these people of the benefits of bilingualism whether it’s professional or personal, if there if you had that one superpower, right.

Hugo Gomez 34:57

What you could do to convince other organizations? Is that right? Yeah, that’s a great step. And there again, as always, there’s always nuance, right? There is a part of that, I believe it’s the same study. I got this from the book Hispanic Market Power by Isaac Mizrahi, which I’ve been selling this book, on his behalf like crazy. I have no participation in this book. He is a friend of ours. But he has some amazing stats on this, on language usage. And even though the majority don’t speak the language. There are no signals that it’s going away, actually, the folks that can speak it, use it more often than not at home. So that suggests that the language is more than likely here to stay in perpetuity barring that there’s no cultural event that nullifies the use of Spanish language in the United States. So that’s the good news there that it’s all trends point to that it’s here to stay. However, with even with that 54% cohort that speaks very little, if any fluently, a decent percent, I think it’s 70 to 80%. respond to any organizations that acknowledge the fact that they are Hispanic. That is why I think the assumption that language and not culture being so important, is generally false. It is a cultural exercise. It’s not a language exercise. It just so happens that in the cultural exercise, you may use Spanish, or you may use an English or you may use both. But the acknowledgement and this happened post 2020, the trend actually reversed after 2020. I won’t get into why because that’s a whole other conversation. But after 2020, there was a massive trend reversal, especially with Gen Zers. That declared overwhelmingly that if a company speaks to them as a Hispanic, even if they don’t speak that much, that much Spanish, that they will more than likely defer to that company or respect that company or just have more affinity to that organization. I think that’s… it’s so nuanced. Right. And it’s an it’s not monolithic. But I think it speaks to how much there is yet to be learned about this cohort. It is. It’s just more complicated than the general market. That’s just what we find. It’s just more complex. But the opportunity’s there and all the all the numbers point to the opportunity. Absolutely staying and remaining, regardless of language adoption.

Christian Klepp 37:38

Yeah, yeah. Well, that those are, those are definitely very interesting statistics. And I think it’s going back to what you said earlier, it is a nuanced thing. But I think it’s also… it speaks volumes of like, where we see all of this going eventually and how this how this, call it what you will behavior or trend is going to evolve in the years to come. But people are readily embracing not just their linguistic identity, but also their cultural identity.

Hugo Gomez 38:11

Yes. Yes. Which is way more important to most persons of color, that whatever language they speak, it’s really just like the acknowledgement of the background. That’s the background.

Christian Klepp 38:22

Absolutely. Absolutely. Hugo, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. I mean, I had a wonderful time. I mean, this was such a great conversation. Please a quick introduce yourself and help folks out there can get in touch with you.

Hugo Gomez 38:40

Yeah, Christian, this is awesome. Thanks for asking such, you know, nuanced questions and, and yeah, really going beyond surface level. I really appreciate that. My name is Hugo Gomez. I’m the founder of Abogados NOW, and Doctores NOW. These are agencies helping the medical and legal verticals market their practices to Hispanic speakers, rather Hispanic persons across the United States. We’re nationwide. And we also operate under Gente NOW (gentenow.com), which is the wing of our business that deals with everyone else outside of the legal and medical verticals. So if you’re looking to tap into the Hispanic community and on the B2B or B2C level, feel free to reach out to me at Hugo@abogadosNOW. You can also… I encourage you to please like really talk to other multicultural professionals across the US. We’re a growing community.

Christian Klepp 39:44

Fantastic, fantastic. And let me see. I’ve been practicing this before we hit record but… Approxima vez, Nosotros hablamos Espanol solamente.

Hugo Gomez 39:57

Se Bien. Gracias Christian.

Christian Klepp 40:04

I promise you, I’m going to brush up on my Spanish at some point.

Hugo Gomez 40:08

That was great. That was good.

Christian Klepp 40:09

But in the meantime, Hugo, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Hugo Gomez 40:15

You too Christian. Thanks so much, man. Talk soon.

Christian Klepp 40:18

Talk soon. Bye for now.

View Details

How to Build Owned Assets that Perform

When it comes to content marketing in B2B, there’s something to be said about building owned assets like newsletters. Many of these assets fall flat if the content is too company-centric, not shareable, and if there is a misalignment of expectations. How can B2B companies develop content that is interesting, relevant, shareable, and will ultimately generate good results?

Join us as we go “behind the scenes” with B2B content marketing expert Casey Hill (Senior Growth Manager, ActiveCampaign). During our conversation, Casey highlights the importance of setting the right goals and performance indicators, and how to think about attribution thoughtfully. He also highlights the pitfalls to avoid, the importance of segmentation and personalization, and some recent trends that B2B marketers should be aware of.

https://youtu.be/2A7QaCsVag4

Topics discussed in episode

• Casey talks about the major challenges of building owned assets [2:34]
  • Being too company-centric
  • Not setting up a timeline and KPIs for the specific objective
• How to address pushback for owned assets within the organization [9:09]
• Casey explains the types of segmentation available and provides examples on how to segment your subscribers [12:46]
• The “hierarchy of importance” with regards to email newsletters – opens, clicks, page visits, and replies [15:47]
• Recent trends in content marketing and building owned assets [20:33]
  • The importance of specificity in building trust
  • Make things skimmable and accessible
• Casey’s actionable tips: [24:53]
  • Identify formats that have been successful
  • Have clear expectations
  • Provide a concrete plan
  • Set leading indicators
  • Explain the potentials of the owned assets to get buy-in
• Metrics for building owned assets: [28:16]
  • Subscriber growth
  • The engagement metrics: opens, clicks, page visits, and replies
  • Direct attribution and last touch attribution
• Casey explains why he disagrees with the notion that marketers should only ask minimal questions to potential customers [30:57]

Companies and links mentioned

• Casey Hill
• ActiveCampaign
• Mutiny Newsletter

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Casey Hill, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to break from the mold in B2B content marketing. So coming to us from Carlsbad, California, USA, Casey Hill, welcome to the show.

Casey Hill 01:09

Thanks for having me, Christian. I’m excited to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Likewise, man, this, this interview has been long in the making. So it’s finally happening. Looking forward to it. And you know what, I should have hit record when you already got on because we started having this really intense discussion. And it’s pretty relevant to what we’re going to talk about today. So looking forward to it, man.

Casey Hill 01:30

Absolutely.

Christian Klepp 01:31

All right. So let’s dive in. So Casey, I think this is the understatement of the month, right? That you are a content marketing expert in every sense of the word, so you not only work for Active Campaign, which is a company that has about 185,000 customers across the globe. That number might have increased since the last time we spoke. And you also teach marketing at UCSD. So that’s University of California, San Diego, for those of you that don’t understand that acronym. But um, for this conversation, I’m going back to what we were saying earlier, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become a big part, not the only thing, but one big part of your professional mission. So how B2B companies can build owned assets like a newsletter, and help it to perform? So let’s kick off the conversation with this question. When it comes to building owned assets, where do you think most B2B companies fall flat? And why?

Casey Hill 02:34

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there’s a couple major flaws. And I think email has changed dramatically over the last decade. So I think one of the first major challenges is folks keep things too company centric. And really, it’s just speaking to their existing audience. So we’ll maybe unpack and get a little bit into the importance of setting goals and having newsletters that are tailored to a very specific audience. But connected to that problem of being too company centric is that the content that is built isn’t inherently shareable. And that is a very big problem, because the name of the game with content today is around distribution. It is around sharing ideas that can be proliferated by in other places, by partners, by customers. And if stuff stays too system agnostic to company centric, you are going to suffer from that.

The other major challenge that I see is that it seems they are not getting their time horizons, right? So you go with this mission of I’m going to launch this new newsletter. And then companies often a month, two months in, might look and say either the subscriber growth isn’t sufficient, or we’re not driving enough end revenue, and they pivot away. And really what needs to happen is for folks to have that clear goal, to have an understanding of what is the purpose of this email strategy? Is it around conversion? Is it around pipeline generation and new leads? I mean setting up a timeline and setting up KPIs that make sense for that specific objective. Because one of the beauties of email is that it can serve both these purposes, I’ve seen firsthand at Active Campaign, an incredible amount of email campaigns that are bottom of the funnel and are driving conversions, a lot of direct revenue attached to email. But then there’s the other side, which is about new lead generation, it’s very different type of content. It’s a different expectation. And so if I was to start out with the two buckets of biggest problems of where people are falling flat, those are the two that I would highlight off the bat.

Christian Klepp 04:34

Wow, you started that one off strong, man. Well done. So couple of things there, Casey. And I think you brought up some really great points there. I think let’s go back to the one about time factor. All right. Because you’ve probably seen that more times than you care to count. I’ve seen that as well. Why do you think companies have such unrealistic expectations when it comes to timeframe and what I mean by that is, to your point, they release a newsletter out into the wild. And in two months, they look at the numbers and say, well, it’s not performing. So why do you think that is, is that the pressure to deliver results is a combination of different factors. What is it?

Casey Hill 05:15

I think part of this comes to the problem with expectations. So one of the challenges is you bring a bunch of content marketers into the room, and all the content marketers kind of feel the same way. We need more financing, we need longer timeframes. But I think it’s important to understand the flip side of this, which is executives, or the CFO, these kind of folks are smart people, too. So why is there pushback, I think it’s important, we don’t just assume that these people are dumb. But we acknowledge that one of the problems is what you don’t want to have happened is to go spend a year, two years, and you keep pumping all this energy into something and you see no end business results, right? Nothing is attributable, nothing is attached. So there has to be some sense of what is a) the goal of this? Like, are we really looking at how many subscribers we can get? Or are we actually looking for how many sales we can get like, what are the metrics that are going to make sense for this goal? And those are going to be different if my focus is let me build pipeline, let me build topical authority. Or how can I convert 20 more people that are already in my flow? And so the first problem, I think, is that there isn’t a good expectation set up front. And so then people are kind of just choosing out of a hat. Oh, we went from zero to 480 subscribers. And I don’t know if that’s going to be sufficient. So start with that clear expectation, connected to that, start thinking about attribution, thoughtfully, meaning have direct attribution, be asking people on intake, how did you hear about us, be trying to look very specifically at what are the highest performing emails in terms of things like say, click, or page views? Right? What is getting the most replies like, really be thoughtful about that, I think that can be really helpful. I won’t go too far off on a tangent. But when I built the LinkedIn program at my company, one of the things that we did, I thought was really helpful, is I said, as a starting point, I want my team to post about whatever they’re passionate about, whatever they want to post about, I want to start completely open. But then what we started to do is we started to study each week, how many views people were getting, how many inbound DMs that were actually related to business that people were getting, what partnerships were started. And we started to map it to the type of content. So instead of me walking in, and just saying this type of content wins, we took a data driven approach where we said, actually write about whatever you want. But now we’re going to pick out these three types of content are getting the most views, the most, inbound DMs. So how do we start to center the team more around that behavior. And also, the team was so much more inspired, because a) they got to write about whatever they wanted initially. And then when we told them, I want you to shift gears a little bit, it wasn’t just the company being like, you know, let me just kind of toe the line, it was data driven, they can see it too, that this is the content, it was performing the best. So it made complete sense. The reason I think that’s relevant is email connect the same way, as you build these emails. And you’re testing different strategies, what subject lines are winning? What type of content is winning and actually driving results? And you’re able to take a very data driven approach there.

Christian Klepp 05:45

Yeah, no, no, that’s absolutely right. And I love how you brought up the topic of data driven approach. And we’re gonna go back to that in a second. The follow up question I have for you, Casey was, and you, you brought it up. It’s almost like a keyword “push back”, right. So you’ve probably dealt with this many times before. But companies get like… B2B marketers internally might get pushback for things like owned assets, for example, people don’t see, for instance, the value and having it or it sounds like a lot of work. It’s gonna take too long to see a return on that. So what would you say to those folks out there that are listening to this saying, Oh, we would love to put out a newsletter. I’m just worried we’re gonna get pushback for that. How should they address that issue?

Casey Hill 09:09

Yeah. So I’m going to start at the top again, just as kind of solidifying what I’ve said, but just be really clear with whoever you’re trying to sell? Is your focus to generate pipeline? Or is your focus to convert leads? Start there, just ask them that simple question. Based on that, then I would basically paint a vision that was very different between those two. So if someone said, my focus is revenue, I would say phenomenal. So what I want to do is I want to start bring in customer stories. I want to start bring in use cases, I want to start bring in very data rich comparisons, not in the fluffy way that those are always done, which is like, not realistic doesn’t build any trust these like matrixes that… but actual real rich conversation that fairly paints these. I would start going deep into all of those bottom of the funnel motions. Right. On the flip side, if someone said to me, I want to generate eyes, I would take a very different approach. One example that I loved, there was this boot company, I think it was like Salomon or something. And what they started to do is they had a newsletter, where each episode of the newsletter, each send of the newsletter was a customer’s incredible epic journey. And that customer was wearing, you know, the boots, but it wasn’t this dry generic, like, let me send you a newsletter about what boot you can buy next, it was getting that affinity building where someone was able to read a story that independently was super interesting, and was shareable and was like, it’s almost like a, like a sports journalism piece. This person summiting this crazy mountain, going through all this adversity, super interesting content. And of course, they were wearing that specific type of boots. But that is a good example of something that can function very well at the top of the funnel. So I guess what I would say here is that newsletters have changed. What you need to sell internally to your organization is that the company updates plus new product releases, plus customer stories, plus new hire, you can’t just have this amalgamation of everything stuffed into a newsletter, that will not work. So number one, we need to have a clear focus. And just to be clear, it is absolutely okay for you to have multiple newsletters, and for you to divide and say, you know, I was working with a university that did an awesome job here. They were like they had one newsletter that was talking about innovative stuff coming out of the university, they had another one that was talking about alumni doing interesting things, and one about like sports. So absolutely feel free to have different ones for different purposes, but don’t shove them all together. And the final kind of connective tissue that I would also say here is around that importance of clear expectations. One thing that is so important, and if you’re taking something away, I hope that you go and look at your own newsletters, and you do this: Have a clear literally on intake expectation, we will be messaging you each Friday at 9am. And you’re going to get a use case about XYZ, that specific, you create that super clear expectation, your engagement is going to go way up, because people aren’t guessing when they’re going to hear from you next, right. And they know when they’re going to get that email exactly what they should come to expect or be excited about. Whether it’s a customer story, and whether it’s, you know, an exciting epic, or whether it’s how we went from zero to 1 million at my agency, whatever your focus is, they have that clear expectation.

Christian Klepp 12:31

Fantastic. Fantastic. Absolutely love it. Talk to us about the importance of segmentation and personalization. Right? You touched on some of these things already. But when it comes to building owned assets, what are some of the key things that B2B marketers need to keep in mind?

Casey Hill 12:46

I love that you asked this question, because I think that there’s this problem where everyone says personalization, personalization, segmentation. And I can tell you, because I’ve been on the practitioner side for 10 plus years, half the companies that are espousing segmentation aren’t even segmenting themselves. The majority of people getting out there and saying personalization is so important. They’re not even doing themselves. So I think we need to start with what is the actual barrier to segmenting, and it’s not the complexity, it’s not any of those things. It’s literally that people aren’t gathering the data. You can’t segment if you’re not gathering the data. So the first thing that we have to kind of have a conversation about is where are you going to actually capture data that is usable to the customer. So we have to start there. One of the most common questions I get is folks say, well, Casey, should I segment on industry? Should I segment on company size? Should I segment on role? Like, I don’t want to ask them a million questions, right, I think that’s a totally fair, a fair note, what I would say is, you need to understand what is actually most relevant to the type of content you deliver. So for example, a 1000 person B2B company might be more similar to a 1000 person e commerce company, than a 1000 person e commerce company is to a 10 person e commerce company. So in that case, if that variable, it’s actually not industry, it’s company size that’s more relevant to their needs. Then what you should do is you should ask the company size question, because what you’re going to deliver in the content is going to be more relevant to be divided by that. On the same note, if it’s like, no, it really is industry, because we’re going to talk about fulfillment and shipping and all these things that just aren’t relevant the other side, then make it about industry. So the first, the first kind of litmus test that would be having is focus on what are you going to actually functionally change that is relevant to the customer, right, based on that input. And then I think you should bring that up front. And you should be asking that question on intake, so that you can have that journey be more tailored. And when I think about personalization and segmentation, there’s two buckets. There’s what I call static and dynamic segmentation. So static is what we gather upfront, it is industry, it is pain points. And that’s what you can segment in much the way that I was describing. Dynamic segmentation is also important. So dynamic is what are they opening? What are they clicking? What are they engaging with? What pages are they visiting? And how do we say, Look, if someone hasn’t engaged with our content for three months, we should not treat that person the same as someone who engages every single week with what we’re putting out. And so changing the tempo, changing the frequency of when we reach out to people and how we reach out to them based on those is super important. But if you aren’t at a top level, gathering the right information, that of course, you’re not going to segment because you don’t have the info to do it in the right way. So that would be the kind of pillars of that. And one thing I’ll leave folks with is, I want you to think about the hierarchy of importance, when it comes to email like this. Opens is the bottom of the barrel. That is the least reliable metric. After changes with Apple and others like open rates, Apple auto opens all the emails on every major ESP, which has inflated open rates by 10 plus percent. So clicks are better than opens. page visits are better than clicks. And replies are better than page visits. So when you think about those four engagement metrics, replies are king. Replies are the very best thing that you can get. And so with that in mind, also started thinking about, can I ask targeted questions in my newsletters? Can I involve my audience in some sort of meaningful way, not only will that be a proxy for true engagement, and making sure this is not bought opens or even bought clicks, but these are real people engaging. But it also gives you that opportunity to be tailoring, to be modifying, to be learning about what people care most about. And the final cherry on the top is around deliverability. One of the major ways that inboxes decide what content hits into folders is based on reply, the people that wrote the algorithms were smart, and they said, people who send personal email to each other to your family and friends have an 80 plus percent reply rate. One of the easiest way to spot any kind of automated email is that the reply rate is like 2-3%. It’s such an obvious signal that during the last modifications, they massively elevated reply rate as a metric for inbox placement. I have worked with dozens and dozens of brands that are not landing in promotion folders, even as their newsletter grows from 1000, 5000, 10000 subs. And the secret to it is they have incredibly high reply rates, especially on the very first email that they send out. So as that final nugget for folks, in your heads be thinking about that, as you design out your email strategy.

Christian Klepp 17:48

Casey, I think you inadvertently came up with a title of this podcast episode “replies are king”, right? And there were so many things you said there that really resonated with me. But you’re absolutely right. Like if people don’t reply, then, you know, there’s so many other metrics to look at. But if they don’t reply, then what’s the point? All right. I wanted to go back to the data driven approach, because you know, you spoke a lot quite a bit about data in the past couple of minutes. But just going back to that, how important is this data driven approach when you’re building owned assets? I would imagine that it does have a high priority.

Casey Hill 18:29

Yeah, yeah, I think that you want to be able to make decisions as a company, when you’re building these assets based on reality. And to me, the data becomes what is reality. So again, going back to this side of as marketers, as people in content, we’re asking for more budget, we’re asking for more allowance, connected to that, we need to show momentum in the areas that are meaningful. So data is our greatest ally, to be able to be an advocate to show the impact of the work that we’re doing. Right. And so I think it’s super important, like I kind of shared earlier in my LinkedIn example. That is what builds confidence within the executive team in my organization, that we’re not just throwing darts at the wall, we’re being very calculative. Because a lot of times, if you say write about whatever you want, companies get really nervous about that. They’re like, Well, what do you mean, write about whatever you want? Why is someone writing about their dog? Why is that relevant? Well, the beautiful part about it is we look at the data. If that person who’s writing about their dog, if they get 100,000 views and two inbound DMs about the company, then awesome, amazing, we can say keep writing about your dog. If they don’t, well, then the data showed that that wasn’t something that had that kind of topical relevance to drive that momentum. And so I think when you’re building an owned asset, and you’re trying to set that expectation and you’re trying to get add, buy in within the organization and build that advocacy, data is your greatest asset to help you there.

Christian Klepp 20:01

Absolutely. All right. Talk to us about maybe like the top three to five, like recent trends that you’ve seen in content marketing, because like every other discipline that’s evolved in the past couple of years. So talk to us about some recent trends that B2B marketers should be aware of specifically when it comes to building owned assets.

Casey Hill 20:23

Yeah, for sure. So I think one of them, we’ve covered on quite a bit, which is just the importance of kind of specificity. Moving on past that, I think it’s really important to have a conversation around trust. So often as marketers, we spend so much time around awareness, and how do we grab eyes? How do we grab attention. But a really good example is if you have a subject line, and man, that subject line drives so much curiosity, because it’s just so clever, and you get people in there. But then actually, they expect one thing and you give them something totally different. Sure, you might get some great open rates, you might get some great eyes, but you don’t drive any actual action. Action comes from trust. And trust is built with a couple things. It’s built with specifics. It’s built with context, right? Let’s imagine that you’re a company, let’s say you’re trying to build an agency, right, and you’re at $300,000 a year, brand new, just starting out, and you get an email that says how to go zero to 1 million for your agency. And here’s the exact go to market pillars that we did. And here’s a breakdown of the tools that we use, and you get really specific, that is going to build an incredible amount of trust, because the person looked at that. And they’re like, that’s exactly what I need right now. I don’t need the agency that went from 10 to 100 million, right. I don’t need the story about getting your first 10 followers. That’s the exact next step that I want. And you bring that trust forward. And so I think one of the things that I encourage folks to do, really spend some time unpacking statements. You know, it’s almost like website copy, if you say we increase demos by 114%. To me, I’m like, that just feels like filler. But if you say this, over the last six months, we took the amount of demo bookings we had from 120 to 285, we actually hired two new AEs to take this new kind of volume. And here’s kind of how we did it. You’re adding those layers of specificity where I’m like, Oh, they didn’t just pull a number out of a hat. They’re giving me real specifics that build the trust and confidence that that’s an actual thing, right. And so one of the best things that you can do when you’re designing content, you’re trying to build trust, is to be really specific.

The final pillar that I would say is, we live in a time of short form content, we live in a time of fractured attention, right. So you absolutely need to make things as digestible, as skimmable, as accessible as possible. So a couple of very top line things, do not have a ton of CTAs, literally one to two CTAs in your email, keep them focused. Number two, use bolded headlines that encapsulate exactly what you’re going to talk about, make it clear, I always call it the skim test. If someone spends two to three seconds, literally two to three seconds, just glancing at your email, what will catch their attention and want to make them read more. The third thing is have a summary at the top. And like a good example. This is a company called Mutiny. So Mutiny runs a newsletter, and they had a summary and they say, we’re going to talk about these six things. If you have a newsletter that’s a little bit longer. Having that summary at the top is another way that you make your content very skimmable. Because someone can go, nope, nope, nope. Oh, yeah. Point number four, that’s actually something I’m really interested in, boom, jump there. So if you do those three things, your content becomes digestible, you start to build trust, and you have that clear top line expectation. I think those things are going to make your email strategy generate a lot more pipeline and revenue.

Christian Klepp 24:04

Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. And I mean, you know, one of the key aspects of the show is providing the audience with actionable tips. And if I was gonna ask you this question, Casey, because you’ve given us so much up to this point in the conversation, in terms of like, what people can act upon. And these are most of the challenges and this is what you can do to address those. But let’s just say for instance, there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this conversation that you and I are having, and they’re, they’re facing this dilemma. But they need to take action on it right away. So how would you… to summarize all the advice that you’ve given, like what are maybe some like the top 3 things you tell them to do if they only have if they only have one to two weeks, for example, to pull this together?

Casey Hill 24:53

Yeah, for sure. So one of the things is exactly isn’t higher, low buy in examples. So one of the great places to start is find examples of newsletters in industry that are doing well. And there’s a lot of public information folks will share all the time, because the people who run newsletters want to highlight the size of their newsletter and all these different things. So you can go out there and look at newsletters from top performing companies and use those as a blueprint, right, to say, hey, we’re finding success with these different formats. Then underneath that, you set the clear expectation of what you’re going to be focused on. And you give them that clear concrete plan and you say, Look, over the course of the next quarter, or maybe two quarters, right, our plan is to have a newsletter that’s going to be going out every single week, and it’s going to be talking about these specific topics. And then you set, what are those leading indicators that you’re going to be looking for. And again, these are different depending on the nature of what you’re trying to accomplish. But let’s say you’re trying to build just that top of funnel, you might be saying, look, the barometers that we’re looking at to find whether the momentum of this is building in the right way, is we’re adding 300 Subs per X period of time, right? Like, again, this is all variable. So I don’t want to throw out just filler numbers and benchmarks. But the point is, when you now give them examples of folks that have done it, right, you give them a clear plan of a goal and focus of this owned asset that you built. And you give them a timeline of what it can become. I think that is incredibly powerful because these owned assets are slower moving. And so like one aspect of this is as an owned asset grows, it can actually open up a lot of interesting things that people might not expect. For instance, you can advertise on top of your owned asset, you can use it as part of a Partner Exchange, you can use it as part of an Account Based Marketing Strategy for a client that you want to land you can have him on as a guest. There’s all of these powerful things you can build. But oftentimes, it takes time to get to these pieces. So you having that clear goal where look, we’re just trying to grow size and exposure from this window to this window, then we’re going to also try to use this potentially, when we get to 10,000 subscribers, we can actually start advertising across this, and it will be relevant like those pieces. If you do that, and you have that clear plan, I think you’ll get buy-in quickly and folks will give you that green light to move forward and start to run this, whether that’s a newsletter is what we’ve been talking about. But I think the same thing is true of a podcast or other owned assets that you might create.

Christian Klepp 27:31

Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, thanks for that man. Those are basically the Cliff notes of what you need to do, right? Do people even use Cliff Notes anymore? I wonder I’m probably I’m sure it’s a digital version of that now right.

Casey Hill 27:45

I remember it from school. Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s been a little bit.

Christian Klepp 27:49

Right? It’s been a little bit, it’s been a hot minute aging myself here. But you know, it is what it is right. The next question, my friend, we can go deep down a rabbit hole with this one, metrics, right? Just give us some top level metrics, because I know, you’ve got 100,000 metrics out there that people are looking at. But what are, again, linked to the previous question, what are the key ones that marketers should be looking at to get stuff off the ground now?

Casey Hill 28:16

Yeah, 100%. So the first is, I want folks to remember that hierarchy that I gave people, which is that clicks are better than opens, pageviews are better than clicks, and replies are better than pageviews. That is what I would think about in terms of engagement metrics. So when you start anything, especially something that’s top of funnel, you got to be talking about engagement metrics, those are going to be a relevant part of the equation. So obviously, you’re looking at subscriber growth, that’s something that’s going to be relevant to building any kind of owned asset, whether it’s a newsletter, or podcast. But when you think about engagement, which is really going to be the hook, if you add a bunch of subscribers, but you have a 9% open rate, obviously, something’s wrong, there’s something missing there, right. And so you need to be looking at engagement metrics as part of that equation. And that’s the four that I would start with. In terms of all these activities. If you start one that is about conversion, you’re going to need to more quickly move to direct attribution of Trial and Paid. If you sourcing it’s top of funnel, it might be a slightly slower build to that where the engagement metrics are the leading metrics, but then everything ultimately needs to culminate and come back to actual business generated, right. I mean, that is, I think the key. The time horizons can be different, but we still need to get there. So for that I am a big fan of direct attribution as one piece of the puzzle. I don’t think it’s the whole piece of the puzzle. I do encourage… there’s obviously lots of challenges that direct attribution has, it won’t catch everyone. So it’s one part of a strategy where you’re also using UTMs inside of any links that you’re putting inside of email. So you’re having some, you know, being able to attribute revenue, for example, that comes specifically from these clicks. You can do that with UTM tracking. So you also want to make sure that your keeping get an eye on that, and there’s a lot of different systems that can help you do that. And so I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of all the tools that you can use. But I would say combine direct attribution, which is just asking people with some sort of model, right. And again, at university, I teach the difference between time decay versus linear first touch, last touch, we could have an hour discussion just about attribution. But to keep it simple, be looking at potentially something like last touch attribution, as well as direct attribution. Those would be the two that I would start with from a direct revenue perspective.

Christian Klepp 30:36

Fantastic. All right. Casey, I kind of get the feeling that you’ve been on your soapbox the whole time? Well, you know, we’ve been having this conversation, but please just stay up there a while longer. What is a status quo on this specific topic of owned assets, Right. So what is the status quo that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Casey Hill 30:57

Yeah, there’s a few that I fight battles around. So I’ll say one is, there is a mentality around path of least resistance when it comes to marketing in general, they say only ask her email, don’t ask additional questions, don’t create an additional barriers, right. And this goes across to so many different aspects of the marketing journey. And I actually disagree with that. I think we need to double down on the best experience for high intent folks, I think that we have the power now with technology to create these personalized, these segmented, these really curated experiences. And I think, ultimately, what we care about is that end result. And so I think it’s a mistake. Some folks might say, well, if I add this additional question, or I add these additional barriers, instead of 1000 leads, maybe I get 700. And I say, I don’t care whether it’s 700, or 1000, how many customers at the end of the day, how much actual real business at the end of the day, and if that’s 20% higher, even though we have 300 less leads to me, I think those 300 leads, they don’t have high intent. They’re not at that stage, maybe we bring them in later, but they’re not there now. And so I’ve fought this battle with marketing leaders and with folks for such a long time, that are really pushing for that path of least resistance. But I spent a lot of time in the trenches, I’ve looked at a lot of data. And I have conviction that that data paints a picture that asking a couple questions to gain specificity can be a huge benefit for brand.

Christian Klepp 32:35

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you could almost say that it’s kind of human nature, right. Let’s be non-confrontational. Let’s avoid, let’s avoid any potential friction. But I think it’s to your point, right? It kind of defeats the objective of the exercise, or you’re just adding in, like, extra layers in terms of your marketing efforts, right, like, so you only capture a certain amount of data. But that doesn’t help you to get over that hill. Right. Sorry. I’m oversimplifying everything that you’ve just said.

Casey Hill 33:03

No, I think I think that encapsulates it perfectly.

Christian Klepp 33:07

All right, Casey. So here comes the bonus question. And this is a new one on the show. But like, you’ve got quite a bit of experience, you know, teaching at the university, and you’re teaching marketing at UCSD. So let’s just say that, you know, it could be this show, it could be any other show, somebody listened to you, or to the conversation that you and I had, or you had with somebody else on another podcast, and they give you a call, maybe after this interview, and they say Hey Casey you know what. You really know what you’re talking about. I love your stuff. And I am going to give you money and a plane ticket that you can go on teach marketing, anywhere in the world. Wherever you want. So the question is, if you were given that opportunity to teach your marketing class at any institution in the world, where would you go and why?

Casey Hill 33:59

Mm hmm. Great question. So I think the first thing that jumps to mind is Stanford. And I’m going to get some serious heat for this because I’m from Berkeley, the arch nemesis of Stanford. And so, you know, drilled into as kids but the reason I say Stanford is specifically because of the depth within the institution around entrepreneurialism, and this is something that I’ve been passionate about throughout my entire life and career. I’ve focused on working with small businesses. I come from a family, my dad ran a business, my grandpa ran a business, my cousin’s ran businesses. And so I’ve seen this entrepreneurial energy growing up as a kid. And I genuinely find it incredibly exciting for folks to take that passion to take that interest and translate it into something that they can own and have kind of possession of in the world. And so, I love entrepreneurship, and I think that if I was speaking at a program like the MBA program at Stanford, which is kind of known as the number one in the world around entrepreneurship, specifically, I would have that platform to be able to kind of amplify and get more out there. So I think that’d be really exciting. And as just a small kind of a side note, since we last chatted, I actually am teaching a demand creation course through the Stanford extension. Wow, I’m not not yet on the inside as a tenured professor, but I’m going to be teaching starting in April, it’s going to run eight weeks, and it’s around how to think about demand creation. And I am going to be doing that with Stanford. So I’m kind of starting to get a little bit started in that direction.

Christian Klepp 35:39

It’s amazing. Congratulations.

Casey Hill 35:41

Thank you.

Christian Klepp 35:42

So you could even maybe just you’re the virtual foot in the door. Right. So..

Casey Hill 35:48

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s just like UCSD, it’s going to be taught online. So not on the inside yet. It’s always a little bit of challenge when it comes to academia, if you don’t have a PhD, and you don’t have that doctoral kind of experience to get in on a professorship, but to give credit to UCSD and Stanford and other universities that have been reaching out, there’s been this huge appetite that I’ve seen recently for practitioners. And so I think it’s really cool that the university is realizing, hey, these theory components are awesome. But we also need to bring folks that are doing these things in practice right now. And they’re starting to do more of that. So I think that’s awesome.

Christian Klepp 36:31

Fantastic, fantastic. Casey, this has been such a great conversation. I mean, we could we could have gone on for another five or six hours. But you know, in the interest of time, thank you once again for coming on the show. Introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Casey Hill 36:45

Yeah, absolutely. So, again, my name is Casey. I’ve been for kind of 12 plus years, working in the Martech space working with email marketing, marketing automation, owned assets, as we now call it, in the kind of content space. And if folks have any questions, you can send me an email Chill@activecampaign.com. My name is Casey Hill. So it’s just, I’m chill at where I work. So Chill@ActiveCampaign. Active Campaign is a marketing automation and CRM platform. So that’s where I work. That’s my day job. And then you can also follow me on LinkedIn, I talk about a lot of these concepts. I talk about firsthand experiences of what I’m learning, running experiments in the kind of organic growth world all the time. And so Casey Hill, you can go find me on LinkedIn and the insights there as well.

Christian Klepp 37:34

Fantastic, fantastic. Once again, Casey, this has been an incredible conversation. Thanks again for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Casey Hill 37:41

Thanks Christian.

Christian Klepp 37:42

Alright, bye for now.

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How to Craft Interesting and Engaging Customer Stories

When done correctly, customer success stories can help to convert prospects into customers and position B2B companies strategically against competitors. Why do so many customer success stories fall flat in B2B? What can be done to transform them into tools for B2B growth?

Join us in our conversation with B2B video expert Alexander Ferguson (Co-Founder & CMO, TeraLeap) about how marketers can craft better customer success stories that are interesting and engaging. During our conversation, Alexander talked about the pitfalls to avoid and what marketers should look for when conducting customer interviews. He also elaborated on how you can add more emotion to your B2B videos and provides actionable tips that marketers can implement immediately.

https://youtu.be/2A7QaCsVag4

Topics discussed in episode

• Alexander talks about why most customer success stories in B2B fall flat [2:03]
• Some pitfalls to avoid when crafting customer success stories [5:02]
• Tips on conducting research and how to incorporate the findings into customer success stories [8:54]
• How to get buy-in to from the sales team [11:57]
• Alexander’s actionable tips: [16”18]
  • Have a clear plan
  • Remember your customer is the hero, not your company
  • Don’t estimate the value of visuals
  • Invest in a good thumbnail
• Alexander shares an example of how to create interesting and engaging customer success stories [18:25]
• Alexander’s take on how AI should be used to craft customer success stories [23:19]

Companies and links mentioned

• Alexander Ferguson on LinkedIn
• TeraLeap
• Dovetail
• Grain
• Rev
• Jasper
• Quillbot

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Alexander Ferguson

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is a show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to get customer videos that convert and to find the One Ring of Power. (laugh) Coming to us from Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, Alexander Ferguson, welcome to the show.

Alexander Ferguson 01:13

Thank you, Christian, glad to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:16

Not to be confused with Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United coach. Alexander, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Alexander Ferguson 01:26

Me too.

Christian Klepp 01:27

All right. So before we head out into the Shire, let’s kick off this conversation with a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to craft great customer success stories that are interesting and engaging. And correct me if I’m wrong, but interesting and engaging are not necessarily words that are characteristic of B2B. Most times. So why do you think most customer success stories in B2B fall flat?

Alexander Ferguson 02:03

They often are either vague, or just generic praise of the company, or they’re just plain boring. And it really just makes then the entire story invisible to the prospect, doesn’t mean anything. They really lack an emotionally engaging narrative. In the B2B space, I feel like, we often feel like we’re Vulcans, from Star Trek not to change up to another franchise away from Lord of the Rings. But I feel like, we feel like oh, emotion is bad. Logic and reasoning, that’s all the way. That’s what’s important. I don’t think that’s right, though. I feel like B2B companies are more like, they should be more like Spock, you know, a 50/50 split, where logic and reason, they’re important. But you don’t want to disregard the power of an emotionally engaging narrative.

Christian Klepp 03:00

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m going to share something with you that I asked… Well, I asked the guest the same question, you know, someone that came on the show previously. And this guest answered the question about, you know, B2B being boring by: Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of boring, because it also depends on who this whether it’s video or whether it’s some other form of content, it depends on who this is meant to appeal to. Right. For instance, and I’m not saying, I’m just throwing in this caveat, I’m not saying that this group was boring, but like, for example, engineers, right, if you’re appealing to engineers, that perhaps something that is very structured in a very intricate and systematic format. And in some kind of, like logical order, is something that would really appeal to that demographic. And if it’s highly technical as well. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

Alexander Ferguson 03:59

When it comes to an industry specific, it’s like when you resonate with the content that person, then to someone else, it could be boring, but to them, it’s either fascinating, interesting, there’s still a lot of motions connected to it, because they’re in that world. So being able to unpack and tease out whatever, that particular industry story. There’s definitely value in that that others may deem uninteresting, but it’s not.

Christian Klepp 04:30

You handled that question like a champ, well done. But speaking of which, that was a great segue into the next question, which I have no doubt that you will answer this really well. Mistakes that you’ve seen B2B marketers make when crafting customer success stories. So and the way I’d like you to answer this, if you can, Alexander, is what have you. What kind of mistakes have you seen? And how should marketers address these mistakes?

Alexander Ferguson 05:02

Mistake number one, I would say is probably lacking specificity and detail. Missing the unique problem or a use case for that story. And this is often as you’re just talking about the high level, what it is and what features, what it was. But being able to fix this, how do you address that? I would say ask more questions when you’re interviewing and pulling out the story with your customers. Ask more who questions or how questions or why questions, when, where, not just the what. And that’ll help unpack and really pull in all the details that grounds the story, in a reality. So when your prospective buyers listening to it, they don’t feel like it’s just this surface level. Well, maybe in some theoretical world, this could help someone, but they see the realness of it. So that was I say, mistake number one.

Number two, I would say is kind of connected what I opened with emotion, often many are missing emotion. It’s like, okay, how do you address that? How do you pull out emotion in a B2B environment? That’s tough. There’s no foolproof plan here. But I would say asking follow up questions of your customer like, Oh, interesting. Okay, so you’ve had to re-enter your data into your accounting software five times that lowered your efficiency, your workforce efficiency, how did that make you feel? And was it frustrating? Did that make you angry? Overwhelmed? How was your team feeling about all this, these follow up feeling questions, can then unpack that emotion.

The third one, I would say mistake is no demonstration of tangible impact, or really, that before and after transformation. Again, it’s just the, hey, we worked with them, and we use these features, you know, go for them. But really showing those before and after states. It can be difficult to get these sometimes because your customer may not know. And you have to do a little bit of the prep work ahead of time, just like you do prep work for these discussions and you craft questions and you already know how to introduce someone versus just showing up and saying, oh, here it is. By doing that little lifting ahead of time for them, it can make the difference.

Christian Klepp 07:13

Absolutely, absolutely. So just to recap the three mistakes, so lacking specificity and detail, then the emotion piece, and then the third one, there’s no demonstration of tangible impact. And I think that one is really hits the nail on the head. I mean, you know, you never want to have a customer success story where the outcome was all they loved it. And it was great. (laugh)

Alexander Ferguson 07:39

It lacks all like that the power of that transformation. It’s like that’s what everyone, why they listen to stories do someone who goes from rags to riches.

Christian Klepp 07:47

Absolutely, absolutely. But to your point, I think the outcome that a lot of people are looking for when they watch these videos are, you know, quantifiable results. And you know, more often than not those are those are not that easy to obtain, I think what’s your point?

Alexander Ferguson 08:06

Yes. And that’s where like in some companies, they either don’t want to share it, or it’s not quantifiable. And so then you have to find other ways to quantify it. Like it could be an emotional state that you can focus on or physical change that happened. But of course, the best is still KPIs and numbers because we’re logic and reason focused B2B companies.

Christian Klepp 08:27

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, don’t rock the boat there man. (laugh) All right, you. You can’t define or develop good customer success stories without conducting the relevant research. Right? So talk to us about what marketers should be looking for when they’re conducting research, and how can they incorporate this into their customer success stories.

Alexander Ferguson 08:54

It’s really ties into what we were just digging into around this before and after state, I would say in customer research, fully understanding or unpacking the problems, you know, how well do you know your customers problems? I find as part of the customer story process, you can really get great insight on this and give direction and have more direction on what should you drill down deeper on there, maybe even from previous use cases or problems they were feeling and experiencing, this then helps the story much later. Because you have that direction to say okay, this is where we’re going to, we’re gonna take this interview. Another thing I would say is on the results side too, being able to do some of the heavy lifting, maybe if you’re a software platform, you could pull the numbers for them ahead of time. So doing some research of that data analysis, having these pre-conversations with them understanding what’s the most important numbers and metrics that they’re tracking? Because you may think it’s one number but it could be a very different number or metric that they’re focused on, and it’s important to them in their role. In addition, you could be talking with other departments heads. And so seeing the larger organization achievements or goals that they’re trying to make, and then you’re piecing this puzzle together for them in this customer research before you do that, the interview itself.

Christian Klepp 10:15

I really love how you brought that up, Alexander, because I sometimes see this happen. And a lot of people out there don’t realize how much preparation work is required to conduct these interviews and to conduct this research. You know, it’s not a simple question of just okay, let’s just put together a bunch of questions. And then let’s find some customers that we can interview and then off we go. And, you know, in reality, it’s not that simple. Right. So I think that preparation work, like you said, or, you know, I hate to use this term, but you know, here we are, um, do your homework.

Alexander Ferguson 10:52

Makes a difference. It makes a difference.

Christian Klepp 10:54

Absolutely. All right. Well, this is more of the… this next question is more of the devil’s advocate question. And I think it’s a really important one, because we discussed this during the pre-interview conversation. A lot of marketers are facing this out there, and you just brought it up a couple of minutes ago, right? Sales is very, you know, they’re guarding their customers very closely. Because, you know, those are, those customers are very precious to them, and they don’t really want anyone outside their department or business unit to be talking to these people. Right? That being said, that does not further our cause, or move us further along down the river, excuse me, I’m going back to these analogies again. But how can marketers get not just the customers, but the sales to buy in to this important exercise of crafting customer success stories? How do they deal with, as we just said, sales saying like, No, we don’t want you to talk to the customer directly.

Alexander Ferguson 11:57

Before you can really get a testimonial or customer story program off the ground, you need that buy in from sales, from customer service, without a doubt. Part of it is painting the picture for them. And you have to market to them, easing their fears and concerns that this could take away a potential future sale or this is too much of a lift, I just had a conversation today with a marketing leader who… it took a little while for them to get the buy in. But once they did, once their sales team started to see oh, wow, actually, this is a great customer touch point. They liked to talk about it, they wanted to share their experience, it removed that fear. So it may take a little bit of work ahead of time with the, painting the picture and the vision for the sales team. But once you’ve got that buy-in then it really paves the way to make the rest of it much easier. Because ideally, already in the contracting process and onboarding, you’re mentioning to the customer talking to the customer, hey, we’re excited for this, I think we’re going to have a great outcome. And once we get there, we’d love to share that story, your story of us working together, so they already know in their mind that this is coming.

Christian Klepp 13:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, I had a follow up question for you. And I think this might have been where you were going with that. You know, I think an important part of the process of planning and developing strategy and marketing is to conduct customer research. And as a result of that customer research, you develop the relevant buyer personas. And you map out that buyers journey with the respective stages, you know, and you highlight or you illustrate the different triggers, and then the different touch points, and why those touch points are relevant within that specific journey. Okay, I say all of that, to ask, how useful do you think it would be for marketers to show that research and that, for example, that buyers journey map to the sales to get them to understand well, this is the reason why we need that because you know, we did the research, and we identified these touch points. And these are the things that we saw were important to the people that you guys are trying to reach out to. So your thoughts on that.

Alexander Ferguson 14:12

Creating a case study for your sales team on the reason for a customer story program or customer case study program, your testimony program, it’s, I think, being able to show them that if we get this buyer persona, we capture this story that is going to help your job. It helps them make the sale so much easier through that. I absolutely think it’s a great idea.

Christian Klepp 14:32

Yeah, because like, you know, the last thing you want them to think is like, oh, no, you need a customer. You need to interview a customer, you need a testimonial, that sounds like more work for me, that means that I need to go out there and have that conversation with a customer on your behalf. So you know, just, I won’t even say flip the script, but just make them understand that like no, actually we’re helping to make this easier for you. Right? Because it’s also a conversation starter. Correct me if I’m wrong, right? Like, if they are able to show the success story videos, to potential prospects and like, okay.

Alexander Ferguson 15:08

Yes, I think often though a big barrier for sales or even for the end customer is lack of clarity on the process. When they aren’t sure how you’re going to get this case study, what’s involved? What’s the process? How much time is it gonna take? I can make it happen, then it’s just this automatic: You know what, this just sounds like too much work. But when you bring specificity, clarity, detail. Hey, this is how long it’s going to take. This is how we’re going to do it. And this is what’s going to happen, like, oh, okay, that I can communicate, that I can share. That makes sense.

Christian Klepp 15:43

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips. And you know, you know the drill, you’ve been on the show before, Let’s appreciate that. You know, you can’t do all of this stuff in 24 hours, right? This exercise takes time. But I would say, if somebody were listening out there to this conversation that you and I are having about creating and developing better customer success stories, what are maybe 3 to 5 things that they can do right now.

Alexander Ferguson 16:18

Some of this is going to be kind of recapping some of the things we talked about earlier. But I feel like the first thing is having a clear plan on how you’re going to ask, how you’re going to capture and how you’re going to share those stories. No plan, and this will forever be on the backburner. The second thing is, I mean, remembering the story isn’t about you, or your company, you gotta remember the who the hero is in this, which is your customer. And you’re really just the guide on there, because I see too many stories that fail because it’s the wrong defining of who the hero is. Don’t underestimate the value of visuals. I would say. I’m a little biased, but I think video is an instant level up by having be able to have that face, the voice, the credibility in today’s age of authenticity. But also being able… don’t miss the opportunity to integrate product footage or or content footage into. This will be a little bit of a mini product video itself, if done well. And then comes the versatility of this assets. Another reason why I like video. So keep in mind, how are you going to repurpose the story. So maybe you have a two minute version already have a plan for a 30″ version, be able to leverage the transcript and be able to use it in all the different places because the way people will people consume content today is not just in one format. And I would say the last thing to keep in mind would be investing in a good thumbnail. MrBeast, one of the world’s most popular YouTubers out there. I saw where he reportedly spent upwards of $10,000 on developing that that preview still image. And I think too often these great stories are hid somewhere on a website on a back end page and never get seen. Because the right imagery, the right placement, whether it’s in your email campaigns, whether it’s on social YouTube, people don’t know that. Oh, I should watch this.

Christian Klepp 18:10

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, I’m glad you brought that up about visuals, because it’s such a great segue into the next question where I’d like you to give us an example of how you helped save a company from boring customer success stories.

Alexander Ferguson 18:25

Yeah, yeah. So there was one fellow, Mark, he was a director of marketing B2B company in the customer… in the life science space. Couple challenges that they had. One is why they were getting stories in the first place is getting engagement, getting their potential buyers to just pay attention to them. That was a major issue. At the same time being able to get the customers to agree to get on a video because he knew that if they shared other customer stories to prospective buyers, it would help getting them to agree. So multipurpose here of how they approached that. I thought this is an interesting story to share of another angle. There was an awards going on for that in their particular vertical. So they actually asked their customers about interviewing them for this upcoming award. And using that partly for the entry and promotion of it. So positioning them as as a hero, and what they’ve been able to achieve. And then of course, Mark’s company was the guide, that trusted guide there to help them achieve and get to that award. So in the same interview, they were able to do two things at the same time accomplish both promoting them. And they were wanting to be promoted, as well as they got great content for an insight and customer testimonial. Out of that story because there was a lot of excitement of where they were to where they were able to get to achieving this award. They use it mostly in email campaigns. They have a great email list. And they saw I think was a 500% increase in click through rate because of them focusing on that story, great thumbnail. And then being able to get that engagement from those from those buyers.

Christian Klepp 20:06

Just give me a second here. (laugh) Great points, I’d like to just go back to a couple of them. I mean, first of all, 500% click through rate. Well done. What an achievement. The second one, I thought that the, the awards piece or this, you know, the awards initiative, what a brilliant approach. Right? What a great way to push the customer into the spotlight, right and give them I mean to use the radio term, airtime. Right,

Alexander Ferguson 20:41

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 20:42

I think and then the other point that you mentioned, you’ve mentioned this a few times now in this conversation, which I think is worth jamming on a little bit further, if you will, positioning the customer as the hero, right. And we talk about this a lot on this show, because I bring a lot of folks on that are either in you know, in the same area of expertise that you’re in, or copywriters, and content marketers, etc. It’s about that hero’s journey, right? There’s a book out there called Building your story brand by Donald Miller. And there’s also I call it a formula, but you know, you can call it whatever you want. But it’s the hero’s journey. And that was basically something that the professor of mythology called Joseph Campbell coined. And it was… because he studied all these different myths and legends from different cultures around the world. And it basically, they all had the same pattern. And I believe there are seven steps. And you probably know that, right? So it’s the hero, has a problem. And then goes on a journey to find that solution. Meets a guide, who gives him or her a plan of action, encourages them to take action, so that they achieve success, and they avert failure. You’ll look at every, not even just the Hollywood movie. Well, these days that might, it might be different. But um, you look at every major Hollywood production, you’d look at any case in point, Lord of the Rings trilogy, right? Any Greek mythology, right, any story from Greek mythology, they all follow that pattern. Right? And you’re really right to point this out that the hero, well, you know, bring us back to B2B. Now, the hero is not the company. Right?

Alexander Ferguson 22:38

It’s the it’s the customer. And the story will be better for it when you know, when you know who the real hero is.

Christian Klepp 22:46

Absolutely, absolutely. All right. Next question. Oh, you know, we’re trying so hard to avoid talking about this. But here we go. AI. (laugh) It seems to be impacting almost every aspect of our work as marketers, and you know, it’s also spread across other industries as well. Right. So, here comes the question. And it’s a it’s a basically a two pronged question. Right. So do you think that AI should be used in crafting customer success stories? And if yes, how?

Alexander Ferguson 23:19

Absolutely. But in the right way, yeah, I think it’s great coming up, helping with certain things, but not other things, so not great with creative things necessarily from scratch, well it’s not there yet. But it’s great at helping you ideate, summarize, organize, repurpose. There’s a lot of software tools out there that are integrating AI into their product. Like if you look at a customer research side, there’s some tools that you can use there, like Dovetail has some great insights, Grain and Rev. Both have the ability to hear and these is to help analyze, give summaries. You can even ask questions of the customer interview. And it’ll help you pull out that insight, then you as a human can figure out what you want to do with it. You got standalone tools to help analyze or write new content, ChatGPT, everyone knows that. Jasper, Quillbot. These help you… can come up with maybe headlines for the story, help you generate story outlines based on the transcript or just repurpose or create new social content. So there’s a lot of different ways you can use these in those functions.

Christian Klepp 24:30

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. You know, I always say there’s a place and time for AI. And it’s not. I think it will be foolish to completely dismiss artificial intelligence and throw it out the window and say, No, don’t use it. But I think it’s to your point. It’s, I mean, currently with this current capabilities, it’s a support function, right? Like, I mean, don’t use AI. Don’t replace what people are actually good at and doing with AI. I think that was your point, correct?

Alexander Ferguson 25:02

Yes. Don’t… you don’t need to replace people. There’s a lot of tools that are coming out that are generative AI when it comes to video and that either people are afraid of it. That’s a very common one. And which is why real authentic stories, people and when they tell like this is a real thing that it feels so good.

Christian Klepp 25:22

Mm hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Alexander, I kind of feel that you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but please stay up there a little bit longer, at least for this question. All right. Um, so let’s just narrow it down to today’s topic about creating those great customer success stories that are interesting and engaging. But what’s the status quo that you passionately disagree with regarding this topic? And why?

Alexander Ferguson 25:52

Status quo. It’s okay, if B2B content is emotionless and boring, faceless facts and data, that’s all that matters. No. I feel like we need to be able to bring more emotion, real people, real stories, as we were just talking about, we’re in an age where so much is fake and generated. And so the more human and authentic we can have our marketing, the stronger I think the attraction of today’s buyer will be. And I think customer stories are that key to to unlocking this if done correctly.

Christian Klepp 26:25

That’s such a great point. I mean, like, just look at look at LinkedIn. Right? I mean, how often do you get people or bots reaching out to you on LinkedIn messenger on InMail, right? Or, how often do you see posts where you see engagement that looks well, otherworldly? Like for lack of a better description, but you’re like, Yeah, that. That does not sound? Yeah, that does not sound like like an actual person that’s engaging with this with this post. Right. So it’s AI, right. So and I think in this day and age where even like videos, I mean, there’s AI generated visuals of this and videos of that. Isn’t that a breath of fresh air to just have something that’s real?

Alexander Ferguson 27:12

Yes, it’s like, yes. Thank you, something real. We were just talking before the show of like, when people mess up, or something’s not perfect. That’s great. Let me see more bloopers.

Christian Klepp 27:21

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yes. There will be a bloopers reel in the works at some point, I promise. (laugh) All right, folks. The moment we’ve been waiting for, the bonus question. Right. And I do remember from your last interview, how we were talking about Lord of the Rings, and that franchise and trilogy and whatnot. And I couldn’t help myself, but think of a question that is linked to Lord of the Rings. So here it is. In the third Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, right. So there’s the scene where Lord Elrond shows up at the Rohirrim camp to hand Aragorn the sword. So he’s encouraging Aragorn to go to the Dwimorberg to rally the army of the dead. And then Aragorn says the dead answer to no one. And then Lord Elrond said they will answer to the king of Gondor. And then that’s when he shows him the sword. And he says, this is Anduril, forged from the shards of…

Alexander Ferguson 28:28

Narsil. That one I got!

Christian Klepp 28:31

Well done.

Alexander Ferguson 28:35

Love Lord of the Rings. This is so good.

Christian Klepp 28:39

Alexander, we can keep on going about Lord of the Rings too. But once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. Again. It was an honor to host you. And please, quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, especially if they’re trying to save the world from boring customer success stories.

Alexander Ferguson 28:58

Absolutely, absolutely. So a little bit of myself: 15 years I’ve been focused on video, co-founded three different brands. And I’ve been serving lots of different companies, but I’m doing lots of different videos, but I think customer stores, these are like the shards of Narsil, they’re like the thing that could really help in this war building buyer trust and I’m just on a mission to tell everyone getting more customer stories. It’s not hard, and I can help.

Christian Klepp 29:25

Yes, and Renewed shall be blade that was broken. Alexander once again, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks again for coming on. Take care. Stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Alexander Ferguson 29:39

Thanks, Christian.

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How to Get Engagement on Your LinkedIn Content

B2B Marketers who are getting low or no engagement on the content they’re developing for LinkedIn are missing out on a great opportunity. When you create content that is meaningful and engaging, it not only fuels content impressions but also helps you to build relationships with your audience that could translate to future business.

That’s why we’re having a conversation with B2B content expert Anthony Leung (Founder, Mean Write Hook) about how marketers can better leverage the LinkedIn platform. During our discussion, Anthony talks about why a lot of content falls flat (and what can be done about it), what pitfalls to avoid, and why you should conduct research before writing anything. Anthony also talks about whether companies should or shouldn’t be leveraging B2B influencers, why a personal brand is crucial, and what people who are hesitant to post on LinkedIn should be doing.

https://youtu.be/GVg8CwrpMSo

Topics discussed in episode

• Why you shouldn’t settle for low engagement on LinkedIn with content. [2:45]
• Anthony highlights some misconceptions about LinkedIn:
  • ‘Engagement doesn’t matter’ [10:46]
  • Hack the system with ‘Pods’ [12:46]
  • ‘You have to post every day’ [15:02]
• What the engagement and impression stats are telling you [17:48]
• Do these 2 different types of research before developing your content: [19:33]
  • Research on yourself
  • Research on your audience
• Anthony shares his thoughts on the use of B2B influencers [26:32]
• The importance of having a personal brand [32:31]
• How companies can leverage their own people and turn them into advocates [34:43]
• Anthony’s actionable tips to improve engagement on your content on LinkedIn: [37:12]
  • Remove self doubt
  • Be yourself
  • Understand yourself and your audience
  • Show how active you are in the community
• The one thing that Anthony would change on LinkedIn [47:17]

Companies and links mentioned

• Anthony Leung on LinkedIn
• Mean Write Hook
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Lea Turner

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Anthony Leung, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to make LinkedIn finally, work for you and your B2B business. So coming to us from London, England, Mr. Anthony Leung. Welcome to the show, sir.

Anthony Leung 01:10

Hey, Christian, how’s it going? Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:16

Pleasure to be connected. Anthony, Sorry, I had to throw in that London England piece, not to be confused with London, Ontario. Sorry, that’s the Canadian thing. (laugh)

Anthony Leung 01:26

I get it. I get it. I mean, I’m from Canada. Right. So you know, I know all about it. But it is slightly different. I have to say, London, Ontario and London, London, UK.

Christian Klepp 01:37

Yeah, just a little bit, right.

Anthony Leung 01:40

But I think the food’s better than in London, Canada. But don’t say anything.

Christian Klepp 01:48

All right. Well, let’s dive in. Because man, I was thinking about this today before, you know, jumping on this call. This is either going to be a very informative and insightful conversation, or it’s going to be one that’s laced with a bit of controversy. So we’ll leave it up to the listeners to decide which one it is.

Anthony Leung 02:06

A little a little controversial, never hurt anyone. So let’s go. Let’s roll the dice. Let’s see what happens.

Christian Klepp 02:13

Absolutely. All right. Well, okay, so your professional mission has been to make LinkedIn finally work for B2B companies, as I said at the beginning of this conversation, but let’s focus on the following topic, right? Because I think this is really, really important. How you can start getting engagement on LinkedIn for your content. So let’s kick off this conversation with this question. Where do you think B2B marketers fall flat, when it comes to engagement on LinkedIn? And most importantly, what should they do about it?

Anthony Leung 02:45

Yeah, you know, what’s funny, I think we, we’ve gotten to a place with LinkedIn, where companies will publish content on their channels, you know, companies with like, millions of followers, and they’ll publish something, and you’ll get what, 17 likes, and the impressions would be low. And we’re all ok with that for some reason, and I think that’s become the status quo. And I think that’s, that’s what I’m kind of going against, because I think that’s such a missed opportunity. And you know, we are settling for low or no engagement with content. And LinkedIn is a place where… it’s a platform where it values engagement, because the more engaged you are with the content, the more it realizes that this is going to keep the users on the platform. So of course, they’re going to spread that content further. So that’s why engagement is important. Right? So I think that’s the first thing we need to establish is that the likes, the comments, that’s not just what so called vanity metrics. It’s actually what fuels your content impressions, what fuels how relatable and how meaningful that piece of content is to your audience. So when you see, you know, pages with large followings and low engagement, it’s like, that’s such a miss, because you’re spending so much time, so much effort, so much energy into creating this content, it’s and it’s not getting engagement. Well, it is. You look at the engagement, a lot of times you look at the company page, 80% comes from their staff members, right? And it’s like oh were they forced to engage with the posts? Or worse, it’s actually just talking to your own staff members, right. So and that’s what the content is there for.

So let’s think about why it’s falling flat. And I think it’s partly because as marketers, we’ve been conditioned, like how we’re educated about marketing. We’ve been conditioned to think about our brand first and foremost. Nothing wrong with that when you think about advertising and kind of classic marketing tactics. But when it comes to social media, LinkedIn in particular, it’s really self-serving. And when we’re conditioned to put the brand always go first, we start off our posts with like, a bit of bragging, like, oh, Company X we do blah, blah, blah and Company Y we value this, this and that. And it’s like, that’s so boring. It’s so…, I can’t relate to it as a reader. And when all of these posts kind of go back to back, and it shows up on our feed, of course, the reader is going to skip it because they know, if they just scroll past it, there’ll be something else for them, someone else will have figured out how to create content for them that’s interesting. And they skip past you. And when LinkedIn clocks onto that, that’s when your engagement really matters. Because they realize no one’s engaging with the content, they’re going to pull back on your impressions. And that’s how it happens. So I think that’s really, at the core of it, the problem is that we put ourselves first. And what we need to do is actually flip the script. And if we flip the script, and we start thinking about what’s in it for the audience, what’s in it for our customers or prospects, how to be helpful, how to be useful to our audience, that’s going to be the game changer for you and your content, and your impressions and your engagement.

Christian Klepp 06:21

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, speaking of all these LinkedIn posts that don’t get much engagement. The ones I love is like, hey, check us out. We’re at collision, you know, drop by our booth and say, hi… right?

Anthony Leung 06:33

Yeah, like the amount of times I’ve been at a booth, and somebody ran up to me go, Oh, thank goodness, you posted this on LinkedIn, I finally found it… if it wasn’t for this post. No one has ever said that. There’s zero, right? And no one ever, literally right? And it becomes I think it becomes like almost like a PR exercise where we go, oh, we just want to show that we’re here. And it’s like, well, why? What a wasted opportunity. The opportunity when moments like that happens is, well, you know, what’s the, what’s the energy in the place? What’s the connections that you’re making, as a company or as yourself? If you’re doing it for yourself? What connections are you making? And what have you learned? All these things are valuable content for for your readers? Not like, Hey, I’m at a booth at X right?

Christian Klepp 07:24

Absolutely, absolutely. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, because I think it bears repeating. And it’s so important. Making content, you know, making it about them. So them being the target audience, the ideal customer, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder, in your experience, why does that tend to be overlooked, especially in bigger companies who are posting on LinkedIn? Like why, you know, when you look at their content, you can tell like, okay, they’re talking about their product, they’re probably posting this content, because somebody internally told them to. They’ve got to try to please all these different views, and have to be approved by multiple layers most likely, before it went out. I mean, like, Why do you think that this is such a… it’s a recurring problem in B2B?

Anthony Leung 08:13

I think you touched on it, it starts from the top, I think that when Management gives metrics to their teams, it’s calibrated to classic marketing, right? So like, oh, how many leads did we get? How many downloads did we get, how many, whatever do we get, and, and when they sign off the content. That’s the mindset that they’re in. And so of course, you start thinking like, well, I need to sell this thing, I need to shove this down your throat effectively. And when they when they’re writing the content, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. And that’s the first thing they… that’s what they need is actually for the company to look good and not to be meaningful to the other side. And the ironic thing is that, if you flip it and you’re become more meaningful to your audience, then your brand begins to shine. But because these metrics and these kinds of ways of viewing marketing kind of sits on top of how we create content, that really changes the creators’ perspective, and I guess, because the pressure that content comes up that way. I’ve just had a chat with a friend of mine who’s head of marketing at a B2B company, and we discussed for months, like how great their LinkedIn could be. Six months later, it’s at a place where they don’t like and they’ve tried to avoid and to me, it’s such an illustration to your point, which is, even when somebody has the will to want to turn it into something meaningful, that top down pressure turns it back to something that just becomes very bland.

Christian Klepp 10:08

No, fantastic. Thanks for bringing up those points. Are there any other I would say mistakes or misconceptions you see out there with regards to engagement on LinkedIn? And if you could talk about those a little bit.

Anthony Leung 10:23

Misconceptions about LinkedIn, do you mean like, how it’s used? Or do you mean like how to succeed on it?

Christian Klepp 10:30

Yeah, it’s specifically on this topic about LinkedIn engagement. I mean, I know there’s a, you know, there’s a couple of gurus out there that are telling people, Oh, you should be doing this on LinkedIn instead of that. And like, you know, just, if you could just maybe like, I don’t know, three to five.

Anthony Leung 10:46

All right. This is this, you want the controversy. Christian, we’re getting it. (laugh) All right, so here are a few things when I see on LinkedIn, I can’t go… I’m not so sure about it. Right. The first thing is that… the first narrative I see is, “engagement doesn’t matter.” I see a lot of people post sometimes, and it’s the people who post them don’t get engagement, I think that’s like them kind of like going well, it’s fine. Because, right. The narrative goes something like, it doesn’t matter if people are clicking like, it doesn’t matter if they’re commenting on your post, because I’m still getting business out of it. It’s partly true. It’s partly true that when you at the very least show up on LinkedIn, you’re part of like the 1% of users that are actually creating content, and so you’re already standing out. But my argument is that if it’s not getting engagement, that’s not getting the impressions that it should be getting. So that’s a massively wasted opportunity. And it really irks me when, you know, it’s almost like, well, it’s fine, we get the participation ribbon, it’s like, why do you want to settle for the participation ribbon when you can get like first place, when you can get a gold medal. Right? Let’s go for that. Right? So that’s the first thing I say is engagement does matter. Because when you’re just posting and you’re not getting engagement, it’s one way communication. But when you start getting engagement, and you start getting participation from your readers and your audience, now you’ve got a community, and that is very different. And that’s so much more valuable than you try and just tell them and selling them things. Not to mention also that it gives you more impressions on your posts. So that’s definitely a bonus. The second thing that really irks me is the people that tried to cheat the system. So the theory goes, if LinkedIn values engagement on my content, then all I need is a bunch of people to fake-engage my content, and I can hack the system. And I have been part of these links. (laugh) Yes, say it again. It was deeper and more scary.

Christian Klepp 13:20

Pods….

Anthony Leung 13:21

Beware the pod.

Christian Klepp 13:22

The Ides of March and the Pods.

Anthony Leung 13:24

Mostly the pods. But these pods… For any listeners who don’t know what LinkedIn pods are, it’s basically a group of people that their only relationship with each other is to like and comment on each other’s posts. So that it in theory, I’m doing air quotes here boosts your content impressions, and from my experience, because I just went in and just to, you know, for research purposes, but also, you know, see what’s up in there. But the engagement that it gives you, it’s meaningless, because they go in, they like your post and they leave, or they give a very robotic answer that basically just repeat what you said in your captions, and they leave. And LinkedIn clocks in on that. LinkedIn knows that it came through a link that they saw this thing, did something really quick and just bolted. And that does not at all, you know, help your impressions. In fact, the posts that I leave out of the Pods actually do better. And the only way to cheat the system or beat the algorithm is actually just to create good content and content that’s meaningful and that content that’s rooted in your values and rooted in something that’s helpful. So if you want a surefire way to beat the algorithm, well actually hits it’s actually just to do content. Good content. And I think the last thing that irks me is people that goes, Ah, you’ve got to post every day. That’s going to help them beat the algorithm. And, ah, it drives me nuts, because I’ve tried to do it myself. And you’ve only got so much time and energy per day. And when you spend it all on trying to hit a quantity of posts, it’s exhausted. And you start kicking yourself for missing days in your life, but nobody on the other side is going like, well, what’s Anthony up to? Why isn’t his post up to date? Literally, nobody’s waiting for this. It’s only yourself that’s giving yourself this pressure. And when that pressure comes, it’s very similar to that top down pressure that comes from you know, in the company, and it changes how you create content and your energy changes, your content changes, and the audience feels it and you start… In my case, I start getting less engagement, and my content starts becoming less meaningful. So, you know, I, I’ve done a test, where I didn’t post for a week, and then I posted something which actually ended up my top 20 posts of the year. So if there’s any doubt that, you know, this narrative of like, you’ve got to feed the algorithm every day. That for me, I’ve proven it myself. So I’ve got receipts.

Christian Klepp 16:29

Yeah, you know, that’s a really good point. I mean, that’s probably the reason why I wasn’t able to sleep last night, because I realized that you hadn’t posted on LinkedIn every day.

Anthony Leung 16:40

I apologize.

Christian Klepp 16:42

Mysteries solved. But um, you know, those are some really great points. And I mean, like, you know, I’ve been posting actively on LinkedIn, also since…, I guess, it was starting to lock down which, and you’re in Toronto, it was March 2020. And I didn’t notice that bit about the pods. And, you know, I can’t claim credit for this one, because there’s another guest that mentioned it. And it’s so true. You know, to the point about pods. There are some people out there that, you know, come up with really excellent content, and they get low engagement, or they get maybe 8 likes or 12 likes. And then there’s other people that put up to quote him, these absolute nothing burgers, right? And they got 400 likes. And you know, there’s telltale signs that I think that was your point. You see the comments, and they’re like, oh, absolutely amazing. Fantastic. Love this. Excellent. You know, it’s all this like, like what you said, so it’s just not genuine at all. It’s like, okay, well, you had nothing else to contribute to the conversation except to give this post the thumbs up. Right?

Anthony Leung 17:48

Yeah, I think I think when we look at… when we’re able to only see the engagement stats on one side, on the outside, we look at it and we go, I wish my posts had 400 likes, I wish I had a bunch of comments, I wish bla bla bla bla bla. But the key is to look at those engagement stats along with your impression stats, which you don’t see that’s the other side, that’s the only the author can see. Because you can get high engagement and low impressions. And that just means that your content is not relatable to a large group of people. Right? It’s, if you use a pod, and you get high engagement, it just means that a lot of people are trying to get you to like their post too. If you get high engagement and low impressions without a pod, it means that you’re speaking to your audience directly. It’s very well, it could be a post about you changing a job or getting a promotion. Those people are celebrating you, that’s also a win. But if you can get the content that’s high engagement and high impressions, that means that you’re seeing something that is hitting a nerve in the industry or in your target audience. That’s great content. That’s the content of everyone wants.

Christian Klepp 19:03

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m glad you brought that point, because that’s such a great segue to the next question, which is about conducting the right research for developing content on LinkedIn. Because you know, to your point, to get that engagement, you have to develop content that is good quality. It’s relevant, it’s insightful, it’s interesting, but you don’t develop that out of thin air, I hope. But talk to us about that. Like why is it important to do research?

Anthony Leung 19:33

So I’m going to flip it on its head a little bit because I think that… when we think about researching for content, we immediately think about our product or service, the pain points of our customers, all of these things. But what I’m going to challenge people to do here is to do two very different types of research. The first is you, your company if you’re doing it for yourself. Think about yourself. Think about your why’s. Why are you in business? Why are you offering these services? Why this? Like, is there a reason why you offer a certain product that’s different than someone else. Because when you discover your why’s, your content’s gonna be a lot more rich, it’s going to be a lot more relatable. And it’s going to go into places where your competitors aren’t going to go. I’ll give you an example where one of my clients, he’s a creative director. He has a creative agency, loads of creative agencies out there, but what he cares about deeply is sustainability. And we are able to go there in his content and talk about things that matter to him and talk about his company through that value. And by doing that, it just opens up more conversations about and more content about the values that drive him and his business. So what that’s done for him is open doors that hasn’t, you know, been able to open before, been able to talk to other people that in the industry that he wants it to collaborate with. And it makes you stand out so much more because of that. So do that research about your why’s and what makes you tick. And what makes you different, because, you know, even for me, … look, you log on to LinkedIn, and there are thousands of supposedly LinkedIn experts. And you know, I’m in a sea of all that, and what makes me different, the only thing that will make me different is my values and my core. So once you map that out, you’re going to have a place of confidence that you can go to, to go back to creating your content. And that’s incredibly important. Because without that, you’re going to continuously try and chase trends or chase ways to hack the algorithm, right? And when you when you have that confidence to know why you’re telling your story, all those things don’t matter anymore. The second part research is actually them, your audience right. Their whys and their reason for being, and I’m sure there’s a lot of these. You’ve done a lot of this already, right. So you know, I’d be surprised and shocked if you’re sitting in a marketing position you don’t know anything about your audience. But think about also what values that crosses over with you. After you’ve researched on your why’s, because those are going to be very, those are going to be the greatest pieces of content you’ll ever get is when you cross between the core values between your audience and your yourself. And yeah, it just goes back to not second guessing anymore. And that also goes back to what we said in beginning about creating content that’s for your audience, if you don’t know why they’re here for you, or why they value you more than your competitors, you’re not going to be able to know how to deliver that value to them in your content. So that’s important. And yeah, I would say those are those, those are what I would go into in terms of research.

Christian Klepp 23:39

Right points. But I’m going to play the devil’s advocate. Right? Because I know that you’re probably facing this a lot. I totally understand where you’re coming from in terms of conducting the research. So it’s, it’s I call it the soul searching. So it’s like doing the internal research and the external with the customers. Well, what do you say to those doubters? And there’s a few of them out there that say, But Anthony, we don’t need that kind of research to produce content on LinkedIn. Right? Why is that? Why is that so important? Like we don’t understand what you’re giving us so much priority? What do you say to those people?

Anthony Leung 24:16

Well, I’ll tell you right now, I think there are two camps of people. And it’s the same camps of people in any discipline of marketing or any channels of marketing. There’s one side see LinkedIn… let’s talk LinkedIn, they see LinkedIn as a never ending sales opportunity, where they connect with as many people and they DM as many people and they try and make the sale. No, there’s no hate for that. Absolutely not. If that’s your hustle, go for it. Right. But that doesn’t build you a long term brand. That doesn’t… When you stop that activity or if you’re using Ads, when you stop spending on those ads. That’s when people forget about you and your services. And because you’re not paying to be there anymore. But when you’re talking about values, and you’re talking about something that’s beyond that transactional relationship, it’s such an obvious relationship. But it’s when you go beyond that, that’s when they’ll start remembering you, that’s when they’ll start putting you top of mind. All these wonderful jargons that we we say in marketing that we want to achieve, we achieve that without needing to spend endlessly. That’s, you know, everybody goes back to brands like Nike, you know, three little words “just do it” means so much more than Brand X who does shoes that we’ll never remember. That’s what happens. Right? Same with Red Bull. It’s like… they’re an energy drink. But why did they kill off all the other brands, when they’ve embedded themselves and be meaningful in extreme sports, people remember that. And those are values. That’s what it means. It’s beyond… Hey, if you give me money, I’ll work for you.

Christian Klepp 26:15

Absolutely man, absolutely. Okay. Moving on to the next slightly controversial topic. What’s your take on B2B influencers? And should companies be using them? And why?

Anthony Leung 26:32

Well, I’ll tell you the most incredible use of influencers I’ve seen on LinkedIn is when Succession was coming back out, and they had LinkedIn influencers go to like a premiere, I’m like that actually makes perfect sense. Beyond that, when we’re talking about the day to days, I think that it’s important for companies to work with people with high influence, I think that’s helpful, because those people have already an audience. But at the same time, they can’t slack on their own influence, because I’ve seen companies that, you know, hire brand advocates over brand champions, and their entire LinkedIn strategy is for that person to succeed, and to get a lot of influence. And the problem is, that person will leave at some point. And they take all of that wonderful influence with them. And you’re now simply ground zero. And you have to build this thing all over again. So what I say is, unless you have a small company with, you know, few employees and you have the energy and the resources to create your company page, do it and earn people’s trust through your brand. Because it’s doable, it’s possible. Look at DeWalt of all people, they’re a power, their power tools company, and their LinkedIn is off the chains. If they can do it, you can do it. And they spent… it’s clear they spend time and they spend resources on developing communications with their audience that makes their values pop that makes… they know why their audience is there. They know why their audiences love their products. And they celebrate it through their videos and their their images. So they can do it. You can do it too.

Christian Klepp 28:41

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that’s almost sometimes like a, like a balancing act. But you know, to your point, and I’m not sure if this is the right term, but it almost sounds like some companies do it to temporarily inflate their figures. Right? Because, you know, it’s it’s almost like, I hate to say the word hack, but it’s like a shortcut to just, you know, it’s like expediting the process a little bit. Right. So.

Anthony Leung 29:11

Yeah, you know, sometimes it’s about just a pat on the back, it comes down back to purpose because if the purpose is to make the CEO feels better about their company, or feel like oh, hey, they can go to that dinner with their friends and go look how many likes this post has come then job done. But what a waste, what a waste. We should be using this platform to be talking to others, we should be using this platform to be connecting, making real connections with people because it happens because this happened. This is an example of a real connection off LinkedIn. I’ve never met you in real life. I don’t know what you look like beyond this the screen (laugh) but yet we are here having fun. But yet here we are having a meaningful conversation about marketing and LinkedIn and helping people. And having a mission beyond just selling stuff. That’s why we connected. And that’s why I’m here. Right? So this is a testament to that.

Christian Klepp 30:25

Let’s face it, like you’re not going to be best friends with everybody that you connect with on LinkedIn. And I don’t think that that’s the objective of the exercise either. Right? It’s to connect with like-minded individuals. I always talk about like exchanging ideas, exchanging perspectives, we may not always have the same perspectives, and that actually makes the conversation even more interesting, right, because I think if everybody just agrees with everybody, that would also be slightly mundane. (laugh)

Anthony Leung 30:50

I agree. But for me, the power of this platform isn’t just a one off, isn’t just like, you know, exchange, it’s the, it’s the idea of showing up and showing up often and being meaningful every time, right. And that’s why, you know, I kind of slacked off posting every day. But you do, consistency is is important, right? If you can’t do every day, don’t kill yourself over it. Try once a week, start with that. But once you’re consistent, and every time somebody fires up LinkedIn, and they see you, and they see your content, and they go, Oh, that person is insightful or funny, or he really get me or there’s Oh, I can really relate to this. Or they solve my own problems every single time. And I can’t wait for it to see that person. Again. You’re on top of mind. Right? That’s, that’s the power of it.

Christian Klepp 31:51

Absolutely. And speaking of which. This is a two pronged question. On the topic of personal branding. Okay. So the first question is, do you think… why is it important to have a personal brand on LinkedIn? And then number two, is how can companies leverage people within the organization who have a personal brand to become advocates?

Anthony Leung 32:16

Okay, so I’ve, I’m going to have, you might have to remind me of the questions again. Okay, so the first one is…

Christian Klepp 32:24

The first one is like, Isn’t, why is it important to have a personal brand on LinkedIn?

Anthony Leung 32:31

So I think it’s, it’s funny that we see personal brand as this, like, this exercise that needs to be done because you’re in business. The truth is, we are always working on our personal brand, right? When you pick up a coffee, and how you treat the barista, that’s you, that’s your personal brand. How do you treat people? How do you how do you how do you? Are you? Are you? Are you jovial or are you a jerk? We don’t know. But every interaction with people is building your personal brand. Right. And I think that we only gave it a term for LinkedIn and for blogging and for digital and for PR, the to formalize it into into something that we can kind of be tangible as a job that we need to do. But the truth is, it’s actually just just ourselves, right? And so regardless, if you want to work in your personal brand or not, you are already doing it. Right. You are at networking events, and you’re talking to people, you are talking to clients, you are talking to prospects, that is all working on your personal brand. And but what LinkedIn does is that it gives us a place to congregate all of those stories into one place and continue building more influence with it, right. And so when I go, let’s say go speak at an event, and make all these great connections. That’s building on my personal brand in real life. But now I’m able to continue those conversations and be meaningful to those people on LinkedIn. And we’re building our relationships even further. That’s, that’s what that’s about. And so yes, it’s important to do personal brand. Because you’re already doing it.

Christian Klepp 34:27

Absolutely, absolutely. Fantastic. So that’s the first question. Then the second question is, how organizations… you know, what can they do to use people within their company as advocates with personal brands?

Anthony Leung 34:43

I think the first and foremost is what we talked about earlier is that top down needs to value it because it’s really hard for people you know, to try and do it themselves, or try and create a program from the bottom up. When you try and do from bottom up, which I’ve tried before, you get so far, but it’s the people that are the most enthusiastic that will continue it, it doesn’t become a program or activity that the entire company can get behind. So I would say the first is, you know, if you’re a business leader listening to this is to think about how you empower your employees to, to feel free to do this. I think that a lot of companies by default, try to limit the use of social media, from their employees, because we’re possibly afraid of what they’ll say or what they’ll lesson. But if your company is, has a great culture, and has great employees, and are doing great things, wouldn’t you want them to shout about it? So I would think of ways to incentivize them to do that. And I would just lead by example. Um, as a leader, I would start posting things I would want my employees to be posting. And once a while, just go, Hey, guys, look what I did, you guys could be doing the same thing, right. And now that I have live examples, these are not, these are not abstract ideas anymore. That’s like, oh, the person who’s basically signing off her checks. He’s doing this. He’s being himself or she’s, you know, being fully vulnerable in moments I didn’t expect. I’m allowed to do this as well, I’m allowed to be myself because my leaders are doing it. So I think that’d be a great way to incentivize people.

Christian Klepp 36:43

Fantastic, fantastic. So we get to the point in the conversation, where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given quite a few of them already, but lets us assume that there’s somebody out there, could be a potential client of yours, could be somebody that genuinely wants to connect with you after listening to this. But what are three to five things that you think people can do right now? B2B marketers gonna do right now to help improve engagement on their content on LinkedIn.

Anthony Leung 37:12

Okay, so I’m going to talk in a personal level, I think that I’m going to talk to people that are…or haven’t posted yet, that are afraid of posting, that are sitting here going, I think LinkedIn is important, but I don’t know what to do. Or I see all these loud voices, a Gary Vaynerchuk. And it’s like, I’m not Gary Vaynerchuk. I’m not Lea Turner. I don’t sound like them. But do I need to sound like them in order to win? The answer is no. And the first practical thing I would say is get over yourself. I think that it’s… we are our worst critics, we are our own worst critics. And we talk ourselves into believing that we don’t have anything of value to say. And then that’s before we even hit a single key on the keyboard. The good news is, is that that kind of mindset is with everyone found on all levels. I’ve talked to CMOs who say the exact same thing, and it’s like, Are you crazy, you’re a leader, you’re in a leadership position. You’ve done it all. I would love to hear how you got there. I would love to hear what your lessons are. I’d love to know what you ate for lunch? Like, do you even eat lunch? I don’t know. But those are all, you know, those thoughts that keep you from, from sharing your experience and keeping you from using a… should just telling your story. Those voices are on all levels of career paths. So don’t, don’t be you know, don’t be too hard on yourself. And the moment you start realizing that you’ve got actually a lot of value that you can be offering to anyone. I think that’s when you realize you’ve got some to say, your contents can be great. The second thing I would say is, you know, give yourself permission to be yourself. It sounds silly, it sounds weird. But whenever people first start doing LinkedIn, we get influenced by the thought that… the content that we see. So we either have to be as swearing and as loud as Gary Vaynerchuk or we need to be as prim and proper, and we need to put on our suit and tie and we need to be very stuffy because that’s how we talk on LinkedIn and it’s like no that’s that’s the worst. That’s goes back to goes back to what we said before… it becomes content for you. The content isn’t you at all. Oh, you’re not being yourself. People connect with, people who connect with values, people connect with personality and people connect with people. And even when you’re creating content for the company, when you can create it with personality, and it represents the people inside your company, and not just this facade that you’re trying to portray, that’s when it becomes powerful, that’s when it becomes relatable. That’s why a lot of companies, best performing content is when they post a picture of their pizza party. So, um, it’s true. So give yourself permission to be yourself, loosen up that tie, think about how you talk in real life, how you conduct yourself. So instead of, instead of being the business version of you, think about what your casual Friday view is like, and start from there. And I think that’d be a good barometer to start losing yourself a bit and how you conduct yourself.

Christian Klepp 41:04

Friday version, sorry, the casual Friday version of you minus the swearing right… (laugh)

Anthony Leung 41:10

Hey, listen, um, some of the best content I’ve seen in genre is people flipping the bird. So there’s no, there are no rules. There are no rules. Gary Vaynerchuk swears a lot. And he’s fine. He’s doing just fine. It’s down to you and your values. If you don’t swear, don’t swear, don’t feel like you have to right. If you swear, like, well, you know, pace yourself. Don’t use every single word, but use it for effect. Yeah, but honestly, it’s about knowing, it’s about giving yourself permission to fully express yourself. And once you’re able to let loose, it feels so different behind the keyboard. We talked about understanding our audience, understanding our story, that’s key as well, that’s, you know, spend time in it. Like when I start working with my clients, I start with what I call a starter kit. And it’s like an eight. There’s eight questions I give them and it goes to like, Well, why did you start your business? What do you value beyond just work? And then we start asking questions about their audience, why did they come to you and not someone else? Why did they love you more than someone else? And we start discovering the layers beyond that transactional bit. A lot of it is going to be feel instinctual. And you’re going to look at those questions like, okay, but I know this, but why are you asking me? It’s because if you don’t write it down, and you don’t map it out. You won’t go back to it. And you always go back. It’s, there’s no plan, and there’s no strategy, and there’s no story that ingrained in your head. And so that document for me is so incredibly important when I’m working with my clients to create content, because they’ll start talking about something else. And it’d be like, Well, does it reflect back on the starter kit and the questions that we have here? Because if it doesn’t, then we watch, we should think twice before we post this. But if we do find a way, oh, my goodness, there are ways that you can talk about winning new clients or winning new work that goes back into your company values, that goes back to personal values. It’s so much more rich, and it’s so much more meaningful, and it gets so much more engagement. And one last thing, one last one last thing I would say is that, I think by default, when we first start thinking about LinkedIn, we think about really long content, it’s like, I need to do a video I need to type like thought leadership or something. And I feel like thought leadership is meaningless, without examples of being in action. So think about, you know, if you’re in a company, think about the events that you put on, think about the places that you’re going to be a part of the community or to enrich the community. If you’re doing it for yourself, think about these personal things that you do. People that you meet with, leaders that you have just had a coffee with, learnings that you just had from an event. But show how active you are in the community because being part of… contributing part of community is just as important, if not more important than showing that you’re a thought leader. There can only be a few thought leaders. But then some of those can be faked, but you can’t fake the fact that you’re within the community and you’re part of it.

Christian Klepp 44:59

Fantastic advice man. Fantastic advice. I’m just furiously taking notes while you’re talking. So let me see if I can recap this quickly. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you spit your water out there.

Anthony Leung 45:10

All right. What’s, what’s a podcast without a spit stage?

Christian Klepp 45:14

All right. So let me see… Get over yourself. Okay, remove that self-doubt. And then the second one is be yourself. So like, you know, just the way, write the way that you talk in real life. And depending on what kind of person you are, that may be a good or a bad thing. Understanding your audience, I think is key. I mean, that is so… you know, we can’t repeat that enough, right that you have to know who you’re writing this for. And then the fourth one is showing how active you are in the community, versus trying to like obsess around the whole concept of thought leadership. I hope I capture that correctly.

Anthony Leung 45:53

Yeah, that’s exactly it. All right.

Christian Klepp 45:56

Fantastic. Fantastic. All right, My Friend, here comes the bonus question. So buckle up. So let’s say like, you know, we wrap up this interview, and you’re about to head home, and then suddenly you get a call on your phone. And then the guy is like, Hello, is this Anthony Liang? Like, well, this is Anthony Leung, but how can I help you? Oh, Anthony. Hi. You know what? I do. I do, believe me. So and then the guy on the other line says, Hey, Anthony, this is Ryan Roslansky. Right. And you probably know who that is. So you know, I’ve been following your content on LinkedIn. Right? So it’s, you know, for context, you know, for the audience out there. Ryan Roslansky is the current LinkedIn CEO. Right. So let’s say that Ryan Roslansky calls you and says, Hey, I’ve been following you on LinkedIn, love your work, I’d like you to come in. And, you know, I’m gonna like for a day, hand you over the reins, and give you the power to make one change on LinkedIn. Just one. So here comes the question. If you were given that power to change one thing on LinkedIn, what would that change be? And why?

Anthony Leung 47:17

Such a fascinating question. Such a fascinating question. And it’s fascinating even more for me, because I’ve had opportunities to possibly work for, let’s say, the platforms right. The Facebook, the Twitter and stuff. But I’ve always shied away from it, because I would rather use the platform to be storytelling and to be connecting with people. And that, to me is more interesting than the platform itself. And so because I always think like Twitter can go down, Facebook can go down. LinkedIn will never go down. It’s been around for 20 plus years. I will never go down. So that’s interesting, too. Interesting question to me, because it’s like, what is it? What’s one thing I would change that makes storytelling and genuine connections easier is what my brain is trying to tell me. It’s like, well, what is that one thing? I know there are things that distract us, I would like to take away like, those verification badges. Who needs those? Nobody needs those. Why are you putting out there? There are… top voice badges. People with top voice badges, you know, they earn it by contributing to certain amounts of LinkedIn articles that LinkedIn tries to distribute. And it doesn’t actually mean your top voice, it just means you’ve done a few articles. And I feel like we get distracted by these things. And we try to chase these things, because we feel like that’s how we feel like we’re making progress. And so I guess the change that I would like to see. The change I would like to see actually is a bit like the Tik Tok algorithm. I think that as much as we… As much as Tik Tok is talked about, the great thing about how they treat content is that it’s not about how many followers you have. It’s not about how much money you put into it. The organic content comes down to it well, isn’t is it engaging? Are people watching it? Because if it is, I’ll give it to more people. And if LinkedIn can do that, better, I think that we’ll start seeing more of I don’t want to say because the term for me right now is that comes to mind is like a micro influencer. But that’s not right. But will enable people with genuine thoughts, actual thought leaders that aren’t fuss about getting the most likes or getting the most comments. But that content starts distributing around to people that need it. They start giving the little guys with big ideas, a chance to shine more than people with millions of followers. That’s what I would like to see.

Christian Klepp 50:39

Some really interesting one. That’s a really interesting one. You’re absolutely right there, I guess, like a lot of platforms, right? Because it’s not necessarily unique to LinkedIn. But there’s so many distractions on the platform that that somehow deviate from its original purpose. Right. I suppose we understand like, like, the things you talked about, like the badges? I mean, I think they’re well intentioned. But to your point, I think it’s leading people down this, this path, which may not necessarily be right.

Anthony Leung 51:11

But yeah, a lot of it. A lot of these distractions are quantifiable. What I mean by that is, we go back to the things that irked me, right, like things like you got to post every day, you’ve got to comment on everybody’s comments, right? These are all quantifiable actions. And I think that’s why it gets preached a lot is because they can go well, you’re not doing well, because you didn’t post every day. Or someone else can go, oh, I can post every day. I can do that. Right. But the truth is, the hard work of understanding your story, your values, and your relationship with the audience. You unlock that, that’s going to beat any algorithm. I don’t care if you’re on Tik Tok. I don’t care if you’re on Facebook in 1995. It’s the same thing.

Christian Klepp 52:02

Absolutely. Well, Anthony, this is such a great conversation as expected. So thank you again, for coming on and sharing your slightly controversial insights and expertise with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Anthony Leung 52:19

Yeah. My name is Anthony Leung. And I help you make LinkedIn finally worked for your business. So I work with companies as well as business leaders to make the most of LinkedIn through discovering their voice on LinkedIn. And… You’d be shocked to know that you can find me on LinkedIn. I know crazy crazy. (laugh) But if you search for Mean Write Hook, You’ll find me on LinkedIn. You’ll find my company page, but hit me up, hit my personal page up. Send me a DM. Don’t be shy. In fact, if you send me a DM, I’ll send you the starter kit that I send all my clients. It’s the first thing we do. And that will you know, I’ve sent to other people where it’s unlocked their thinking about how to how to storytell their story on LinkedIn. So I hope it’s helpful to you too, as well.

Christian Klepp 53:26

That’s fantastic. Thanks for that. What’s the story there with the Mean Write Hook?

Anthony Leung 53:32

Oh, oh, yeah. So I have two loves. At least 10 years ago, when I came up with the name. I had a love for mixed martial arts. Bit of organized violence and, and good puns. And so when I had to think of a name for and wanted to do some own business, like over a decade ago, I was like, Okay, this makes sense. You’ve given mean right hook. And it’s mean right hook because I firmly believe that regardless of if it’s a movie, a book, a TV show, a poster, a LinkedIn posts, it all starts with good writing. It all starts with good intentions. And it’s all starts with good storytelling. And that’s why you give mean right hook.

Christian Klepp 54:25

All right, Anthony, once again, it was a pleasure. Thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe, and I look forward to catching up when you finally make it over to Toronto at some point.

Anthony Leung 54:35

Absolutely bad. I am jonesing for a proper double double.

Christian Klepp 54:41

All right. Take care.

View Details

How to Help B2B Companies Find their Value Proposition

B2B companies must have a compelling reason why customers should choose them over the competition. They need to be able to prove and substantiate their differentiation and convince companies that they are the right partner to work with.

That’s why we’re having a conversation with B2B copywriting expert Linda Melone (Conversion Copywriter & Strategist, The Copy Worx) about how companies need to have a strong value proposition. During our conversation, Linda explains the importance of having a value proposition and the pitfalls to avoid. She also explains what you should look out for when conducting customer interviews, how to leverage AI the right way, and provides actionable tips for developing a value proposition that truly differentiates your B2B company from the rest.

https://youtu.be/sZPxNh69DOQ

Topics discussed in episode

• Linda explains what a value proposition is and why it’s so important [2:10]
• The most common mistakes pertaining to value proposition and how these can be addressed [4:36]
• How to find your real value proposition:
  • Study your competition[5:52]
  • Conduct customer research [7:53]
• Actionable tips: [13:37]
  • Conduct the right research
  • Rate your value proposition based on 5 traits (Unique, desirable, specific, succinct, & memorable)
• Linda elaborates on what should be in the value proposition – using her own value proposition as an example [15:51]
• Linda shares an example of how she researched and crafted the value proposition for her B2B client [20:39]
• The role of AI in copywriting [24:51]
• Bonus question: The one person that Linda would love to interview [33:16]

Companies and links mentioned

• Linda Melone on LinkedIn
• The Copy Worx
• AnswerThePublic
• User Testing

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Linda Melone, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies craft compelling, high converting copy and emails. So coming to us from Arizona, USA, Linda Melone, welcome to the show.

Linda Melone 01:08

Thank you so much for having me on Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Great to be connected. Linda, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. And before we jump in, please shout out to Eric Melcher from Innovators Can Laugh for this introduction.

Linda Melone 01:22

Yeah, I know. It’s great that he connected us. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 01:26

All right. Well, let’s dive in. Because you know, this is gonna be quite the conversation I think. You are… You’re quite the expert I would say when it comes to copywriting. That might be the understatement of the new year. But…

Linda Melone 01:41

There’s a lot of a lot of good copywriters, but I hold my own. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 01:45

Absolutely. So but you know, for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to help B2B companies find their value proposition. So I would say, let’s kick off this conversation with two questions. One is, first of all, let’s clear the air and define what a value proposition is. And number two, why do you think that’s so important?

Linda Melone 02:10

Value Proposition. First of all, it’s my favorite topic of all when it comes to B2B. And I’ll tell you why later on, we get into the other questions, but it’s really, it answers the question: Why should I choose you? Like the value proposition. Really, it’s not just about what you do. But it’s why what you do matters to your clients. So it’s like a unique promise. And I say unique, because this is what really hones in on why it’s important. It’s your promise of value. It’s a compelling reason why a business should pick you over your competitors. So that’s really why it’s so important. And most B2B companies can’t tell you what theirs is. I know because I work with them.

Christian Klepp 02:57

Oh, wait a minute. You mean, the value proposition has nothing to do with the amazing product features and the patents and technology? (laugh)

Linda Melone 03:02

You know, it can be…. they can be woven in. Yes. And in full transparency. It’s funny because getting ready for this interview, and I knew this was going to be our main discussion, I took a look at my own value proposition. And I changed it, which I could tell you, if you want me to reveal for the first time on this podcast. Well, I recently shifted my niche, boosts your fitness and health brand with expert crafted magazine quality copy. And it meets all the criteria that we’re going to be talking about. So it’s boost your fitness and health brand with expert crafted magazine quality copy, which really separates me from other copywriters.

Christian Klepp 03:02

So that’s your current value proposition. Right?

Linda Melone 03:09

That’s what I just came… Yes, that’s what I came up with literally yesterday. Because I had otherwise been focused on SaaS companies. And so I’ve shifted my niche.

Christian Klepp 03:56

Right, right, right, because that’s the one that I saw. When I was doing your I keep calling it a background check. But what I’m really doing is my homework and researching my guests, and that’s what I saw on your LinkedIn profile. Right?

Linda Melone 04:10

Yeah, I changed that already.

Christian Klepp 04:12

Okay. Okay. So that’s, that’s a great start. Now, let’s segue into the next question, which is about and you will have no problem answering this, I’m sure. Um, common mistakes and misconceptions. And you mentioned some of them already. But what is it pertaining to value proposition? What are some of the mistakes you’ve seen out there that marketers make? And most importantly, what should they do to address them?

Linda Melone 04:36

Well, the biggest mistake, it’s not really a mistake. It’s sort of a lack of, it’s more of a, I don’t even know. Well, I’ll tell you what it is. You can tell me if it’s actually a mistake. It’s just that they either don’t have a value proposition, or it’s not niched down enough. It’s too vague. You know, a lot of these companies sound like everyone else, and there’s a couple of reasons And for that one is they, they don’t want to, like they want to stand out, but they don’t want to stand out. You know, it’s always, especially if it’s a big company where a lot of people have their say with what is, you know, the messaging is, but it works against them because they’re not setting themselves apart from their competitors. So that I think is the biggest issue that I see. And I see it all the time. Like on a landing page or home page.

Christian Klepp 05:30

Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But what do you think they can do to address that? Because I mean, like we, you know, that’s the classic, like B2B scenario, right? It’s the whole, like, let’s play it safe. Let’s not rock the boat too much. But let’s try to be different anyway. So it’s kind of like they’re always becoming their worst enemy at some point in the journey, right?

Linda Melone 05:52

Well, what I suggest and this is the best way to find your real value prop is you want to study your competition. And what you want to do is like, when I work with a client, I will get into the social media, what are people saying about them? What are people saying about their competitors? And what are the biggest complaints and what are their competitors not doing or not talking about? It may not even be that they’re not doing something. But if they’re not talking about it, that’s something you want to talk about. There’s that famous story among copywriters is famous. Now I’m gonna forget all the names associated with it. It was a famous copywriter, who was working for Schlitz beer back in, I don’t know, 60s or something. And he was brought into a factory. And because his job was to find, you know, to create this high converting copy. And he saw a process that they were doing to clean their glassware or something they were doing where they were, it was to him, it was astounding, like, I didn’t know that you guys did this, it was some kind of steam cleaning of it was like a step that he was not aware of in the process. And the person, the marketer, he was talking to, said, well, all our competitors do it, too. He said, Yeah, but they don’t talk about it. And so he brought that out in their copy. And they ended up being like the number one selling beer, like after that point, because they just pulled out what it was their competitors weren’t talking about. So that’s how you find the best value prop.

Christian Klepp 07:27

That’s, that’s a pretty good example. And I love that you brought up that bit about research. You kind of can’t like talk about value proposition. And just skip the research part, right? Especially customer research. So talk to us about what marketers and/or copywriters should be looking for when they’re, for example, conducting customer interviews, like what kind of insights should they be extracting?

Linda Melone 07:53

The most important thing is to ask… First of all, is to talk to customers, and past and present customers, and a lot of companies don’t feel they need to do that. But you need that outside perspective. And you want to ask them, what is it that made them go with you instead of competition? And, you know, what was the transformation, so this fill again, it goes back to kind of that gap that your competitors are not doing or not talking about. So you know, it could be something. I mean, there’s just that could be anything really. I have one of my clients, all of their customers, because I talked to them when I was doing before I did copywriting for them. It was all about how they have this, as one person put it other worldly customer service where everyone had a, you get caught in that voicemail loop, oh, click three, if you want to speak to this department. And these people, this company, it’s a big company, they have real people answering the phones and they’re not just answering the phones, but they’re they’re very helpful and everyone was talking about the same thing. And so they’re actually… I use that phrase in some of their copy other worldly customer service, which is exactly what someone said. So it’s what is it that you know, made you go with them? And how did it transform you or transform the way you do your business? Whatever it is, the product or service does?

Christian Klepp 09:25

Don’t even get me started on this whole like thing with customer service and AI. I mean, like every bank that you call here in Canada, you never actually get to talk to that person because they just give you this whole menu and press one for this, press two for this, and it says: What would you like to do today? And then it’s AI right? And then you tell him what you want to say. And it’s like, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Could you please repeat? It’s like, ah, give me a break. (laugh)

Linda Melone 09:50

Yeah. And so people are starting to really you know, appreciate that when a company has real people answering the phone.

Christian Klepp 09:56

Yes. Imagine that. Right. I know. Real people. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, because it’s, it’s, it’s something that I know some of the listeners are struggling with. And I’d like to get your take on it. Conducting customer research is important. extracting all those insights that you talked about are important. But let’s take it another step back. How do you… it’s not so much buy-in. But how do you get customers to agree to this type of interview? Because you know, we’ve all seen this before, where you try to interview customers, and there’s pushback because of oh sales are guarding their customers, and they’re not very comfortable with marketing talking to the customers directly, et cetera, et cetera. And that impacts the work of people like you.

Linda Melone 10:41

Yeah, it’s not always easy. Yeah, I mean, I usually I tell my clients to strive for contacting as many people as they can 15 or 20. And if I get five or seven interviews, that’s usually enough. And side note, you know, it’s enough when people start saying the same thing, like everyone starts repeating something. So what I do is I have a letter that I write for them, and it talks about how… and it’s coming from my client. So it’s like, it’s people who are usually happy with their service, you’re not going to talk to somebody who’s not. So hey, this is going to really help our you know, it’s going to help our marketing. Could you please talk to Linda for, and I say, 15 minutes. Now, I know that a lot of researcher, people that I know, other copywriters say I allow an hour, you tell somebody want to talk to him for an hour, and they just will shut down because no one wants to do that. So I tell them 15 minutes, and what happens is, if they have a lot to say, and it runs over that they usually don’t have a problem with it. And I’m very casual. I’ve interviewed, you know, I’ve done so much like, writing in 20 years, and I did a lot of content writing, which means I did articles, magazine articles, I interviewed hundreds of people. So I have a good ability to know how to talk to someone. If people are very curt, if they give one word answers, and I can’t go any farther, it’s going to be a short interview. But I usually say You know, it’s a 15 minutes, it would help us out a lot. And you know what, the people that I’ve worked with, when they give me the names of their customers, a lot of times those people reach out to me and say, I am more than happy to talk to you about so and so because they’re just… I’ve just loved them. That’s the ideal situation. So yeah, it’s just tell them it’s going to be short, tell them it’s, you know, they’re not going to I tell them, Listen, you’re not going to be quoted, because they’re not unless they want to be, I’m not going to quote you. I’m just I want to get an idea of whatever it is, I need to find out.

Christian Klepp 12:37

Absolutely. No, I 100% agree with you on that. You know, having done some of these customer interviews myself, I always, I always, I top it up by five minutes. So I’m like, I usually say like 20 minutes of your time, right? And nine times out of 10. Linda, I’m not even kidding. They go for about 30 to 45 minutes. Because people just have a lot to say like, you know, when you start making it about them instead of the company, right?

Linda Melone 13:03

Yeah, like, how did this help you? And they start talking about… I’m sure.

Christian Klepp 13:07

Absolutely. Alright, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, right. So let’s appreciate this for a second. We all know that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say, and you know, some of the stuff you can’t do in an hour or in 24 hours and so forth. But if somebody who is out there struggling with copywriting, helping to define the value proposition of their company, what are three to five things that you would tell them you can do right now?

Linda Melone 13:37

Number one thing is study your competition. And that’s going to take I mean, you can do a brief, even just a brief research, you don’t have to dive into it super deep unless you want to. I mean, I do because that’s what I do. But you want to look at, you know that there’s that there’s a site, answerthepublic.com. You familiar with that? So you find out what people are asking about that product or service, what are they looking up? That’s the first thing I would do. The second is there’s five traits of value proposition that you want to have. And so when I actually have like a scorecard, and I rate a value prop on these five traits, so it’s, it should be unique. It should be desirable, something that your customer says they want specific, succinct, so keep it short. And lastly want it to be memorable, something people will remember. And so it it has to be… it could be stronger on one part than the other but look for something that stands out and doesn’t sound like everyone else. And how do you do it? There’s only something you know, I’ve worked with a lot of health and fitness companies that on the surface seems like they do what everybody else does. But when you get into it, there’s always something unique that they’re doing. And so those are the things I look for, where’s that gap? So it’s study your competition look for the gap. Look for these five traits, unique, desirable, specific, succinct and memorable. So that’s three things. Well, is that, is that enough to get started?

Christian Klepp 14:17

Absolutely. And, um, you know, I gotta backtrack a little bit. And this is my bad. Like, it might also help or be useful for the listeners out there, if we can just dissect that a little bit, right? Because there is a process. And you’ve mentioned that already, to developing a value proposition. But can you elaborate a little bit more on what that actually consists of like what in the value proposition?

Linda Melone 15:51

It should say, going back to my own. So the reason that I chose… I said, boost your fitness and health brand. The reason I said that to start is that I have a fitness background, and I’ve written for a lot of health companies, and brand indicates is B2B, because I do B2B. And then I said, with expert crafted magazine quality copy, because I spent 15, 20 years working for and writing for glossy magazines, they call it like the real, you know, I’ve been in Time Magazine and Huffington Post and a lot of these other ones. And so it combines what makes me unique, as well as who my target audience is, and what I’m doing so boosts your brand. That’s what I do. Health and Fitness brand that’s specific to the audience. Magazine quality copy shows how that’s what my magazine, my magazine writing background. So if you can combine those things, a lot of it, too, is also about testing. So you want to run these things by like you could even there’s a number of sites, and I can’t name offhand that was usertesting.com. And that was one that used to be $50 a person to try. But I think it’s more than that. Now, it can be pricey to test this, but even just run it by your, you know, colleagues, or people who are potential customers, do a poll on LinkedIn, you know, this, these are three things, you know, what do you think is, is best? So they come about… like the value props usually come about, partly from the research from interviews with my customers. What are they saying? What are the terms that keep prop, you know, popping up? what’s being said on social media is also important, because it’s unfiltered, especially a site like Reddit, where I get some really good stuff, because people just don’t care. (laugh) Anything.

Christian Klepp 17:49

Oh, yeah, there’s no filter there.

Linda Melone 17:51

Right? I know, I posted things, made a mistake, they’ll just blast you. And so it’s a combination of what you hear kind of on the streets, what your customers are telling you. And then what you want to be, you know, as far as the unique versus your competitors, and it takes a while. I mean, I allow for weeks of research, to pull together a really good value prop and I could probably do a little bit quicker than that. But to get a hold of everything and really look at what’s important. It’s not something that’s easy to do. And people just throw these things out there. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 18:30

Well, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I tend to see that a lot, even, you know, with my customers or what not. A lot of them are under this illusion that while it’s a value proposition, that can’t be that hard, or it can’t take that long, right? But then the reason, the reason they think that way is because you know, nobody’s ever like, you know, pop the trunk, lifted the hood or whatever, whatever analogy, you want to use right, so they don’t actually know what’s happening behind the scenes. How much work goes actually goes into it? Right?

Linda Melone 19:02

Yeah, it’s not something you can just toss together. But if you do, I mean, you’re gonna end up sounding like everybody else, like even using AI.

Christian Klepp 19:09

Case and point. Yeah,

Linda Melone 19:10

I mean, I will use AI to brainstorm. I never use like, for something like this, I did go in there and say, Hey, this is everything I do, what do you think would be a good value prop, but you have to keep in mind AI is going to pull together what’s out there already. So it’s not going to be unique. It’s going to be okay, this is what other people are saying. So, but it gives me an idea of how like when it said, fitness and health brand, I like that because it said if you’re using… if you’re a B2B, you want to include brands. So yeah, I did use AI to brainstorm a little bit, but the end result was my own. And, you know, that’s the way I use AI to help it along, but it’s not the end result.

Christian Klepp 19:53

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And we will get to the topic of AI in a second but before we do that, Um, if you could just give us an example of how you help the customer to develop and define the value proposition that they have, or they didn’t have.

Linda Melone 20:08

I was working with an Australian company that had… it’s a recovery company. So it’s for sports, it was owned. Well, it is owned, it’s still there. It’s owned by a former professional athlete. And so this is it’s not a gym, it’s more of a recovery and recovery place. So you go in and you do ice baths, massages, like things to recover from your…

Christian Klepp 20:37

Physical therapy?

Linda Melone 20:39

Yeah, it’s like that. But it’s even beyond that. Okay, so I talked to him. And I spoke to his… Trying to think…. his customers. This is a while ago. So I’m trying to think customers, he’s, he’s started a franchise of these. So this is the B2B where it comes in. So B2C would be the people or the end user, but he actually was selling the franchises to people who had the same goals as he did, which is to help people recover from sports, injuries, or just to up their game. And so when I talked to him, and the people that were potential customers. They talked about how they were driven by a greater purpose, it wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about how much am I going to make, you know, running this franchise, how much can I charge… like that never came up. And so it was always like, after talking to him, and literally, that’s the thing that got him out of bed in the morning. He and his wife, were running this franchise. And so I incorporated that into the header. And that’s what made… I mean, he, I remember, because what happens is, when I do a value proposition, I create this whole presentation. And so when I was presenting it, he was silent. And that’s either really good or really bad. You know, in this case, it was really good. He just said, I don’t even know what to say, This is so good, is what he said. And the, the franchise, you know, the header on his website was for entrepreneurs, driven by greater purpose. That was it. That was it. You know, it wasn’t the money. It wasn’t Hey, you know, even even helping people was I mean, it was secondary was part of it. But it really was about that inner drive to, to seek, to have a greater purpose. And this was…what their they felt their purpose was. That was probably the biggest one as far as a revelation. Like, he didn’t even expect that.

Christian Klepp 22:36

Yeah, ya no, fantastic. I mean, that must have been nerve racking for you. I think we’ve all been in those meetings where you know like the customer doesn’t say anything, and like you said, it’s like, okay, he either really loves this, or he really hates it. And he’s just waiting, like, until you’re done and then. And that’s the grand finale.

Linda Melone 22:54

And I don’t give them anything ahead of time. Because I mean, we talk back and forth during the process, but when I present everything, I don’t send them everything until it’s completely done, because sometimes I’ll edit it live during it. There’s something but it’s nerve wracking. And, you know, I’m pretty good at ad-libbing here and there and not getting nervous and not showing that I’m nervous. But sometimes inside I’m just… So…

Christian Klepp 23:23

I hear you, I hear you. I’ve tried to train myself to do this. And I haven’t been very successful. But I’ve tried to train myself to avoid using gap fillers. Yeah. When I’m nervous in a presentation, like, you know, they say just exercise or practice using silence instead. Yeah, there’s apparently silence can be very powerful. But I’ve found also that silence can also be to your detriment as well.

Linda Melone 23:51

Yeah. Sometimes I know I used to years ago, I was a part of a Toastmasters, where they teach you how to speak. And then somebody… did you ever go to one of those meetings? Yes. And they have somebody counting your ohms and ahhs and that’s what got me out of it. I usually can catch myself but makes you really, really aware of it for sure.

Christian Klepp 24:12

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. And now we are going back to the topic on everyone’s lips these days AI. All right. Now don’t get me wrong. We’re not going to start talking about how the machines are rising up and replacing all the copywriters because I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. But I think the more important question, which I’m passing on to you, Linda, is AI seems to be impacting almost every aspect of our work, not just as marketers and copywriters, but pretty much across other industries. But do you think that AI should be used in copywriting? If yes, how?

Linda Melone 24:51

I think it should be… there’s definitely a role. There’s a place for it. What I have found is I like to brainstorm with it, but it tends to come up and I have the ChatGPT there’s next level, there’s like I paid $20 a month for it, which is supposed to be my copywriting coach said, get this one because it’s it’s better. It comes up with the same phrases a lot. And it loves words like dive into, and I can’t think of the… it’s like marketing speak is what I call it. So I think that it’s great to get a start. Like, a lot of times I will take an entire interview, even like my podcast, you know, I’ll put everything. The notes are a bulk of it into AI. And so can you extract what the main points are? And that will speed up things for me, it really worked well, when I had a client that had, she said she had five different target audience personas. And when I looked at this Excel spreadsheet she sent me I’m like, how am I gonna go through all this? And I said, you know, I’m throwing all this in AI. And I said, Can you merge these into one? Like, what are the commonalities? That was probably the eye opener for me, because it came up with what was the same in all five. So it saved me a ton of time. I think that’s the way to use it really is you want to… it can save you time for extracting important information. It can get you started with titles and headings. I don’t rely on it a lot for that because as I said, it uses a lot of marketing speak. It’s the same stuff, everyone says and that’s what this whole interview is about is not sounding like everybody else. And even AI at one point I asked something about that kind of as I put it, I made it punch itself in the face. I said what is it that humans do better than AI. And it said, you have to remember that AI does not create, it repeats, and it gets information that’s already out there where it doesn’t. It can speed up research, but it’s not the… To me, it should never be the final word, you’ve got to be a copywriter. And you’ve got to know how to create good copy and use it as a tool. It definitely has a place and it has sped up processes for me for sure.

Christian Klepp 27:24

At the very least, it’ll help you to filter out all the terrible ideas. When you prompt ChatGPT to come up with headlines, and it comes up with all these like cringe worthy ones.

Linda Melone 27:38

Oh, I know. And it always uses colons. It’s like it has one part colon and I. So you can say you can put in it. You know, please change these two titles without colons. It’s still sometimes will still do it. It’s very uncooperative at times.

Christian Klepp 27:56

Absolutely. No, I…

Linda Melone 27:57

It started the uprising using colons (laugh)…

Christian Klepp 28:01

Like these little …. like like these microaggressions. Right, like?

Linda Melone 28:06

Yeah,

Christian Klepp 28:07

No, I agree. I mean, like, Look, I’m not against AI. A potential client asked me this last week, you know, how does the the availability of all these AI tools impact the kind of writing work that I do? And I said, like, look, there’s a time and place for AI. I just don’t think that it should be used. And I think this was your point. Like the way that people are always chasing the next hack or looking for that shortcut. I don’t think that it should be to shortcut your work. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that you can save time researching. I think that’s great. But I don’t think that you should rely on AI to do all the copy for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s where it goes. All right.

Linda Melone 28:49

And you can tell, you can tell when someone’s used it, even in LinkedIn, I’m on there a lot and people will… You can tell, because if somebody if their comment is a summation of what you said, That’s AI, like, 9 out of 10 times.

Christian Klepp 29:04

Absolutely.

Linda Melone 29:05

They’re not adding anything. They’re just repeating and it’s like, just stop.

Christian Klepp 29:12

That was how you feel… really…

Linda Melone 29:14

Well, you know it’s interesting. I just recently heard an interview with somebody who had met… Oh it was one of the actors in Jurassic Park had met the who was I can’t think of his name. The writer of Jurassic Park. Yeah. So he had a conversation with Michael Crichton. And he asked him about somehow… I just, it wasn’t even AI specifically, but it was the internet and he said, What is it you know, how do you feel about everything that’s happening and Michael Crichton said, I hate it. And the actor… why? It is because people aren’t thinking for themselves. He said Einstein came up with his ideas by sitting and looking out into, like, whatever he looked out into it was, you know, he just, he would sit and think. And he said the AI and our reliance on the internet is kind of a, what did he call it? But it meant like, it’s just everybody else’s ideas put into one, like you don’t have your own idea. He said, You need to sit by yourself and think of things, originate ideas on your own without relying on everybody else’s input. And I thought that was great. was such a good point to make.

Christian Klepp 30:35

More people should be following that advice today. I would say, even more pertinent than it was like, a decade ago.

Linda Melone 30:43

Yeah, it’s easy to just rely on AI.

Christian Klepp 30:47

Absolutely. Linda, it kind of sounds like you’ve been on your soapbox all this while but I’m going to ask you to stay up there a little bit longer, just for a couple of minutes for this next question. So here goes, the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why, and let’s make it relevant to value proposition.

Linda Melone 31:13

Value Proposition. Okay, somebody else lined up for that. For a value proposition, I think. And I don’t know if it’s something people do all the time, but it’s really not either not thinking they need one, I think that’s probably the biggest thing is, you know, we don’t need a value proposition. People know what we do. Or we just can keep talking about what we do. And it’s just your value proposition is the foundation for all of your messaging, once you have that down. And that’s why I do that first with my clients, we need to find your value prop, because all the copy needs to come back to that. So not taking it seriously enough, not spending enough time creating it. These are the things just really not seeing that it’s that important. And that’s one reason why I chose this as sort of my area of expertise, because I’m really good at distilling down a lot of information and summing it up into one statement. So I think is just feeling like you don’t need one or the edge. It’s not that important. And you’d be wrong.

Christian Klepp 32:20

Absolutely. I mean, at least in my experience, because I’m more of like the branding guy for B2B. And it tends to be that way with a lot of B2B companies, they don’t feel the brand is important until that actually becomes a serious problem. Right, in terms of the lack of differentiation, I mean, to your point earlier on the conversation, right?

Linda Melone 32:39

Or the saying that people… if you don’t create your brand, and I think also pertains to your value proposition, people are created for you? Yep. You don’t want that.

Christian Klepp 32:49

I’ve heard that one. Okay, Linda, here comes the bonus question. Let’s see if that’s something to do with your actual area of expertise, or it’s just something for you personally. Okay, here we go. If you were given the opportunity to interview someone, one on one, living or dead. Who would it be and why?

Linda Melone 33:16

You know, the first thing that popped into my mind is Keanu Reeves. Because I love him as a he seems to have escaped all the Hollywood BS and maintained his humaneness. I want to know how, how he did that. I could also say about Tom Hanks, but I’ve heard some negative things about Tom Hanks. Keanu Reeves. Also, because Keanu is half Asian, like you and I are. So I’m fascinated whenever I read things about him where he doesn’t, he doesn’t talk about things like how he gives away money. You know, he supports things that he doesn’t look for the accolades. He doesn’t do it for the publicity. And he gives up his seats on a bus for you know, for people. I mean, I’m fascinated by that. So probably him and he just seemed like he would be so cool to sit down and talk to.

Christian Klepp 34:18

No, I mean, absolutely. To your point. It’s, he’s managed and kudos to him because it’s not easy. He’s managed to avoid all these, you know, this Hollywood intrigue and scandal that other celebrities of his caliber are plagued with. And, you know, some of them, some of them can’t seem to get away from those scandals, right.

Linda Melone 34:36

And the other question I would have for him is how does he do a movie like John Wick, which… have you seen any of the John Wick movies? So they’re violent. I mean, they’re violent to the point of almost being comical. They’re like insanely ridiculous. But how does he do that at the same time that he seems to be such a… I don’t know if he’s spiritual, asserted, he comes across like that. Yes.

Christian Klepp 34:58

Yeah he does.

Linda Melone 34:59

You know, And it’s interesting…

Christian Klepp 35:01

I could be wrong. But there was a movie. I think it was the early 90s. And it was Bernardo Bertolucci was the director. It was Little Buddha, I think.

Linda Melone 35:04

Okay, I haven’t heard that

Christian Klepp 35:09

He was in that one.

Linda Melone 35:15

Oh, interesting.

Christian Klepp 35:17

So he actually did play Prince Siddhartha, who eventually became the Buddha right. So

Linda Melone 35:22

Oh, yeah, I just, I don’t know. He just seems like somebody. I also feel like he’s somebody who you can sit down and talk to without feeling intimidated, like, there’s other actors that you would be the kind of, you know, you’d be nervous. I just don’t think I’d be nervous. I just think he’s just a regular guy. How does he do it?

Christian Klepp 35:41

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all part of the magic. Linda, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Linda Melone 35:57

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Christian. It’s been a lot of fun. Well, obviously, I’m on LinkedIn a lot. The Copy Worx, Workx.com is my website. And you can reach me there or DM me on LinkedIn. And if have any questions or comments, I’d be happy. And I also have my podcast, of course, which is the B2B marketing and copywriting podcast.

Christian Klepp 36:26

Linda once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe. Talk to you soon.

Linda Melone 36:29

Thank you. Okay.

Christian Klepp 36:31

All right. Bye for now.

View Details

How to Optimize the Customer Experience for ABM

It’s a topic that is discussed quite intensively by B2B marketers: account-based marketing, or ABM. When done the right way, it will help both sales and marketers to ensure that targeted accounts are engaging and that the pipeline continues to grow, resulting in more revenue.

Join us as we chat with B2B marketing expert Cristina Daroca (Head of Americas Marketing, Riverbed Technology) about how to optimize the experience for customers and prospects for ABM. During our discussion, Cristina talked about why ABM is not going anywhere anytime soon, the importance of conducting customer research, and what pitfalls to avoid. She also provides actionable tips that B2B marketers can take and what key metrics they should focus on in ABM.

https://youtu.be/7P6RDyVcY5U

Topics discussed in episode

• Cristina explains why she believes that ABM is not going away [2:54] and why some people believe that ABM is becoming obsolete [4:07]
• Why ABM is not something you can scale to every single account [6:04]
• Some common pitfalls to avoid [7:23]
• How to deal with internal pushback regarding ABM [10:43]
• The importance of market research to improve all ABM-related activities [14:25]
• Cristina’s perspective on using AI for ABM [18:39]
• The key components that will help improve the experience for customers and prospects in ABM: [23:50]
  • Start with research
  • Align with your sales team
  • Identify the target audience (accounts) and their needs
  • Building the campaign – select the right channels, content, human elements
  • Document everything
• Actionable tips: [27:21]
  • Don’t overcomplicate ABM
  • Think about the things that you can do to impact the experience that your customers are having with you
  • Consider in-person activities: get your audience to speak with their peers, listen to them and understand them better.
• ABM metrics: [32:01]
  • Engagement
  • Pipeline
  • Revenue
  • Ideally, have a control group when measuring the results

Companies and links mentioned

• Cristina Daroca on LinkedIn
• Riverbed

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Cristina Daroca, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to build and develop winning marketing teams. So coming to us from Boston, Massachusetts, señora Cristina Rocca, buenas tardes y bienvenidos!

Cristina Daroca 01:11

Muchas gracias. Hi, everyone, thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:14

It’s definitely, probably one of my New Year’s resolutions, improve your Spanish. Cristina, it’s great to have you on the show. And you have the honor of being my last interview for 2023. Let’s get started. Because wow this is going to be, I’m sure it’s gonna be an exciting conversation. You have quite a diverse background. I think that’s the understatement of the year. Right? In the field of marketing. You’re also… I recently noticed this that you are one of LinkedIn’s top B2B marketing strategy voices. So congrats by the way. One of the disciplines that you’re undoubtedly passionate about, and why I say undoubtedly is because you write about it a lot on LinkedIn. It’s on the topic of Account Based Marketing or ABM. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that has clearly become a part of your professional vision. Right. So B2B Marketers on a Mission. So if this is your mission, how to optimize the experience for customers, or prospects, or ABM. So let’s kick off the conversation with this question. Okay, here we go. There’s so many people on platforms like LinkedIn, talking about ABM, and there’s several camps and one of those camps is saying that ABM is dead and dying and it’s going away. And there’s the other camp, which I think you belong to who’s saying, ABM is not going anywhere. So why do you believe that ABM is not going anywhere, anytime soon.

Cristina Daroca 02:54

I don’t think it’s going anywhere because ABM is really about marketing and selling better and being more relevant for both of your customers and your prospects. And like you said to, you know, make sure that you’re optimizing that experience. So call that ABM or call it whatever, you know, the next buzzword will come here, I’m sure and we’ll call it a different thing. But to me, ABM is what good sellers have always been doing, right. If you speak with any anyone in the sales profession who has been successful, they will tell you that the main thing you have to do is understand your customers, build that relationship with them, build trust, treat them like humans, because they are humans, and you know, ultimately you do get the deal. So that’s really what ABM is for me, really, you know, it’s just helping that process for our sellers. So I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

Christian Klepp 03:48

Why do you think there’s this camp that is completely like dismissing ABM? Like why is this… Why are there so many people on LinkedIn saying that it’s dead and dying? And it’s passe or it’s becoming obsolete? Like why do you feel that there’s a camp that exists that strongly believes that?

Cristina Daroca 04:07

Yeah, I think that ABM has been flooded with tools. And a lot of people think of ABM as synonymous for a bunch of different tools. And that, to me, is not what ABM is but I think that’s what’s going away that you know, just like the over rotation on tools, and just getting more and more tools to measure every single thing you’re doing to get more data that you end up not using because you don’t have the resources to use it, to gain more you know, more things in your tech stack. I think that’s going away. I do believe that we’re going to go towards a world where we have fewer tools, but just really the the main ones that we need to again, understand our customers, figure out where they hang out, figure out where we can, you know, educate them or help them through their journey and finally, you know, hopefully get that deal. So if you think that ABM is a bunch of tools that you need to do this, then yeah, that’s going away. Because we don’t have the money to do that. Money is not free. And it’s, you know, it’s costing more and more money. So I think we are going towards a world where we’re going to have fewer tools buy we’re going to do this in a much more efficient way.

Christian Klepp 05:20

So you could perhaps say that it’s a kind of disruption, with a hopefully more positive outcome, right? Because I think if I understood what you’ve been saying, in the past couple of minutes correctly, a lot of companies have been to use the word seduced by technology, right? Because everybody is chasing the next. I wouldn’t even say it’s a hack, but it’s the they’re trying to chase the next shortcut. They’re trying to like, I mean, perhaps a big part of why companies are investing in these tech stacks and getting these tools. It’s because they want to work faster, and they want to work more efficiently. But then underneath the surface, they’re chasing a shortcut is what it seems like, right?

Cristina Daroca 06:04

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also goes back to trying to boil the ocean, I think a lot of people are thinking like, Oh, we’re gonna do ABM to you know, every single account out there. And that’s not ABM, that’s not, you know, you’re not doing account based anything if you’re doing it to every single account under the sun. And that’s where these tools really, you know, try to, I want to say lie to us, but you know, like you said seduce us, right, and saying like, Oh, we can help you do it to the masses, right. And we can help you scale this, when ABM, by definition is not, it’s not something that you can just scale to every single account out there. It has to be very targeted, it has to be very intentional. And you have to be making sure that you know what accounts you’re going after, you understand those customers, and you’re optimizing the experience for them. But it’s just not possible to do for every single account out there.

Christian Klepp 06:59

Absolutely, absolutely. And that was an excellent segue into the next question, which I’m sure you will have no problem answering. It’s about common mistakes and misconceptions, but specifically around ABM, around improving the experience for customers and prospects. So what are some of the top mistakes you’ve seen out there that marketers have made? And what should they do to address them?

Cristina Daroca 07:23

Yeah, I think the main mistake we make and I say we, because I’ve made it in the past. So, it’s losing sight of that relevancy that we’re talking about. So ABM is really about being relevant to your customers, understand them, know what they need, know what they’re going through. And then, you know, use your content and your tools to help them educate themselves. And, you know, ultimately, hopefully, speak with you and you know, and buy your product. But if you lose that relevancy, if you try to do ABM again to the masses, you know, sending the same message to everyone, then that’s where you…. ABM just doesn’t work. And it’s not it’s not efficient. So I’ve done that before, too, trying to do too many accounts and trying to be too generic. Because, you know, you can’t be relevant to every single account. And I think that is, that is a very big mistake.

Cristina Daroca 08:15

And then internally, I think there’s also something that again, we’ve all done before, which is go to your sales team and say, Hey, guys, we’re gonna do ABM, it’s gonna be great, we’re gonna get so many opportunities for you. And this is going to be you know, the panacea to everything. And you have an event, build your list, you haven’t done your research, you haven’t even you know, like, build your program and or your strategy. And your sales team is already, you know, thinking that they’re gonna have these opportunities tomorrow. And, you know, sales people tend to be very short sighted and they’re just looking for things, you know, right away. And that’s not how ABM works, ABM takes a lot of time. So my recommendation there is to not say it like that. Don’t go to your sales team and say, Hey, we’re gonna do ABM, start building your programs, start sharing, because you do have to share and align with them. But just share as in, hey, this is how we’re going to do marketing going forward. We’re going to help you with your accounts. Can we work together on what accounts you’re working on? Can we start to figure out the messaging for these accounts and start building it like that. Instead of just saying, you know, we’re gonna do this new thing, and it’s gonna be awesome, and you’re gonna get all these results from it, because it takes a lot of time, for ABM, to really have those results. So that internal education is super important too.

Christian Klepp 09:33

Absolutely, absolutely. Great points. I mean, going back to your first point, sending the same message to everyone. I believe that that’s the spray and pray approach, hoping that something comes back, right. And then the second one is going to your sales team and essentially giving them false hope.

Cristina Daroca 09:52

Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp 09:53

And run this ABM campaign and then it’s going to lead to this, I call it the revolving door of leads, right which we all know it’s not going to happen. But I did have one follow up question for you Cristina. How do you… And I’m sure you’ve dealt with this in the past, like, for instance, that second scenario where you go to the salespeople, and you talk to them about ABM, and what have you, and that you’re going to implement this campaign, and you’d like to get them involved, because clearly, there needs to be some kind of collaboration between the two departments. How do you feel with pushback? Right? Like, say, for instance, maybe they don’t know what ABM is? Or if they do, they don’t think that it works? And they, they are not on board with that at all. Right? How do you deal with that?

Cristina Daroca 10:43

Yeah, and I’ve had a lot of pushback from, especially from the sales team, because they’ve heard this, you know, a lot of times, and they’ve heard it a lot of companies and it hasn’t worked. And so it’s normal, they’re skeptical, and you know, they just want to do their work and, and hopefully close more deals. So yeah, the way I deal with it is, again, first of all, not going to them and saying, Hey, we’re gonna do ABM and it’s gonna be great, because then yeah, you’re losing your credibility right there. It’s really about start building your program. Have a program in place and a strategy in place that you have thought through, and work with them to make sure that you’re aligned in terms of what accounts you want to target, what message you should be putting out there. And then usually, what I try to do if you have the option is select two or three reps that really have worked with you in the past or that you know personally, or you know, that you know can be allies, and work with them first and get it with them first, get their buy in, get, you know, help them first. And then once they have seen success, and they, you know, they understand the program, they are the ones who then go to others and say, oh, yeah, they’re you know, marketing is helping me with this thing and that thing, and then you can start to show results to others and sell quote, unquote, sell it with results, rather than, you know, going to your entire salesforce and saying, we’re going to do this for all of you, we’re going to help you all because we all know reps are different, some of them work in different ways. And you really have to select who can be successful with this and start there so that you can then you know, increase the program to the rest.

Christian Klepp 12:19

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. When it comes to working together, because I totally agree you should. You should have or nurture that relationship with those particular like those specific like salespeople, and test that out with them and get their buy in so that they can also in turn become your advocates internally. But in your experience, when you say work together with specific number of reps, are you talking about, like more senior salespeople or the mid level? Or are they across different levels of like, in terms of seniority?

Cristina Daroca 12:53

Yeah, it really depends on your org structure. And you know, how your sales team is organized, I would say as long as the rep is open to working with marketing, and you know, we all know some reps are very open, and they’ve worked with us before, and they trust us and others are not. And that’s fine, right? We all have our own personality. So as long as they are open to working with you, I wouldn’t mind if it’s, you know, a more senior seller or a more junior seller, the only thing I would say is make sure you’re picking someone who has accounts where you can have an impact. So if you’re selling a very transactional product, and there’s some sellers who are doing, you know, sales over the phone, for example, it might be harder for you to have an impact there because it might be a faster sale, and you don’t have that much to do. So, you know, I would try to go for accounts that are going to take longer that you know where you can actually have a good account plan and you can really have an impact so that you can then show those results to the rest of the company. But it doesn’t really matter the seniority of the person, it’s really about, are they willing to work with you or not.

Christian Klepp 14:01

Moving on to the next question. You’ve talked about this a while ago, and I think we, you know, we should jam on it a little bit further, if you will, the importance of conducting market research and having the right strategy in place when it comes to improving the experience and all things linked to ABM. So can you talk to us a bit about that?

Cristina Daroca 14:25

Yeah, market research is so crucial for ABM. We marketers are usually very prone to just launching things and you know, we’re always, we always like action. So we tried to launch things very quickly. But you absolutely need to do your market research before you launch anything. Speak with your customers, sit on sales calls, speak to the sales team, you know, do all the research that you can. We’re actually going through that right now because we’re launching some new programs that have been out a year and we hired an agency to do some market research for us in parallel to ours. Right, like speaking with our sales team. speaking with our customers and doing all of that internally, but it’s really about understanding the market, what’s happening, what’s going on? What’s the competition doing? Why, you know, how are your products really helping these customers? and then building your programs off of that. Because, you know, if you just go with your own assumptions, you’re probably not going to be right. So it’s really, really crucial to do all of that research and all of that work before you launch anything. And before you even build your strategy really.

Christian Klepp 15:31

Absolutely. I will 100% agree with you. But now I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate a little bit, right? Because I’ve been in this situation before, and I’m sure you have as well. And I know some B2B marketers in my professional network that are facing the same problem. What if, I mean, we all know that it’s important to conduct market research and have the right strategy. But what if you have to work with other members within the organization to pull this all off? And they completely dismiss it and say, that’s a complete waste of time? We don’t have time for research and strategy. We need the results right? Now. Let’s skip that part. So how do you deal with that?

Cristina Daroca 16:11

I would push back, honestly, because I’m sure you’ve run campaigns in the past that haven’t worked. And you can use those and say, Look, we did this campaign, it didn’t work, it didn’t really result in much. And you know what, we just didn’t have the right message, or we didn’t target the right people. And that’s where the market research is going to, you know, help us with the next campaign. And I, I understand that some people feel like you know, it’s a little bit too much. We know what we do, we know our customers, we don’t need to go through that. But you absolutely need to go through that. We all need to constantly be doing market research, the market changes every, you know, every single month. So you have to be doing market research continuously. So I would try to push back as much as I could. If it’s, you know, someone very senior who says like, you don’t have a chance against them, then do your own market research, you know, just pull a couple of hours every week. And we tend to focus on LinkedIn that you can have a conversation with, or reach out to your sellers and have conversations with your sellers. Nobody’s going to, you know, not let you have a call with the seller answers. Ask them about, hey, walk me through that deal that you just closed, right? What happened? What were they asking? If you have recordings of the calls, you know, listen to the calls, just do your own research, and even if it’s just for yourself and your own education, but you’ll be able to then provide so much more value during the program, you know, and it’ll help everybody.

Christian Klepp 17:39

So in other words, I mean, short of sounding like a teacher, do your homework.

Cristina Daroca 17:44

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Don’t go rogue, but do your homework. And you know, do your own research. Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp 17:55

You know, Cristina, we’re at the end of 2023 now, and, you know, everybody is in planning mode, or they’ve already probably come up with our plan for the coming year. You most likely have had your ear to the ground, and you’ve looked at some recent trends. So maybe give us two or three. Right? What are some recent trends that you’ve seen, that B2B marketers should be aware of, especially if they’re thinking about ABM?

Cristina Daroca 18:23

Yeah. Well, the first one and most clear is AI. Right? We’re here with AI left and right, every single day. And…

Christian Klepp 18:33

We did so well. We’ve gone like almost 30 minutes now without talking about AI.

Cristina Daroca 18:39

Yeah. So sorry to bring it up. It’s inevitable. Yeah, no, but it’s, you know, it’s in our lives, we can’t avoid it. I am so excited about what AI can do for us. And I’m, you know, I’m definitely on the AI train. And I love it. And I am trying to, you know, get as, as, you know, as educated as I can with ist. But I would also caution ourselves in terms of, you know, again, losing that relevancy and, and just assuming that AI can solve everything for us, because it can’t, at least now. Maybe it will at some point, but right now, you know, we’re still very early stages. So all of these tools, and other vendors will tell you like, oh, yeah, we have AI and with our AI, you can do this and you can do that. Just make sure that you’re not losing relevancy with your customers and your prospects. So again, you know, if they are promising you that they can serve the, you know, personalized content to every single person out there at the right time, etc. I don’t know. I don’t believe in that yet. I don’t think that’s right. So you do have to do your homework again and really understand your customers and understand how you’re gonna deliver that message and that content. And, you know, it might still be a little bit manual. If you really want to do you know, one to one ABM that’s still manual, you can’t you know, automate that and send it out to the masses. So I, as much as I love AI, I do think that we need to be careful with how we apply it and use it for ABM at least for now.

Cristina Daroca 20:10

Yeah, and the second one, I think, you know, with all the changes we’ve seen in 2023, with, you know, a lot of layoffs and teams being, you know, reorganized and things like that, I am seeing a lot of folks and a lot of talent now setting up, you know, their own agencies, or just being fractional, and, you know, doing all that. So, I think, for us who are so you know, in our traditional nine to five, we are gonna have to be very flexible and be open to having some folks, you know, come in, and I’m having external help. Because, again, we’ve lost team members we are, our teams are smaller, we have fewer resources, but there’s a lot of talent out there that I think we can utilize. And the same way we’ve been utilizing communities and you know, just learning from our peers and things like that online in the last three, four years, I think now we’re going to see a lot of folks who, you know, are out there and can help us with, you know, project based things. And I think that’s going to be a very big trend in marketing going forward.

Christian Klepp 21:18

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that second one really, probably hits close to home for a lot of people, but like the reality of like, what’s the current economic climate. I sound like a politician when I say that, but you know, it’s true. I wanted to go back to the AI point, right? If you could, at a very just, maybe from a top level perspective, when it comes to ABM, can you give us some examples of where you think AI could be very useful to teams, and other situations where perhaps it’s best that they keep AI out of the equation? And let an actual human handle that?

Cristina Daroca 22:03

Yeah, yeah. So I think the personalization piece, you know, AI can definitely help you personalize a lot of content based on you know, the persona, based on the account based on geography, territories, things like that. So I do think that that could be a very helpful piece, the only thing is, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So if you don’t have the right data, that’s not going to work. So we all have to, you know, do a good job of, of having our data be very clean or as clean as we can have it. And then pieces where I don’t think it can help us much is building relationships, we, you know, ultimately, we’re all human, we’re still human for now. And I think you still have to build all those relationships in person. So although our buyers are, you know, making most of their decisions online and most of their journey online, we do have to have that in-person piece, right. And so don’t forget about having in-person meetings or in-person events or things like that, you know, bringing back the human element, I think is very important. And I don’t think AI can do much for that yet.

Christian Klepp 23:15

Can’t too much for that yet. And hopefully, it won’t be able to do much for that for a while. (laugh) Okay, so this next question is what I call the Lego question. Why? Because I’d like you to break it down into its respective parts for the benefit of the audience. So what should B2B marketers be aware of, what are the components that you believe will help to improve the experience for customers and prospects in ABM?

Cristina Daroca 23:50

Yeah, I think it’s really going back to building your program as a process, right? So think about it in a process where you start with your research, like we said before, really getting that alignment with your salesteam, understanding who you want to go after, and what you you have to offer to them. And then building your building blocks of the actual campaign, what are the channels you’re going to use? What is the content that you have to produce? How are you going to get that content in front of your customers? And then bringing in the human element, right? Like, when are you going to start reaching out to them, you know, on a one to one basis with your sellers? How can you bring those customers and prospects, maybe for an in-person event or a user group or something like that, where they can network and meet other customers and sort of like start building that community? And then ultimately, right you start having conversations with them about an actual opportunity and a deal. I think that’s really you know, that you have to have those building blocks very clear in your head and you know, on paper, document everything, and just make sure that you’re going through the process and you’re not skipping steps.

Christian Klepp 24:58

I’m hearing all these things that you’re saying and while I tend to agree with them, I can’t help but think like, is there any way that you can pull any of this off without completely like, going over budget? And I’m sure you’ve come across this scenario, probably more times than you care to come. So maybe can you give us an example?

Cristina Daroca 25:21

An example of going over budget?

Christian Klepp 25:24

Well, not going over budget, but like, how do you how do you deal with the budget equation? Because for example, I don’t disagree. I think events are important, but they can also, you know, they can, they can also be, they can also get expensive, right? Depends on how many channels you use and what not.

Cristina Daroca 25:42

Yeah, so I would try to not be on too many channels, because first of all, you’re not going to be able to do all of them, depending on the resources that you have. But you know, usually we don’t have extra resources. So I would definitely choose a few channels, and start there, see what works, and then, you know, continue to grow from there. And yeah, just monitor your budget very closely. Make sure that you know where you can spend the money, and you know, how much money you’re gonna be spending per channel. I, you know, I think that there’s certain things that yeah, they’re expensive, like in-person events, but they add so much to the experience, and they really help you build trust, and build, you know, those opportunities, versus, you know, other things that might be online, or they’re, you know, less. Yeah, it is less human, and you’re still spending money on them. So you know, make sure that you’re not wasting money on things that are not adding to the experience. And you can shift that budget to things that are more impactful.

Christian Klepp 26:46

Okay, Cristina, we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips. So I’m gonna throw in this caveat that let’s appreciate that you probably cannot put together an ABM campaign in an hour. It might even take more than a day. Right? But that said, like if somebody is listening to this conversation that you and I are having, right, who’s a B2B marketer, who’s contemplating either doing an ABM campaign, or doing something around improving the experience for customers and prospects. What are three to five things that you would say they could do right now?

Cristina Daroca 27:21

Yeah. Um, so first of all, I don’t think you have to overcomplicate ABM, you could just pick a few things and include them in your current programs and just start there and start, you know, adding some ABM tactics to your current programs without having a blown out, you know, ABM program itself. So yeah, just think about the things that you can do to impact the experience that your customers are having with you, right. And, again, I go back to in-person, things always work really well, it really depends on your audience and who your buyers are. But for us, at least, trying to sell to executives, they, they like to speak with their peers, they like to listen to other people doing the same things that they are doing, right. So try to bring those folks together, give them opportunities to network and to spend time together. And that way, you can also listen to them and understand them a little bit better, right? And then I would also include in their content, make sure that you are developing the right content for the right audience. This is something that’s very hard to get right. But again, do your research, do your homework, really understand what are the things that your customers need to solve today? You know what, how can you create urgency? How can you get in front of them? And those are the pieces of you know, the piece of content that you need to develop and the things that you have to be answering in your content. And then from there, just again, choose two or three channels and make sure that you’re pushing that content out and getting in front of your customers, because you’re not going to be able to use all the channels under the sun. If you’re on LinkedIn, you’re going to be hearing about you know, every channel is dead. So don’t listen to that. But you know, choose a few channels that work for you that have worked in the past and start there.

Christian Klepp 29:14

Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, on that note, like, all those LinkedIn posts, like ABM is dead. Email is dead. SMS is dead. Everything is dead. (laugh)

Cristina Daroca 29:26

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 29:28

But I did have a follow up question for you regarding content for ABM because, you know, I think you’ve seen a lot of that right. From your experience, where do you think the B2B content for ABM tends to fall flat? And what I mean by that is, you see companies that are just churning out all this content and they’re trying to like incorporate it into their ABM campaign somehow or into the different stages of the of the sales funnel or what have you. And where have you seen content just not working, or just not being effective. What was the main reason for that?

Cristina Daroca 30:05

Yeah, I think content doesn’t work when it’s not relevant. And that it’s as simple as that. I keep going back to the same, but it’s really what it is. If you are relevant, if you really do your homework, and you really understand your customers, and you know what they’re struggling with now, and you can build content around that, then that content tends to resonate. One thing that we’ve done in the past, and you know, this is not too complicated to do is get four or five, six people together on a call. When I say people, I mean customers on a call on like, you know, a zoom webinar or something like that, and just have a conversation with them and send them a few questions ahead of time that they can prepare, they come together, they have a discussion, and they share their thoughts on those. And then with that, you can use those ideas and use what you’ve heard in that conversation without really having to quote them if they don’t want to be quoted, but just use those ideas to build your own content. And that way, you’re speaking their language, you’re saying the same things they’re saying, and you can then use that to target other customers, right? So again, it’s really about listening to your customers, understanding where they’re struggling and what they are, you know, what’s top of mind for them and what they’re talking about when they get together with peers. And then using that in your content and and driving your content strategy.

Christian Klepp 31:30

Ya no, exactly, exactly. Okay. This is probably one of your favorite questions, metrics.

Cristina Daroca 31:39

Oh, yeah.

Christian Klepp 31:40

Metrics, because at some point, you’re gonna have to show results to somebody. Right?

Cristina Daroca 31:44

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 31:45

And hopefully, those metrics will show that you’ve made progress that in this case for this particular discussion, that you have helped to improve that experience for customers and prospects. So what are some of the top metrics that B2B marketers should be paying attention to?

Cristina Daroca 32:01

Yeah, so we bucket our ABM metrics into three different buckets. One is engagement. The other one is pipeline, and then revenue. So like I said, if you have a long sales cycle, you’re not going to be able to just wait until you see the revenue to see if things are working. So you need your leading indicators. So engagement is really your leading indicator. And within engagement, you can be measuring a couple of different things. We measure, you know, how many campaigns do we have in market? How many account plans if you’re doing one to one, for example, where you have a specific account plan for an account? How many account plans do you have? How many account plans are executed? And, you know, underway? And then is the content resonating? Meaning, are your named accounts or your target accounts responding to the activities you’re putting out there? Right? Whether that’s webinars, in -person events, whatever it is, are they consuming the content. So that’s all part of the engagement. And you want to make sure that your accounts, the accounts you’re targeting, are engaging with all of that. Then once you’re past that, and you start to see meetings and conversations going, you then start to get into pipelines. So are we building more pipeline? Are we building… You know, it really depends on your goals. But if you want to cross sell, or upsell, are we building those types of opportunities. And then once you’re seeing opportunities, and you’re seeing, you know, continue to advance to the cycle, then you obviously want to see revenue, you want to see that you are closing bigger deals, the deals are closing faster. So there’s a lot of different metrics that you can be looking at. But essentially, I like to bucket them into those three, those three categories.

Christian Klepp 33:41

I was so sure that you would have no problem answering that question. Because ABM, like a lot of these disciplines, there’s so many metrics to look at. And I think, perhaps, the challenge is not like that is, in fact, I think that one of the challenges that correct me if I’m wrong, is which metrics to focus on, because they’re probably so many metrics, that maybe some marketers become overwhelmed, right?

Cristina Daroca 34:07

Absolutely. And one thing I also like to look at when I look at metrics is compare them to a control group. So make sure you have a set of accounts that you’re not necessarily targeting, and make sure you can compare those because otherwise, you know, if you… you can go back to your sales team and say like, oh, this program was great, you know, we close three opportunities. Well, what does that mean? How many accounts they will target, you know, is three a lot. It’s three, not a lot. So, it’s good to also have a control group where, you know, you can compare to that group and say, okay, the control group, we didn’t close any opportunities in this period of time, versus with ABM, we did close two or three or however many, right? So it’s always helpful to have a control group. Not always possible, because sometimes, you know, then you get the reaction of Whoa, why are we not targeting those in the control group? So you know, you have to navigate that conversation but if you can have a control group. That’s that’s always very helpful.

Christian Klepp 35:04

Yeah, yeah, no, no, that definitely makes sense. Okay, Cristina, I think you’ve already been on your soapbox, but please stay up there a little bit longer. For this next question, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why.

Cristina Daroca 35:24

Yep, I really disagree with tying every single tactic and every single thing that we do in marketing with revenue, I absolutely think we need to bring in revenue, I absolutely think we own a number and we have to deliver on a number. But I think a lot of us in demand generation and ABM, we’ve over rotated lately to you know, having to justify every single thing with a with a revenue number, right. And it doesn’t work like that. Marketing has always been a marketing mix, we used… when I was in college, we studied marketing mix, right? Like, it’s a mix of things that get you to the revenue, but it’s not one thing or one tactic. So I tend to disagree with you know, people who say like, everything drives revenue, and everything has to be tied to revenue. In my opinion, it doesn’t, of course, at the end of the day, you have to be bringing in revenue, and you have to own a number. But not every single tactic, or every single channel or every single piece of content can be attached to revenue. You have to know what works, what doesn’t work, you need to be able to measure the things that you need to measure. But at the end of the day, you know, as long as you are demonstrating that you as a marketing team, and as a marketing program, you are driving pipeline and revenue. I think that’s the goal, and not just you know, tying every single tactic to revenue.

Christian Klepp 36:47

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve, you know, and I’m sure you’ve, you’ve gone through the same where, I was sitting in meetings with either clients or back then with a board of directors, and every time they keep saying, what’s the ROI, what’s the ROI? And they’re always comparing, like dollars to dollars, right? So, if we spent like, 20,000 are you going to guarantee me 100,000 in revenue, and we constantly have those conversations for every single initiative that we rolled out. And somehow, it was always challenging to get them to understand, to your point that it doesn’t, why it doesn’t work like that. Right?

Cristina Daroca 37:27

Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp 37:30

Fantastic. No, Cristina, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. So please, tell us a little bit about yourself and how people can get in touch with you. And by the way, how does someone with a degree in environmental sciences end up in SaaS marketing? Just out of curiosity

Cristina Daroca 37:50

That’s a good question that I asked myself every day. I always thought it was gonna be like a climate activist and I do care a lot about climate and I started my career in energy and climate tech. And you know, hopefully, someday I can go back to that and, you know, pursue that passion. But yeah, life gets in the way. I, you know, at one point, I needed a job, I got laid off from an energy company that I love, and I needed a job on a job in IT came up and then you know, I just went more into like the IT world, and that’s where I am now. So yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Cristina Daroca, and I’d be happy to connect with anyone there.

Christian Klepp 38:33

Fantastic. Once again, Cristina, thank you so much for your time.

Cristina Daroca 38:37

Thank you. Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much, Christian.

Christian Klepp 38:42

Take care. Stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

View Details

How to Optimize the Digital Buying Experience in B2B

As the B2B landscape continues to evolve, having a seamless buying experience is no longer a “nice to have”. Rather, it is something that is imperative for industries serving digital-first B2B customers.

How can B2B companies adapt accordingly? How can B2B marketers work in tandem with sales and other teams to deliver a better experience for customers?

Join us as we chat with B2B marketing expert Matt Bell (Founder & Principal Consultant, MessageUp) about how B2B companies can optimize the B2B buying experience. During our conversation, Matt discussed some recent trends that B2B marketers should be aware of and what pitfalls to avoid. He also provides actionable tips on how the digital buying experience can be improved.

https://youtu.be/TykPnl4ssso

Topics discussed in episode

• Matt talks about why optimizing the buying experience for digital-first B2B customers is so important in today’s ecosystem [2:14]
• Why B2B has lagged behind in the digital domain [5:26]
• Some pitfalls to avoid when improving the buying experience for digital-first customers [8:43]
• The role of marketing research and having the right strategy in improving the B2B buying experience [18:21]
• Matt shares the recent trends in the buying experience that B2B marketers should be aware of [22:10]
  • The role of AI on the buying side and vendor side
  • The decentralized groups of buyers
  • Digital buyers are willing and able to spend online without meeting the company
• Matt’s take on the need for ‘a human touch’ vs. AI in the buying experience [27:42]
• Matt’s actionable tips: [32:47]
  • Identify the gaps
  • Be realistic about how much resources (time and energy) can be put into marketing
  • Explain how digital marketing works to the organization
• A status quo that Matt passionately disagrees with [39:06]

Companies and links mentioned

• Matt Bell on LinkedIn
• MessageUp
• Strategic Piece
• Link to the books: “Content Marketing: Mission Critical” & “Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen”

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Matt Bell, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to differentiate successful B2B companies from the rest as we operate in an increasingly digital-first world. So coming to us from Houston, Texas, Matt Bell, welcome to the show, sir.

Matt Bell 01:12

Hi, Christian, thank you for having me. I love the idea that marketers are on a mission. Absolutely mission critical.

Christian Klepp 01:18

Indeed, we are on a mission to continuously improve ourselves to initiate those conversations, those much needed conversations within organizations to change, right, to give marketing that strategic importance and that airtime slash limelight that it rightfully deserves, right. So let’s dive into this conversation, Matt, I mean, it might be occupational hazard, but you’ve been a person that has always found ways to improve things, be they systems, businesses, people, right. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I believe has become part of your professional mission. And that is okay. Get ready for it – how to optimize the buying experience for digital-first B2B customers. So let’s kick off this conversation with the question: Why do you feel that’s such a crucial component in today’s ecosystem?

Matt Bell 02:14

I think you know, you can look back several years, even before the pandemic, and we were already starting to see a new generation of B2B buyers coming into the workplace, right. It’s sort of crew change, the boomers are retiring out, the millennials and the Gen Z’s are coming in. And not just joining but moving into those positions of authority where they’re actually doing the buying. And these particularly Gen Z, it’s a digital native generation. That means they’ve grown up with technology in their hands, we sort of.. I’m an Xer right. So I’m just before that. I got to technology a little late. I’ve been playing catch up ever since. So they’ve grown up with technology in their hands. So their expectation for everything in life is it’s digital first. And like a lot of things in B2B, you know, B2B buying lagged a bit behind. B2B tends to move a bit more slowly. You know, we all know B2C buying. Let’s call it personal shopping raced ahead and into the digital domain, thanks to Amazon and others like them. But B2B was already starting to catch up in like the late 20 teens, so 2017, 18, 19, and then the pandemic hit and just accelerated everything tremendously. We were all forced to do things digitally, whether we liked it or not. And so you know, what we have today, I think, is an increasing majority, actually, of B2B buyers who are younger, they’re tech native, and so they expect to do every aspect of their job online. So when it comes to finding product, finding vendors, they’re doing their research, they’re doing their evaluation, and if they can, they’re making those purchases online without necessarily visiting or you know, interacting with, with the selling business with the vendors in person at all. So, as a vendor, what that means is, it’s absolutely essential that your buying experience caters for these digital-first buyers. If your company your brand, your products aren’t easily findable and understandable online. Basically, you don’t exist. So I would say that’s pretty important.

Christian Klepp 04:22

Absolutely, absolutely. So I had two things for you based on what you’ve just said, Matt. The first one is, I think you’ve read the report by Gartner. Right? It was about the state of the B2B buying journey, and this is most likely post COVID. But it was… it said something to the effect of I can’t remember the exact statistic but it was something from 70% to about 80% of B2B buyers prefer to do their own independent online research. They don’t reach out to the sales representative off said vendor or service provider because they just want to… they want to have that… for the most part, say sales-free buying experience, right? And there’s certainly like many reasons behind that. I have one follow up question for you. So why, why do you think that B2B has lagged behind so much? In this digital domain? Is it, Is it a combination of factors? Is it the organizational culture? The nature of the beast, in terms of the industry they’re in? Is that there was resistance to change? Is it all of the above and more?

Matt Bell 05:26

I love multi choice questions. That’s good. I don’t try to have to think of an answer. I’m gonna go with D, all of the above. I think, you know, when we talk about B2B, I think there’s a mindset, it’s always industrial, it’s heavy industry. You know, it’s manufacturing businesses. And they inherently are slow to change, because they’re capital intensive change costs money. And there’s been a lot of optimization over the years to make things as efficient and repeatable as possible. And so when you introduce a completely new way of doing things, that sort of hiatus throwing everything up in the air is, is very unwelcome. But we also have B2B Tech, right. So there’s plenty of companies developing software for other businesses, that’s B2B as well, so that you don’t have the same excuse there. They don’t have to… themselves disrupt, but they’re disrupting the customer. So when you digitalize the way a customer is doing something that is pretty slow going. So I think there is just a, an ethos around B2B, that is, everything takes time. The other thing I would point to is, when you’re in the consumer space, usually the person you’re talking to is the customer, right, they’re buying for themselves. So it’s a one to one or a company to one transaction. When you’re in the B2B space, it’s very unusual that one person has that buying authority, it’s usually a committee of people, a group of people, technical experts, financial people, frontline users, whoever they represent, you know, you’ve got a group of people that need to get convinced. And if the dollar value, the monetary value is high enough, then there might even be a tender board or an approval’s committee. That group has to submit its decisions to get them blessed. So that inherently leads to this really sort of slow cycle time for B2B sales. So everything in B2B moves a bit more slowly, it’s a little bit harder to affect change, it’s on a large scale, you’re not just asking one person to buy a new iPhone and start using an app, you’re actually asking an organization to change the way it does business. And so I think B2B lags inherently for that, until you shut it down till it to go home and work remotely and figure it out. And then oh, my gosh, can it catch up quickly? And I think what the pandemic showed people, much to some of their maybe concern is when B2B wants to change quickly. it can, but it has to have an impetus, it has to have a need, the this sort of momentum, it’s people talk about turning around the big ship, right? It’s, there’s not a little sailboat where you can just flip the boom over go the other direction. This is a big supertanker that takes a few days and months, you know, whatever to turn around. So, but I think we can change quicker when we want to, but this is one where consumer was just so much easier to go digital.

Christian Klepp 08:08

Yeah, and the less absolutely right, I think short of stating the obvious, I think the pandemic and everything around that, whether that left in its wake it expedited and accelerated that process in the world of B2B. Exactly. I’m going to move us on to the next question, which I’m sure you will have no problem answering, mistakes and misconceptions that you’ve seen out there. Especially when it comes to B2B marketers who are working to improve that buying experience for digital-first customers. So some of the mistakes you’ve seen out there, and what B2B marketers should do to address them.

Matt Bell 08:43

So I think I would put almost all of them under one big heading, which is the temptation to try to replicate what you’ve been doing, but in a digital way, right. So a prime example would be if you look at a lot of B2B websites, company websites, they’re basically a digital catalog, there are features and benefits and a list of what we do. And here’s the salesman’s phone number at the bottom, you know, email to give them a call. They’re not speaking to the customer’s needs, or how the customer should try to evaluate these products. They presume the customer either knows what they want, or that they’re going to reach out to that salesperson to have the discussion about how to pick the right thing for them. And as you absolutely correctly pointed out, low low down on the totem pole of people that, you know, people want to work without salespeople, right. They’re down there with lawyers and you know, other undesirables that we would rather only speak to if we have to. So the reality is, we said these, these digital buyers want to work by themselves online. And so the information we’re putting out there needs to cater to that. It needs to support them in finding out what’s out there. And he’s in understanding their own challenge and how to how to assess it, how to evaluate it, how to compare these different solutions, how to make a good buying decision. So I think a second group of mistakes is trying to move the customer or the prospect from the online domain into the offline domain to then deal with them the old way, then you see that in, you know, somebody has clicked on your ad and immediately says, Would you like to schedule a meeting? Well, no, they wouldn’t. They’re clicking on your stuff because they want to evaluate it online, they don’t want to talk to you. So let them choose a meeting if they want, but don’t push the conversation, you know, into an offline or even a digital interaction, an in-person interaction straightaway. And I think this all comes from a bit of a mindset, where traditionally organizations was sales lead, the mantra was always be closing it, sell, sell, sell. In the digital domain, where you can’t necessarily get to that buyer. But what you can do is make information available to them, their mindset needs to be always be helping. And if you help them, and you are seen as a source of relevant, helpful information, and you guide them through that decision, if your solution is right for them, they will pick it, they will come to you because you’ve built a trusted relationship, even mindshare with them.

Matt Bell 08:54

So I think the last part of your question, the fixes. I think the first one is understanding who you’re selling to. So you have to do your research. Who is your ideal customer? Who’s on that buying committee that needs to be informed and convinced? Who are those buyer personas, what does their buying journey look like? And then you can use your properties, your digital properties, primarily your website, social channels, to share that relevant, helpful information that those digital first customers are looking for. And then they can evaluate their options and make the right choice. So moving away from just digitizing the old way to actually working in a digital manner.

Christian Klepp 11:29

That’s absolutely right. I mean, you brought up so many great points. And I wanted to go back to some of them. Like, for example, it’s so true. The whole trying to replicate what you’ve already been doing, but trying to digitize it, I think is the word right? Like just trying to like, you know, it’s the whole…

Matt Bell 11:45

I’m never sure if it’s digitized or digitalized…

Christian Klepp 11:49

Let’s use both like, loosely, interchangeably. It’s this old like style of selling, but then they’re just trying to do it via the website. And I’ll give you an example. And this happened to me about back in 2018. So I was looking for something online as you do like researching for, for a project. And I found an eBook. And I looked at it. And, you know, they asked… this particular company as asked me to fill out a form, and I looked at the form, and I’m like, Oh, 18 the fields. I guess I really wanted the book badly, though. So I said, alright, I’ll fill it out. And I’m not even joking. Within 20 minutes of me filling out the form and actually downloading the eBook. I got a call on my phone, saying, Hi, I’m so and so from this company. And you’ve just downloaded our eBook, Christian, I am literally 15 minutes’ walk from your office. Let’s have a coffee and talk about what we can do for you. And I, I was, well, first of all, I was completely taken aback because, you know, my first reaction was, wait, who are you? Yeah. And secondly, I mean, this is almost like me saying to, you know, if back in the days when we were all like, Young, Wild and Free. And you know, I would go up to somebody in a bar or approach a girl in the bar and say, Would you, I’m so and so. Will you marry me? Not quite yet. Right. So, fantastic. I have. I did have one follow up question for you, Matt. You know, if we’re already talking about what we’re doing digitally. And there’s a lot of people online, and there’s two camps here. But if you’re producing content for a B2B audience, and you’re putting it on platforms, or like, the websites of the companies, for example, gated or ungated, and why.

Matt Bell 13:46

Yeah, it’s interesting. I wrote a I think LinkedIn posts about this not very long ago, I think there are several categories. In fact, I think it was a blog post, I have to look up, I’ll have to look at my own blog and see what I wrote about it. But I remember the conclusions, which was, you know, there are reasons to do gated content, obviously, it’s a lead generation tactic, right? So you’re trying to capture the person’s information so that you can then follow up and have an ongoing engagement with that person. So the question is, to your audience, what is sufficiently valuable that they’re willing to give up their privacy and trade their contact information for your content? I think there are those that would say nothing, right? Nothing is valuable enough these days for my contact information. So all your information should be free. So you publish your content ungated, and then you wait, and you have to keep doing that. And you can’t predict the lead generation cycle. At that point, you’ve got to wait for your content to have effect. And for some of those prospects to go, I need to reach out to this company and interact with them further. The other end of the spectrum is you do gate your content. You accept that a lot of people are allergic to filling in forms, never hopefully one with 18 fields. Actually a first name and an email address is usually enough but okay, you put some sort of gates on there. But in which case, you have to be damn sure that the value of that content is high enough that they won’t feel shortchanged. Because if they feel they gave something up on the promise of a great piece of content, but got something that was pretty lame, then you’re going to damage your reputation. And you’re going to lose that prospect for sure. And your brand reputation go down. There are some sort of bits in the middle, which is where you ungate your content, but you ask them to sign up. So you as part of the you know, here’s the piece of content, would you like to join our newsletter? Would you like to join our mailing list? Can we reach out to you about other stuff, you ask them to opt in, so you still have that option, even if they’re past the gate. And I think there are other sort of hybrid stuff where instead of just gating content, come up with something that’s more valuable than that, give them a calculator, give them you know, some unique research that your company has done, you know, that really then allows them to engage differently. But so I think it is a bit horses for courses, I prefer ungated content, I think it should be up to the prospect to decide for themselves after multiple touchpoints, that you’re the right vendor for them to interact with. And if they don’t want to interact with you at all, but they still end up buying your thing. If that’s possible. If you’ve got online, you know, ecommerce, great. If they have to interact with you to buy your product, then they’re going to if it’s the right product for them, and your content should be enough to get them across that line. So I’ll err on the side of ungated. But I understand why in certain circumstances. It works.

Christian Klepp 16:32

Yeah, no, absolutely. I tend to agree. And it’s going back to a point you raised earlier on in the conversation where it’s about building that trust, credibility, especially if they don’t know who you are. And, again, back to another point that you mentioned, you’re appealing to a group, right, like a buying committee. So it’s most likely going to be a group of people, unlike in B2C, where you’re generally like, you know, targeting that individual consumer, per se.

Matt Bell 16:59

Yeah, yeah. And I’ll go with the salesperson story, rather than necessarily you talking to girls in a bar. But, you know, if a salesperson, in person and even in the old days was trying to sell to you, they spent time building the relationship before they asked for your business. And so they would get to know you and play golf with you and take you out for lunch and come and visit your business and spend some time and then eventually say, so what is it going to take for me to win your business? They wouldn’t jump straight from may I have your card, please. I’m going to mail you something tomorrow. Hopefully we’re doing business by next week. I mean, it’s just that you do business with companies that you trust. That’s true at the B2B level to right? Those individuals. It’s still a human to human transaction. Well, it could be an AI to human transaction, we might talk about that later. But, you know, on the buying end, at the moment, at least, it’s humans, and they have a very good sense, an innate sense for authenticity. And so inauthentic communication, communication that’s not trusted yet where that relationship isn’t there. Yeah, you’re not gonna get them to buy like that. You’ve got to get the emotional side sorted out first. And the logic and the data and the features and benefits can all come late.

Christian Klepp 18:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s absolutely right. Moving on to the next question, talk to us about the role that you believe that market research and having the right strategy play in improving the B2B Buying Experience.

Matt Bell 18:21

Yeah, I could talk for a long time about this. That’s because I’m a strategic bargain. It’s I mean, let’s just start by acknowledging that random acts of marketing are a waste of time, right? I mean, social media is just flooded with bogus ads for shortcuts and hacks. And you know, I’ll fill your calendar with appointments, and I’ll fill your funnel with leads, and it’ll be overnight and you’ll basically won’t pay a penny. And that’s just total nonsense, of course, right? So marketing takes effort, it costs money, it takes time, it’s actually so if you’re going to spend that marketing time and effort and budget efficiently, effectively, you have to have a strategy. You can’t market to everybody all the time on every channel, that would be impossible. So you’ve got to know where you’re going, what message you’re going with why? And we’re doing all of that in a thoughtful way. So I think we’ve already said we need to be focusing on information that’s relevant, helpful to your target audience. How do you know what that is? You got to do your homework. Market research is going to let you understand the buyer that your solution is ideal for. What are their needs? How does your solution create value for them and then you can communicate that in your content marketing and well all aspects of your marketing strategy. So I guess you know, it’s a bit school teacher-ish, but please do your homework, right? Define a strategy, implement it carefully, measure what’s working, what isn’t. And then you can go from there. So intentionality really, and market research is a part of constructing an accurate picture of your audience of your customer, so that you can most effectively deliver them the information that they need, and that then they’re going to latch on have that and say, Wow, these people really get me. This is exactly the information I’ve been looking for. I should probably do business with them.

Christian Klepp 20:05

Absolutely, absolutely. And to the point you just raised that mean, it’s generally an evidence based approach, right? That helps to take all that guesswork out, not just the content strategy and the content marketing, but every marketing endeavor moving forward, right.

Matt Bell 20:22

Yeah, and you can’t predict everything, right? I mean, there’s no way. Everything is constantly changing, for a starter, buyer preferences are changing, the market is shifting, your competitors are responding, the macroeconomics are changing, whatever, right, so this, it’s moving goalposts and to maintain an accurate understanding of that you’ve got to go and look. And usually your frontline people, the people that are out there in the market, that are interacting with your customers, are in a very good position to feedback, you know, create the feedback loop that says, hey, here’s what I see going on out in the market is where I think it’s heading. Obviously, a visionary leadership will help you decide, this is the direction we’re going to take the market, we’re actually going to steer the market in this direction with our solutions. But in terms of responding to the market, yeah, you have to research that somehow. And you need a mechanism for sort of accumulating and analyzing and synthesizing that information in the middle. I like buyers journey maps, I think they’re a great framework for capturing what prospects and customers are looking for at different stages as they evaluate and select and implement solutions. And what channels, very importantly, what channels do they turn to when they are seeking information? It’s not where you want to publish, it’s where they go to read. And if you’re not meeting them there, well, you’re publishing into the abyss.

Christian Klepp 21:44

I think you really hit the nail on the head there. That’s one of the my favorite reasons for using a buyer’s journey map. Because you see the critical touch points from the customer’s point of view, not the company’s. We’ve all been in that situation where you’re sitting in a boardroom internally, and everybody’s saying like, Oh, we have to, we have to, you know, focus our investment on this channel and that channel and, and then you always, it always begs the question, well, what? Based on what?

Matt Bell 22:10

Yeah, intuition, right, gut feel. We’re very good at trusting gut feel. But we get we have a horrible overconfidence in that. And I think you see it a lot where members of the team have been on the buying side. Yeah. And they say, Well, when I was a buyer, I used to go here, okay, great. If you’ve recently been a buyer, and if you are representative of a large group of your audience, that’s fine. But if you’re remotely obsolete, you know, 10 years ago, I was a buyer, cross that off, ignore, that’s gonna get ignored completely. Because as we’re talking about, it’s a new generation of digital first buyers, they go to different places. I don’t think anybody who’s been in the business more than 10 years used to use Tik Tok to find information about B2B products. But some B2B buyers are seeing things on Tik Tok, and Snapchat and Instagram these sort of second, what we might consider second tier platforms from a B2B point of view. So yeah, it takes, it takes, it takes a lot of understanding, actually, to figure out, you know, if you’ve got quite a broad audience, they’re not all going to the same places. And that then leads to some very tricky decisions about well, do I try to be in all these places? Or do I focus on a subset of the audience, and be really good in one or two places, my guidance would always be pick two or three channels, do those really, really, really well. Once you’ve got that down, if you’ve got the resources, then you can try to expand and cover off more of your audience.

Christian Klepp 23:32

What are some of the recent trends and just name two or three, if you will, what are some of the recent trends in the B2B Buying Experience space that marketers should be aware of? I mean, if we’re if we’re on the topic of how things have changed, right?

Matt Bell 23:44

Yeah. Well, I think I did drop it into conversation a minute ago, but you know, congratulations, we got I don’t know how many minutes into this without saying AI you know, you can’t, you can’t say trend or change without saying AI. Yeah, it’s really changing the way work is done especially information work. So it’s playing its part on the buying side, helping buyers find and evaluate solutions. It’s playing its part on the vendor side, for example, you know, in content creation. I think when we’re talking about the digital buying experience, I foresee AI becoming the research assistant to those buyers and the buyer just saying go out and find the vendors that sell X. What that means of course is it just reinforces the fact that if you are not, if that information isn’t visible online, AI can’t find it, AI cannot look in your, you know, salesman’s toolbox, tool bag of brochures and find that information. It has to be digital. So it just reinforces the fact that digital information is going to be important. It brings up an issue which you know, we’ll get deep into here is should you put your pricing on your website, you know, a classic marketing question and one of the answers for yes is I think we’re gonna see RFQs and RFIs is replaced by we’re about to launch our AI bot, and it’s gonna go hoover up all the information that can find on potential vendors, including pricing. And if you’re in the running, you’re in it. If you’re not, you’re not, we’re not even gonna come and ask you, we’re going to expect it to be out that maybe that’s, you know, that’s out there on a limb, whether we’ll ever get to that we’ll see. The other, the next trend, I think it’s somewhat related, which is, and we saw this explode in the pandemic, but it still matters, which is we used to have centralized groups of buyers sitting on one floor in a headquarters building somewhere and you could go knock on the door and sweet talk your way past the receptionist, and you could go meet buyers. And once you knew where they were, and they knew you, you could take them doughnuts, and you know, all was well. That’s gone, right buyers have scattered to the winds, they can be in literally Timbuktu or the Philippines or Ukraine or maybe like Ukraine right now. But you know, anywhere on the planet, not in headquarters. But the only place that they not going to be is in some central office because buyers don’t need to be. So there really impacts how you get information to them. You can’t find them a knock on the door, you have to use digital means. It’s got to be… it’s online or not at all. And then I think the third trend that I think it’s surprises some business leaders in B2B companies is the amount of money that B2B buyers, digital buyers are willing and able to spend online without ever meeting, you know, the company, right, they can do their research, and they can fire off a PO. You know, I think McKinsey published some data last year, I’m sure there’s… they’ve either updated it or there’ll be more recent studies. But you know, a lot of buyers willing to make a half a million dollar, a million dollar purchase entirely online, end to end online transaction. So you know, it’s not, it’s not just buying pencils, and printer paper from Staples, you know, digital first applies to those bigger and bigger purchases as well. So B2B companies that sell a few very large things, are also needing to get into this digital buying experience. It’s not just the ones that sell consumable widgets that can be more easily ordered online.

Christian Klepp 26:59

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, all three of them, like great insights. I mean, yeah, I have to agree. I’m kind of surprised myself that we got this far in the conversation without even touching, without even broaching the topic of AI. But on that topic, like to dig into that a little bit further if you if I can, Matt. In terms of AI, and when it comes to the buying experience. And I know there might not be necessarily a one sentence answer for this. But how far do you think companies should take it? And what I mean by that is, like, at what point should AI stop? And, and the human touch or the, you know, the human intervention come in?

Matt Bell 27:41

So we already said the word authenticity a couple of times. And I think, to me, that’s the key if, if you’re, if the piece of the process that you’re thinking about depends on authenticity depends on trust, depends on believing what you’re hearing, eventually a human has to be involved in that. So I think transactional information, you know, where can I get the spare part for this thing that I bought from you, an AI chatbot can handle that. You don’t need a human being. And knowledge base can be paused through a chatbot that has natural language capabilities, that’s extremely efficient, that’s allowing the customer to get to information that’s just in a database somewhere and can be you know, it connecting them to the right dots. When it comes to making a purchase, and deciding if your solution is the right one, compared to a competitors solution, there comes a point where some human authenticity has to come into it so that the buyer goes, Yeah, I think you really know what you’re talking about, I think you actually have my best interests at heart, I think you are going the extra mile to service me. And so there’s a point where that crosses over. I focus a lot on content marketing, in its broadest sense, which is, you know, demonstrating and putting out this relevant, helpful information, but also demonstrating domain expertise, showing that your company understands what is needed in the market, what the market is going to need next. So you’re working towards what’s next. And communicating that requires vision, it requires having an opinion, these are things that AI currently at least doesn’t have, right? We call it generative AI, it’s generating things, but what is generating a combinations of existing information that it can already see in its training data. So AI is great for adding color to things, doing research around things, you know, telling me the history of this from, you know, wherever it started to where we are now so that I don’t have to go to the library or to Google and find that information. It’s good at you know, building a nice document out of some information that you’ve gathered. It’s great, by the way, at improving writing. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that that I see companies making isn’t not taking advantage of those writing tools. I mean, you know, the grammar police. If you’ve got a fantastic, qualified editor in your organization, lucky you, most B2B companies don’t right, that’s not a core competency that most companies have is that you know, as an English major, even in there somewhere. So use the tools. I mean, the AI writing tools are transformative for turning really dull, badly constructed prose into something that is very readable. And what that does is it engages your audience better, you know, they’re looking at the same information, but they’re able to absorb it, they’re engrossed in it, they read it more easily. And so you get through. Your message gets across better. So I think that’s a place where AI needs to be used. But it should stop short of saying, I want to generate a blog post on you know, marketing on a mission. Tell me that what the 10 headings should be. Write the thing for me 1500 words published, that’s, that’s silly, because anybody can do that. Where’s the differentiation in that? How do I understand your point of view, and it’s just not authentic? It’s not authentically you, even though you can tell AI to write in your voice, which it is scarily good at, here’s a little humorous aside. Take a piece of prose that you’ve written, maybe it’s a blog post, and ask ChatGPT 4 or one of those tools, rewrite this in iambic pentameter. And for those that may not know, iambic pentameter is how Shakespeare wrote, I did this for part of a blog post recently. And it is frightening. I mean, it is just it’s perfect. It is it is a Shakespeare sonnet that accurately captures a B2B marketing blog. It’s nuts. So I mean, goodness, I could tell it write this like Christian Klepp. And it would, it would be perfect. So you know, anyway, that’s taking it a little too far. Don’t do this to all of your material. I don’t think most B2B buyers want to read in rhyming couplets. But yeah, it’s a supremely capable tool. It accelerates things tremendously, great time saver, but use it for what it’s good for. And don’t lose the human element maintain the authenticity.

Christian Klepp 32:02

To be or not to be? That is the question.

Matt Bell 32:05

Well, it is no longer to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous marketing, or have a strategy and be intentional instead. There we go. Fantastic. That’s drunk Shakespeare. That’s the stage.

Christian Klepp 32:20

Points for the effort. Points for effort. Matt, we get to the part of the show where we’re talking about actionable tips. But you know, let’s appreciate that you can’t do all of this in a day. Right? But what are some things if somebody were listening to this conversation? What are 3 to 5 things that a B2B marketer can do? Probably in tandem with other teams to help improve the buying experience for their customers?

Matt Bell 32:47

Yeah, I think I think you phrased that question very interestingly, in tandem with other teams, successful B2B marketing in this domain, right. So in the digital domain, the content domain, it depends on you’re working with the whole team, and practically your entire organization actually, because it’s only through marketing, that buyers will discover the information that’s in those people’s heads, right, whether it’s your CEO, or your subject matter experts, or in fact, now your sales organization, you know, marketing is the precursor to all of that. So that information needs to be transposed from that what would have been in person, let’s have a meeting with these people into content that can be discovered by the buyer. So ideally, you want the whole organization working on content marketing all the time, the simple reality is the rest of the organization doesn’t have time. They’re already busy with their own stuff, right. So I think the first actionable thing is to, is to take on the responsibility of understanding what is most important right now for improving that digital buying experience. So again, it’s about doing the homework, to find the customer, understand the needs, then you can kind of run a gap analysis, if you will, to see which of those needs you’re not really addressing. And you can prioritize those even. And now you’ve got a shopping list of things as a marketer, that’s like where I need to get some content generated on these to cover these gaps, because these are places where we’re losing our customers right now. And then focus on that. So that’s an actionable thing where you’ve taken what could be this enormous mountain of stuff to do and distilled it down to a few. Now your organization can support that.

So the second actionable thing, I think, is to figure out who in your organization you really need to be contributing, and how much time and energy can they realistically contribute? I see too many marketing strategies that are great on paper. But they’re underperforming horribly, because they’re totally unrealistic about the level of contribution that people can make, you know, especially in smaller growing businesses. You’re inherently under resourced the whole time. Everybody’s wearing multiple hats. They’re too busy. So you have to establish what I would call a production cadence. How fast can you turn out content, how many pieces a month you know, it’s great if it says online then you should be blogging three times a week. If your company can only write one blog a week, you can only publish one blog a week, otherwise, there’s just going to be a fire drill and it’s, you’re gonna get hated out of town.

Then I think the third thing, which sort of these all fit with each other, you need to explain to the organization, how marketing works, especially digital marketing, and why it’s so important, why it’s become mission critical. And then that helps you to explain why those individuals play an important role, why they’ve got information, it needs to make it into this process and out into the content. And then kind of what it’s going to take to win, right. How you as an organization are going to compete with your competitors, the other organizations in your market so that you’re winning the mind share of those prospects, and they’re becoming your customers? Because I think there’s a big, a lot of misunderstandings, misconceptions about how marketing works. You know, a lot of people still think it’s creating brochures and banners and sponsorships and swag, you know, T shirts, whatever it is. And digital marketing, obviously, is not that, content marketing is not that. And then I think the last one I’ll throw out is marketing needs to be sitting at the at the C suite level, or at least connected to it. So I think it’s important as a marketer to work closely with the leadership team, with the CEO, or whatever the head person is called. Because they’re going to be the ones that are defining the foundation of the business, the purpose, the mission, the vision, you know, the direction that the company is taking, that needs, those are anchors for content marketing, that information has to make it in, that’s number one. Secondly, they need to be championing this initiative, because it is a burden on the organization. And so you’re competing for resources, like, you know, with other initiatives going on. So if the CEO is championing this thing and saying, This is critical to our business, I need you all to support this, then that’s giving those other contributors permission to do so. And if they’re not, you can go kind of grab the CEO and say, Hey, can you push these people. I need, I need them to spend some time on marketing rather than the 1000 other things that they have on their plate. So I guess in summary, prioritize what you asked for, be realistic about who you ask, how much you ask for, that somebody that can support, explain to everybody why it’s important, why their role is important, how it works, and then get your senior leadership on board to, you know, to give it the priority that it needs, and then content marketing can succeed.

Christian Klepp 37:24

Absolutely, absolutely great advice. I would say not always very easy to implement, especially that piece, were getting marketing to sit at the table with the C suite, and getting the buy in from the CEO, because we’ve all been in those situations where that hasn’t quite worked out. Right,

Matt Bell 37:43

We’re gonna talk about a really good book called Content Marketing Mission Critical written by this guy Matt Bell. It’s written to CEOs. And if you buy a copy and give it to your CEO, and they actually read it, they might get it. It’ll make it easier. We’ll come back to that.

Christian Klepp 37:57

Maybe, maybe. (laugh)

Matt Bell 37:59

It’s the reason I wrote the book. I was a CEO, I understood marketing. But I had shareholders in particular, were like, why are you wasting your time on this? Why are you spending so much money on this? I’m like, God, you guys just don’t get it. This is mission critical. This is top tier stuff. And so I had to I had to sit down and actually figure out how to write it down.

Christian Klepp 38:18

Good on you for doing that. Because you know, a lot of it in my experience is out of sight, out of mind. And because they don’t really know what it is marketing does. And because they don’t know, they feel it’s not that important. And that’s why…

Matt Bell 38:29

And marketing budgets get cut. Every time there’s a pinch. One of the first things is oh, we don’t need marketing, we can live without marketing. That used to be true. I, you know, I don’t really have an issue with it in the past, when, at the end of the day, the sales team could just keep dialing and knocking on doors and driving from customer to customer, but now that they have to access customers through marketing, now it is mission critical. I keep coming back to that expression. I can’t think of a better one for it.

Christian Klepp 38:54

No, absolutely. Absolutely. We’re done with the last two questions, Matt. Yes, yes. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Matt Bell 39:04

There you go.

Christian Klepp 39:06

A status quo in your area of expertise that passionately disagree with and why.

Matt Bell 39:13

Excellent. Get on the soapbox at the end.

Christian Klepp 39:15

If you haven’t been on it already, like…

Matt Bell 39:17

Oh, you’ve seen nothing yet. You want passionate disagreement? I want to start pounding… Yeah, look, I’ve spent, you know, the big chunk of my career working at different stages, but a lot with sort of early stage and growth stage companies in the B2B, all in the B2B domain. You know, they’ve either been bootstrapped, or they’ve got some venture capital. But in general, marketing is grossly underfunded. We’ve just touched on it right. It’s undervalued, therefore, it is underfunded. And related to that, as we just discussed, and some of this is a legacy thing that we’re gradually growing out of. Sales is always prioritized over marketing, right? That’s kind of the status quo. Sale is here. Marketing, if it doesn’t even report to the sales guys, at least the smaller thing, and the relative budgets, that marketing gets are low, you know, marketing budget needs to be… go read the statistics online, these are not mass numbers 12-15% of your new revenue target even more if you’re a tech company, or you’re in some sort of land grab market. And marketing, as we said, should have that equal seat at the table alongside sales, this is a CMO thing or even maybe have a CRO that’s refereeing both of them. But you know, they need to be of equal stature. It’s a marketing lead business, more than a sales lead business these days. You know, today, your business is not going to grow without marketing doesn’t matter how great your sales team is. So marketing needs that status. So I guess you asked me for one status quo. And I’ve kind of given you two right. So I think I’ll go with the budget side. The underfunding of marketing is horrendous. And I fundamentally disagree with it. And I’ve gone to battle with my own investors and shareholders over this many times. Without money, it doesn’t really matter where marketing sits in the organization, whether it’s at the C suite or in the basement, you’ve got to have the funding. First of all go with that. Marketing is hard. Marketing takes time. It costs real money, if you want to stand out online and earn the mind share of your target audience. So stop penny pinching marketing.

Christian Klepp 41:20

Amen to that.

Matt Bell 41:21

So box off. I can’t drop my mic. It’s on a stand. But I will.

Christian Klepp 41:27

Please don’t drop that one. No, thank you so much. This was such a great conversation today. And please, quick introduce yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you. And rumor has it you are a voice actor.

Matt Bell 41:41

Ah ah! The voice actor. Alright, I’ll put that on the end. First of all, I love the way you leave the intros to the ends of these podcasts so that people don’t like to now during the intro, we have to get to the meat and potatoes. So hopefully a few of your listeners have stayed tuned all the way to the end, that would be great. Obviously, we can put this information in the show notes. Who am I? I’m Matt Bell, I’m a recovering engineer, I spent the first half of my career at a major oil company. Then I moved into new technology development, ended up in corporate venture capital. So that was kind of my springboard into growing businesses. I joined one of our portfolio companies at that time. I ran a manufacturing business, I ran a software business, later ran a service business, all B2B. And all at some point either owned by or invested in by venture capital, private equity shareholders. Eventually decided look, I want to work for myself because I want to focus on the things that I really love most about early stage business, which is the growth strategy and the marketing pieces. Hence, we’re having this conversation today. I run a B2B in strategy and marketing business called Strategic Piece together with my wife. She is a marketer and a marketing technologist by trade. And yes, I work for my wife. That’s a whole other episode. And then I founded MessageUp, which is really the primary company for me at the moment in 2021, focusing on B2B content marketing, which as we have said, ad nauseam, I believe is mission critical for today’s B2B businesses. That’s a nice segue to the books, I set out to write one book, long story, it became two. The first one is content marketing, mission critical. And that is a guide for B2B CEOs, who are tasked with designing and championing content marketing. And then the second one is content marketing, making the magic happen, which is for the B2B marketing leader who’s challenged with operationalizing that their companion set. Ideally, the marketing manager reads, its green, the one with the green cover, CEOs read the one with the blue cover. And then you can have an effective conversation and make magic happen together, loads more information about MessageUp and links to buy the books and some discount codes on the books or on the website, messageup.com. And please connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s my primary social media channel. And I guess my email is Matt@messageup.com. If you’d like to reach out directly, please don’t spam me now that I’ve said that on a podcast.

Christian Klepp 44:01

Fantastic. And the voice actor, please, please.

Matt Bell 44:03

Oh, yeah. Well see, you can probably tell I’m not from America. Originally. I was born and raised in England, travelled around the world. I’ve been in the US since 2001. But I have this accent thing that people keep telling me, hey, you should use that. You should do voiceover work. People love, love that accent. So I’ve done a couple of video voiceovers, things like that. I’ve just finished recording the audiobook versions of the two books that we just mentioned. So those should be out. Fingers crossed on Audible in about the next 10 days or so if I can get my act together and get them properly finished and loaded. But yeah, if you would, if anybody on the podcast would like my accent on your video or your training material, it’s very popular for training. Apparently people respect instructions with a British accent in industrial training more than they do an American accent. Yeah, happy to help so there’s lots of AI out there. You can get a lot of things done now with these fake AI voices. I think they still sound fake. I will bring a level of authenticity to your product that you can’t get anywhere else.

Christian Klepp 45:07

Fantastic. Fantastic. Matt. Once again, this has been a fantastic conversation, a great conversation, I should say. Thanks again for your time. Take care. Stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Matt Bell 45:18

Thank you, Christian. Appreciate the opportunity. Look forward to the next one.

Christian Klepp 45:20

Thank you. Bye for now.

View Details

How to Deliver Better B2B Digital Marketing Results

Combining disciplines like behavioral analysis and data analytics enables B2B marketers to have a deeper understanding of their target audiences, identify patterns, and implement digital marketing campaigns that generate solid outcomes.

Join us as we talk to certified data scientist Michelle Bassett (Founder, BIZQOR) about the value of leveraging behavioral analysis and data analytics for better B2B marketing results. During our conversation, Michelle talks to us about what these specialized fields help organizations to solve and what pitfalls to avoid. She also provides us with some actionable tips on how to make sense of all the data to get marketing budgets approved.

https://youtu.be/A_Re6yGNFnI

Topics discussed in episode

• Michelle talks about the importance of understanding behavioral analysis and data analytics in B2B digital marketing [2:10]
• Some of the mistakes that marketers make when it comes to combining the different disciplines [3:40]
• How B2B marketers should start looking at numbers if/when they feel overwhelmed [7:22]
• The types of problems that behavioral analysis and data analytics can solve for B2B marketers [9:37]
• Michelle talks about how she would present data and information in a way that is digestible and gets budgets approved [13:54]
• Michelle’s actionable tips [20:33]
  • Pick one number and hone in on it
  • Ask questions and set aside a small budget to experiment and analyze what works or doesn’t
  • Be prepared to iterate your marketing campaigns
  • Don’t be afraid to try
• One thing B2B companies should be measuring: Market saturation [25:13]
• Michelle explains why she feels having a social media presence is overrated [28:50]

Companies and links mentioned

• Michelle Bassett on LinkedIn

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Michelle Bassett, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Okay, everyone, welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. So this is your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I am joined by someone on a mission to combine digital marketing and data science to deliver better B2B marketing results. So Michelle Bassett, welcome to the show.

Michelle Bassett 01:09

Thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Great to be connected Michelle. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Because I know that introduction sounded like a bit of a mouthful, but it’s highly relevant, it’s very useful, and I have no doubt that you are going to knock this conversation out of the park.

Michelle Bassett 01:25

I’ll give it my best!

Christian Klepp 01:29

Michelle, I mean, this is short of stating the obvious, but your professional background is incredible. So you have this unique blend of expertise. And let me see if I can get this right. behavioral science, data analytics and internet marketing. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I believe has become part of your professional mission. And that is the value of combining behavioral analysis and data analytics for better B2B digital marketing results. So if we were to kick off this conversation with a question, let it be this, why is the understanding of these different disciplines important for B2B digital marketing?

Michelle Bassett 02:10

Well, for B2B digital marketing, it’s important to have this combination, or at least to be aware of this combination, because it happens organically, people are behaving and users are using. And so there are data points that come from that. And part of my behavioral analysis background, most people associate it with ABA therapy, or treating kids with autism or even business organization. As far as the whole. I think it’s called organizational behavior management companies who come in and restructure companies based on, you know, different personalities and job functions and things like that. But when it comes to marketing, and B2B marketing, specifically, having that, that junction of understanding of things that are happening anyway, just it is gonna, it’s just gonna make your marketing campaigns that much stronger.

Christian Klepp 03:09

Fantastic, fantastic. And we will get into the nitty gritty aspects of that later on the conversation. But that was such a great segue into the next question. And I have no doubt, you will have no problem answering this question, because you’ve probably seen at all, mistakes and misconceptions. So when we’re talking about combining these different disciplines, what are some of these things that you’ve seen out there, that mistakes that marketers make? And how should they get the rest of them?

Michelle Bassett 03:40

Well, there are a few. Again, I’ve worked in many, many disciplines in many, many different companies. The main one is what I’m calling data next, right? So if you think about fishing, and you make your net or you cast your net, there’s data net. So if you are a company that uses Google Analytics, per say, nine times out of 10, you probably either should be using Google Tag Manager, or some sort of, or some sort of platform tag management software that collects that information. So whether it’s a Facebook pixel manager, or ad roll for your retargeting efforts, or what have you, there is a data net, something that’s capturing front end data and sending it to the back end, so that you can analyze the those numbers so just not setting those at all. I’ve seen a lot of companies who were pretty successful, pretty profitable. A lot of them had either no D&A team, or D&A is a data and analysis team, which is more engineer, an analyst position. Or they just, I guess, forgot to set the data nets. I don’t know what happened. And the marketers are left jumping from platform to platform and trying to figure out, okay, did this person click on this button or did this person click on that button. And they never really know if their marketing campaigns as a whole was successful down to the user journey. It’s always these high level, you go on YouTube, you see, okay, I had this many impressions and this many conversions. But even your conversions are a little bit off, because the pixel was never set properly. And you don’t actually understand what those particular impressions and those visits actually mean in the grand scheme of things, because you don’t have the whole whole picture of what your organic traffic even looks like. Didn’t even compare your actual marketing, your paid marketing efforts rather. And so that’s one of the biggest ones. Another one is just generally just being overwhelmed by the idea that today I have to look at numbers. And so a lot of times marketers are put in this creative box. And yes, marketing is creative. And it’s fun. And you get to make all this content and all these visuals, and you get to play inside the Illustrator and, and all these lovely, artsy crafty areas. But for validation purposes, you really want to make sure that the numbers and your creativity go hand in hand. So it was not setting those data nets at all. And just being afraid, essentially, of numbers. And I feel like that’s where a lot of people fall short.

Christian Klepp 06:34

Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. I did have one follow up question for you. And I’m pretty sure you can answer it. Not everybody is going to be a trained data scientist going into this. And I believe that was also part of part of your point. And there is definitely the factor of becoming overwhelmed with all the data and the attributes and the numbers to look at. So let’s just assume because there are listeners out there that are most likely facing these situations, right? Going into this, what is the best way for them to tackle these this type of problem, like the ones that you’ve just mentioned, without necessarily having to be the data scientist? So let’s look at this from a, maybe like a more top view perspective, if we if we can?

Michelle Bassett 07:22

Okay, so to kind of combat that, right. So no one besides me, and like six other people in the world are internet marketers and data scientists, right. So, so let’s clear that here and you do not in any way, shape or form have to be a data scientist. But at the end of the day, most of your of your platforms are going to come with some sort of an analytics. So as far as dipping your toe in the water, kind of just starting to look at numbers, I would say find the metric that is most impactful for you, and start there. And so we call them KPIs or key performance indicators. So find your one, your main one, not impressions, not necessarily anything that’s out of your control. But the main thing that your job is paid off of, find that one thing for you, and learn everything about that one number, and then improve that one number either by saying hey, I need more data around how many people went from this page to this page on this page? Or I need more data around this particular marketing channel? And then really, really, really hone in on that number. Once you perfect that number, and for those of you who report to see CMOs or CTOs or whatever, and you can tie that number to bottom line revenue, and profit, then you’ll get more and more comfortable because you’ll eventually be rewarded for your efforts. And again, it’s just one number. Start with one. That one thing, The one thing Yep. One thing.

Christian Klepp 09:21

Fantastic. Fantastic. Michelle, in your experience, what types of core problems and give us maybe three to five? What types of core problems do behavioral analysis and data analytics solve for B2B marketers?

Michelle Bassett 09:37

Well, the biggest problem, and I necessarily wouldn’t call it a problem, I would say it’s a road to discovery, but then I’m being all romantic and marketer-y at that point, right. But there’s a lot of power in customer journey mapping. It was… There’s no big buzzword around it right now. But I would say maybe like 2016-2017, there was a lot of big name, big brand push to know exactly what a user were doing on your website, on your app, and how that because again, it’s the 2017, and then how did it get from the internet, to your store. Um, I worked with a large company… a large, a large restaurant company in America. And they sold chicken, by the way, and they were really, really, really, really concerned about their marketing campaigns, specifically on Facebook, and how many people got from the marketing campaign to the store. And so we literally drilled down, and then the whole behavior analysis part of that, or the behavir modification part of that is that I know the levers to pull, and the things to tweak or conversion rate optimization, current buzzword, to make those people get into the store without necessarily saying, Okay, here’s a free coupon for this, or that or the third, but be able to track those users from online behavior to offline behavior without being creepy about it, because you can get real creepy, real fast. But that is the main one. So conversion rate optimization and journey, customer journey mapping, essentially, having those data points that we make every day, and being able to look at it from a higher perspective without getting into people’s personal lives. And now, you know, it’s a whole, it’s a whole invasion of privacy, and just being able to tweet people in a very ethical sound way, but to, but to ultimately increase profits.

Christian Klepp 11:57

Absolutely, absolutely. And I’m glad you brought that up about, you know, the sensitivity around the data or privacy information or what have you. Because I guess, I suppose in the United States, that depends on which state you’re talking about. But also, for example, over in the EU, you’ve got the GDPR. So there’s a lot of like, sensitivity around using people’s personal information and those details, right?

Michelle Bassett 12:24

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 12:25

Okay. So we’re moving on from that topic to another one, which you’ve talked about it a bit in the past couple of minutes. But again, behavioral analysis and data analytics, they’re both topics that can generally be… except for you and the other people, it can be pretty overwhelming. And we did talk about like, Okay, you mentioned, focus on that one particular metric and concentrate some efforts on around that attribute, that particular metric or attribute. But if the B2B marketers, the folks that are listening to the show, and this conversation, if they are following these steps, they’re sifting through all this data, and they’re trying to consolidate it to be presented to, let’s say, members of senior management, the Board of Directors, you’ve been there many times, I’m sure, right.

Michelle Bassett 13:17

Yes.

Christian Klepp 13:18

They do not want you to present them with a novel. Right?

Michelle Bassett 13:22

Absolutely.

Christian Klepp 13:22

They want you to have a presentation that is as succinct and straight to the point as possible, and will tell them what they need to know. And will also hopefully get you the approval and validation that you need from them. So here comes the question, excuse me for the for the really long setup. But how can B2B marketers sift through all that data and information and present them in a way that is A) digestible? And B) which I know you’ve done, gets budgets approved?

Michelle Bassett 13:54

Yes. Okay. So here’s what I tell everybody. And most people don’t believe me at first. But okay, so nine times out of 10, that no matter where you are, you are typically interacting with either your marketing director, your chief marketing officer, and then the Chief Technology Officer sometimes, and then some guy in finance. There’re always some guys in finance is lurking around the corner somewhere, right? And so when I make presentations, and when I have this wall of data in front of me, I have to talk to my higher up, so typically a director and marketing or both, so they want to know the types of campaign and ultimately, your thought process as far as beginning middle and end. So impression, this happened, and here’s how they converted. When it comes to the finance guy, right? He doesn’t care about any of that. He’s like, Look, how much money did you spend? How much money did you make? That’s it, the only thing he cares about, he doesn’t care about the agency you worked with. He doesn’t care about this, he doesn’t care about anything. So what I do is, I have this executive summary slide, it is the first slide and might be two slides, depending on the length of data and length of time. Also, any quarterly reporting or like, or like anything like that, everything is clear cut on this one slide and text format, might be one or two charts. I know people have mixed feelings about pie charts. But it might be one or two charts, one might be a pie chart. I don’t know, might feel spicy that day. Don’t know. So. On that one executive summary. I’m giving the beginning, middle and end, that I’m saying, Okay, here’s how much money we spent. Here’s how much money it produced. And then we can literally end the presentation there. But when I do presentations, I have this thing called “prove it”. So at any time, even including this conversation, at any time, whenever I’m talking to anybody, they have the right to and it gets annoying initially, they have the right to, at any point in time, mid-sentence, say prove it. And then I go to that particular slide because it might be 10, 15 slides. But again, I’m only presenting one or two slides. But if the CMO has a question about, hey, how many different variations in this A|B split test did you do, and essentially says prove it. I already have it pointed out. I already have a slide just just on that. But again, there’s an executive summary, very wordy, not very appealing to the eye, but very wordy, might have one or two, again, visualizations. And then as soon as they say prove it, then I go to a subsequent slide with that data, not a wall of text. It is very visualized, very easy to understand CMOs, they love, they love bar graphs, don’t know why. But they really into bar graphs. Okay. So bar graphs for the higher ups. And again, on occasion, CFO or or finance guy around the corner. He likes pie charts. So, so this, this was the profit for this. This is what I believe the long term investment for this is. Here’s how it affects the customer lifetime value, and so forth and so on. But that is on the “prove it” slide, not on the executive summary slide. So hopefully that answer your question.

Christian Klepp 17:46

Yeah, no, it absolutely does. I mean, when we used to prepare presentations like that, we used to call that the appendix section or the extra ammunition section. So the executive summary and those probably be the three slides that you’re presenting to these very senior people, undoubtedly, you will, you will focus on those. And there were always links in each of those slides in case they did say prove it, or they have more questions, then it redirects them, it redirects you to the to the detail section.

Michelle Bassett 18:19

And kind of… one more point on that right, the more detailed you make the presentation. Again, it’s not for those higher ups, it’s not for budget approvals. But the more detailed you make that presentation, you can always go back to it next campaign and say, this worked, or that didn’t work, and then carry all that logic from there. But if you don’t make that initial draft, and you don’t have that initial information on that, it’s very, very hard to for the next campaign, say, Okay, I’m gonna do XYZ because then you have to start from scratch. But if you don’t have to start from scratch, it makes budget approvals way easier. It and then it also builds a history of your work and your effort and your value. So that come bonus time or whatever time you celebrate in your personal life. Um, you know, it’s kind of all there already.

Christian Klepp 19:17

Absolutely. Absolutely. If I understood what you’ve been explaining in the past couple of minutes correctly, you also have to keep in mind marketing 101, who’s your target… not who’s your target audience, but who’s your audience? Who is this being presented to? Exactly. What are their roles and responsibilities? In this case, because it’s internal within the organization, what their roles are, what do they care about? And more often than not, what will make a light bulb go on in their head? In a good way. Right. So clearly, the chief marketing officer will look at different factors, if compared to like, say, the finance person. Yup. Right. Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay, Michelle, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips. And I know you’ve given some already. Yes. But let’s just imagine if somebody were listening to this conversation. And they were faced with this dilemma that we have so vividly painted here. And they were going to walk away from this and take action on it, what are like maybe three to five things that you could tell them to do right now that they can act upon?

Michelle Bassett 20:33

Okay. So three to five things that you can act on right now. One, one would be picking that one thing. So we already talked about that. Two, would be not being afraid to mess up. We don’t talk about that as much, especially from like a corporate point of view. But when you’re in a creative spot, and you might have you know, a $25,000 budget for this campaign. A lot of times we don’t take those shots, especially early on in our career. Because we don’t want to look bad. And when you don’t want to look bad, you typically don’t ask questions. And my biggest thing, as a digital marketer / data scientists, is you have to ask questions, even if you’re asking yourself these questions, because sometimes I need expert advice, and I have to talk to myself. But you have to ask the right questions to get to the right place. And so sometimes you don’t have enough data to move forward with your marketing campaign. So you have to miss, like, it’s fine, it’s fine if you mess up. Now, I don’t know if the CFO thinks it’s fine. But spend a little bit of your budget, maybe it’s 5%, maybe it’s 10%, depending on how big your budget in your market is to just mess up, throw the spaghetti on the wall, and kind of see what sticks with math, mathematically see what sticks. And then and then improve from there. A lot of marketing, especially product, and we didn’t talk a lot about product design and product pushes and things like that. But when it comes to a SaaS product, specifically, treating your marketing campaigns the same way your engineers and developers treat the software, it’s very, there are a lot of iterations involved. And you have to treat your marketing campaigns similarly. And so that was, don’t be afraid to mess up. Don’t, don’t, don’t be afraid. Just do it, see what happens. It’s only money, but it’s only money, right. And then also, the last one that I’m just gonna throw out here is if a marketing channel suddenly stops working, that is okay as well. It may have worked in January, like Facebook may have been really, really, really good for you. YouTube may have been really, really, really good for you. And now it’s not, or maybe the CPA or cost per acquisition is no longer what it used to be. And that is okay, everything costs more now, because of supposedly inflation, but my views on that. So it’s like, you really have to find what works for you. And that goes back to not being scared. You might have to try a brand new marketing platform. Instead of you know, Instagram ads, you might have to do native or display ads on Bing, right. So don’t be afraid. So it was all about not being afraid. It was a pick. So pick your one thing. Don’t be afraid to try different things and new things. And don’t be afraid to change marketing channels. So now you’re afraid.

Christian Klepp 24:17

Yeah, have courage. Yeah. Afraid. Pick up that sword. Right. And, yeah, on the topic of inflation, I would say that that’s probably a topic for another podcast that is more politically inclined, or economic. Right? Yes. No, thanks for sharing those. And that’s a great segue into the next question. And I know you’ve spoken about metrics a little bit and you did say pick that one thing. So I’m gonna throw that right back at you and say, well, just from your experience, what exactly is that one thing or I suppose it depends on the organization. Vertical, what they want to measure? what campaign they’re running that stage in which the campaign is… like over to you? What type of metrics should B2B marketers be paying attention to?

Michelle Bassett 25:13

Okay, um, this is gonna sound controversial, hear me out. And so this is me coming from a point of view of, I’ve done big for profit, medium for profit, small for profit. And I’ve also done nonprofit. So, really what it comes down to, this kind of goes back to the previous point that we were talking about with changing your marketing platforms and distribution networks. Okay, so the main metric, the main metric is going to be market saturation. So a lot of times out of the box, your platform might not have a market saturation tool. I know Facebook does. But if you dig a little bit deeper, and you can actually request. I know Outbrain does it. If you request like additional numbers, they’ll tell you. Same thing for HubSpot. HubSpot actually has a lot of data that I’m like, How’d you guys get this information like I don’t want to know. So market and audience saturation can be your best friend. Because eventually, you’ll have a plateau. It’s called the point of diminishing returns. That’s typically what people call it, where they’ve been doing good, they’ve been doing good, they’ve been going up, they’ve been going up. Now all of a sudden, they’ve kinda teeter… not even teeter off. But like, no matter how much money they spend, no matter how much content they make, no matter what happens, they never really grow, they might kind of blip up here and there. But they never really skyrocket the way that they, you know, probably promise nine times out of 10. And that’s because the area is saturated, especially for local, like actual brick and mortar companies. A lot of times outside of that five mile radius, you’re not going to get a lot of traffic coming in. If you’re a dentist office, which I don’t know if there’s a lot of dentists listening to this. But that’s the only thing that I think of. You’re only going to have that three, maybe five mile radius. And that’s just for general dentistry. Now, if you’re some kind of special doctor who does special doctor stuff, then then you know, might be a little bit bigger. But when it comes to like, any sort of major enterprise things where there was a location barrier, and geofencing involved. There’s only so many people who who live in that area. So if they haven’t acted on, you know, engagement point 11, engagement point 15. They, they might not do it at all. And so you have to take that into consideration, especially when you’re looking at your individual platforms as well. Well, how much audience and market saturation can I really get? And again, people find that controversial, so.

Christian Klepp 28:21

Open to interpretation, I suppose. Yeah. Like, yeah, no, I mean, I think that was a really good point. And, you know, thanks for sharing your insights on that. All right. Michelle, I kind of feel like you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but just stay up there a little bit longer. All right. A status quo in your areas, plural, of expertise, that you passionately disagree with and why. And please only pick one.

Michelle Bassett 28:50

So the main status quo thing that I feel is a little bit overrated is a social media presence. Now for a large corporation who has B2B and they sell, you know, toilet paper inside a commercial buildings. A social media presence may not be needed. Now, if you scale that down to someone like me, who is doing a podcast, you know, it may it may be more inclined for me to have one. But really, I have the socials. I’m not really on socials. And so I honestly honestly honestly don’t believe that the amount of content creation, content management and content preparation that it takes to go viral because everyone wants to go viral, and they’re never prepared to go viral. It’s all the whole thing. Everybody wants to go viral. Um, that’s not needed to have a good sound financially stable business as a whole, but marketing campaign. Now if your goal as a marketer is to go viral, then you have to have certain things in place to capture that viral-ness. Right. And so, if you’re trying just to accidentally go viral, don’t do it, it’s just, it’s gonna be a waste and then you’re gonna get bad PR, it’s just gonna go bad for a reason. But I really think that posting three times a day, on five different social media platforms, and doing Tik Tok dances for every single business, for as far as the status quo for marketer is, is not necessary. It’s just not necessary. And you know, Tik Tok has taken everything by storm. And the cost per acquisition, or the cost per impression is super-duper low, and everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon. And there are a lot of businesses who can thrive from Tik Tok fame and viral videos going out. But if you are, if you are a Procter and Gamble, and you are supplying paper to, you know, businesses all over the world, or you’re Xerox or whatever, you sell big industrial printers. I don’t see it. I just don’t see Tik Tok dances on top of the printer, like, I don’t get it, I don’t get it. And I don’t think that the money is well spent in that area. I think customer outreach, customer engagement, maybe even gift-ology if we take it offline, and start to track on some of those behavioral things, would actually be more beneficial than paying some influencer to dance on top of one of your printers.

Christian Klepp 31:58

Absolutely. No, no, I 100% agree with that. And you know, I’ve had this conversation with a couple of guests on the show. And I had a discussion with another with a gentleman a couple of weeks ago, on the topic of developing case studies for B2B And you know, he had clients that come to him as to say that, you know, we want something that goes viral. And quite frankly, if you’re developing content to your point, in B2B, in specialized B2B sectors with the hope that it’s going viral. A) I think you’re completely missing the point. And B) it’s wishful thinking because you don’t get to the side if your content goes viral. Right. And anyone that tells you otherwise says A) doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And B) Yeah, they probably haven’t done it before. Right. Exactly. And and C) most important of all, is that really, the objective of the exercise, to go viral? And I think the more important question is, what when you do go viral then want?

Michelle Bassett 33:04

Exactly, because most businesses, and most people aren’t set up to even deal with 7 million orders.

Christian Klepp 33:13

Right.

Michelle Bassett 33:13

It doesn’t mean people even order. Even if the people order because a lot of times these campaigns will go viral. But that doesn’t improve any brand recognition and people odds are it went viral. So your site, your link isn’t attached to it. So there’s no way even to get back to you. Someone’s gonna say, Oh, look at this goofy ad. And so that’s about it.

Christian Klepp 33:36

And then it extends into this, I call it the realm of like, factors that are outside of your control, like you said, like, then it becomes an order and fulfillment challenge. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Fantastic. Michelle, this has been such a great conversation. And you know, thank you so much for coming on, and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. And maybe there are a few like aspiring data scientists out there. And if there are, how do they get in touch with you?

Michelle Bassett 34:05

Yeah, sure. So, again, I’m not really on the socials. We already talked about this. But LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, it’s Michelle A Bassett. Or you can email me at Michelle@Newgen.digital. And so I will get back to you as soon as I can on LinkedIn. But if you email me, I probably get back to you like the same day or like the next day depending on when you email me. And I’m always happy to answer your questions or to make fun of finance people, because that’s what I do. So yeah, just reach out.

Christian Klepp 34:53

Fantastic, fantastic. And final question, you’re not related in any ways to Angela Bassett, are you?

Michelle Bassett 34:58

No, probably not I don’t know.

Christian Klepp 35:01

Distant relatives maybe. who knows?

Michelle Bassett 35:04

I did see a picture of her once and I was like, maybe maybe.

Christian Klepp 35:09

Possible possible.

Michelle Bassett 35:10

I was filling myself entirely too much that day.

Christian Klepp 35:12

No, fantastic. Michelle, once again, thanks for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Michelle Bassett 35:20

Thank you.

Christian Klepp 35:21

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Create Good B2B Brand Narratives

Playing it safe is the easy and predictable route, but this approach won’t make B2B Martech companies stand out in the sea of competition. They need to have a unique perspective that’s relevant to their target audience and position themselves strategically in the market.

Join us as we talk to marketing expert Joe Zappa (Founder and CEO, Sharp Pen Media) as he unpacks how B2B MarTech companies can develop a strong brand narrative. Joe also talks about the pitfalls to avoid and how marketers should adapt to the changes in the B2B Martech landscape. He elaborates on the importance of conducting customer research to develop the right narrative, and how companies should go about niching down.

https://youtu.be/K79RR7s_URY

Topics discussed in episode

• Joe elaborates on the challenges B2B MarTech companies face when it comes to building brand narratives [1:51]
• How to come up with an idea to expand and improve the brand narrative [7:04]
• Some mistakes and misconceptions regarding brand narrative, and how marketers can address them [11:40]
• Joe shares his thoughts on the topic of ‘niching down’ [17:20]
• How to conduct research to get the narrative [21:20]
• Actionable tips: What can marketers do immediately to craft a better brand narrative [32:18]
• How to get B2B companies to buy in to the importance of a brand narrative [36:57]

Companies and links mentioned

• Joe Zappa on LinkedIn
• Sharp Pen Media
• Adalytics
• Beeswax
• Bombora
• Leadferno

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Joe Zappa

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. All right, everyone, welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission, hold on to your seats, to help B2B MarTech business leaders drive revenue with marketing strategy, content and PR. So coming to us from Brooklyn, New York, Mr. Joe Zappa. Welcome to the show, sir.

Joe Zappa 01:12

Hi, Christian. Thanks so much for having me on.

Christian Klepp 01:14

Great to be connected. Joe, I really enjoyed our previous conversation. And I’m really looking forward to this one, because we’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover.

Joe Zappa 01:17

Yeah, sounds great. Let’s get to it.

Christian Klepp 01:18

All right. So on to the first question, so you’re clearly no stranger when it comes to narrative building. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that has become part of your professional mission. And that’s where brand narrative falls short for B2B MarTech products and how to solve that. So let’s kick off the conversation with this question. Why do you think that’s such a challenge for B2B MarTech?

Joe Zappa 01:51

Yes, so one of the main challenges in B2B marketing, especially for the companies with which I work, which are AdTech and MarTech firms is commoditization, everyone who is in this industry thinks about it in terms of categories, right. So you, we love our three letter acronyms. So you have CDPs, customer data platform, CRMs, DMPs, whatever it is. And the problem with those acronyms is, they’re great because they help us make sense of the industry at a glance. But they also necessarily lead to commoditization, because when I think of a bunch of different companies in the space, I just like, Oh, they’re a CDP. I know what they do, right? They help a company sort through their first party data and activate it for marketing purposes. The problem with that, though, is that then everyone in the industry just thinks you’re the same as every other CDP. And while you might think, Oh, well, we’re like the CDP for enterprises or whatever it is, whatever your niche is, it’s very hard for people to remember that. And remember the distinctions among all the companies in the category. And this is where marketing in general, and especially narrative marketing comes in, is allowing you to differentiate not just on products, but on some broader mission, very apropos for the name of the podcast.

Christian Klepp 01:55

Absolutely, absolutely. And I tend to agree with you there and ponder me this Joe, like, why do so many B2B MarTech firms and you know, we’ve all seen them, we’ve all jumped on somebody’s website, you know, that’s selling some kind of like, SaaS software, or, or some MarTech service or solution and whatnot. And after scrolling through the homepage, maybe three to five times you still can’t figure out what it is they do. Why do you think that that’s such a recurring trend in the space?

Joe Zappa 03:40

Yeah, I think one reason is that companies are very immersed in their own business. So they are describing what they do, like they’re speaking to an expert, or like they work with someone, they’re working with someone else who is as immersed in the product as they are, which is almost never the case. Because even if you’re a marketer, and you’re using, let’s return to the idea of a customer data platform, you might understand pretty well what that product does. Maybe you’ve worked with others before, but it’s still not your entire work, like your entire 40 hour week is not sorting through this technology, right? You want to go to that technology, you want to get your insights quickly, and then you want to get on with your job. So all, like all B2B tech companies just need to remember that. Even though you live and breathe the details of your product, your customers do not. And so the challenge is twofold. The first thing is to focus on the pain points of the customer and not the details of the product. So what is it going to help them do not like what are the products intricacies? And the second, like the higher level to B2B marketing. This is where the mission thing comes in, is ideally you don’t even just solve pain points for your customer, but you’re part of a broader movement in business culture that they can latch on to. So for example, one of my collaborators who does strategy for my clients is Mark Johnson, who was for seven years, the CMO Bombora, which is a B2B intent data company, and Bombora stick was sustainable marketing. So their idea was like, they sold B2B intent data, they helped companies marketing and sales, understand who were their buyers, and what were their buyers interested in and how to message to them based on their interests. And not just you know, product alignment with their needs. And but Bombora didn’t go out into the market, and they grew from like zero to 60 million while Mark was there and say, just like we have this amazing intent data, let us tell you about how amazing it is. What they did is they said the entire industry of marketing and sales, B2B marketing and sales as moving toward sustainability and sustainable marketing. The idea being we’re all sick of getting spammed with messages, how do we have an approach to targeting our customers, that is not going to piss them off. And that is going to allow us to build these long term sustainable relationships. And they were able by focusing on that idea, to A) position their product as what would enable that movement and B) get a lot more people interested in it and interested in talking to them than if they were just talking about how good their product was. Because when you focus on an idea, like sustainable marketing, you can have, you know, journalists come and industry influencers, more people can get involved than just the people who are in the market for your product right now.

Christian Klepp 06:35

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I have a follow up question for you, Joe, just based on what you said in this these past couple of minutes. But the idea of focusing on an idea, right, to expand and improve that brand narrative. And I know you can go in several directions with this one, but how do B2B companies come up with that idea that not necessarily will stick but that idea that will resonate with the target audience? How do they how do they do that?

Joe Zappa 07:04

Yeah so I think it’s a synthesis of what resonates with your customers, and what do they already love about the product? And then where is the industry heading. So like, when we do this with customers, we’re doing one today, like we have a two hour call, where we talk to the leaders of the company, and usually someone from sales and someone from marketing. And we think about like, Who is this company? Why does it exist? Why is it important to the industry? Where’s the industry going? And how are we going to take it there, then we go off, and we talk to a handful of customers. And that’s essentially a reality check. Like because the we hear from the CEO, and the head of marketing, and so on, like what, who they think they are and what they think is valuable, valuable about the product. And then we hear from customers? And then we find out really what do customers think is valuable about this product? And what are their aspirations and how does the company fit into it? And then we synthesize that, so then we look at what are the trends and what we’re hearing from these five customers, like if three or more of them say the same thing, then we’re starting to see some qualitative evidence that okay, this, this resonates. And then we take that to the original team, CEO, CMO, and so on. And we try to figure out, okay, based on what our customers care about, and what they love about our product, plus, where we think the industry is going, what is an idea that would captivate our customers and also influencers and so on. So if you think about Bombora, and the sustainable marketing example, what I would imagine, like Mark discovered when he was talking to Bombora’s customers back in the day is like, okay, it’s not just that, like we help them target more effectively, it’s that the product is a relief for them, because they’re sick of getting bombarded with messages that don’t resonate with them. And their customers are sick of that. And they’re sick of as sales and marketing people of sending people DMs or cold calling them and being told to go away. And so. So that’s how you land on that kind of idea. I think. What do you think? Because I know you do similar things with your clients.

Christian Klepp 09:20

No, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I agree. And we do similar things. It’s fascinating to me, at least from my experience. And this isn’t… I mean this in the nicest way and no disrespect to anyone out there. But it fascinates me how sometimes. What the client says, the client’s team says about their product and the market isn’t necessarily a reflection of what the customers say and think. And when that happens. I mean, when that happens, people tend to say, oh, there’s a problem like yes, there’s a problem but I also see an opportunity in that. Because you know, So it’s very easy to go down the negative slope of all but the market doesn’t say that right. But, you know, the, I suppose you do this as well, right? So it’s, it’s about also testing out some of the ways that they want to approach the market. And so internally, they have a consensus and everybody high fives each other. And then we’re like, Okay, well, let’s see what the market says and how you know how the market perceives this, right? Because that, for me will be the most more important take.

Joe Zappa 10:27

Yes, I Sorry. Yeah. No, I just want to say I totally agree. And the other thing I wanted to say is that, because we don’t want to, you know, offend our clients, the same is true of us. It’s true of every business. Like, I’m sure you’ve done this with your clients. Like, in the spring, I interviewed five of my clients to find out the same exact thing I do for them, like, what did they actually like about working with us? And what do they want from us and all of that. And some of the findings were really surprising, right? It’s like the stuff sometimes that we obsess over as business owners or marketers. We talk to our customers, and we’re like, oh, wait, they don’t care about that at all.

Christian Klepp 11:05

At all. Yeah, yes, yes. And there you are internally stressing about it, right, like losing to a certain degree. I mean, I’ve been there, right, like losing sleep over it. And then when you talk to the customer, they don’t even they don’t even bring it up. Right? Yeah, no, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. All right. I’m gonna move this on to the next question. And you brought up some of them already, but highlight some of the top mistakes and misconceptions you’ve seen out there, specifically with regards to brand narrative, and what are some simple steps that marketers can take to address those?

Joe Zappa 11:40

Yeah, so what are some of the main mistakes people make with B2B Marketing, especially the narrative part. One part, one really common mistake is they’re very afraid to talk about anything that doesn’t directly relate to the product. Right? So for example, in AdTech, some of the big trends going on are like retail media, like companies like Instacart, setting up ad networks, or CTV or privacy. And I once had a client where they weren’t directly doing any of these three things that the industry is obsessed with and that everyone is talking about. But we thought that they had an angle where we were like, Okay, this isn’t your exact product, or what exactly what you guys do. But we do think that you have insights to share on this, because we’ve spoken to you and it’s tangential to your product. And they were, they just were super resistant to saying anything about those topics, because they don’t directly solve for them, even though that they are topics that their audience cares about. And so I think that’s one of the big mistakes is this unwillingness to talk about anything that doesn’t directly relate to your product, because that’s how you get attention from both influencers, and journalists who are not going to buy your product, but can like bring attention to your company, and to the 90 plus percent of your actual target audience that people who may one day buy your product who are just not in the market for it right now. Like if someone is interested in your technology, like it’s relevant to them, but they’re not buying right now. They don’t want to read a case study of how your technology increase someone’s ROI as by 30%, or whatever it is. They want to engage in broader discussions about problems in the industry and where it’s heading. Another big mistake that happens is a failure to differentiate on anything other than product details. So when we are working on our products and marketing then, like again, we are living and breathing the product, we’re obsessed with it, We’re like these companies are our competitors are under serving our target audience and XY and Z ways that we built these features to deal with it. And as we mentioned in the beginning with the CDP example, it’s very hard for customers to remember those differences. Maybe you can get away with it, and it has an impact. If it’s like bottom of funnel content for that small percentage of your audience that’s deciding right now, should I buy product X or product y. But for anyone else, you’re much more likely to reach them and earn their attention. If you’re talking about an engaging idea, and less like the minute differences between products. I’ll add a third which is I think, like thought leadership is a long term proposition. I was talking to a company called Adalytics. They’re like an advertising transparency platform. And they recently basically achieved a marketer’s dream, and that they produced this thought leadership report on YouTube, serving ads on made for kids channels, and this report was covered by the New York Times it was covered by virtually every advertising pundit and publication And companies would, you know, kill for that sort of awareness. But when I spoke to the CEO and founder of Adalytics, Krzysztof Franaszek, what he said was, you know, we’ve been producing these reports for years, and the vast majority, like, most of them, barely make a blip. Or they get the attention of like, you know, a small number of people. It is through constantly iterating on your thought leadership and narrative strategy by pushing out insights that are based on exclusive data, figuring out what resonates, and then constantly getting closer and closer to what the market really cares about, that you have that big success with Thought Leadership, you should see leading indicators along the way that it’s working, and that you have people’s attention, and you’re starting conversations. I’m not saying like, keep doing that if you’re getting no response. But you know, the New York Times story does not come in month one, or even two or three.

Christian Klepp 16:03

Yeah, and those are some really great points there. And, you know, like, to your point number three, thought leadership, like a lot of other things is a work in progress, a continuous work in progress. It’s not it’s not something like you said, it’s just like, straight off the bat, and you get you get the attention of like, The New York Times or, or NBC and what have you. I remember what I was gonna ask you earlier, Joe, and I want to know, your take on this, because I keep hearing advice about this flying all over the place. The concept of asking your clients to niche down? What are your thoughts on that?

Joe Zappa 16:42

Asking your clients to niche down? So you mean, okay, that’s interesting, because I’m used to… Yeah, go ahead.

Christian Klepp 16:52

Okay, let me elaborate a bit further. So what I mean by that is because, you know, when you’re creating brand narratives, and messaging, and the positioning and all that it has to, obviously target audience or audiences, plural, and that there’s always this advice going around. Well, yeah, in order to do that, effectively, you’ve got a niche down, but in my experience, niching down, it’s not something you just do like that, and then bam, you already know who your niche is. Right? It’s, it’s something that happens over time. But I mean, over to you like, what’s your take on that?

Joe Zappa 17:20

Yeah, so I guess first there’s the question of niching down, and then even within niches, there’s, there are personas. So in terms of niches, I think it depends on how nascent the company is, like in the beginning, you’re… yeah, you should have an idea of like, who might be interested in this product. But it’s probably too early if you’re working with like a seed stage or even pre-seed company, for them to niche down too much, because they haven’t tried their product out with enough customers to figure out who their ideal niche is. So when you’re talking or when I’m talking to early stage startup leaders, be it like CEO, CRO, the way they usually go about as they have some inkling about who their first like ideal customers would be. They try it out with them, once they find a niche with whom that resonates like they go to an adjacent niche. And I think marketers should work with sales to identify that ideal audience and sort of iterate along the timeframe, that makes sense. So you don’t want to like force a niche at the same time. We all know that speeding everyone is not an effective marketing strategy. So I think it’s about striking a balance. Another thing I would add, and this is where I think the whole narrative thing can be really powerful, is oftentimes you have companies who even might be quite successful, like they might be working with some big brands or something. But they haven’t yet really fleshed out personas on a level where they understand like, what makes this person who’s going to use my technology tick, and therefore why is my product better for them than all of the other products in the category. An example I like to use here is our other in-house marketing strategist, Paul Knegten and who was the CMO for Beeswax, which was a DSP and Bidder-as-a-Service that sold for nine figures to Comcast. When Paul was at Beeswax, he, they were having trouble closing deals, and their sales cycle was very long and they couldn’t necessarily figure out like, who are the best customers like we know we’re, we’re, they had great awareness. They had a great CEO Ari Paparo who’s getting tons of attention. So they had a lot of big brands and agencies coming through the door, but they couldn’t figure out within that set of brands and agencies whom should we really be speaking to, to accelerate deals and you know, forge happier customer relationships. And what Paul figured out was that their most successful clients were what he called control freaks. And this was a great term, because like many marketing innovations, as you can probably survive, it actually turns away the majority of potential customers, right, because if you say, like, We are the ad buying platform for control freaks, tons of buyers are gonna see that they’re gonna be like, I’m not a control freak, right? Like, they might almost be offended by it. And they’re like, clearly I don’t want to work with this company. But the 20%, or whatever it is, of the buying population, who, with whom that did resonate. They loved it, it clarified the proposition to them, they were like, This is the DSP for me in an extremely crowded and commoditized market. And they, you know, grew revenue very quickly on the basis of that intuition.

Christian Klepp 18:25

Great explanation. Thanks for that. And that’s a beautiful segue into the next question. And we’re gonna stay on this topic a little bit about: Well, for you, it might seem painfully obvious, but like, the importance of conducting research and having a deeper understanding of your target audience, to get the brand narrative, right, because you and I have probably both seen companies that didn’t get this part right.

Joe Zappa 21:20

Yeah, for sure. I think two things go into this. One is collecting the data or doing the research. And the other is having people on your team, whether it’s in house or at an agency, who can analyze it and package it for the market. So let me return to the Adalytics example. You know, they put out these extremely rich and rigorous thought leadership reports, like 200 Page reports on for example, the YouTube Advertising made for kids situation. And I spoke to Krzysztof, the CEO. And I was like, you know, Krzysztof is a PhD. He did, he was a computational biologist. And I was like, you know, do you need a tons of companies would love to produce thought leadership that is this rich and rigorous, and they would love to get the attention of the New York Times and other publications. But they’re probably wondering, you know, is Adalytics only able to do this, because they have a Cambridge trained computational biologist, as their CEO. And he has a network of, you know, PhDs and serious data scientists who can pour over this data. And Krzysztof actually said no, like you don’t necessarily need an MIT scientists to be pouring over your data, what he and I settled on is that you do need three things. You need exclusive data, and research. So you need to look at what your own clients are doing. If it’s quantitative data, that’s great. But it also might be qualitative, like, it might just be a survey. You take that original data, you look at them you say, what are the surprising patterns, and then you take those patterns to a brain trust, of, say, 5 to 10 people could be customers, industry experts, and you say, is, is this unusual pattern that we’ve detected actually worth sharing with the market. Like if you sell to CMOs at big brands, you want to be thinking, would this pattern or an analysis of this pattern we’re seeing in our customer data, help big brands, CMOs do their jobs better. And if it would, then that’s worth diving into, which then gets to the you’ve got to analyze it piece, which is probably a combination of data oriented people, especially if it’s quantitative data. And then marketers who know how to take that analysis and package it so that the 99% of people who are not going to pour over a super long research report or even the white paper can appreciate it. So I think it’s those three things is the exclusive data or insights, ability to analyze and ability to package and distribute.

Christian Klepp 24:13

Pretty much, pretty much. I mean, like even with some of the research we’ve conducted, it does boil down to exactly those things that you said, and especially, and I’m sure you’ve done this more times than you care to count, sitting in a meeting with the board of directors or senior management. These are people that are pressed by time anyway. So they genuinely just want you to get to the point and tell them, tell them what it is that the data is telling you that they should be aware of.

Joe Zappa 24:43

Yep, exactly. And that’s where, you know, even something like Krzysztof’s super technical, that’s where they appreciate marketers because that’s where we come in.

Christian Klepp 24:52

Yep. yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. And you’ve probably seen a lot of things out there, but if you could summarize how has the B2B MarTech landscape changed from your perspective? And so that’s the first question. And the second question is, how should the brand narrative that B2B companies tell be adjusted, reflect that change?

Joe Zappa 25:15

Well, there’s some changes in the industry. And then there are changes in the way that information gets distributed. I was talking to a second time MarTech founder the other day. And what he was saying was that, you know, when he was building his last company, 5 to 10 years ago, it was really the golden age of performance marketing, where like, you could figure out, you know, Facebook, especially if it’s a cheap SaaS tool, you could figure out Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever it is, and just crush it on that platform. And you could grow to, you know, eight figures in revenue solely on the basis of that, it’s just gotten harder, like, everyone has figured out that how useful like not just social advertising, but also organic social is, and with third party data deprecation, with the cookies going away, and mobile identifiers going away, like ad targeting is getting harder. So it’s no longer the case that you can just crush it at one platform or one marketing tactic and grow on the basis of that. So the result is that you need to have what this guy, Aaron Weiche of Leadferno, called a tentacle approach. Like, you’re probably going to do like, five plus things. And the key, especially in the beginning, is just to focus on like what you’re good at and go from there. Because that’s the path of least resistance. So that’s the first thing is like, if you’re a founder, you’re a small marketing team. And you’re great at storytelling, you love writing good, go, do you know, organic, social, or write on the blog or whatever. If paid ads is your thing. Maybe that’s where you’re going to try earlier on, though, like the economics that are harder for early stage companies. But that’s the first thing in terms of how the information environment has evolved. In terms of the actual market of technologies, I think, like they’re over 10,000, I think over 11,000 MarTech tools now. It’s just like, very commoditized, anything you’re doing like someone else is doing. And that just speaks to the importance of what we’re talking about here, which is, you need to find ways to differentiate, what would you say?

Christian Klepp 27:29

Yeah, absolutely. Differentiate and stand out. For sure, for sure. I mean, maybe my answer is going to be a bit biased, because I’m a branding guy, too. So of course, I’m gonna say, yes, absolutely, you should do that. But on another level, and I think you’ve alluded to it previously, coming up with that idea that will resonate with customers, you know, being part of this movement. But I think it’s also, you know, beyond the product, it’s also the overall experience that your company and your brand hopes to deliver to said customer. Because we all know that it’s more than just the product and the features, right? There’s many companies out there that are selling, I wouldn’t say exactly the same product, but it comes pretty close. Right? But what differentiates your company from the others, and especially if you’re, you’re answering an RFP, and you’re up for like, like a contract renewal, and the buying group is reviewing contracts or proposals even right, so what would make you stand out? Right? And on that note, on the topic of tools, Joe, I’m gonna throw this at you. And I don’t think it’s a controversial question at all, because I think it’s everybody’s dealing with it these days. How has AI and machine learning and all these types of tools impacted the brand narrative landscape and B2B?

Joe Zappa 28:53

Yeah, first, I just want to say I think your take on how MarTech has evolved is great. I saw a tweet the other day that a lot of people were commenting on that said, essentially, SaaS is dead, which was, you know, a polemical way to put it, but what they meant was that you can’t get away with no service anymore. Like it’s too competitive. So yeah, like your software can be great. And it should be easy to use and all that stuff we learned from like the SaaS era, but also you’re going to need some level of service and like human touch, and marketing can also help with that right by humanizing the brand. And especially, I think that’s where founder brands can be very impactful is like getting in getting the company out there. But as for ChatGPT and generative AI I think the amount of attention ChatGPT and generative AI have gotten this year has actually been outsized. I think that ChatGPT as exactly as you said is a tool. It is a useful tool, it will allow you to pump out basic content quickly. It also as good for research and inspiration, for example, if you have a writer who’s never written about a topic, you could say, hey, like to get like a basic education on this topic put into ChatGPT, you know, write a blog post about X, like for Y. And that will probably do a pretty good job of priming the writer on that topic. And then if you’re an expert or someone else in the network is an expert, they can sort of fill in the gaps. But the problem with ChatGPT is that it’s drawing on everything else that’s out there. So it’s necessarily commoditize content. And we just were talking about how really the point of content is to do more than that, right? Like, we are not in the era anymore, where you’re going to win by just doing like, you know, we’re a CTV advertising company, and we’re just going to do blog posts, like, what is CTV advertising? Right? Like SEO is still valuable, but it’s not SEO like that. So yeah, by all means, like use ChatGPT, or similar tools for efficiency, or to do first drafts or whatever it is, but you’re going to need to tailor it to your specific brand and your customers and what makes you different for it to be fully effective.

Christian Klepp 31:11

Absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, you know, I’ve, I’ve given like, like many others, like, I’ve given ChatGPT a whirl and I do find that it produces very well, it’s vanilla content, essentially, right? Because it’s aggregating, it’s aggregating all this data that it finds online was, you know, probably a content piece that was written by somebody else, like a while back. And it does have its limitations, as you well know, because there is a time there’s a time limit in terms of like, the month and the year, like it could it can aggregate data up to a certain period. And that’s it.

Joe Zappa 31:42

Yeah, I mean, that’s another limitation, of course, is that it won’t be as accurate as a skilled human writer, and it won’t be as up to date. Correct?

Christian Klepp 31:51

Correct. Okay, Joe. So a big part of the show is talking about actionable tips. And so give us something actionable here, but I’m gonna throw in this caveat. And let’s appreciate that not everything that you do can be done in a day. Right? But if there are folks out there listening to this conversation that you and I are having, what are some immediate steps that they can take right now to craft a better brand narrative?

Joe Zappa 32:18

I think following that process that I laid out before, would be hugely impactful for most brands. So like, let’s say you’re a marketer, you’re listening to this. At some point, you probably did that strategic work for your company of figuring out who are we? Who do we want to be? Where are we going to go? and then interviewing customers and finding out who do they think we are, what resonates with them, and synthesizing that into a brand narrative. If it’s been, you know, a year or more, since you did that, or if you never did it, and you don’t have the answers down on paper, it’s time to re up because the market evolves and your customers perceptions of you evolve, and you have new competitors. By doing that process of figuring out who you are, who your customers think you are, where the industry is heading, and articulating the synthesis of that. You can create content that better resonates with your customers, get their attention, get them in the funnel and ultimately create sales opportunities. And that’s what we’re in the business doing.

Christian Klepp 33:22

Absolutely, absolutely. And on that note, I’m curious to know, Joe, and I know it depends on the company and the vertical. But how often do you recommend clients going through this exercise of reviewing their brand narrative and possibly updating it? How often should they do that?

Joe Zappa 33:40

I think once a year, which is just like, if you just did it a year ago, and you did it thoroughly, you might discover that you don’t need to iterate a ton, but I think it’s worth taking the time once a year to say, Okay, this is what we came up with last year. Is this still true? Have we released new products that change it significantly have our has our customer base change? And what do our customers say? Because I think things internally sometimes don’t change so much. But the way your customers view you may have changed. So that’s where I’m checking in on.

Christian Klepp 34:14

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Okay. Get up on your soapbox here. What is the status quo on the topic of brand narrative that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Joe Zappa 34:28

I think the status quo is a lack of action, actually, I think like the biggest problem is that a lot of B2B tech companies struggle to invest in any form of marketing that cannot easily be measured on a dashboard, which is totally understandable especially in the current economic environment. But if you you are only investing in things that can be easily measured, like performance advertising, or maybe even SEO, let’s say, you’re just missing out on a ton of conversations that you could be having with your customers on, you know, on social, via media sites and influencers and podcasts. There’s just like, your customers are online. They’re having conversations about your industry every day. And tons of B2B tech companies are just missing out on the opportunity to have those conversations and then not just to have them, but to have them in a very systematic way that reinforces an agreed upon brand narrative. And that moves people down the funnel. And I think, undergoing that strategic work of figuring out, what is the narrative? How are we going to reinforce that narrative across the channels where our customers spend their time? And then how are we going to measure the impact of that those activities? Those are basically the three components of marketing strategy? And, you know, don’t miss out on them.

Christian Klepp 36:15

Absolutely, absolutely. And I have one last follow up question for you, I promise. I’m sure you deal with this every now and then I know I have… how do you get folks in the B2B MarTech space to buy in to the importance of a brand narrative? Because every now and then, as I said, I hear this from people, I have conversations with them, they’re like, well, Christian, that’s all well and good. But that sounds like more of a nice to have rather than a must have. And so they don’t really see the importance of it, partly because they don’t quite understand what you’ve alluded to the amount of work that actually goes into it. But yeah, over to you.

Joe Zappa 36:57

Yeah, to be honest, usually, it’s companies that are struggling with some form of stagnation, that do buy into this. So like, we have two personas of customers, we have customers who want like tactical content support. And then we have more strategic customers who want this like strategic exercise and want to figure out what they’re really about and how that’s going to inform all their content and where they’re gonna put that content. And generally, the customers who fit persona to who want the strategic help, they might have just fired a CMO, or they’ve been stuck at a certain revenue level for longer than they want to, and they don’t understand how to break through, or they’re having trouble with the sales velocity thing that I mentioned earlier. It’s usually from that kind of holistic commercial pain, that the desire to invest in a new marketing vision comes.

Christian Klepp 37:52

Yeah, no, I 100% agree with that. If they don’t feel that the pain is too great, they’re never gonna buy into it. Fantastic. Joe. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please quick, introduce yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Joe Zappa 38:10

Yeah, please find me either at podcast@sharppenmedia.com. Or you can look for Joe Zappa on LinkedIn founder and CEO of Sharp Pen Media, and I’m sure you’ll find me easily. Thanks so much.

Christian Klepp 38:24

Fantastic. So Joel, once again, thanks for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Joe Zappa 38:29

Thanks, Christian. Great to be here.

Christian Klepp 38:32

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Develop B2B Content That Solves Business Problems

A crucial part of B2B marketing revolves around understanding the core business problems that content can solve. B2B marketers must also proactively have conversations with different departments and customers, and conduct the relevant diagnosis in order to produce content that is interesting, insightful, relevant, and delivers results.

Join us as we sit down with B2B content marketing expert Steve Goldhaber (CEO, 26 Characters). Steve talks about the five common barriers to solving problems, what the six core business problems are, and the six effective techniques that B2B marketers can use to discover the real problem that they’re facing. He also elaborates on the different visions for a content marketing program and the different ways to plan and execute various types of content.

https://youtu.be/U14FS916KHk

Topics discussed in episode

• Steve explains why understanding the core business problem is a crucial component of successful B2B content marketing [2:32]
• The 5 common barriers to solving problems [8:57]
• Steve talks about how he deals with internal roadblocks when creating content [13:40]
• Six effective techniques that B2B marketers can use to uncover the real problems that their company is facing [17:01]
• The 5 visions for content marketing [23:14]
• Steve talks about how to map the buyer’s journey separately from a sales process [26:45]
• Key metrics B2B marketers should pay attention to when it comes to content [29:21]
• Steve’s actionable tips [34:12]
• A status quo that Steve passionately disagrees with and why [40:06]

Companies and links mentioned

• Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn
• 26 Characters
• The “What’s your problem?” Book

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Steve Goldhaber, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies to shine. So coming to us from Chicago, Illinois, Mr. Steve Gouldhaber. Welcome to the show, sir.

Steve Goldhaber 01:09

Hey, thanks, Christian. Great being on here. Been looking forward to it. So thanks again.

Christian Klepp 01:15

Likewise, Steve, it was a pleasure to be on your show. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation because we are going to roll up our sleeves and talk about some really not just interesting stuff, but something that’s very, very pertinent to B2B marketers out there. Steve, short of stating the obvious, you’re no stranger when it comes to content marketing for B2B. In fact, you’ve written a book about it called “What’s your problem?” And that’s probably wasn’t meant to be confrontational. But there you have it.

Steve Goldhaber 01:47

For people who knows that I’ve been in marketing forever. They kind of can understand it, but for the non marketers who I work with, they do have that reaction like, Oh, interesting, like everything okay over there, Steve? And I’m like, it makes sense. When I explain it, it will make sense.

Christian Klepp 02:04

Absolutely. Absolutely. On that note, let’s focus on a topic today, which I believe has become part of your professional mission. So it’s understanding the core business problems that B2B content marketing can solve. So if we’re going to kick off this conversation, let’s kick it off with this question. Why do you think that that’s such a crucial component of successful B2B content marketing?

Steve Goldhaber 02:32

Yeah, good question. I’ll answer that with a little bit of a story. So before I started my own company, I was the global digital lead for two Fortune 500 companies. I did that for about five, six years. And part of the fun of my role was I got to work with everyone in the company, because inevitably, digital was hot, they needed something. So they would come to me as the leader of that team and say, Hey, Steve, I need this thing. I need an app, I need a website, I need an infographic, you name it. And when I started doing my job, I was I was not that effective. And it was because I would take all these projects on and be like, yep, we can do that, we can do that. And then I noticed that, when it came to like measuring the results of these things, it was a little bit of hit or miss or some of these projects just died out, because there was a lack of interest from the person who started them. So I realized that I needed to do a better job of figuring out why they actually were requesting these digital things in the first place. So the inspiration behind the name of my book, and an answer to your question here is I always started to say, tell me about what your problem is, you know, what’s the business problem that you’re trying to solve? And when I started asking that question, half of the projects went away, because people couldn’t understand why. And, you know, this wasn’t, that’s not like a, it’s not necessarily something I’m proud of, oh, I want the projects to go away, right. But those, the projects that didn’t get kicked off were the ones that wandered and weren’t really implemented. There wasn’t really a success story around those things. So to me, understanding that business problem is something where great marketing starts. And because people just request things. Hey, my boss wants this, can you give it to me? And I think marketing too. Depending on the organization, culture, sometimes marketing just takes the orders. And other times they can get in and they can solve the problem. And I’ve always prided myself on trying to be the marketer who asked the questions. You know, I’m not, I’m not the person who just takes the prescription that someone gives me and I fulfill it. I try to work upstream. I try to diagnose, I try to listen, ultimately, knowing that once we figure those things out, then yes, we can actually execute it and create whatever the marketing thing is that we’re creating.

Christian Klepp 05:01

Absolutely, absolutely. Wow. A lot of the things you just brought up really resonated with me, because I’ve seen that throughout my career as well. But over to you, I’m curious to know, what your take is, do you feel that… And we can probably talk, like, from a top level perspective, because it can get pretty nitty gritty, right, like, um, but in terms of B2B content marketing, you know, from your experience and observation, do you feel that sometimes where the content falls flat is a result of, well, A) not understanding the business problem, but B) also not understanding who the target audience is, what they’re looking for, and how they benefit from consuming this piece of content?

Steve Goldhaber 05:50

Yeah, I agree. I think that a long time ago, I learned this framework called, you know, essentially the business brand customer framework. And imagine three circles that have to overlap. Some content marketing is just all brand related, right? So those are like the brand journalism efforts, the hey, we spent a lot of money to drive awareness, we want people to think about us differently. The business circle is essentially, you know, what’s the product? What’s the solution? What are we trying to accomplish there. And then the last one I see is the customer. So I do agree with you that when people create things, content, marketing things, they don’t work as well, unless you can overlap all three of those, right? Like, you can’t just say this is our product, we want a technical paper on it, maybe maybe there is a place for that if someone’s already like, low in the funnel, and they and they’re ready to buy, and they just say, hey, strip away all the brand and the information about the customer. Maybe that’s the case. Most of the time, it’s not. So yeah, to me to create great marketing, you have to, you have to build those three things into it. I’ve always thought that great marketing is one where the customer or the prospects reaction is essentially, this company really gets me. And I think that that’s, you know, the whole role of marketing in the B2B space is about building trust to enable a sale. And some companies will make that assumption that the best way to build trust is just to showcase the product, or to push the brand. But essentially, if you create headlines, designs, whatever it may be, that really connect with your customer that that again, they say this company gets me, they understand my pain, they understand my challenges, they understand how I make decisions. That’s when you’ve done your job as a marketer, because you you can really blend all those three things together.

Christian Klepp 07:48

Absolutely, absolutely. And yes, amen to building trust, because it’s just going to be hard to do anything if you don’t establish that early on the piece or build that credibility, especially with potential buyers or prospects that don’t know the company yet. Right? And take your pick, and I’m sure you’ve read them right. Like Gartner Forrester McKinsey, about the B2B buying process. And how, for lack of a better description, how haphazard and nonlinear that is.

Steve Goldhaber 08:23

Yeah, well too it’s funny too. You bring up the analyst companies, I mean, that’s a whole category built out of “can I trust you?” Right? Well, if Forrester says I can trust you, then I should probably trust you. Right. So those people should be thankful of the lack of trust in the B2B space, because they essentially help you make an informed decision.

Christian Klepp 08:43

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which is focused on your book. So in your book, you talk about the five common barriers to solving problems. So can you talk to us about what they are?

Steve Goldhaber 08:57

Yeah, sure. So I’ll just list them off right now. So unnecessary constraints, mental set, confirmation bias, groupthink, and we’ve got paradigm blindness, and then or irrelevant or misleading information. So these are these are all things that are, are sometimes hard for us to control and doing planning work or strategic work. It’s just so critical. When you’re trying to figure out the problem and solve it. I, I always will fall victim to some of these at one point, right. So I’m not speaking from a standpoint of, Oh, you just have to follow these things and you’re good to go. I think mental set is one that we’re probably most familiar with because it essentially is saying we’ve always done it this way. And that that’s very comfortable for organizations in how they do marketing or even down to like the budgeting process like so much of the budgeting process unfortunately becomes: What we do last year. What’s the target that finance has given or the CEO has given? And we’re gonna go up 10%, we’re gonna go down 10%. I mean, when did this become the magic formula to do great work, right? It’s the… So that’s, that’s an example of that flaw is just, “we’ve always done it that way.”

Steve Goldhaber 10:24

Confirmation bias is when you go out to find a solution to something and you already know the solution in the back of your head, but you’re just going to kind of go through the motions. And you’re essentially just finding facts that support your conclusion. And that’s a bad thing, right? Very hard to control. Certainly, how we can be very efficient from a marketing perspective is because we have all these learnings in the past, but we have to, we have to respect that sometimes you use those and other times, you just say, All right, I’m ignoring this for whatever reason, and I’m gonna see if that leads me to a different outcome.

Steve Goldhaber 11:05

Paradigm blindness is another interesting one, you know, Thomas Watson made the funny statement about how he saw a world market in global computing for five computers, he’s like, I think there’s a market for five, you know, and at the time, probably not such a bad insight, right? Like, these companies didn’t understand how to use this. So he’s like, I think we can sell five. There’s also a great quote from Henry Ford, who always joked about, you know, hey, if I ask people what they wanted, they would have just said faster horses. So Ford could see through that paradigm, and see the bigger opportunity.

Steve Goldhaber 11:45

And then the last one I’ll kind of bring to life is the irrelevant or misleading information. It’s especially relevant recently, because there is too much information in our world. It used to be very tightly curated amongst small networks who had vast reach. And now, you know, the media landscape is a combination of that fragmented, but also individuals creating their own content. And, you know, we have to understand what to filter, what to discredit, in order to be productive, in order to solve a problem.

Christian Klepp 12:24

Fantastic, fantastic! Those are some really great points. And I’m gonna throw this question in there if you don’t mind, Steve, only because I know you can handle it. All right. Let me put it this way. I know that a lot of the listeners out there have to contend with this issue, especially if they are in larger organizations. And there might not be a straightforward answer to this. But how do you as a content marketer, in B2B, when you’re developing content? How do you go about maneuvering the internal politics? And I know that can get super complicated, but what I mean by that is, well, and you’ve probably dealt with this before, but I guess the goal here is not to try to please everybody, the goal is to try to get a piece of content that is useful and relevant, ultimately, to whoever the audience’s that the piece is intended for. But you and I both know that sometimes you run into these roadblocks internally, or somebody says, Well, no, you can’t say that, because that’ll make that person look bad. or you gotta get it approved by these many levels. So maybe just scratched the surface a little bit. Because I know we can go pretty deep with this one. But how do you deal with that?

Steve Goldhaber 13:40

That’s a great one. To me, I’m a big believer that the customer always breaks the tie. And what I mean by that is, there’s all these different people that you’ve got away when you’re creating content. And inevitably, someone will take it more, too far in a brand way where the customer is going to look at that and go, I don’t want this or someone’s going to take it too much in a product way where we haven’t connected yet with the customer. So when I say the customer always breaks the tie, I try to bring that into the conversations that I have. And I will ask questions like, Is that the best thing for the customer? What would the customer have to say about that? That’s some organizations you have the luxury of doing research. So you can create these things early on, and share them and get the feedback. And, you know, when I when I used to do this for larger companies, you know, you sit in focus groups for a day or two, and you just you get all that feedback. And if the decision maker is in that process, they see it and they’ll have the humility to go, we were wrong on that. Like we just we have to scrap that. There’s not as much of that done today, I think because of the need for speed. So even if you don’t have focus groups, or you can’t have your customer actually say that I would just say like, you know, there’s a great philosophy along this lines of “Always leave one chair open”, or for your customer in the meeting. And the whole, the whole idea behind that is, give your customer a seat at the table, acknowledge that they are there. Because if you don’t, you’re just going to create stuff that that you want. Whether that’s a good or bad thing. that’s up for debate, but like you have to ultimately measure your marketing by the customer saying that’s, that’s really helpful. That’s really effective.

Christian Klepp 15:30

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a good, that’s a really good point. And it’s that whole, like, you know, outside in versus inside out perspective too, isn’t it?

Steve Goldhaber 15:39

Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes, I mean, I’ll start projects off, and I’ll just say, hey, like, organizationally, let me know what what type of business you are? Are you, Are you vertical centric? you product centric? Are you customer centric? And, you know, of course, everyone feels the need to answer customer centric, alright. But I encourage them not to answer that way. If it’s not, in fact, other structure, because then what I can do as we create the things is say, Well, okay, let’s pause for a second, you guys said that you wanted to be customer centric, what you’re asking for is not. Do you want to change that paradigm? Or do you want to course correct? So it’s, it’s good to establish that upfront, like what I’ve learned as a marketer, is you, you want to predict the the hard conversations before you have them, so that you get people’s vision or philosophy before you encounter the problems. And I think that helps keep everyone honest. Because when you’re in the trenches, and you’re creating the content, and someone says, No, I really, I think this is the right path to go, then you can connect it back to a conversation that you’ve already had.

Christian Klepp 15:57

Absolutely, absolutely. Move on to the next question, what are the six effective techniques that you believe B2B marketers can use to discover the real problem that they’re facing, or their company is facing?

Steve Goldhaber 17:01

Yeah. So there’s, there’s a bunch of them, I think the most helpful ones I’ll start with the first one is, is journey mapping, you know, I think journey mapping has been around for a while, it got a little bit more traction, when, maybe 10 years ago, the whole like UX/UI emphasis started, but essentially it’s just saying, let’s map out the entire journey from when a customer doesn’t know us to when they know us to when they start to work with us and use the product and renew or buy other things from us. And what I love about that is you just start with a dot on the left side of the page, draw an arrow to the right. And you, you map out all these different things. And then you work with the organization to say, what’s working well at these stages, what’s not working well. And to me, content marketing is really effective when you kind of fill in the cracks or the gaps of what’s happening. So if you get to around one meeting, where people still are saying, I don’t really understand what you’re doing, I don’t understand your product. That’s an opportunity to say, all right, maybe a week before that meeting, we should do this as a prep for that meeting. So that the meeting isn’t just us talking about ourselves, the meeting is us understanding the true needs of the customer, whatever it may be. So journey mapping is a really strong tool.

Steve Goldhaber 18:29

Another one, root cause analysis, I think that’s a really great tool to get underneath what’s really happening. And I can, I’ll share an example to bring that one to life. So in the 90s, in Washington DC, the Jefferson and the Lincoln monument had stone that was falling apart. And one day, a huge, you know, 100 pound stone just fell and almost hit someone. And they needed to figure out, alright, what happened there. So, you know, root cause analysis, it’s a scientific thing, it’s… go look it up, like you’ll see all the steps and how to use it. But for this example, what was really interesting is they said, Well, what’s been happening as we’ve had to use more cleaning solution on these monuments? So the frequency of us cleaning them has increased, therefore, we think something in the in the solutions may be affecting them. So that was a good theory. And then, you know, essentially said, Well, why is that the case? Why are we doing that? And then they met with the custodial staff who then said, Well, we’re cleaning up bird droppings, and we’re doing that like two three times a week because we want to keep the monuments clean. Okay, well, why? Why are the bird droppings happening more frequently? Well, it turns out that there was all these nets that were being attracted to the area and the birds would come in and eat the nets for you know, meals, leaving all the droppings behind. Okay, well, why are these nets showing up all of a sudden? Well, the reason why the nets are showing up is because we actually have these really beautiful powerful lights to light the monuments up at night, we want to make sure people can see them. Oh, so the lights, were drawing the nets, which were drawing the birds, which, you know, and you can understand that. So, without root cause analysis, the solution might just seem something like, Well, don’t clean the buildings as often or get another solution. But then you really start to see what’s going on here. Oh, maybe we should, we should still like these monuments, but not in a way that is so strong to attract the nets. So that’s an example of root cause analysis. It’s, it’s harder and deeper to get to it. But once you’ve invested the time in that, that’s, that’s a great tool. And I’ll share one more, which is what I’ve used forever. It’s called the Five why’s. And I use some of that in the root cause analysis in my example, but the five why’s very simple is just, if you presented with a challenge or a problem, ask yourself why five times. And the thought is, is that if you keep on getting deeper and deeper, you’re essentially, you know, peeling back layers of an onion, you finally get to what’s really happening. That was a technique used in Toyota’s manufacturing process by a really, you know, well known engineer, and he was able to pinpoint, you know, well, why did the assembly line slow down? Well, it’s because this thing happened and that, and he would get it down to like, Oh, we’re not oiling this one thing. And if we fix that, if we apply oil once or twice a day, then all these other things, fix themselves. So those are the, that’s the fun part of problem solving is when there’s just something that was really puzzling, and you can’t figure it out. And you use these techniques. And then you go, like, think of that, like, we’ve been doing this for a year or two years. And no one no one has figured that out. So that, for my work, that’s the joy that I have is if I can be a part of a team or if I can individually help figure out that problem. That’s really satisfying.

Christian Klepp 22:11

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those are some really great points. You made me think about, like, on the topic of root cause, like reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries was part of a required reading back in high school. And I’m not sure if you remember any of them. But in any case, there was one standard pattern and each of these mysteries, right, like Sherlock Holmes would never… he was very rarely seen with a pistol, right, or a gun. And the way that he would solve all these crimes was through powers of observation and deduction, he would see things and he would peel back layers that nobody else, either they overlooked it or they or they just completely ignored it. Right. And that’s what immediately came to my mind when you when you were talking about the technique. Just peel back the layers keep peeling…. Okay, what, from your perspective, are the five different visions for content marketing program?

Steve Goldhaber 23:14

Yeah, good question. So, you know, people use content marketing for a variety of reasons. And what I’ve helped some clients with are essentially like, what’s your vision, right, and this usually will reflect the company culture and how they’ve set up their business. Some companies will take a brand centric version to content. So an example of that, you know, the company John Deere has been around for a long time, in the late 1800s, they started this magazine called The Furrow and it was all about them, building a relationship to the farming community. And that was their goal. You know, like, they just wanted to let farmers know that they were there for them. They weren’t necessarily talking about the new tractor. So that’s one way is just we want to have a relationship. Another vision is what I call the “helpful friend”. Now, the helpful friend thinks, I’m not even going to create content that has to do with my company, I just want to build trust with you. Because if I build trust with you in some way, you’re more likely to think of me as relates to my product or solution. So HubSpot is a good example who’s embraced that philosophy as it relates to content, they will, they will do things that are just trying to earn trust, and then they’ll kind of talking about you know, CRM, automation, things like that. Another version is, you know, a sales journey. So essentially, like some clients I work with, you know, they may have a head of sales who starts the engagement and they just want to sell more so you can create a content vision that is all about educating and converting. So that’s, that’s the sales version. Other companies will do something, what I refer to as a customer retention vision, so you already have the customer. Now your goal is to retain them as long as you can. So how can content do that? How often do you have to connect with that customer? To remind them of the value that they’re getting? And then what data can you look at? To help determine, Okay. All these customers signed up on day one, but on day 50 100 200, they all look very different. They become, you know, essentially different segments, and how do you market to each of those segments. And then the last vision tends to be like a product launch solution, launch vision. So, you know, we’ll take Apple, you know, every, every time a couple times a year, they’re going to do product launches. And that’s your, you’re essentially saying, we’re making the announcement this day, let’s work backwards to figure out the best way to do that. So, yeah, that’s the thing that’s interesting about content marketing is there’s not a there’s not a way to do it, it is very much about what are you trying to do? What’s the what’s the organizational structure or culture, and then you kind of have to find the right vision, to bring it to life.

Christian Klepp 26:11

Some really great points, I’m sorry, I’m gonna go back to something you said earlier, this light bulb just suddenly went on in my head. On the topic of journey mapping. And just from your own experience, Steve, how often have you seen this happen… When you’re sitting down with a customer and having a meeting with them, you’re doing the brainstorming, and you’re trying to come up with this, essentially what’s meant to be the buyers journey. And then you take a step back and you realize, like, Wait, hang on a second, this isn’t actually the buyers journey, this is their sales process. How often do you run into that situation?

Steve Goldhaber 26:45

Yeah. It happens a lot. I mean, and here’s a, here’s a little technique that I do is on the line that I was referring to, I say, you can only put things on the top that affect your customer, and you can only put things on the bottom that are that have to do with your process. So that one thing is a great exercise, because you essentially show that client, you guys are too product centric, or some might be too customer centric, but putting out information above and below the line is a really helpful exercise, because I think that’s, that’s the challenge of most marketers today is they, they are safe. And assuming the role of I have to be all about the product, like you never, you will never get criticized by the product managers or the you know, the CEOs for being too product centric, it’s the safe, it’s the safe play. So you have to kind of get yourself out of that, that comfort zone, because you have to, you know, you have to do some things that are a little bit daring, in customer centric in the world of marketing to make sure that that it works, because ultimately, the challenge of every marketer is if you don’t bring your marketing hat into what you’re doing, you will make a lot of people very happy internally. But those are the people who are going to come to you afterwards and say, Why didn’t this work? And that’s the conversation that you don’t want to have. So you have to, you have to balance that. keeping people happy, because they just want it that way versus focusing on the customer, which ultimately if you focus on the customer, your business outcomes and metrics should follow.

Christian Klepp 28:28

Absolutely, absolutely. Gosh, you really hit the nail on the head there. Like I mean, how often have I seen that… In B2B companies where they, they just try to play it safe. Let’s, you know, let’s just be a little bit risk averse. Because we don’t want to like you know, throwing whatever analogy you want, drop the ball, ruffle the feathers, rattle the cage, or whatever. But like, to your point, you don’t want to have that conversation like in the next quarter. Well, why didn’t this convert any leads? Right? Like, why did this not generate results? Right? Like what’s going on here? On the topic of metrics, love it or hate it. But you know, at some point, you’re gonna have to show that this content that you’re producing and putting out into the wild there is producing results. And I know that we can go on and talk about this all day, but just off the top of your head. What’re some of the key metrics a B2B marketer should be paying attention to when it comes to content?

Steve Goldhaber 29:21

Yeah, so metrics are a good conversation to have, I think, for me, my advice to my clients is always for whatever we’re doing, choose two, maybe three metrics, force yourself to do it. And it’s not to say that you can ignore all the other things, right. But if you have two or three primary metrics, most of your conversations should be about those metrics. Now, secondary metrics, to me are more diagnostic tools. So it’s kind of like you know, your take your car in for service that can run all these tests, figure out what’s going on. In marketing, the secondary metrics, there’s too many of Oh, there’s hundreds of things time on site, impressions, click through rates, all these different things that help you understand what’s going on. I think the challenge of many marketers is, they tend to weigh all the secondary or diagnostic metrics as important. So that’s, that’s my big take on metrics is you got to choose two or three to focus on. And then if you need to go to the diagnostic metrics, as your secondary metrics, that’s fine. Those things always help you understand a little bit about behind the scenes, what’s really happening, but don’t get lost in the diagnostics, because you just, I’ve seen it many times where people will present results of a marketing program by just sharing diagnostics. And, and you’re usually sharing them to non-marketers. So oh we increased our impressions by this. They don’t know what that is, like, why is that important, but they’re up. If they’re up, they’re good, you know, like this, just, it’s really hard to have this conversation. So I think the more you can focus on primary and have those primary metrics be focused n the business, then as a marketer, you start talking the same languages, you know, the CFO, the CEO. It’s just more productive.

Christian Klepp 31:13

Absolutely, absolutely. And more often than not, about this conversation with a couple of other guests on the show. It’s about understanding, again, who the audiences are, right, who you’re presenting these metrics to? And to your point, what do they care about? Or what should they care about and why. And not like inundate them with all this data. And this marketing jargon. Because you know, I’ve been, I’ve been in a couple of meetings with like, boards of directors, and they don’t get to tell them a long story, man. I mean, get to the point, right? Well, what’s the data telling us? Why should we care? And what’s your solution? Right?

Steve Goldhaber 31:52

Yep. That’s, that’s so true, I think that the more you get away from presenting to non-marketers, that’s when you become like, really effective as a marketer is because now you understand your audience. You’re, you’re sharing information in ways that they understand. And sometimes it’s like, my favorite thing to do is just, you do all the legwork for a meeting like that. So like, if you’re documenting it, you have it in the appendix of a presentation. And if some… because there’s always one person who’s Senior who is like, I know a little bit about this, and I’m gonna go deep on it, and then you can kind of go, Oh, you want to go deep. I’m happy to go deep, like, I have a slide to go deep, and just let them have that conversation. But most people, they don’t know what you’re doing. They know marketing, but they can’t get into the operational side and the diagnostic metrics.

Christian Klepp 32:50

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, let’s not forget, this is B2B we’re talking about here. I mean, I don’t know about your experience, the but my B2B marketing career, I had one CEO that had some marketing experience, right. Everybody else was a CFO or CIO or CTO. Everything else. Yeah. Right.

Steve Goldhaber 33:14

I agree. It’s rare, it’s rare the CMO of a B2B company gets elevated to an executive role. Maybe a little bit more common, maybe in like this, the B2C space I’ve seen some maybe some CPG people where, where you do, like, marketing can really shape the consumer landscape fast. So they can maybe do that. But I agree with you. Marketing tends to be the alien in the room that not everyone understands.

Christian Klepp 33:46

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips, and I think you’ve given us plenty of them already. Right? But let’s just imagine that there’s somebody out there that’s listening to our conversation, and you want them to walk away with three to five things that they can implement right away. When it comes to B2B content marketing, what would those things Yeah, off you go,

Steve Goldhaber 34:12

Things that they could implement as it relates to B2B marketing. I mean, obviously, the whole problem solving thing is my first tip, just by taking away from this conversation, what’s your problem will help you immensely as a marketer. I think the other thing would be what I said earlier, which is don’t wait for the conversations to happen. Have them before. So what I mean by that is, get alignment on why are we doing this project. Are we brand centric? Are we customer centric? Are we vertical centric? Get alignment, all those things before, so that’s essentially the handshake that marketers need to have with their organizations. So that when you start building the problems, you’re just reminding people and I think a lot of marketers just don’t have those conversations inherently. So that would be my second thing. And then the third thing is, I would say, think of different ways to produce content. There are some very mature models to produce it, meaning organizations can build these teams in house. So they can say, hey, we need a couple of designers, we need some writers, we need some operations people, some metric people, like you can very much do that. And if you go down that path, know that like, that could be a three to nine month thing to build that team. But you can also create content very efficiently. You can hire a freelancer, you can use a content marketing agency, you can use an online platform. So that would be my third takeaway is, is don’t feel like you have to go all-in on content. You can start by experimenting, I love the idea of piloting content. And then if it works, if you think there’s something there, then great, build the function internally or do some type of a hybrid model. So yeah, that would be my that would be my advice. As far as like, more of like, you know, what could you do this afternoon after listening to the show to get some traction as it relates to content.

Christian Klepp 36:16

Fantastic advice. And Steve, only because you handle that. So well. I’m going to ask you a follow up, another follow up question. It’s on point three. And you’ve probably heard this more often than you care to count. But how do you save the world from boring, B2B content? What’s your advice there?

Steve Goldhaber 36:34

That’s a great question. I’m saving the world right now. I would go to, you know, what I said earlier in the conversation is, bring your customer in the room. And I would you know, in the perfect world of an A|B test, create boring content, create exciting content, and let the customer react to it. And whether that’s through research, or whether that’s just saying, Hey, we’ve got a list, let’s take half the list and do that and half of the list to the other thing. That’s why I would say that I think that’s the fastest way to convince people that it doesn’t have to be boring is to is to say, hey, let’s run an experiment. I love working with companies to just say it, let’s figure that out. Let’s run an experiment. I don’t know. I don’t know if my way is right. You know, I think marketers, you know, maybe they can be a little bit guilty of doing cool things just to make them cool. And hey, this is fun for me as a marketer, so I’m going to do it. But if you can put your science lab coat on and just say, Hey, I don’t know which way works. Do you do? Would you agree that would do an experiment? And I’ve, I’ve found that that specific phrase, it is rare to find someone who just goes, I’m sorry, I don’t want to do an experiment. So fight for the experiment, do a traditional A|B test. And I think that’s, that’s how you get rid of boring. And who knows, maybe, maybe there is a time and a place for boring. You know, like I’ve, I’ve worked with some clients who they’re targeting engineers, and those engineers will actually want like instruction manual type level things. So boring, boring, should win for that audience. Let that be boring. For other audiences, do do what you think is best for, for what they would react to.

Christian Klepp 38:29

Fantastic, fantastic. I suppose it’s a bit of a balance, right? Because on the one hand, like you said, boring is, quite frankly, open to interpretation, depending on who it’s for, what stage of the buying journey they’re at. And it’s also on the one hand, you don’t want them to scroll past the content. On the other hand, I mean, marketers that say, Okay, we want to create stuff that goes viral. I mean, that’s kind of also missing. I think a little bit of a…

Steve Goldhaber 38:59

Yep. Yeah, it’s you got to figure it out. I think it’s if you go back to that customer journey, you know, there’s times you know, upper funnel. If someone doesn’t know who you are, you probably should do something to get their attention. Lower funnel. Yes. They probably don’t want the circus tricks as much but sometimes you need a circus trick up upper funnel to to get someone’s attention to go. Oh, did you see the funny thing that company did? No what company? I’ve ever heard of them. Oh, well, they’re they do this. That’s not important. Just watch the funny thing. Then you’ve done your role, right? Like you’ve had someone who doesn’t know your company spent 10 20 30 seconds on, on something you created. So it’s helped do what they needed to do.

Christian Klepp 39:43

Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. More questions before I let you go, Steve. This is kind of like the soapbox question, but I suppose you’ve already been on the soapbox all this time, but please stay up there a little bit longer. A status quo, in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why,

Steve Goldhaber 40:06

Yeah. All right. And this is going to come from someone who’s been in marketing for about 25 years. And I think that while I love planning and strategy, there’s a there’s a belief that like, oh, we need to figure out a new strategy, a really effective strategy or an interesting plan. Having done marketing this long, I do believe that like, all the plans, and all the strategies have been done before. You know, it is there is no new strategy to be discovered. Now. Is the marketplace different? Are the channels that we use different? Of course, that is, that is the thing to figure out in today’s world. But all of that front ends things about like, what’s the business trying to accomplish? How are they going to grow? Are you trying to acquire more? Are you trying to convert? Better, those things are already played out. So I would, I would encourage people to kind of appreciate that and know that it’s not so much about finding the new planning or the new strategic thing, but really just saying, Oh, it’s one of these. Okay, so we’re doing that right now. Or, hey, here’s the stage of where this company is at. This company is backed by a private equity company, which means that, you know, they have a two to four year window that they’re trying to sell. So that means this so here are the things that they’re going to be looking for. And spend your time and energy on the on the marketplace stuff on the channel stuff on the customer insights stuff. But yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s my one thing is, there are no more new strategies to be discovered, they have already been done. So just study them and know when to pull them.

Christian Klepp 41:50

Absolutely, absolutely. No, that’s a really good one. And I suppose that spans across the entire B2B marketing spectrum, right? You have these people that are just always over planning, right? Over analyzing and let’s just spend a little bit more time on planning. And just like, let’s shelve the execution until we’ve got the perfect plan. Right.

Steve Goldhaber 42:11

Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, like, the conclusion of any planning process is that decision has been made. And for some companies, that’s hard to do. To draw a line in the sand, like any great plan just draws a line in the sand. One of my favorite questions to ask, when planning is wrapping up is okay, what are we not doing? Is it clear in this plan, that we’re not doing things? And because some plans are just we’re gonna do this, it’s like a firework show, we’re gonna do boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And and sometimes you have to say, no, that’s not that’s not a plan. You have to say, no, your plan needs to clearly, you know, someone I used to work with. Define strategy in a really great way. He said, It’s a bet. You have to bet on something. You can’t bet on everything when you plan. So what’s your bet? What do you have the five paths that you could take? You gotta choose one. What are you going to do?

Christian Klepp 43:09

Absolutely. Steve, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on, and for sharing your expertise, insights and anecdotes with the audience. So please, quick, introduce yourself and help folks out there can get in touch with you.

Steve Goldhaber 43:23

Yeah, so Christian, thanks for having me on the on the podcast, I really had a good time. People want to know more about my business. It’s called 26 Characters. We’re a B2B content marketing company. We specialize in service based businesses. So feel free to go to my website, if you’re interested in more problem solving, and that that puts you in the realm of you might be interested in the book. So you can go to Amazon and find the book. And then lastly, if you want to hear more crazy things that I say it’s Christian alluded to before, I’ve got a podcast called interesting B2B marketers, so you can find me and other podcast channels for that.

Christian Klepp 44:03

Fantastic, fantastic, and we will be sure to drop all the relevant links in the show notes once this episode gets published. So Steve, once again, thank you for your time. Take care, stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Steve Goldhaber 44:15

All right. Thank you for having me again, and take care.

View Details

How to Create and Run a Thriving Community

It’s something that many B2B marketers out there are a part of: communities. Some are active members and some even think of establishing and running groups of their own. How can a thriving community become your brand’s biggest asset? What do marketers need to do to keep the momentum going?

Join us as we talk to serial B2B entrepreneur and community builder Lloyed Lobo (Co-Founder, Boast.ai) about what it takes to build a great community. Lloyd also highlights the pitfalls that marketers should avoid, how you can add value to members of your community, and how to keep members engaged so that they come back for more.

https://youtu.be/Q54BvD7qmbo

Topics discussed in episode

• Lloyed talks about why he believes that if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity. [3:19]
• Some mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to building and nurturing communities. [9:39]
• Lloyed explains what “providing value” means to him. [15:32]
• Lloyed talks about how to build a community from a grassroots level. [16:59]
• What teams can do to maintain a high level of engagement and following within a community so it doesn’t fade [29:12]
• Lloyed’s take on metrics to monitor when building communities [32:43]
• A status quo that Lloyed disagrees with and why. [35:09]

Companies and links mentioned

• Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn
• Lloyedlobo.com
• From Grassroots to Greatness
• Boast.ai
• TechCrunch
• VentureBeat
• Traction
• SaaStra
• GitLab

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Lloyed Lobo

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Okay, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies bring people together to create greater impact. So coming to us from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. No. Dubai is not a country, by the way, right? Lloyed Lobo, welcome to the show, sir.

Lloyed Lobo 01:14

Thank you so much for hosting me, my good friend Melissa Kwan spoke so highly of you. And thank you also for taking the time to get on a call with me prior and get to know me better. And you know, we have a lot of things in common. So I appreciate you taking that time as well.

Christian Klepp 01:29

Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, shout out to Melissa, thank you so much for this introduction. Secondly, yeah, the overlap is crazy. How much we had in common. They’re all the parallels like you know, there was a Canada connection in there somewhere. Right.

Lloyed Lobo 01:43

There was a Kuwait connection in there somewhere.

Christian Klepp 01:45

There was a Kuwait connection. I mean, it’s just all over the place. Man. We’re going global. We’re going global. That’s what’s going on here. Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself but I hav to throw in that Dubai is not a country because so many people keep getting that one wrong. Right?

Lloyed Lobo 01:59

It’s the United Arab Emirates.

Christian Klepp 02:01

Yes.

Lloyed Lobo 02:02

And San Francisco is still home base for me. Toronto is second home base. And, you know, Vancouver is third home base, and where our head office for Boast is in Canada. And then you know, Dubai is a new home. I spent day in day out. Summer I was between bouncing between San Francisco and Toronto over the summer.

Christian Klepp 02:24

That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Well, Lloyed, man, I am really looking forward to getting into this with you. Because this is such a great topic. It’s not only a great topic, I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t entirely understand. And when I say that, I mean, they don’t understand how to optimize it. Right. So what am I talking about? I’m talking about communities. Okay. So you said something in our previous conversation, and it also appears in your bio, and I’m just gonna read it out, because it really resonated with me. Okay. So you said, I’m, in a world where traditional marketing is losing its edge, and products are struggling to stand out. A thriving community is your biggest asset. So here comes the question. Why do you believe that if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity?

Lloyed Lobo 03:19

Definitely. So one of the key things I’ve found, right, we as humans latch on to innovation and technology a lot. What happened in 2000 .com .com. Everything was a .com company. Then came what social, we were all social companies. Then came mobile, we were all mobile companies. And then somewhere in between was the cloud. We were all cloud companies, and carries on and carries on and carries on and today now everyone is an AI company. But why just go until 2000? Why not go even farther back right. What was the innovation in the 80s it was electronics. What happened then, a key incident was the Japanese manufacturers commoditize electronics. The impact was a large brand like Harley Davidson almost went bankrupt when the Japanese manufacturers commoditize electronics and build these cool motorbikes. The Harley Davidson leadership, they stood up and said we’re going to rebuild the company on the ethos of community. Management leaders went out and started riding clubs. Employees became writers, writers became employees. They came together on the ritual of ended up shared brotherhood of riding and the joys of riding coming together on the weekends hanging out. And then they started creating impact by supporting causes that were beyond the profits of Harley Davidson. They were donating to breast cancer and autism and all these causes. That community ended up not only saving Harley Davidson, but today Harley Davidson is an iconic brand right, fast forward some 40 years right. And you can recognize a Harley fan merely by what they’re wearing. What’s really interesting is, as I’m doing the speaking tour, I go to places dressed as a Harley Davidson fan. I mean, what is dressed like a Harley Davidson fan, I wear knee high boots, and I wear a leather jacket. It’s on, it’s on my book cover in my bio. And, of course, I don’t have any Harley Davidson logos on my body. But the first thing people ask me without fail is where is your Harley Davidson. That just tells you it’s an iconic brand. And so what I truly believe, is that yesterday’s innovation, and you can think about it, namely innovation, but yesterday’s innovation, from electronics, to the GPS, to internet, to social, to mobile, and AI. Right, and now AI. Yesterday’s innovation will always become tomorrow’s commodity, but the most enduring brands over time, the most enduring companies, the most enduring cultures were built on human to human connection. If you build a community, you will not become a commodity, your first community is your family. Your second community is probably the people you hang out with the most outside of your family. Right. And those connections stay. Those connections stay with you. Those connections are what forge enduring brands and you look at it in 2023. Marketing is taking a bloodbath. CPMs are up on all these platforms. Consumers are tired, right, even with generative AI now you know if somebody’s copy pasting from AI tools. And consumers are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again of spam, of clickbait, of giving personal data to access crappy white papers. But the best most endearing brands, all along have been built on human to human connection. Like Nike wants to help people become better athletes, you can run with a Nike Running Club, no matter where you are, by downloading their Nike Running Club app and being a part of the running club community. You don’t have to wear Nike shoes. And that’s that’s what I truly, truly believe in is the most enduring brands are forged on human to human connection. So as I was researching for this book, and talk to maybe 1000 leaders, community people, looked behind the scenes of every company, went into deep research, every company that endured, and rewatched all of our traction community content over the last several years. What I found is very, very interesting. Every obscure idea that eventually went on to become a global phenomenon. From Christ to CrossFit. Every obscure idea that became a global phenomena had four stages in common. People listen to you, or buy a product, you have an audience. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another, it becomes a community. Two way communication. When that community comes together to create impact towards a greater purpose, far bigger than your product or your profit, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or religion. Audience, community, movement, religion, that’s the sequence. And so if you look at the heart of this, it’s human to human connection, every brand that went from an audience to cult-like, we’re built on human to human connection with community being this sort of jumping pad to that, right. And yes, there are going to be anomalies. But you know, you don’t build a business or a culture, or company, or any sort of relationship based on anomalies. You look at the norm, the average. And that is that is true for most of these iconic cult-like brands is they had community at its core. And that’s why I believe that.

Christian Klepp 09:02

Yeah, those are some really great insights. Thanks for sharing that. We are definitely going to dig into some of those details later on in the conversation. But something you just said is such a great segue into the next question. And you’ve probably come across this. There’s a lot of these misconceptions about communities and probably even some to a certain degree, mistakes that people make when it comes to building and nurturing these communities. So just off the top of your head, can you think of like maybe three to five of these mistakes and misconceptions, and what people should do to address them?

Lloyed Lobo 09:39

Definitely. So one of the first things that I think are a misconception that people have is they want to start a community and they asked me one of two questions very frequently. I want to start a community when can I make some money number one. Number two, I want to start a community, should I start a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group or a Slack group? Or whatever? And asking those questions are like saying, I want to build a church, but I’m not sure if I’m a Hindu or a Muslim, or I’m atheist or Jewish, I don’t know what I am. Right. And I want to monetize is like saying, I walk into a bar, and I’m gonna just ask the first girl I meet to marry me. Which is ridiculous, right? You got to optimize for what? The phone number, then the text? Right? Basically, what you’re saying is you’re exchanging value, and you repeatedly exchange value before the transaction happens. If you’re transactional, it’s hard to build a community, building a community is a marathon of the mind and heart. It’s a labor of love. It’s focused on understanding your customer, figuring out who they are, where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, what are their problems and goals, but problems and goals are short lived. So what are they long term aspirations and what stands in their way, and then delivering them value in the sequence: visibility, credibility, and then profitability, right? Deliver value, deliver value, and through that you will become credible, and they’ll buy from you. But if you hope to add no value and monetize, or you hope to build a platform, and people will join, then that’s not going to happen, right? It always starts in the sequence of you’re visible people believe that you can add some value, you become credible, because you have added value, and then you become profitable. So that is, you know, I think one and two misconceptions. The other misconception is, you know, people are jumping on this community bandwagon. Building a community that business or a community is about giving, adding value I talked about. So you got to look within yourself to understand your values, the values of your co-founders. Do you draw joy from helping others, like I believe, as a function of my DNA growing up, right, my mom was born in the slums of Mumbai, I was born in Kuwait. They weren’t educated, they weren’t wealthy. So our summers were spent in the slum of slums of Mumbai, every summer vacation were like eating food to go into the bathroom to watching TV was communal, because we didn’t have enough. There was no toilet in the house. Fast forward a few years, the Gulf War hit Kuwait. And the community came together as a big grassroots movement to rescue people and get them to safety. Right? When there was no Internet, there was no phones, every building became a sub community communicated with the next building, the next building, the next building, word of mouth spread to embassies to countries, and this whole evacuation movement started. And, you know, I’ve experienced the power and the love of community, in bringing people together, right. So I think that is, that is a huge one. And so if you don’t have the DNA of giving, you don’t want to give people and you just want to take, it’s gonna be very hard to sustain in the long haul. Number three, or number four, is do you have a passion for this audience. So we talked about understand your customer, right? Before figuring out the platform you want to be present on, before you build a home. Give value before you take value, which is given before you ask for money. Then look within yourself, make sure that you have this DNA of giving. And these misconceptions are not in any particular order. But make sure you have the DNA of giving. I think that is key. Number four is having a passion for the audience. If you don’t like this audience, you hate your customers, building a business or building a community-led business or building anything long term is a slog, man, your success doesn’t come from showing up when the conditions are perfect. Your success comes from showing up when the conditions suck, but you got to still show up, and it becomes very hard to show up when the conditions suck. And you don’t like this audience and you hate your customer. Right. And so having a love and a passion for that customer that you’re creating for that you bringing together is super, super important.

Christian Klepp 14:55

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those are some really great points and yeah, I’m sorry, you went through that. I mean, like, definitely some humble beginnings there. But I did have two follow up questions for you. Okay, I’m gonna just take them one at a time. So it doesn’t get all confusing. The first follow up question, and you kind of talked about it already. But define for us, in your own words, what value means because you know, value is one of these words that people tend to use very loosely these days. And different people have a different definition of value. So when you say you need to add value to the community, what does that actually mean?

Lloyed Lobo 15:32

It means understanding a customer’s problems and pain points, but also understanding the aspirations and connecting them and bringing them closer to their goals, their aspirations, solving their problems, it means giving them something that is immediately actionable for them, that they can walk away with, and say, Aha, I learned something, or I made a connection, I can do something with this, my life is better as a function of it. That is value, right? Like so if I make an introduction for you, and you were able to get through a hump, that is value. If I gave you a piece of content that unlocked a stuck point for you, that is value. If I invited you to an event where you met some people that opened your mind to an area that you weren’t even considering, that is value. If you learned something new, you made a new connection that were actionable for you. That has value.

Christian Klepp 16:39

Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay, great. So that was the first follow up question. This second follow up question is on the topic of grassroots, and I know you talked about this in your book as well. How important do you feel that is for community building, to start at a grassroots level?

Lloyed Lobo 16:59

You know, I think, you know, my, my book is called from grassroots to greatness, because it’s cover stories of companies that were seemingly obscure, or ideas that were seemingly obscure, that made the journey through audience, community, movement and cult right, they made that leap. And that’s why it’s called from grassroots like starting at the bottom. And I think when you’re starting at the bottom, you got to start by one, understanding your customer. So let’s say you want to start something. And it’s brand new, you don’t know where to start. So how do you figure out? Who do you even target because everything starts with the person you’re targeting, you’re adding value to, you want to help? And so it’s like, do I have the passion for this audience? Because if you want to last long, you got to love your audience. Two, is it a small but growing niche? Right? Three, is there a propensity pay? Maybe? Will they pay me someday? And four, is there an ease of access? Even if there’s a propensity to pay and you’ll love the audience. It’s a massive market, but if you can’t access it, then you can’t do anything there? So I think starting there is is a number one. Number two is understanding your customer, where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? What are the problems? What are the goals? What are the aspirations, which is the long term and what stands in their way? Number three is understanding the circle of influence around your audience. Who are the people they follow? Like, this podcast right? You have an audience, you bring people of influence that could add value to that audience and create some social proof in front of them. But then, what do they frequent? Meaning what platforms are they prevalent on? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Insta? Or do they read TechCrunch? Do they read VentureBeat? So you can one maybe invite those journalists to your events? Or you can distribute your content on those platforms, like on LinkedIn on Insta on podcast? And then three is Who do they fund? Meaning what other tools or services do they pay for? Those are the people who can co-host things with? They can be your sponsors, you can partner with them to do things. Right. So then it’s about understanding that circle of influence. Then after that, you figure out what kind of community I want to build. I understand the audience. I have the passion for it. I understand the circle of influence. What kind of community do I want to build? There’s three kinds of communities you can build. One is a community of practice, where you bring people together to learn about a specific field. Just learn get better at a specific field like the inbound marketing community, or Traction is a community for innovators or SaaStra as a community for B2B SaaS founders when people learn to become better SaaS founders, right, CrossFit is the fitness community people come and learn to, you know, become a better version of themselves get fit. Two is a community of product, where people come to learn about your product, to build on top of your product, to leverage your product to further their business, can be a Microsoft community or a GitLab community or the Atlassian community. It’s all about the product, turning your customers into evangelists. And the last one is a community of play, where people come together to have fun, like the Nike Running Club, or the Red Bull community, or the Harley Davidson community where people come together and have fun, right camaraderie and shared brotherhood around the bike. So then it’s like picking that, right the kind of community you want to build. What I tell people is, if you don’t have a product that’s used frequently, or you don’t have product-market fit, or you don’t have any customers, don’t build a community on a product. People are gonna think you’re gonna sell to them. It’s like a timeshare thing. Build a community or practice or build a community of play, bring people together to have fun around the ideas, or bring people together to learn about the field you’re serving. And as a function of getting better and better at the field, and you helping them become masters at the field. If you have software that enables that field, then they’ll naturally progress to becoming your customers, like Boast our community was traction, was helping innovators get traction on their products. And as a function of helping them get traction on their products. Eventually, they started to become customers of Boast, right, because we follow this path of surrounding ourselves by the circle of influence of the ideal customers. We would invite people to speak who are people that our ideal customers followed, we will invite reporters like TechCrunch and VentureBeat to moderate those sessions. I don’t hog the sessions at our events, I only do on the podcast. And we will invite the people who they paid for other service providers, other tools, as sponsors, or co-hosts for our events. And so that’s it right like how do you dominate that, that circle of influence? And then what do you do is, then you go through the series, like, how do I build an audience? Create content around a white space? For both in the early days, when LinkedIn wasn’t very prevalent, and podcasting wasn’t huge. We did two things. One, we wrote for a local newspaper, a column called Startup of the Week regularly. And we got that column of honestly, through hustle, I reached out to the local newspaper, ask them if they’d give me a column. And they said, No, it’s not of interest. Startups weren’t very hot back then. So I blogged for another regional sort of tech blog. And we drove so much traffic to it through friends through retweets and whatnot, that when I, I leveraged that social proof to follow up with the editor. And he said, Fine, I’ll give you a blog. He give me a blog. I didn’t ask for permission. I said, I’ll beg for forgiveness, because I know it was giving you one blog post, unless you’re doing something illegal. As entrepreneurs, don’t ask for permission, beg for forgiveness, they call the blog startup of the week. Now what happens when the newspaper like post media puts out a blog like startup of the week, it gives the impression that it’s like a weekly award. So that post went viral, I covered a founder, the editor called me a couple of days and said, Hey, if you commit to writing this every week, I’ll turn it into a print column. Now that blog, did three or four things. One, I put a form on there, a Wufu form, where if you wanted to be featured, you’d apply. Number one. Number two, it gave me a backlink for our new website from the highest Domain Authority website in the country. Number three, it gave me social proof that two unknown guys who we you know, have no clue what they do, are now like legitimized by being columnist on the newspaper, and four it was a print column. And I don’t know what it is, but they’re still in 2023. When you’re in the print column, people want to take copies of it and share it right. It’s, it’s ultimate social proof, especially with so many more blogs and the print being a scarce resource. So every Monday at 6 or 7am, the founder is going to the newsstand picking up papers, taking photos sharing with friends. So we did that. But nonetheless, that form would build our list. And we’d invite everyone from that list to then host meetups, small meetups. 10 people on a cadence regularly around specific topics the whitespace was at the time all the events being held were very high level inspirational talks. But a founder has decided to quit their job and start to innovate. They don’t need inspiration, they’ve quit their job, they need tactics. And nobody was talking tactics. So we started inviting, like, founders who got to 5 million or 10 million in revenue. And, you know, could talk about how I got my first 100 customers, how I got my first half a million in revenue, how I got my first angel investment, what’s the right way to hire first employee, when you have no money? Do you do contractors versus like agencies versus like finding interns, all these topics that matter to a founder of zero, or a founder of one, trying to get to the next level, which is five, but they can’t relate to somebody who’s at 50, right? 50 million, because they have a different set of problems. So doing that one, two punch of small events frequently, combined with being a weekly column in the newspaper, had this boomerang effect off each other, our list kept building, we kept inviting those people to the events. And then we were also seated by scraping emails of people who fit that profile. Because once you know that profile, you can just find out their email addresses and email them. And now your email is nothing buy my stuff, but you’re sending an invite to an event kind of thing.

Christian Klepp 26:17

Man, that was a great list. Just give me a second here, because I think you’ve pretty much already answered the question about what B2B marketers who are listening to this conversation can do in terms of building a community the right way. Right. So I think you started out with and people should be doing this if they’re not doing this already, like drafting or writing good content. And when I say good content, that’s content that’s relevant to the target audience. Right?

Lloyed Lobo 26:42

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 26:43

Number two, doing that outreach, whether it’s to media, whether it’s to potential partners, finding that social proof. Number three, and I think you really hit the nail on the head there, hosting small meetups, you know, like starting small, because I think a lot of people when they think of communities, it’s like, Oh, my God, it’s gotta be like a TED talk with like, 5000 people, right? I mean, start small. I mean, like, You guys didn’t start with like, 5000, right? Like, you guys.

Lloyed Lobo 27:08

We still…. still the bulk of our meetups are small 15, 20, 30 person events done on a cadence. And then we do a big massive conference once a year. But you know, think about it, the production value of doing something big, is gonna take a lot of time and energy, right. And what happens is for the whole year, if you do that one event, you’re just promoting that one thing. But that’s like, slaying a golden goose, isn’t it? It’s literally slaying a global goose. And you’re just saying, buy this stuff, buy this stuff. You’re seeing the same message around? What if you said, Come on Tuesday, and meet Christian, and he’s going to talk about how to be a great podcast host and get your first 100 leads through a podcast, and what if you come on Thursday at 11. And Lloyed is going to talk about how you raise your first $100,000. And next Tuesday, Melissa is going to talk about how she leveraged contractors to get to 1 million in revenue, then every week, it’s new content, and it’s fresh, right? It’s a new dopamine hit. It’s a variable reward versus like, the same thing. And then people unsubscribe.

Christian Klepp 28:28

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. On that note, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which I’m sure you will have no problem answering. Because, man, you know, we’re all part of different communities. And, you know, we’ve all seen this happen, right? If you don’t engage with members of the community, if you don’t keep things fresh, and I think you wrote this in your in your bio as well, these communities will then fade into oblivion. All right, if you don’t keep that momentum going. So just based on your own experience, Lloyed like, what can you do like in give us examples, if you can, give us examples of what teams can do out there to maintain a high level of engagement and following within a community so it doesn’t fade?

Lloyed Lobo 29:12

Definitely. So think of a community firstly, as not this large thing, right? Think of it as People to People connection. And if you can bring small groups of people to understand their pain points and understand what they need, and connect them with that need, and do it regularly on a cadence. That is a good start, right? I can give you 100 things you can do and I can give you fancy things, but you know the best things are rooted in simplicity. And the key there is can you identify a burning need or a pain point? And can you make that connection? So you walk away and you realize like somebody needs investor intros, you understand their pitch, maybe you refine it a bit, and reach out to investors and make one or two connections. So you realize, like, somebody has lost their job during the pandemic, but is a really good candidate. Can you reach out and make some connections? If you find like somebody stuck with this specific sort of business challenge, can you make a connection? Or can you share some advice? Now, we look at community as this massive thing, but it starts with that like understanding the common pain points, and adding value, so they get over that hump. And that’s how you drive engagement, you drive engagement, through conversations, through connections, through content, right? And just doing that on a regular cadence. It’s not about doing one big massive conference a year, but it’s doing things consistently showing up week in week out consistently.

Christian Klepp 30:55

Absolutely, absolutely. And I did love what you brought up earlier about these, like, I guess you can call it whatever you want, but like laser focused micro events, right. So I don’t know if because I’m not in this space. But I guess there are still like the huge events that are going on. I’m not gonna say that they’re entirely archaic. But I think your point was, that’s not the only way. Right?

Lloyed Lobo 31:19

Exactly. I mean, a good cadence would be, let’s say, you do a podcast, can you make that live? Can you invite people to join, so they interact with one another than the host. But then you take the recording, and you put it to YouTube, and you cut it into shorts. And then you take the audio and you post it to podcast, you take the top learnings you create a LinkedIn post, that’s a good way to build your audience, then, you know, you start sending a weekly newsletter to update people, then maybe monthly, you do a meet up in different wherever you are. And this doesn’t have to be big production stuff, you can find out who your superfans are, the most engaged audience members. And give them the soapbox and say hey, do you want to host this, co-host this and you get to invite people, and I’ll invite some people, and you just host it, I’ll pay for the pizza or whatever, right? Or find sponsors, just doing small things on a cadence leads to big outcomes. Consistency is the secret weapon. You know, and so when you are consistent on small actions over time, it leads to huge things.

Christian Klepp 32:31

Absolutely, absolutely. So on the topic of communities over data metrics, right? Are there any metrics out there that B2B marketers can look at if they’re building communities?

Lloyed Lobo 32:43

You know, we have all these metrics, which caused a lot of confusion. And it’s hard with community because somebody comes to an event, then they forward your company name to another person in their company, their colleague, goes to your website, reads the blog, download the white paper, forwards it to somebody else, and that somebody else reads it, requests a demo, and then it goes to sales. Community attribution is really hard because it involves a lot of offline stuff, right. And I think one of the key things, key key key things is to understand the answers to questions, rather than, you know, these buzzword metrics, right, so it’s very simple with any business. Do your customers love you? Do your employees love you? And do you have money in the bank? Right? And so how do you break that down? When it comes to community? Do people show up? Do they pay? Do they stay? Do they bring their friends? And lastly, does it make money? I can give you a whole bunch of like, you know MRR, ARR, churn rate, NRR, are all these things, right? But let’s keep it simple, because we’re community. Human to human is what? Are they showing up? Are they staying? Are they paying? Are they bringing their friends? And are you making money? That’s it. And so, if nobody’s showing up, then why are you focused on making money? Get people to show up? If nobody’s staying, then why are you focused on driving people in because the more people you drive in, and if they don’t like to be there, then you’re going to leave. So make sure you create an environment where people want to stay. Right. That’s how you would follow that, like, solve one thing at a time.

Christian Klepp 34:45

Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, don’t worry, I wasn’t expecting you to give us a list of like 50 attributes to measure. But um, so I’m going to call this one the soap box question. So basically, What is it in your area of expertise, so that being communities, what is the status quo in this area that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Lloyed Lobo 35:09

I think you know, I don’t know, like community is my passion, it’s my DNA. I think the status quo and community is doing virtual events, building online audiences, everything is online. That is the status quo, right? There’s the million podcast is about to come out. The million webinars are about to come out. The million like, you know, social media influencers about to come out. If you don’t have people’s contact information, you cannot create an environment where you can meet with them one on one, you cannot reach out to them, right? Unless they see your post and decide to register, which is a very low conversion rate, versus like emailing someone or messaging someone. So the status quo is a lot of people want to do virtual stuff. And they don’t think about can I do something in person? Some of the most iconic brands have had in person human to human connection, I truly believe that you need to augment online with offline. Because anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you build stronger connections or sound insight. But have you ever met one of the people you’ve talked to online for ages, and then eventually met in person and it became a bond? I’ll give you an example. I met my wife on IRC. I met my wife in IRC, IRC, and we chatted for months. And then when we met in person were we been dating since our teen, late teens will marry right now. And that’s like 25 years later, like 14 years of being married and 24 years of being together. But had we not met in person you think we’d be married? Probably not. Right? Anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you build stronger connections. So the status quo is do virtual. Everything that’s great is on the other side of risk, uncertainty and difficulty. Doing in-person things are difficult. But love it or hate it. They build genuine bonds and stronger connections. Absolutely, absolutely. That’s such a great answer. And just for the benefit of the audience who’s a little bit younger. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat? Right.

Christian Klepp 37:30

Yeah. And if I remember correctly, the screen was black. So you can’t even see who it is you’re chatting with. You just see that you just see the text popping up, and then you up something and you press enter. And then you respond. I mean, that was virtual chatting for you like, way back, right.

Lloyed Lobo 37:53

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was like, basically, Slack was built on the IRC UX in many ways.

Christian Klepp 38:01

Yeah. It does have some similarities. Right. I mean, clearly, it’s it’s an evolved version. Fantastic. Exactly. Well, Lloyed. I mean, we could have been going on and on for another a couple hours, man. But you know, I appreciate the time, you know, but you’ve taken to share your expertise and experience with our audience. So thank you, once again, quick introduction for yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you. And please talk about your book.

Lloyed Lobo 38:30

Definitely. So I’m on Lloyedlobo.com, or fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. I write business content on LinkedIn, but more on the personal side of business. So bootstrapping, community building, mental health, founder fitness, Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn, Double LLOYED on LinkedIn, and my book’s on fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. 13 rules to build iconic brands by leveraging the power of human to human connection. That’s the book and I’ll have an accompanying notion doc on fromgrassrootstogreatness.com/bonus with things I didn’t include in the book, like email templates to reach out and score speakers, or email templates to get sponsors or email templates. You know, for, you know, you name it, or like Excel templates to organize things, things like that, right, like, templates that will give you ideas to action, from audience building, to community building, to creating movements and cults. And with backstories, and behind the scenes, interviews and whatnot. All included there.

Christian Klepp 39:43

Fantastic. Fantastic. I’ll be sure to like drop all the links in the in this episode. So once again, Lloyed, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Lloyed Lobo 39:55

Thank you so much, man. Talk to you soon. Appreciate you doing this for me.

Christian Klepp 39:58

Alright, thanks, man. Take care.

View Details

How to Shorten the Sales Cycle with Case Studies

Anyone involved in B2B sales will know that the biggest challenge is to get your prospect to trust what you are saying. Providing those prospects with the relevant consulting, expertise, and customer proof in the form of case studies and video testimonials will help to close that trust gap.

That’s why we invited sales expert Julian Lumpkin (Founder & CEO, SuccessKit) to talk about how B2B companies can accelerate sales at different stages of the sales process with case studies and video testimonials. During our conversation, Julian talks about what he thinks is slowing sales down, and how marketing can play a strategic role in developing case studies and video testimonials. He also provides the audience with great tips on how to create better case studies, and how marketers should adapt to the changing B2B buyer landscape.

https://youtu.be/9sllPq3At7U

Topics discussed in episode

• Mistakes that B2B companies make when creating case studies and video testimonials, and how they can fix them [3:45]
• What to do when you don’t have the relevant case study for a particular vertical that you’re targeting [9:36]
• The importance of having a deep understanding of the customers or the prospects and their buyer’s journey [14:43]
• Julian explains why he would focus on the problems instead of the results for case studies [18:38]
• Julian’s take on “How NOT to create boring case studies” [21:28]
• What is the right format for case studies? [24:21]
• How to get customers to agree to a case study or video testimonial [28:50]
• Some actionable tips from Julian: [36:48]
  • Determine the minimum number of case studies needed
  • Start agreeing with different department heads on how the case studies will be used
  • Build a plan everyone agrees and commits to
• Julian shares a point of view that he passionately disagrees with [41:30]

Companies and links mentioned

• Julian Lumpkin on LinkedIn
• SuccessKit

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Julian Lumpkin, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Okay, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies to create case studies and video testimonials that hopefully shorten the sales cycle. So coming to us from St. Petersburg, Florida, Julian Lumpkin, welcome to the show.

Julian Lumpkin 01:12

Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:14

Hey, listen, I mentioned this just before we hit record, but I’m giving myself a little bit of pressure for this interview. It’s a pleasure to have you on. And the reason why I’m giving myself pressure is because we’ve had quite a number of folks come on to talk about case studies and video testimonials. So it is my hope with this conversation that we offer a slightly different perspective and inject some new flavors into what people are going to say is “Oh, that topic again?” Right?

Julian Lumpkin 01:42

It’s great that it’s become such topic that multiple people are coming on podcast and talking about it. And I come from a pretty different angle, as you’ll hear, so excited to get into it. And I’m sure you’ll have some really nuanced questions that I’m excited to get into.

Christian Klepp 01:59

Fantastic. All right, well, let’s get the show on the road done. Okay, so you’re an expert, when it comes to case studies and video testimonials for B2B industries. And so for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how to accelerate sales at the different stages of the sales process or the sales cycle. So I’d like to kick off this conversation with this question. What do you think is slowing B2B sales down. So talk specifically about where you feel sales is falling short?

Julian Lumpkin 02:31

Yeah, I think that, you know, anyone who’s been in sales, like myself knows that, you know, on the day to day grind, the biggest challenge of a sales process is to get the person you’re speaking with to trust what you’re saying. If you’ve got a credible solution, and you’ve done good prospect, and… good prospecting and good targeting, and you’re speaking to someone you actually can deliver results for. The main thing that is stopping them from moving forward, is believing your claims. And I want to emphasize the “when used correctly”, because that is what it’s all about. Proper customer proof in the form of case studies and video testimonials. can close that trust gap.

Christian Klepp 03:23

Absolutely. And I’d like to add in another question there. Where do you feel B2B companies are using that this incorrectly? Like what have you seen out there in terms of the mistakes that companies make when it comes to case studies and video testimonials? What do they get wrong? Number one, and number two, how should they fix it?

Julian Lumpkin 03:45

Yeah, there’s so many ways I can answer this question. So many different angles we can come at it from but I want to give you the simplest answers, one from a company perspective, and one from a more individual kind of sales tactical perspective. From a company level at B2B companies, and you may be surprised to hear this. And maybe this is true for some of your audience. Maybe not true for others. But the biggest mistake we see is the simplest one, which is not just getting a proper amount of case studies done, and then making them available to the sales team. And this may sound really simple and obvious, but you would be shocked by how many companies credible good B2B companies do below what I would call the minimum of having a solid repository of case studies that is available to a sales team. So if you are a marketer at a company or just work for a company, you know, before you go into all the details of what makes a perfect case study and I, you know, if you start to work with an agency, they’re going to really want to focus on all of the details of what makes a perfect case study and we can talk about that all day in everything’s we do, but the first thing that you should have ask yourself is “Do we have enough?” And what’s a minimum threshold of what the right number of case studies for our company, sales and marketing team are. And that can be vary from different company to company, there’s different factors. But the biggest mistake I see companies make is focusing on trying to get a couple perfect case studies, and missing the minimum threshold of an acceptable amount of case studies. That’s the biggest problem I see companies making. The biggest mistake I see individual sellers making is not knowing, truly knowing and understanding the case studies. So when you give your case studies to a sales team, or if your sales team receiving case studies, the way to make them effective, is not just to have them and think that, Oh, if I attach this PDF to an email, my prospect is going to trust me. The key for the sales reps, and if you’re in marketing or sales enablement, you need to enable and facilitate this is making sure the sales reps truly know, internalize and understand the case studies. So they can bring them up authentically when they’re truly relevant to the person that they’re speaking with. And these might sound like some simple answers. But these two things are very often missed. And if done correctly, can be a complete game changer for any sales and marketing team.

Christian Klepp 06:32

Those some really good points. And I mean, you’re going back to what you said, I have actually seen those scenarios play out, like, for example, working with companies in the past that A) didn’t have enough case studies, or B) they didn’t have case studies that were relevant to the companies that they were prospecting. So they would use this one size fits all approach. And then they have this vertical, where they’re showing this case study to and it doesn’t resonate with those prospects, because they’re like, Okay, well, that’s fantastic and good for you. But what does that have to do with me? Right? I mean, they don’t exactly say it that way. But you know, it’s generally that response, right?

Julian Lumpkin 07:12

Yeah. And, you know, I see this, for kind of the way that this happens, and, you know, maybe at the risk of calling out some of your audience if this is them. But it is very often the same people that are so focused on the details of how to write a perfect case study that ultimately don’t create any or any significant volume of case studies. So it’s really interesting what I see. And I can’t tell you how frequently I see this, where I’ll meet with a company, they acknowledged they need case studies. And they’re kind of deciding between doing an internally and working with us. And as they go through this evaluation, they’re so focused on what are the elements that make a perfect case study, and finding that perfect client, perfect situation, perfect story to tell, and thinking that a few great case studies are going to really move the needle. And those are the same companies that I talked to one-two years later, that still don’t have any case studies, or still only have two or three case studies. So I think there’s a little bit of a shift in mindset that needs to occur if this applies to you as a marketer, which is to recognize that case studies can never be perfect. Their client stories, your clients are great, they have great answers, but none of them are perfect. No one client story is going to satisfy all your prospect questions. So what I have seen in my time doing this for seven years, is the biggest companies make, the biggest mistake marketers make is failing to take action.

Christian Klepp 08:57

Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And on that note, I had a follow up question for you, Julian, like this will probably be relevant to many members of the audience who are in this situation, as I mentioned earlier, companies that try to like enter new verticals, and they’re trying to, like, have these conversations with prospects. But let’s say for instance, they don’t have that social proof. They don’t have that case study that really hits the nail on the head for this particular vertical. If you are in that situation, how would you handle that?

Julian Lumpkin 09:36

I’ve been in that situation. In fact, I was in that situation as a sales rep many times. And that’s what ultimately led me to start the company because I could see the difference of how incredibly different it was selling when I had direct case studies for a particular product audience or vertical versus not. So I felt that firsthand, and I did see it. And essentially what you have to do as a sales rep is, you know, be direct about it. And, you know, they’re really, you know, you can’t fake a case study, you can’t talk around, you can’t convince people, someone who’s like them if they’re not. So you have to show them that, you know, you have credibility in other industries. What I would also look to do in that situation, you know, industry, you know, I think the example you mentioned is a company, you don’t have any case studies in the same industry as them. Well, industry is only one factor. So I would look for other factor, other things to match that person up with a case study, ideally, obviously, you’re doing this within their industry as well. But I would think about things like okay, well, what department are they from? Because they, you know, for example, a VP of operations may resonate with a VP of operations from a completely different industry to them better than they would a VP of Finance in their industry. So look for other things like the persona, the biggest problem that you they have, like, what they’re really focused on what their challenges just are. Anything else that you can match them up, I would look for, but depending on how many other case studies you have, the answer is you have to be direct to them, explain the situation and build out that case study for that industry as quickly as you can?

Christian Klepp 11:26

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I mean, it’s also one of these scenarios where and you, you know, where I’m going with this, like, for instance, if you’re trying to, like, enter the semiconductors vertical, and you don’t have those relevant case studies? How can you show something from a different vertical, that might still be at least to a certain degree relevant, right, that shows that you have that competency? And if you don’t have that competency, you have the capability to wrap your head quickly around their ecosystem? Because that’s what they want to know, too. Right? They want to know, okay, are you able to understand how our industry works, what the challenges are, right? What what the what the process of the cycle of everything that we have to go through looks like?

Julian Lumpkin 11:26

And at the risk of being repetitive, I think this just brings up the first point I brought up. So you know, this really puts it all into focus, because what we see happening, and I guarantee you, there are people in your audience right now in the situation that I have, or in that situation, acquired the clients in that vertical, but their sales team still doesn’t have case studies, because they are looking for a perfect case study, waiting for something else to happen and not doing it. So when you think about that difference, and you know, I use this in my own sales process of if the person has experienced or like think about what it’s like to sell into a new industry where you don’t have case studies. If you don’t create case studies, you’re essentially sending your sales reps into that situation unnecessarily. So I think your question is important how to use other case studies in a situation but also just really highlights how much of a mistake a marketer is making, if they allow their company to put off or find excuses to getting, you know, case studies done for their different verticals.

Christian Klepp 13:25

Absolutely, absolutely. It reminds me of all the story that you keep hearing in tech and SaaS, right. Like, if you keep waiting for the perfect product to be launched. The perfect plan, the perfect roadmap, and you’re waiting too long, then you’re ready too late.

Julian Lumpkin 13:41

Yeah. I mean, I think this applies to so many different… Yeah, there’s so many examples of this, the example that I give, and there’s a little more out there, but like, you know, picture two people, you know… it’s kind of like two people trying to get in shape. Youk now, one sits and evaluates, looks for the perfect gym, the perfect program, perfect diet, the perfect this, this this. And yeah, maybe you can find little things that are better. But what’s way more effective, is just starting and actually taking action and joining that gym, starting that case study and building and learning and talking to your clients and learn what they say. And use what you get, you know, organically to create that case, study, build other content, and prepare for the next one.

Christian Klepp 14:25

Exactly, exactly. All right. I’m gonna move us on to the next question where I’d like you to talk to us about the importance of having a deep understanding of the customers or the prospects as well as their buyers journey. And how can this help to build more trust?

Julian Lumpkin 14:43

I think you know, this helps from both sides, you know, from us all, first of all, talk about it from the case study creation perspective. So, when you’re creating a case study, you really want to have a firm understand of your sales and marketing process. Because when you’re interviewing that client to write the case study, you do want to let them to an extent that… you want to steer the conversation, but you want to let their perspective shine through. But you do want to steer the conversation. So when possible, by knowing the most important gaps or difficulties, challenges, objections that you face in your sales process, what you can do is get your current clients to talk through those issues. So let’s think about like a really a really simple example. Let’s say you, let’s say you help companies implement their CRM, for example. And you know that one of the big sticking points in your sales process is, you know, dealing with the one month that you’re going to be switching from, you know, Salesforce to HubSpot, or whatever it is. And you know, that one of the main reasons people say no to you is, you know, that period where we’re switching is just going to be too rough. What you can do that by knowing that as a marketer, and talking to your sales team and understanding, like, what are the things that they hear, and this is an oversimplified example, but then when you’re doing a case study, and you’re interviewing that client, to get them to say, you know, what were you most concerned about before working with us? And looking for them to say, Oh, well, I was actually really concerned about that the month, the transition period. And then by knowing what your prospects are concerned about, you can get your current clients to go back to when they were in that same situation and say, Well, I was worried about that one month transition, but the way that they set up the data transfer and how the data goes over, you know, we did this this week, this this week, such that it never really interrupted things beyond XYZ. If you don’t know your buyers journey, and the different sticking points in your marketing cycle, you could quickly brush over that and say, okay, great, but we did it fast. Yes, great. But by knowing that that’s something your prospects are concerned about when you hear that from a client. So it’s all about connecting, whether your prospect is here, they have these concerns, your client is here, but they used to have those concerns. And connecting those two questions are what great case studies do, they get the client put themselves back in the shoes of a prospect. And that’s why our case studies always focus so much more on problems than results. Because it’s getting the client to go back to when they were a prospect to put themselves in that mindset, because that’s where your prospects are. Talk about those same things that they were concerned about, and then why ultimately, it worked because or in spite of those issues.

Christian Klepp 18:03

That’s an interesting perspective. So I’m going to like play devil’s advocate here. Because going back to something that you said earlier, right. I’m not. I’m not saying that I entirely disagree with you. But like, going back to what you said about focusing on the problems instead of the results. Why wouldn’t you focus that much on the results? I mean, that seems to be like everybody’s like, go-to when it comes to case study, right? Like, that’s what they want to see. Okay, what are the results? What are the results, and they want to see the, especially the quantifiable aspect of it? And my my all time favorite word? Oh, what was the ROI? Right?

Julian Lumpkin 18:38

I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t collect the results when you can get them. Don’t get me wrong. But just think about it from your own perspective. When you see an email that says someone can save you 10% on your costs, or increase your revenue 15%. Are you excited? Are you like, Oh, my God, I need to learn about how this person can do that? Or do you get 20 emails saying save 10%? Save 20% See this, see that? You see that all the time.

Christian Klepp 19:07

You treat those more with suspicion than anything.

Julian Lumpkin 19:11

I think a better way to think about it is the results aren’t impressive, until they’re in context. Everyone has, you know, every company has clients that have achieved results, or they wouldn’t be around anymore. When you hear companies say they achieved a result, it’s not. It’s not just immediately interesting, because we’re, for the few reasons, we’re bombarded with people saying yes, they can save us money, whether it’s in our business emails, on television for our insurance, like it’s just like save 20% or increase revenue 15%. It is everywhere, and it just doesn’t have any sort of connection to yourself as a prospect. On the other hand, if there’s something specific you’re struggling with, that’s top of mind. Your prospects don’t wake up saying how can I find some solution that will save me 15% They wake up thinking, Oh, this thing in my CRM isn’t working right, this drives me crazy, there’s got to be a way better way to do this. We lose two days on our this, you know, every time this happens. So the results are important, but they’re only important after the person reading it can connect with the situation. So we always try to get results in our case studies. But we focus way more on the problems, though, what were you struggling with before you were working with this vendor, and then the results are really there to back up the fact that they would help, rather than most of the time be the lead in the story. There are exceptions, don’t get me wrong, there are certain situations where it’s like, you know, you achieve this result, the people reading it will understand the significance of it, and you want to lead with that. But more often we’re leading with this company had a problem. And they were able to solve it.

Christian Klepp 21:01

Good answer! I’m gonna move on to another question. And rather than asking you something that you brought up a few minutes ago about like, okay, tell us, Julian, what the perfect case study looks like? Instead of asking you that, I would rather ask you something I’ve asked the other guests on the show, how do you save the B2B world, from boring case studies?

Julian Lumpkin 21:28

Yeah, it’s really difficult. And, you know, I think that if you’re creating case studies thinking you’re going to create some viral piece of content, you know, you just got the wrong idea for them. So I think that you want to make your case studies as interesting as possible. Don’t get me wrong. But to start with, how can I make this so interesting that everyone’s going to click and share it, really misses the purpose of a case study, they’re never you know, it’s not edutainment, it’s not, you know, you’re not producing this, you know, amazing two minute video that you work on all year. And then, you know, everyone sees and shares. So I think that you want to avoid them being boring by not making them too long. So we typically do two to three pages, not focusing on technical detail, too much. And the way to achieve, you know, that is by letting your client’s voice and perspective shine through, so letting them explain what’s important to them, rather than make sure you talk about all their terms, more than your own tool, rather. So like, let them talk about the challenges that they solve. But ultimately, case studies are only interesting when they’re in the right context. They’re not, they’re not entertainment. And I think this is why in some cases, case studies get a bad rep, because people use them incorrectly. Or they think, Oh, I shared this case study, I posted a PDF of a case study on LinkedIn. And, you know, only eight people liked it. Well, yeah. Because they’re not interested in that content, except in very certain situations, if you have a big home run with new client, but most of the time, case studies are interesting, because they’re put in the right context, because the person, you know, they’re interesting to the person that they’re supposed to speak to at that moment. So when you do case studies, you know, they’re very different from the rest of marketing content, the goal is not to make them as exciting and get the most immediate eyeballs on them. They’re for a very specific audience in a specific time. And you want to avoid boring, but I, you know, we haven’t seen companies go the direction of, you know, making them turn them into little comedy sketches. And I don’t see it going that way.

Christian Klepp 23:49

That’s a really good point. And I suppose you’re not creating these case studies in the hope that Netflix is going to call you. Right? That’s also like you said, it’s kind of like missing the point. Right. But I do have one follow up question for you. Like, based on what you just said, Is there a particular format that you guys advocate, or does it depend on the vertical? Does it depend on the stage of the buyers journey? Or what are the factors involved?

Julian Lumpkin 24:21

Yeah, all of the factors, there’s no one you know, there’s no perfect format, there’s no perfect length, there’s no perfect structure. And, you know, I drives me crazy. When people debate, what’s better, video or written? I think it’s really, honestly, it’s just like self-serving. You know, people who produce videos will tell you video’s better, people who just produce written content will tell you written content is better. And, you know, to try to decide between them or figure out the right format. I think it’s really the wrong approach. I think that the way that I kind of get my clients to think about these things is just to remember that each person consuming your content is going to have different preferences. Some of them like to walk a video, some of them like to read, some of them like to watch short video, some of them like long form content. And it’s why the kind of idea of like, you know, every people are different. There’s no one perfect format to make your case study that’s going to engage everyone. So really, the answer to that question is to have a lot of different formats. So that you can tailor it, or the person consuming can tailor what they consume based on how they like to consume content. So when we do a case study with our clients, we might make a one page, you know, one slide deck, we might make a two minute video, a few 20″ videos, a three page version, a one page version, because again, depending on who the person reading, it is, where they are in the sales cycle, what industry they’re in, the technical details of the solution, all of those factors are going to determine what the best format is.

Christian Klepp 25:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree with that. I mean, one, it really depends. Secondly, it’s also dependent on, to your point, how your prospects consume content, right?

Julian Lumpkin 26:07

Yeah. And as an example, I’m curious, do you have a favorite way of consuming case studies or content in general,

Christian Klepp 26:12

I’m a little bit biased, because I’m a writer. So the written content. But that being said, I do like watching videos too. Yeah, but I will say that even if, even though I do enjoy written content, I do think it’s important to give the content, some breathing space and insert infographics or insert. I’m a big fan of infographics and diagrams and charts, right? Because it not only helps to break up those huge chunks of text. But it also helps you to provide some visual context. Right. To highlight what is being outlined in this case study, like, for instance, and I think this is relevant, not just in B2B tech, but just across the board, where they have comparison charts, right? Like you know, what was the situation like before, and when they started using the solution, or the software or the technology, and you know, what happened afterwards. And if that is quantifiable, then fantastic. Another one is also like just to just show like diagrams, or like the process of the different processes, or the different journeys that these companies went on, like from where they were before, but where they are right now.

Julian Lumpkin 26:21

Nice. Yeah, and I think that makes perfect sense. And one thing we’ll try to do in a lot of our case studies is… Now if you’re going to do a three, maybe a four page case study, you want it to be such that the prospect can just read it straight through, but that they can also scan it and get the idea. And things like bigger language, call out boxes, diagrams, maybe it’s a you can have a meaty three, four page document. But that is also totally scannable.

Christian Klepp 28:00

Another follow up question for you, Julian, because you’re so good at answering these questions. I just, I’m just gonna throw one more in there. The audience, I know for sure, is struggling with this scenario. Iit’s important. It’s important to get like you said, it’s important to get as many case studies produced as possible. But I’ve heard more than once, right, where people say, Yeah, we we really would like to do that. But sometimes we have a hard time getting the customer to agree to a case study, or… So what I mean is like to say yes, yes, you can do a case study about this particular scenario, or about our our specific case. So long story short, how do you get the customer to agree to a case study, or to a video testimonial?

Julian Lumpkin 28:50

Yeah, this is a great question. So we definitely don’t have any magic bullet to make your customers agree to be in a case study. And when a client brings up the situation you just brought to me, we’re gonna have a conversation to basically try to understand, which is the case. On the one hand, you might be saying that because your clients truly will not go on record and talk about you the vast majority of the time. Some of the examples of places we see that are companies that serve the government, certain or most types of cybersecurity companies, financial technology software, there are… so you know, when I get when I hear that question, the first thing I’m trying to determine is, is it truly a companywide situation that your clients don’t want to go on record can’t slash don’t want to put their name and logo and participate in case studies? If that’s the case, then we’re going to talk about ways to do anonymous or semi anonymous case studies. We can talk about that if you’d like it’s a separate conversation. unless you really have to, I don’t recommend going down that route that road. The other side, and I’m suspecting this is more, what you meant is that you’re just having a hard time getting your clients to say yes. So there’s a few things that I would make sure to have in place in that situation. So number one, is making sure it’s very clear to the client, that they are going to have final sign off on the content from the very beginning. So you know, it’s kind of make sure they know we’re paying for this, we’re going to do all the work. But you the case subject will get to review and approve the content before it’s finalized. So saying that in the beginning, making sure that they know that you’re going to make them and their brand look good. So I talked about problem based case studies, which are great. If you have clients that are very difficult to get involved in case studies, they may not want to go on record talking about a problem they had. So you might have to shift the approach you take of the case study, you always want to make them the hero. So it’s never like, oh, they were clueless, they didn’t know what they’re doing. And then they found us and now they’re great, you can make it clear to them that you’re going to position them as taking extra steps to get out in front and at the forefront of their industry. And basically them as is being the leader. So make sure that they know that they’re going to get…. they’re gonna be the hero of the story. And then finally, just to make sure they know you have like a really tight process for getting it done. You know, many people have been involved in a case study or, you know, someone from marketing interviews you and someone from the other team interviews you and it takes three hours, so lay out the steps for it. So laying out those three things: Timing, how long it’s going to take them that they get final sign off, and then you’re going to make them look good. So making sure those things are in place. And then it’s really about making sure the request actually get made. So I tell my clients in certain industries, if you want to get a case study done, you might have to ask 5 or 10 clients before getting Yes. And that’s okay. I think that so sometimes it’s really just about upping the volume, some will say maybe, and you’ll have to follow up with them, we obviously can… we handle this for our clients, but like, you’ve got to make the requests. And those are the main things that that’ll do it. The last thing I’ll say, and this is really about just kind of more generally running a good company, but I will note that, in my experience, one of the main factors in whether a company ultimately agrees to do a case study is their… the person’s direct relationship with their account manager. In certain situations, it’s very easy for a company to participate in a case study, and then it doesn’t really matter, they like your, your solution enough, they’ll do it. But usually that person has to or very often that person has to go to bat internally. And it often becomes a very person… like, you know, they’re doing it not, you know, you could have two companies that both love your product. And if one of them doesn’t have a great relationship with their account manager, they’re just gonna say no, why bother? You could have somebody likes your product, and they have a great relationship, their account manager, and they come and ask them, they feel kind of personally obligated and want to help. So if there’s kind of a tip in there, you know, I recommend that request not come from your marketing department, but from the account manager who has a relationship. And then just more generally, you know, facilitating your account managers building great relationships with your clients, I think is good advice for everyone.

Christian Klepp 33:51

Yeah, those are some really great points. And thanks again for sharing those. I would also throw in and I’m sure this is where you’re going with that, too, that companies shouldn’t just be asking for case studies just before they need them, right. This has to be something that… it’s like you said it’s nurturing those relationships with customers on an ongoing basis. So that when the time comes that you actually do need to write the case studies or, you know, the video testimonials, that it’s well, that they’re all warmed up already, right that you’re… and it’s also planned ahead of time. It shouldn’t be like this knee jerk reaction where somebody says, okay, because I’ve seen this happen, right? Oh, we’ve got a big pitch. We’ve got to submit the proposal by you know, in a couple of weeks, and we need case studies like we need four or five case studies pronto. So everybody’s in reactive mode. And by then it’s already too late.

Julian Lumpkin 34:43

Completely agree. And I think I’m answering very much you know, thinking that your audience is kind of in the… and the people really listening are in like the getting it going phase and that’s what’s important. But yeah, the next step is what you brought up and you said it really well. And the only thing I’ll add to it is, you know, when this all comes together, and it’s done correctly. You’re selling with case studies during your sales process, you so you’re already setting them up to understand like, Okay, this company does case studies. They are seeing them. And then when you make the request, you can say like, Hey, remember, you were really concerned about our ability to, you know, do the data transfer in the span of two weeks, you know, within our CRM? and we showed you that case study, well, now we’ve achieved some results for you, do you think we can document how… exactly your story so that we can help someone else? So it all starts to come together of having a process for getting case studies into your sales process, bringing it up with clients, you know, casually during the sales process, and then as you’re achieving results for them? And it kind of turns into a bit of a flywheel effect to use the popular term of the day.

Christian Klepp 36:02

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Julian, we get to the point in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips, right. So let’s appreciate that the kind of work that you and your company do. These aren’t things that you can do in, you know, in 24 hours, there isn’t like, at least not to my knowledge, there isn’t an app that you can download, and then bam, right, instant results. But going back to your point about the people that listen to the show, are probably in the situation, what is like a piece of advice, or maybe three to five things that you could tell them to do right now to develop those case studies that will help to shorten the sales cycle?

Julian Lumpkin 36:48

So if I were a marketer, in that situation, what is the approximate minimum number of case studies, we need to be in a solid situation. And by that I mean both a number of case studies. And if you sell to kind of four very distinct verticals, or different personas to maybe have one case study that hits each of these. So if I were in that situation, the first thing I would do, I would try to make this very specific. And numerical. How many do we need? What are the goals? And I think it’s such an important step, because the mistake I see marketers make is, like you said, they wait, they wait, they wait until they need them, they waited until they see or for a perfect situation. But by starting agreeing with sales leadership, people are going to use these case studies, obviously, you can as a marketer, too, and saying, What is that minimum position that we need to be in. Writing that down, agreeing with sales and/or account management that we’re going to, you know, ask the right number of people to get that. So I would decide on the number that you need, try to get a sense of what percentage of your clients are going to be willing to participate. And you’ll know that pretty quickly. Some you know… and then build a plan that is committed to and agreed with, with your marketing team, and your account management team. One of the main things we see stopping companies from getting case studies done is just too there’s too much inter-department coordination that doesn’t happen. So you want to get all three departments on the same page. This is what we need, what we need from, from marketing, from sales and from account management, and then start getting them done.

Christian Klepp 38:40

Fantastic. Fantastic. One more follow up question for the day, I promise. All right,

Julian Lumpkin 38:46

I’ve got time. Go on.

Christian Klepp 38:49

No, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. Because there’s a lot of well, the guests who have come on previously, and also people on LinkedIn, have been talking about this, but the format for the case study, and there’s been I know that there’s several camps out there, and one camp says you should stop, you know, listing it as the problem, the solution and the results. And then other people are saying like, No, that is the format that you should be using. And others are saying like, no, there’s a better format now. So over to you. What’s the correct format that folks should be using to create case studies.

Julian Lumpkin 39:30

I wouldn’t choose a specific format. It’s something I talk with each of my clients about. What I can say is that anyone telling you problem solution results, that doesn’t work because there’s some new fancy or entertainment way and that’s like the old boring case study, I think is overcomplicating the case studies. You can have different structures you know, leading with the big You know, kind of most exciting part or problem and different structures and custom headlines that kind of tie back to problems situation result because that is a good focus. But I think, I think over focusing on something like this really misses the point. The important part is that it’s your customer’s authentic story. That it speaks to the right audience, that it’s used correctly. Whether you make your headers problem, or describe the actual problem in that header. I don’t think is that important.

Christian Klepp 40:31

Totally agree. Totally agree. All right.

Julian Lumpkin 40:34

And just add to that, yes. So this is something we ask our clients about, about 50% of the case studies. We do follow that very closely. 50% take slightly slight variations.

Christian Klepp 40:47

Absolutely. Again, it’s back to what we’ve been talking about all this time. It really depends on the situation. Right?

Julian Lumpkin 40:53

Exactly. Yeah. If there’s one takeaway I’d give is that, that’s what my case studies, when you hear people saying case studies don’t work, or they’re not that good, or they’re this or that. It’s about how they use them. They’re not a magic bullet, they need to present it in the right situation with context. That’s what makes a case study powerful.

Christian Klepp 41:09

Absolutely, absolutely. Julian, I have this feeling that you’ve been on your soapbox all this time, but I’d like to ask you to stay on there a little bit longer. For this next question. So what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Julian Lumpkin 41:30

The biggest thing is that case studies need direct numerical results to be powerful. And it’s kind of like if they have… and this idea that if a case study has a specific percentage, and and it’s a good case study, and if a case study doesn’t have that it’s a bad case study, or it’s less effective. And that seems to be what most people think before they really dive into case studies. And I disagree.

Christian Klepp 41:54

I tend to disagree with that as well. I mean, I’ve heard it so many times before that, you know, when you present case studies, and they don’t see the quantifiable results, that’s why I asked the question about the whole ROI question. Because how often have you heard customers or prospects say, Well, if you can’t quantify the results, then that’s not a good case study or, or that’s not, that’s not a good result. And I tend to disagree with that.

Julian Lumpkin 42:20

Yeah, and I asked people to, like think like, it’s like, it’s such a kind of like, me, us marketing focus point of view, like, think of like, I always want to have these conversations, I get tried to get people to put yourself back in the prospect situation. Can you write out in your ROI for every piece of software that you use? And like? No, that doesn’t mean you don’t like them. So if a company is forcing you into that mindset, they’re not going with how prospects naturally think about things. And it may seem like numerical is always better. And it’s great to have them but in reality, you know, just because something’s good, doesn’t mean you can define it numerically and not having that, and it depends on the situation.

Christian Klepp 43:04

Absolutely, absolutely. Julian, this has been a great conversation, you handled all my impromptu questions like a champ. So thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Julian Lumpkin 43:23

Well, first of all, thanks for asking such good detailed questions. I do a lot of these interviews and your questions really got to the heart of what matters in case studies. If people want to find me or SuccessKit, they can find me on LinkedIn, Julian Lumpkin. I’m the only one with that name. So pretty easy to find. If you’re interested in our company or help with case studies, it’s SuccessKit, the word successkit.io

Christian Klepp 43:48

Fantastic. Fantastic. So once again, Julian, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Julian Lumpkin 43:55

Thank you.

View Details

How to Do Social Selling The Right Way

Nobody likes to get “pitch slapped”, nor is anyone logging into their inbox or social media accounts to be hunted down by relentless salespeople who won’t take “no” for an answer. There is a better way that is not only less intrusive or pushy but also engaging and filled with valuable content. That’s where social selling comes in.

That’s why we brought on social selling expert Brandon Lee (Founder, Fist Bump) to talk about what social selling IS and ISN’T, and how it can be used to fill that trust gap between companies and sales. Brandon also highlights the pitfalls to avoid, what the “Circle of Trust” is, and why commenting as well as engaging is just as important as posting content on platforms like LinkedIn.

https://youtu.be/XjTvQ748l9c

Topics discussed in episode

• Brandon explains why the trust factor is such a challenge in B2B. [2:54]
• What social selling IS and ISN’T, and how it helps to fill the trust gap. [6:32]
• Some common mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to social selling. [12:34]
• How B2B buying behavior has changed and how social selling should adapt to these changes. [19:09]
• Brandon elaborates on what a good social selling strategy should look like. [27:43]
• Brandon provides an example of the value of posting personal content on LinkedIn. [37:05]
• Actionable tips: What B2B marketers can do right now to improve their social selling approach. [43:02]

Companies and links mentioned

• Brandon Lee on LinkedIn
• Fist Bump
• Funnel Amplified
• Social Selling 2.0

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Brandon Lee, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Alright, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies to revolutionize the art of social selling. I’m a great fan of his… he knows it. I’ve been listening to his show. I’ve had the honor of being interviewed by him and now it’s, you know, now it’s his turn. So coming to us from Alpharetta, Georgia. Brandon Lee, welcome to the show, sir.

Brandon Lee 01:20

Thank you, Christian. I’ve been looking forward to this. We always have great conversations. So this will be fun.

Christian Klepp 01:25

Absolutely. Absolutely. Brandon. But you know, I’m a tad bit disappointed today because you do not have a cigar with you.

Brandon Lee 01:32

Yeah. You know, I don’t, I don’t do that in video. You know, that’s, that’s kind of shhhhh. But you know, yeah, I have a, I have a group of guys that I get together with once or twice a month. And I enjoy a cigar here and there.

Christian Klepp 01:51

Fantastic. Well, Brandon, it’s great to have you on the show. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation because man, not only is this a pertinent to B2B marketers, it’s also pertinent to sales. This is a term and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been so like overused, or like loosely used and often misinterpreted. And I think one of the great things about today’s conversation is we’re gonna help clear the air and demystify all of these things around the social selling, right? Let’s do it. Let’s dive in. So, okay, so as I said, for this conversation, let’s focus on this topic of how to create trust, credibility, and drive revenue with social selling the right way. And I’m gonna say that again, the right way, because we’ve seen so many folks on different platforms, doing this the wrong way. But let’s kick off the conversation with this question. Why do you think that trust factor is such a challenge in B2B? And we had a conversation about this earlier before I hit record.

Brandon Lee 02:54

Oh, man, you know, it’s trust. But trust in sales is at an all-time low. And that means trust in marketing, trust in brand awareness, trust in everything is really at an all-time low. And you know, the data right now then, with asking buyers about their buying experience, 78% of buyers said they would prefer a salesperson-less buying process. Now, that is not a testament to anything other than the fact that trust in salespeople, the culture or perceived culture of salespeople is just in an all-time low. And I believe that both sides of the aisle, sales and marketing are responsible for it. Because we in the last call it 10 years, give or take. We have bombarded customers with messages, we have interrupted them, we have pursued them. We’ve gone in the name of personalization, we’ve gone in the name of buyer intent data, all of these different tools. But the bottom line is from the buyers perspective, they’re being hunted. They’re being pursued. It is relentless. And it’s just bothering people.

Christian Klepp 04:15

Absolutely, absolutely. Man, you brought up a couple of key words there. And I wanted to go back to them: interruption, right, because a lot of people have said this on LinkedIn. So I can’t claim to be the one that has come up with this originally, but anything that is not relevant to somebody else’s work, or helping them to achieve their goals is an interruption. Right. And the fact that sales and marketing people collectively and independently are responsible for this trust gap. That is so true. And I wanted to go back to that one about the 78%. So let me just repeat that what 78% of buyers prefer to have a salesperson-less experience.

Brandon Lee 04:59

Yeah. And you would think it would be the other… I mean, it should be the other way. Yes. Huge if. If salespeople were doing what they were supposed to do, from a buyer’s perspective, be informed, be knowledgeable, help me think of things I haven’t thought of, help me see things that are coming at me that I may not be aware of, help me with solutions, all of those things that salespeople in my opinion used to do a lot better before the internet, it’s still what buyers want. But most sales people don’t do it, because they’re trying to move fast. I think a lot of it is culture problems within companies, they got these 30 days, 60 days, 90 days pressure. And what becomes the norm and the culture is quantity over quality. And that has just contributed to this big gap between what buyers really want and expect and what most sales organizations deliver.

Christian Klepp 06:03

Absolutely, absolutely. And on that note, that’s a great segue into a follow up question. In fact, two follow up questions. And you’re not gonna have any problem answering these. Let’s clear the air a little bit here, shall we? Social selling? In simple terms, please tell us what it is, and what isn’t. And number two, is, when we’re talking about the trust gap, how does social selling help them fill that gap?

Brandon Lee 06:32

Yeah, remind me all the questions there. Because there’s a lot, like we can take up all of our time just on that conversation. Look, I think in a, in a big broad term, social selling is about brand awareness. It’s, it’s a communication channel. It’s a networking tool. Gosh, remember when we used to call these things, social networks, not social media. It’s, it’s a networking tool. What it shouldn’t be, is a substitution for spam email. And that’s what most people have started using it for. There’s all these automation tools that are technically break the LinkedIn terms and services. However, there’s lots of companies out there that have it. And what that means, I mean, gosh, Christian, you and I, before we press record, we were chatting a little bit about this, what it means is that we get, they’ll put a bunch of people into a list, they’ll set up a sequence with it, and it’ll fire off. And most of the time, what people perceive social selling is send you a cold connection request, send a message and tell them how awesome I am and ask for a meeting. It’s a two-step process. What it should be, is engaging with people, sharing valuable content that does three things. It’s got to educate, it’s got to entertain, and it’s got to engage. And if it doesn’t, educate, entertain and engage, your audience isn’t going to care about it anyway. But we’ve got to be doing those two things, we have to share content, and we have to engage with our audience. And I know there’s a there’s a bunch of questions in there. But here’s really where I think it’s it’s so important for companies, and especially the C suite, who traditionally have just not had time for LinkedIn. Number one, I was just… we were recording our show. And we’re talking about employee advocacy and recruiting. And Macadam, who out of Belgium, who was our guest, was sharing that he had a workshop for eight people that were CXOs. And it was going to be on LinkedIn. And he said six of them said, Why am I worried about LinkedIn, I’m not looking for a job. So if you’re in a C suite, or your head of marketing, and you’re thinking that, hey, this LinkedIn thing is all about resumes or job searching. Look, LinkedIn is about recruiting. And now there’s a lot of companies out there right now that are struggling with recruiting and filling seats. If your CEO or someone on your C suite is not consistently on LinkedIn, creating content, sharing about the business, you know, interviewing employees, have your employees on your LinkedIn accounts, have an employee sharing each other’s posts, and demonstrating what your culture is of your company. And you’re going to be picking up the bottom of the barrel employees. LinkedIn, the social MSA, the social selling, the selling part is you’re selling your company to new employees. You’re selling your company to new customers, you’re selling your company to your existing employees for retention, you’re selling it to your existing customers for renewals, and deeper wallet share. All of this is about creating a culture of your business that people want to be around.

Christian Klepp 10:19

I mean, you know, what you brought up in the past couple of minutes, also speaks volumes to the issue of filling that trust gap. Right. Yeah. And also about, like, you know, you brought up recruiting, and that’s such a pertinent topic. I mean, I’m sure you guys are facing the same problem on your side of the fence. But um, they just announced in the news today that certain cities in Canada have to reduce the number of flights to the United States, because they just don’t have enough people. Right, to work at flights, to work at the airports. I mean, this is this is a problem that’s been going on for three years now, thanks to COVID. But, and that problem hasn’t gone away, and all that everything’s reopened.

Brandon Lee 11:03

Yeah, I think like social should be viewed as the tool that is differentiating you from the rest of your competition. I mean, we’re in 2023. And there’s a lot of companies that use it really, really well. But the reality is, most companies still don’t, they don’t have a comprehensive plan around using social media for communicating with the world. Again, that could be with the new employees, it could be with existing clients, it could be with new clients. But in 2023, if you’re not using this strategically, for all of those key areas of your business, you’re missing out on what’s probably the most cost effective, and most effective tool that you can use. And it just takes a little bit of thought, energy, focus, systems, just like any other area of your business, it’s no different. It just needs our attention. And I think the key there is getting the C suite out of thinking that LinkedIn is for resumes, and resumes only.

Christian Klepp 12:18

I’m really glad you brought those up. I mean, first of all, like not having a plan, and then you know, getting the C suite to change their mindset. Let’s jam on that a little bit more, if we can. And also, please add on some other mistakes and misconceptions that you see out there.

Brandon Lee 12:34

Yeah, you know, I think… thanks for that question. I think that, you know, a lot of times, I’ll talk to C suite that says, oh, yeah, our marketing teams all over social media. I used to go Oh, that’s great. And now I asked a lot more questions, because I don’t know what the heck that means. Right? They say, Oh, yeah, our marketing team has told us that we have a social media plan. And generally, it’s going to mean that social, they’re going into LinkedIn, maybe once a week, and they post something that is much more like a brochure than something that’s educating or entertaining or engaging their audience, it’s much more of a brochure, look, I’ve worn the CMO hat. I’ve worn the CRO hat, I’ve worn a CEO hat. I don’t mean this to knock marketers. I know your audience is very much marketers. But a lot of marketers still tend to think like a bullhorn. You’re going to go tell them about something. We’re gonna go tell them how wonderful we are about something. And here’s the hard reality right now. And this is for my company, your company, everyone else’s company. You may not want to hear it, but no one cares. They just don’t care. And there’s too much noise. They’re too much content. There’s too many phone calls. There’s too many emails, there’s too much work to do, because we haven’t recruited enough people to fill the seats for people to take the time to even care about that type of message. So we have to be much more intelligent about capturing people’s attention. And it really comes down to is it something that’s valuable to them? I know the terms buyer centric versus seller centric, just get used pretty flippantly these days. But if companies are not really taking an honest look at what do my buyers need to understand, and what do they need to believe in order to want our product and speak to them in those terms? Versus well look at all of our cool features. Look at all the cool things that we can do. Oh, let me show you all of our logos. Right? Of course, we don’t show all the logos we only show the real impressive ones right? Um, I remember this as an example. Yeah. Anthony and Reno, you know, famous author, speaker, all that phenomenal human being on top of that, he was a guest on our show. And he gave the example said, you know, you get 2 different organizations coming in to sell. In generally they come in and they do their pitch on the first day, and the second group comes in, they do their pitch on the second day. And then you go ask the people that were in the buying, you know, the buying team, hey, what was the difference? They’re gonna be like, well, the guy, the first guy was was taller. And I think the second guy had like a red logo. Right? Why is that? It’s because most people go in, and this is whether it’s a presentation, it’s your social media content, it’s your emails, whatever. It’s all about us. And we should all know by now that when we talk about ourselves, people just, they start thinking about their to do list, they start thinking about what they’re gonna have for dinner, they start thinking about a bunch of other things. And we’re trained. We smile. We shake our head, though we really don’t care.

Christian Klepp 16:18

Man, you really hit the nail on the head there… I love the post where… Oh, look, our CEO was interviewed. Right? Yes. Or we’re at this, we’re at this trade conference, or this or this trade show. Come and say hi.

Brandon Lee 16:33

Yeah. Now, your CEO is on video consistently. Interviewing customers, talking about, you know, what’s, what’s coming in the future. Talking about anything like that. And then you share something about, oh, by the way, he’s going to be on the show, or oh, he’s on the floor at our booth at this conference. Well, now you got people paying attention, because they know him or her. Right? They’ve seen him. They’ve heard them that CEO has been pouring value into them. Now they’re going to pay attention to that stuff. But when you just do this, you know, random, random post stuff, and think, oh, everybody’s got to go share this. Because we’re at a conference now. Your audience doesn’t care, you haven’t taken care of your audience enough for them to pay attention. And therefore, you don’t get the likes. You don’t get the comments. You don’t get the shares. You don’t get diddly squat. That’s absolutely right. And then, and then get this and then people throw their hands in the air and they go, Oh, social selling doesn’t work. When it becomes a random act of posting, no strategy, not giving to your audience, no consistency. Well you’re right. Social media sucks. It just doesn’t work. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not a magic wand. And I know with marketers, we have a plan, we have a strategy in 2023, you better take a look at it. Because posting to your corporate pages is views are way down. Because buyers don’t trust your brand messages. It just don’t. Because what are you going to say? something negative? Unless your brand content is pouring into them – Here’s tasks that you know, here’s techniques, here’s this, here’s that, here’s what’s coming. Here’s what you should know. Unless it’s that type of content. They don’t care.

Christian Klepp 18:34

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And we can go pretty deep with this one, but just skim the surface a little bit if you will. Okay. Here comes the understatement of the year. The landscape has changed for B2B buyers. Yeah. So from your perspective and your experience, how has the world of B2B buyers changed? And here’s the follow up question. How can marketers help sales to adapt to these changes using social selling?

Brandon Lee 19:09

Yeah, so I like to call it the buyers have the circle of trust. Remember that movie, Meet the Fockers. And he’s like, circle of trust, right? The crazy dad. Buyers have their circle of trust. And we’re all on the outside until we’re invited into their circle of trust. And how we get invited is what is important and what we can control. So everybody think about your own social media network, your own digital efforts, your own phone like and what you do on your phone. Right? We can accept connection requests. We can unfollow any page we want. We all have very simple buttons. I mean, my iPhone on every email that comes in and it’s newsletter-y. I have a little button right at the top. I can just unsubscribe from there. Right? We have all this information that comes into us. And we have all these methods to keep it out. Unsubscribe, we have voicemail. We don’t have to answer calls. I even have a filter thing on my phone that tells me it’s a suspected spam or a telemarketer, like, never have to answer that. Right. So how it’s changed is, I think, in the early 90s, I’m gonna use numbers like 2010 and 2020. But roundabout areas, around 2010, we started really getting into email marketing, inbound marketing, landing pages, and giving away white papers for free. And buyers were like sweet, free information. What they didn’t know is that they were gonna get lambasted with messages for the next 60 days, because they downloaded a white paper. Like, when we download something, we’re in research mode, it doesn’t mean I raised my hand and said, Please bug the shit out of me for the next 60 days. Because I hit some MQL number that you think is important. I have a company I love their research. And I don’t know how many times I’ve downloaded something, and I will look at my phone. In fact, I’ve been tempted to do this live, I download something, and I look at my phone and wait. And within one minute, my phone rings. And I don’t even give them my phone number anymore.

Christian Klepp 21:32

Wow, that fast.

Brandon Lee 21:34

That fast. Now they’re big, big company, right? I don’t want to say their name, but they’re big company. But I’ll download it with just my email. And I can even use different emails. But they’ve got this massive database and within a minute my phone rings to see if I’m interested in talking about purchasing. And it’s a product I’m never going to purchase. It’s not on my radar. It’s not something I’m going to use but I love there. So 2010 ish we did we started doing this behavior and we marketers are tumbling is we put in all this automation, makes sure that we’re in front of them and staying yellow send this message out, then we throw the lead over to sales and they start pounding the phone and calling him. Because of all that buyers have said enough. And they unsubscribe and they unfollow and all those different things. So the only way that we’re going to capture their attention, if they’re not answering our calls, they’re not responding to our cold emails, they’re not following our business page. The only way that we can do it is to be invited into it. And the way that we do that is through valuable content for them. Consistent, valuable content for them. And I would even say Christian, what you do with your, with your show, with the best pieces of content that companies can be doing. Do episodic content. So you’re in front of them consistently. You’re constantly adding value, bring on different guests, create snippets of your content, use those that you can share in YouTube shorts, put it on Tik Tok. Put it on Instagram reels whatever, but the more they see you. And its value adding content, the more comfortable they are. And then what comes from that is when the calls do come in, or the emails do come in, they’re much more likely to answer it because they go, Oh, Christian, I know you or I know your company. I see your your CEO on all the time, right? We’ve got to stand out from the sea of sameness. And I’m going to add one more thing to this. And then I’ll stop. You told me to scratch the surface. Hopefully I’m doing a good job for you.

Christian Klepp 23:46

You are. you are. (laugh)

Brandon Lee 23:49

The sea of sameness is what we’re fighting against. Every company looks alike right now. We pound the phones, we pound the emails, we want their attention, we want their attention. The way that we are different is by doing things that other companies are not. And so much of that value is inside of social media. And I love to use the term digitally dominant, I call it digital dominance as a strategy. How can we digitally dominate the news feed for your industry, it’s got to start at the top. The CEOs got to get involved or someone at the C suites got to champion it and be become a personal brand builder in order to become a a Brand Builder. But when someone at the top starts demonstrating it, and then we have plans in how we’re going to train and coach and lead and provide content and everything for the rest of the team. You get enough people doing that. You will digitally dominate the news feed and you will dominate your competition.

Christian Klepp 24:55

Man those are some really great takeaways and thanks so much for sharing that and…

Brandon Lee 25:00

Oh, of course.

Christian Klepp 25:01

Yeah, you know, your little anecdote made me think about like, an experience I had 2018 or 2019. It could have been from that same big company you’re talking about who shall not be named. But um, anyways, I was. I was looking up something on Google, as you do. And I saw their ebook, and I downloaded it. And I’m like, well, there’s 10 fields I have to fill out. Okay. I wanted the content bad enough that I that I obliged, and I did that. And I, I entered my phone number. And it wasn’t one minute, but it was about it was about 10. And the guy calls up and says, Hey, is this Christian. And I’m so and so from this company. Christian, I am literally 15 minutes away from where you are right now. Like my office at the time. I can literally, like, go down there. And we can have coffee, and we can talk about how you can use this solution. And I’m like, what, what just happened? Like… (laugh)

Brandon Lee 26:03

You didn’t realize you were dating? Did you?

Christian Klepp 26:05

Yeah. I’m like, Who are you? What’s going on? Oh, you download that ebook. I’m like, Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to buy. Yeah. All right. And that went back and forth for about five minutes. And I’m like, Listen, man, like, I don’t think that this is going to be a very useful phone call for you. Because I’m not interested. Alright. Yeah. And that completely, like, turned me off to this company. Right. I went back to unsubscribe and all that right. So…

Brandon Lee 26:32

Yeah. So you’d asked earlier is, why is trust down so much. And it’s because of behavior like that. There’s, there’s not a respect for our own process. Right. And I get it, there’s this tough challenge on sales and marketing these days. And I don’t want to dismiss that. But on the sales side, we’ve used a lot of technology to really overstep, in my opinion, and we’ve lost the trust of buyers. So that their go-to reaction is stay away. Because we’ve proven in the last decade, that we’re not trusted to behave well. If, if we are invited in in any way, shape, or form.

Christian Klepp 27:18

Absolutely. All right. So for this next question, I call this one the Lego approach, you know, just break it down into its parts. So okay, break it down for us, Brandon. In the B2B context, what should a good social selling strategy look like?

Brandon Lee 27:36

Oh, gosh, that’s such a huge question.

Christian Klepp 27:39

All right. I’m just, I’m just throwing all these big questions at you today.

Brandon Lee 27:43

Yeah. Look, let me let me break it down this way. I think there’s there’s two key activities that individuals need to view. One of them everybody knows. And I’ll say it never goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know, we need to publish content. But even more importantly, we need to have a commenting strategy and system. Now, why is that the case, when we publish content. 99% of us have no desire to be an influencer. However, it’d be nice to be influential to about 100 to 200 people. But when we publish content, we have no control over who sees it. The algorithm determines that. Maybe the hashtags we put in have something to do with it. And a lot of people have gone down this route of joining pods where you get the same people that comment and you comment on theirs, and try to fabricate that and do all those things. But we can’t control really, who’s going to see our content. But when we comment, and this is a strategy that anybody can do, I highly recommend testing it. And you’ll be blown just right how well it works. I go in in the morning, and I comment on my targeted prospects activities first. First thing I do, and why do I do this, because I can control my activity, I can go to their post, I can go to their go to their post activity, and I can go to their reactions. And if I comment on any of those things, the algorithm sees us being connected. I am in a sense, hacking, influencing whatever word you want to use, I’m influencing the algorithm because of my actions that I can control. Now once the algorithm sees us connected, and then later an hour later, something then I publish content. Number one, my target audience is gotten a notification that says oh look Brandon commented on a post that you commented on, I’ve influenced the algorithm. And now I’ve published my content, which gives it a higher likelihood that my posts will show up in their newsfeed. My commenting activity also makes a higher likelihood that they’re gonna click and go see who I am. And what do we do when we go to people’s profiles to see who they are? We read a little bit about him, but we also look and see what if they published. So those are at that really high level, publishing and commenting. And really, for me, if I could only do one in a day, I couldn’t do both, I would do commenting over publishing.

Christian Klepp 30:43

Great advice there. And I want to go back to that because man, it it’s worth repeating. Because I think so many people A) don’t understand how this works. And B) they because they don’t understand how it works. They completely ignore it, the commenting and engaging and how important that is. So, I mean, what why do you think people don’t do it as much? Or they just do it the lazy way, like love it. Thanks for sharing something that’s completely like, like a nothing burger. But yeah, a little bit of description.

Brandon Lee 31:15

Yeah, you know, I still think and even though, you know, let’s say social media has been around for 15 years, give or take, right a little bit longer call, probably close to 20. Now, right? We still carry the imposter syndrome. We’re really worried, am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to be judged for it? It feels with social media, like it’s permanent. Even though social media has a short, short memory. Think about who is who was number one in the news two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, because of some flop that they did. Might not even remember now, like, we really do have short terms. But I think the other thing is commenting and strategically commenting, it takes work. There’s not, I mean, not to say shameless plug. But the reason I built fist bump is there wasn’t an easy way to strategically go comment on a sequence or in a system, the same people over and over and over. I use bookmarks and I use spreadsheets and things like that. But it takes work. And unfortunately, we live in a culture right now where people prefer the easy button. And, you know, if you have a choice of being efficient or being effective, I’d rather be effective. Right? I’d rather be prospecting 25 people and have a 60% close rate, then to be prospecting 200 people and have a 2% close rate. That’s, it takes effort. It takes work. I think the other thing when it comes to commenting, and here’s another thing that people don’t like to do is educate yourself. Read, I mean, 30 minutes a day, read something, listen to something from your industry. Because when you do, and you’re looking at other people’s posts, you’re now filled with all this ammunition of what to say and what to share and how to do it. So it takes work, read, educate yourself, have something valuable to say, say it, learn a little bit of the strategies on you know, tagging people and using hashtags, whatever. But here’s the thing that I found. I can work. Like, I can sit here in my home office, every day of the week. I don’t, I get tired of being alone. But I can sit here every day. I’ve got conversations with people all over the world. I’m on zooms. And it’s all from people I’ve met in the comments. I’ve got three calls this week, with people that I didn’t know a week ago. But I went in and commented strategically, capture their attention. And either they reached out to me or I followed up strategically and reached out for them and said, Man we’re commenting on the same post. We’re not yet connected. I’d love to be connected and would you like to get on a call and get to know each other? When you don’t sound like a pitch slap, you don’t sound like a you know if I can say this on your show a douchebag salesperson that’s trying to capture attention all the time.

Christian Klepp 34:29

I will give you permission to say that. (laugh)

Brandon Lee 34:33

People want to talk to you. And then it also makes our workday so much fun. It’s networking, not selling. It’s networking. It’s meeting people, sharing. It’s helping them and they help you. It’s a lot of fun. But you got to show up the right way because the way that you show up is going to determine the way they respond to you. And if you show up like this, they’re just going to put up their circle of trust, they’re going to keep you out, they’re going to ignore you, ghost you, all of those things. And you show up as a human being, and engage, publish, publish a little bit about who you are, as a human being, don’t hide behind your title. That’s when people want to start engaging with you. And it becomes a lot more fun and comes a lot more profitable.

Christian Klepp 35:28

Absolutely, absolutely. You reminded me of this one connection I made on LinkedIn. Must have been two years ago now. And I didn’t know at the time that she was a B2B marketer. She’s based in Switzerland. We connected because we both answered the same LinkedIn poll, and the poll was about how many languages you speak. Right? And she looked at mine, and she saw that I also speak, you know, besides German, and I’m learning French, and I and I learned Mandarin, but I speak Filipino as well. Right? And she, but this person does. Okay, so the person connected with me, well, she, you know, she’s…. her husband’s Russian, but she actually grew up in Indonesia. So we have that Southeast Asian connection. That’s how we connected. All right. We connected on LinkedIn, we jumped on a couple of zoom calls. And our you know, now we’re good friends. Yeah. But it’s going back to your point about like, you know, showing up the right way being well, not just strategic, but being thoughtful and intentional, right?

Christian Klepp 36:33

One of my favorite is that I’m in business class again. Right? Like…

Brandon Lee 36:33

Yes. Can I share about a post… this is wishes post that I did that opened my eyes to the value of more personal type content. Now I want to I want to say this isn’t Facebook type content. I’m not saying take a picture of your plate and show where you’re at for dinner. And you know, don’t do… you know, here’s my new car. Oh, I’m so blessed. I got a new car. Like, none of that.

Brandon Lee 37:05

You know, but, so it was a Saturday morning, I was up. It was not early, early, but it was kind of early, and I was working on my laptop. And I heard a motorcycle come up our driveway, I have kind of a long driveway, not like a mile or anything, but we’ve got a long driveway and I’m thinking, who’s, who’s coming… who’s on a motorcycle, it’s coming up to our house, especially on a Saturday morning. There’s you know, we have five kids. And I kind of went through this mental game of going oldest daughter and she know anybody… second oldest, you know, I’m kind of going through the list and I’m walking over and I get to the front. And we have a glass front door. And I look out and I start laughing to myself, because it’s our 10 year old neighbor on his little dirt bike. And I opened the door and he opens up his old mask on he’s got his helmet, he pulls up his mask and he goes: Hi Mr. Lee, can Zoe come out and play? Zoe was eight at the time. And I’m dying. I’m laughing because I had this whole story going up. I’m thinking it’s like is Maddy and Kate or Abby or Beckham have friend, you know, I’m going through all the all the… No 10 year old Devon, our next door neighbor, Zoe’s buddy. And I snap a picture. And I go and I post it on LinkedIn. And I’m laughing going, Oh, my gosh, you know, I can’t believe what happened… And here’s how thing… for me it took off. I mean, it was like 65,000 views, like almost 400 comments. I don’t know how many likes. But one person that commented on it was a second connection. I had never met her before in my life. She was a CMO of a bank. And she commented, oh my gosh, if that happened with us, my husband would have died. Well, I comment back. You know, I’m a dad of four daughters. And you know, and she comments and I comment and then I send her a connection request, she accepts it. I send her a message, she sends one back, we chit chat. I’m now friends with the CMO of this bank of a regional bank, big regional bank, right?

Christian Klepp 39:17

Hey, that’s a win. So.

Brandon Lee 39:20

How long would have or could have or even been possible if I was cold calling her I was sending her cold emails like that to get her attention? Zero. right. Now I’ll share another quick story because I like emphasizing this for people when it comes to commenting and publishing. We get to demonstrate our humanity. We get to demonstrate who we are as a human being, not hide behind our title. And before anybody thinks, oh, it’s LinkedIn. It’s not personal. Bull. Business is personal. It’s always been personal. So this is why we take people to dinner. That’s why we take them to lunch, we go to coffee, we show up their office with the box of doughnuts, whatever it is. Most of the time that we have conversations with people, the vast majority of that conversation starts, ends or is dominated by human conversation. How’s your family? What do you do this weekend? Oh, you went hiking? That’s great. Where did you go? My family and I like hiking, we’re always looking for ways to connect with people. LinkedIn is a way that you can connect with people, you give them a little bit of a glimpse into who you are as a human being at scale. So I have a client of ours. That was a cyclist. And he nervous do I do this? I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. Always hid behind his title. Hidden behind the book, I’ve written. All of our accolades… finally started doing a little bit more. He had a picture of him on his top of a mountain holding up his bike over his head. He’s a cyclist, and he’s telling the story about how he overcome overcame a serious injury to be able to do this ride that had been on his bucket list. It was loaded with comments, flooded with congratulations. One of his ideal customers who he had been trying to get their attention for years and never responded commented. Why? he’s a cyclist too. Bonded over cycling, easy conversation to get from there and go down the path of the sales opportunity. I said both those stories for this. You asked about what social selling is. You asked about what social selling isn’t? You asked why we lost trust. It’s because we tend to hide behind our titles, act like everything’s perfect. And send out messages to demand their attention. And it’s not the way humans behave. Take the way you behave in real life at a networking event, and duplicate or mimic that inside of LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp 42:15

Fantastic, fantastic. Those are great stories, man. Thanks for sharing that.

Brandon Lee 42:19

Of course.

Christian Klepp 42:20

In the interest of time, I’m going to slowly start wrapping this up. But I’ll throw two more questions your way before I let you go. Okay.

Brandon Lee 42:28

Okay. You got it.

Christian Klepp 42:31

Thank you. Thank you. This show is also very much about actionable tips. Okay. So let’s appreciate and you’ve talked about it now in the last, you know, couple of minutes, and so forth. But um, Let’s appreciate that you can’t do all of this and, you know, in a day, and it’s not an app that you can download, and he’s got like all these instant results. But if somebody were listening to the show, who’s a B2B marketer, who’s thinking about doing social selling, what are like three to five things that they can do right now?

Brandon Lee 43:02

Yes. Number one, ask sales what content would be best for their customers? Number two, go ask your buyers. What are they concerned about? I would ask the question with buyers and say, if you could tell us what content to create for the next six months? What type of content would you like us to provide you? Something along those lines, because they’re going to tell you what they need. And if you give them what they need, you’ve become a trusted adviser, because you demonstrate it by giving trusted advice. So I’d ask sales because they know and here’s the other thing is marketers and we just have to be realistic with ourselves. Marketers, we tend to speak at people. Right? From the old days of we were the ones that created brochures, we created banners, we create graphics for the for the conference, we create flyers, direct mail, all that said, we’re used to talking at people, salespeople are used to talking with people. They’re trained to listen and respond. And our content should be the same. We should be listening and responding to give them what they need and what they want. And no time is there. So I’m stopping there. If you want more. I keep going.

Christian Klepp 44:27

Absolutely. No, I think these are good. These are great to start with. I mean, like first of all asking sales like what content they need, while not that they need, that their customers would need, that their customers would find useful. Also talking to the buyers. That’s a great piece of advice

Brandon Lee 44:45

In extending that asking salespeople hey, if we created content for you to share, what content that would be, what would that be that makes you look good to your buyers? Yes. Right because that’s it all these employee advocacy programs. I mean, I think they have great intentions. But most of the marketers I talked to will say, Oh, yeah, but they just won’t share it. No, it’s not that they won’t. They don’t want to. And it’s because the content doesn’t serve them or their customers very well. So ask them those questions.

Christian Klepp 45:19

Exactly. Exactly. And by doing that, that’s going back to your point early on in the conversation, right? It’s building that trust, right? giving them what they need, right.

Brandon Lee 45:30

Bottom line of this is if your goal is to become a trusted adviser, or perceived as a trusted adviser, then you need to focus on what is the advice that I can give that’s trustworthy. You have to demonstrate being a trusted adviser by giving trusted advice. And if you’re not doing that, you’re never going to get trusted advisor status. It’s going to prevent the leads coming in, it’s going to hurt sales people from getting their leads, you’re going to create that fraction even more between sales and marketing, because if sales doesn’t look at you as benefiting them, then they’re going to ignore you and everything you ask them to do.

Christian Klepp 46:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Man, Brandon, if we were doing this in person, I would fist bump you. No pun intended. But we could go on and on and on about all of this. But thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick introduction yourself and help folks out there can get in touch with you. Oh,

Brandon Lee 46:33

Absolutely. I appreciate that. Brandon Lee on LinkedIn. BrandonLeedigital is my handle. You can also find me on the socialselling2.0, which is our live show and podcast. We recently hit number one on Apple for shows on social selling which is huge, but it’s also the social selling 2.0 was also our consulting brand, where everything from we have a done for you program where we take the C suite we take a CEO and build out a plan for them to become a thought leader and build a company culture. It helps them with recruiting and client retention and all that stuff. But social selling 2.0 and then my two technology companies on the employee advocacy side is funnel amplified. And on the social selling execution platform is fist bump. Thank you for letting me tell a little bit about myself. And thanks for having me as a as a guest. I always love our conversations, Christian.

Christian Klepp 47:39

Likewise, likewise, my pleasure and I’ll be sure to drop all those links in the notes and you know, thanks again for coming on the show Brandon, and take care stay safe and talk to you soon.

Brandon Lee 47:49

Thank you, Christian.

Christian Klepp 47:51

Alright, bye for now.

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How to Leverage Buyer Personas for Better Marketing Results

Effective and better results in B2B marketing (and sales for that matter) require a deeper understanding of what prospective customers need to know and experience before they buy. Understanding the prospect’s pain points, challenges, and what success looks like to them is also imperative.

Join us in our incredibly insightful conversation with B2B marketing expert Jim Kraus (President, Buyer Persona Institute), who talks to us about how buyer personas can and should be leveraged by marketing and sales teams. During our discussion, Jim talks about the top challenges facing marketers today and how organizations should use buyer persona insights to improve performance. Jim also highlights the results that organizations can achieve through buyer persona research and what mistakes to avoid.

https://youtu.be/KVdNgmmbsXw

Topics discussed in episode

• Jim talks about some of the top challenges that marketers are facing [1:53]
• Jim explains what a buyer persona is and how it can turn challenges into opportunities [4:30]
• The difference between a buyer persona and an ICP [10:45]
• Some of the mistakes and misconceptions around buyer personas, and what should be done to address them [12:42]
• Jim explains how organizations should use buyer persona insights to improve marketing and sales performance [15:27]
• The kind of results that B2B organizations can achieve through buyer persona research [19:50]
• Jim provides some actionable tips on how B2B marketers can leverage buyer persona research for better results [24:29]
• Jim talks about how often companies or marketers should review the buyer personas that they have and update them [30:09]

Companies and links mentioned

• Jim Kraus on LinkedIn
• Buyer Persona Institute

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Jim Kraus

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for change makers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

All right, folks, welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies to discover what their prospective customers need to know and experience before they will buy. So coming to us from Chatham, New Jersey, Mr. Jim Kraus, welcome to the show.

Jim Kraus 01:10

Thanks for having me, Chris. And looking forward to it.

Christian Klepp 01:13

Same here, Jim. I mean, this is a pretty… for lack of a better description, pertinent topic. So well, let’s dive in.

Jim Kraus 01:21

Sounds great.

Christian Klepp 01:21

All right. So Jim, your area of expertise lies in helping companies, as I said, to discover what their prospective customers need to know and experience before they buy. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I’m gonna say it’s become part of your professional mission and that is, how to leverage buyer personas for better and more effective results in marketing. So let’s kick off this conversation with a question. What do you think are some of the top challenges facing marketers today?

Jim Kraus 01:53

Yeah, I think there’s a few different challenges that come to mind. And it’s probably the ones that perhaps I see the most often in my day to day. One of them certainly is just focus and prioritization, particularly in today’s you know, more difficult economic environment, there’s any number of things that marketers could be doing to help the business, to help the sales force, identify and close more leads. And, you know, really trying to determine where do I really focus? What are the things that I should be doing and doing more of? And what are some of the things that I should be doing less of or even stopping, because we have insights that, you know, would lead us firmly to believe that they’re not really paying dividends, and they’re not really aligned to what buyers want and need most, to really trust and make decisions. I think the other area that we see marketers really challenged with is just how do they really influence buyers, and feel confident that their efforts are working? So you know, marketers are talented folks. So there’s any number of different marketing motions and things that they can be doing to help the business. But one of the things is, how can… one of the big challenges they have is how can you really feel assured that you really know your buyers really, really well. And you really understand that word, then when they’re making these buying decisions, that you’re giving them exactly what they need to know, and experience to trust you and your company to make that buying decision? So I think those are the two biggest things, probably, if I had to identify two right now that we see the most.

Christian Klepp 03:27

Absolutely, absolutely. Just a follow up question. On that point. Do you think a lot of the challenges also lie in companies being a little bit too obsessed with pushing out too much information about their product features and the solutions that they provide versus helping to solve the customer’s problems?

Jim Kraus 03:47

Yeah, I think that’s, that’s definitely part of it. And it’s one of those things where if you don’t know exactly what buyers want need, you’re left with the unenviable task of trying to communicate everything to them, which is very difficult, because they’re already inundated with so much information, you only have so little time to really connect with them in a real way. So yeah, I think that’s definitely one of the contributions to it.

Christian Klepp 04:11

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s a pretty good segue into the next question, which is how can buyer personas turn these challenges into an opportunity. And one question, one point that you raised just before I hit record was probably starting by explaining what a buyer persona is.

Jim Kraus 04:30

Yeah, so this is pretty fundamental, probably to everything else we’re going to talk about. And one of the things, the ways you can turn buyer personas into a real opportunity is just to shift your thinking on what your definition of a buyer persona may be, right? So I’ll refer to this for lack of a better word as a modern buyer persona. And what the fundamental difference between that and what you folks may think of the buyer persona is a modern buyer persona, and the way that we advocate doing them is really focused on understanding a specific buying decision, not just a profile of individuals or roles that are involved in that buying decision. And there’s a huge difference in that, you know, the former, when you’re focused on the buying decision, you’re trying to understand a buyer’s needs, concerns, key decisions, key questions that they’re going to want to have answers to, from providers, or thinking about, if you’re just profiling roles, it doesn’t give you those insights. You know, it just gives you information about maybe somebody’s education or information sources they use, even their priorities, overall priorities and challenges that doesn’t give you the insights you need to really develop very compelling marketing and sales plays, when you’re trying to influence a specific decision. So that’s, so that’s number one.

Jim Kraus 05:52

I think another key aspect of how we define buyer personas is how do you get that information? How do you get those insights. And the way to do it, the best way to do it is to talk to recent buyers, have in depth interviews with recent buyers. And what I mean by recent buyers is going out and talking to buyers that have recently made the exact same buying decision that you’re trying to influence. These aren’t necessarily your current customers, these are folks, individuals that you would have wanted in your sales pipeline, so that you have full visibility of all the buying decisions that are being made, that you’re going to really care about. When you talk to these individuals, the reason it’s so important is because you have an opportunity to really listen to their entire buyer’s story from the initial point where they had a need for a solution like yours, all the way until the point where they make a final decision. And all points in between. So the last piece, which it will take a minute to talk about, but I think it’s really important here is what are the key components of that buyer persona, right? So I just indicated that you really want to focus on the buying decision. That’s all well and good. But what are the things you really want to understand within the buying decision. And there’s five that are really critical, we call them the five rings of buying insight, just a name we’ve given them over the years. But the first one is priority… we call priority initiatives. And this is where you’re really trying to understand what are the triggers? What are the things that are causing buyers to look for your particular solution at this point in time, right? Because they may have had a challenge they’re trying to fix or an opportunity they’re trying to attack for any length of time. But what is the thing that really got them started? The second one we call success factors and success factors are benefits, outcomes. What do buyers in their own words, want to realize from their investment? How do they define success? Third one is called perceived barriers. This is one of my favorite ones for lack of a better word, because perceived barriers are all the fears and concerns that they’re going to have buying or making this investment or making this investment with you. And this is really important, because when you talk about B2B Marketing, a lot of these decisions are high consideration decisions. There’s probably some significant investment, there’s multiple decision influencers, there’s worry about, hey, if this doesn’t go the way we hoped it would there’s negative ramifications from it. So buyers are going to have concerns, you want to know what those are, so you can proactively address them. So that’s number three. The fourth one is decision criteria. And decision criteria is literally all the questions that they’re going to have of you, right. So they’re going to figure out who they want to consider. They’re going to look at different options, they’re going to winnow down their choices, you want to know what is all the decision criteria that they actually use to make that buying decision. And then the fifth and final one is buyers journey. And that’s simply what are the steps that they took in their purchase process. Who were the key influencers involved, what information sources they use and trust. So if you think about a buyer persona like that, where you’ve got insight into all those five key areas that will really address many of the marketing and sales opportunities you have, but also some of the challenges that I just mentioned as well. So that’s really a shift in thinking.

Christian Klepp 09:18

Absolutely, absolutely. No, thanks for sharing that. That is a pretty comprehensive list. I had two follow up questions for you, Jim. If you don’t mind, just based on what you’ve been talking about in the past couple of minutes. I like to start out with the one where you’re talking, where you referring to the need to have conversations with customers. And do those interviews to understand and get those extract those insights right to understand what their customers are dealing with their challenges, their concerns. How important do you think it is also to conduct interviews not necessarily just with existing clients but also perhaps maybe leads that have either gone stale or lost leads?

Jim Kraus 09:59

Absolutely. Really critical, right. So one of the key things that the reason you want to… when I say recent buyers, quote unquote, I’m literally talking about it could include some of your current customers, no question about it. But it could also very much include opportunities you’ve never seen, as well as the ones that you mentioned, leads that maybe you had initially that for whatever reason, whether you decided not to make an investment or they made a different decision. All those are fantastic inputs to round out your personas.

Christian Klepp 10:26

Okay. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the second question, which, you know, I’ve seen talk about this on LinkedIn, and people, as I said, earlier, people use these terms interchangeably, but highlight for us, if you will, the difference between a buyer persona and an ICP.

Jim Kraus 10:45

Right. So an ICP is your ideal customer profile is, you know, this is the customer that I always think of ICP, as, this is the type of customer that is ideally suited for your product or service. This is the kind that will be, it’ll be easy to make the sale, it’ll be easier for them to understand your value proposition, there’ll be more of an advocate for your brand and for your products and services. Right, that’s kind of your ideal customer profile. If you think about a time where you’re making a sale, and if everything just seems to be clicking, that’s your ideal customer, the ideal customer profile. There’s not a huge difference from buyer persona. And the reason I say that is because when you do a buyer persona, you know, when I talked about going out and talking to recent buyers, you want to define very specifically, what is the type of recent buyer that I want to go talk to, right, and you make a very conscious decision about this. So when we work with our clients to do buyer personas, we literally do an one hour study design meeting, where we meticulously define, what is that… What is that target? And it’s important, because you may define something about the solution, right? It’s not just a certain tech solution, for example, and certain tech solution with certain features. That is really where your focus, right, or it’s certain characteristics of the buyer that you define. And you want to define all of those, and then go out and talk to recent buyers. So you can make a decision, you can talk focus just on your ICPs. And define your specs that way. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. And that’s a great approach. If you want to go outside your ICP, and you’re looking for market expansion, or you’re just trying to say, hey, what other segments of the market maybe can we learn something? That’s a reason to also look outside your ICP?

Christian Klepp 12:29

Absolutely, absolutely. So, onto the next question, which I’m pretty sure you will have no problem answering. Um, talk about the mistakes and misconceptions and what should be done to address those.

Jim Kraus 12:42

Sure. Yeah. So yeah, so we got I’ll focus on the one that we just started talking about, because it’s so important. I mean, buyer personas, you know, my organization’s called Buyer Persona Institute. And, you know, one of the things we’ve talked about in the past is, you know, do we change the name of it to something else, and literally, because there’s this preconception about what a buyer persona is. So the biggest one is, again, going back is if, if you’re defining buyer persona, and you’re thinking about it as just a fictional avatar of that describes a decision maker and I say, decision maker, I mean, a role and individual, that you can definitely do better than that, that’s only going to take you so far, as far as how much that’s going to really inform your marketing and sales effort, it’s not going to really enable you to differentiate yourself in any kind of way. The thing to do about it is to make the change. If you’re not doing that, and focus on the buying decision, as I just described, it’s really a game changer. Because it you know, some of our some of our clients call them our the buyer personas, cheat sheets, because it literally will tell you everything you need to know to inform your marketing and sales efforts. So that’s, that’s really the key one. The other thing I will mention, for those that may be experiencing these pain points, if you’re focused on buyer personas that are focused on individuals and roles, there’s probably a couple of ways you’re going to know that you’re in pain, for lack of a better word. One is you’re probably gonna have too many personas, right? We’ve had, you know, I’ve met folks that have had 20, 30, 50, up to 100 personas. First of all, you have to ask yourself, are you ever going to be able to have the resources to invest in all of those personas, and it also just adds a lot of unnecessary complexity to what you’re trying to do. The other place that you’re probably going to feel it is you just don’t have the insights that you need. When you’re really sitting down and trying to develop marketing plans, marketing content messaging, you’re just going to have a lot of questions. It’s going to take you too far. Those are kind of the two main pain points that we see.

Christian Klepp 14:49

Hang on a second. Did you say 100 personas?

Jim Kraus 14:53

Yeah, yeah, for large global matrix companies. We’ve seen that before and we’ve had… folks come to us with their hands in the air to saying, you know, help. What do we do? What do we do? Yeah. And the good news is there’s a, this is a remedy for it. The hard part about it is, if you’re down a path where there’s this belief in these role based personas, and you can’t get off that train, so to speak, you know that that can be a hindrance to do it. But if you have the flexibility to do it, and you’re open to new approaches, this could be a real lifesaver.

Christian Klepp 15:27

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. How do you think organizations should use buyer persona insights to improve marketing and sales performance?

Jim Kraus 15:38

So I guess I’ll answer that question with where we see them use the most often. And we advocate for it, and we the ones that are really doing it and doing it well, are using them in a myriad of places. So from I would say three functional areas marketing, sales and product. From a marketing perspective, we see them a lot in taking a fresh look at positioning, we see them used a lot for campaign, and content inspiration, idea generation, right, just a fresh look at just these different ways that you’re…. these different motions you have. Coming up with new ones or refreshing them. We see them using and messaging quite a bit. Obvious, obvious value for messaging, I think the key place where we see people really using them effectively is when they focus their messaging at all stages of the buyers journey. Another way to think about it is these buyers personas will inform messaging at each stage of the funnel from top of the funnel all the way to bottom and middle, particularly when you get the perceived barriers and decision criteria, because now you’re really starting to get into how do you drive conversion when they’re taking a hard look at their alternatives. So that’s from a marketing perspective, that’s where we see it. Sales, we see a couple different places we see sales plays, you know, coming up with conversation starters, you know, sales, a lot of sales folks, what they really want to know is when they’re approaching new prospects is give me some insight about what I can go talk to these folks about, that’s going to be something they’re going to want to talk about. And oh, by the way, it’s something where we have a good story to tell. We have capabilities, we see them using battle cards, we see them used for objection handling, because of the buyer personas will identify many times a lot of objections that you’re that you’ll face. So that really prepares the Sales force. And then from a product perspective, we’ll say the key thing we see from product is it helps the product development folks kind of focus in on on the features and capabilities that are really making a difference when a buying decision is being made. Right. So you’ve got 10, 15 key features, and you’re messaging to all of them, you know, you do a buyer persona, I can guarantee that list is going to be dwindled down to a far fewer than that. And that’s really where you want to place your bets. And maybe you don’t make any changes to your product or service. It’s just more about how you market and sell it. But we’ve often seen times where people have actually made changes because they see that competitively they’re at a deficit versus some of the alternatives their buyers are thinking about. So those are the three I would say main areas we see it.

Christian Klepp 18:11

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s, that’s super interesting. And I think it’s definitely something that you brought up which I, which I would have imagined, it wouldn’t be the case of many companies. When you develop a buyer persona, it’s not something that’s set in stone, right? It’s something that probably will evolve as customers change their habits and behaviors and motivations. Change them. I would say that.

Jim Kraus 18:34

Absolutely. I’d say that’s one thing. And then the second reason to update them is if there’s a significant change in the market environment, right? So maybe there’s a new competitor or a new feature coming out or etc. So those are the two primary reasons that you should be looking to update it or refresh it.

Christian Klepp 18:50

If I didn’t know any better, you guys probably had your work cut out for you in the past two or three years with a lockdown with a pandemic? I mean, because behaviors changed like overnight, almost.

Jim Kraus 19:02

Yeah, certainly, I would say the biggest change that we saw, when you think about the components of the buyer persona was the buyers journey to some of the things that were going on in the buyers journey, more virtual. Things of that nature. And then also just, I would say some of the decision criteria and triggers were different. So we saw a lot of, you know, as an example, we do a lot of research and in the B2B tech space, and all of a sudden, anything that had to do with virtual technology over the last couple of years, became a huge trigger that initiated changes in organizations looking for certain solutions. And it also became a huge factor in the decision process as far as who and what they’re gonna go with.

Christian Klepp 19:50

Yeah, yeah, I’m so sure I’m so sure that was the case. If it’s done properly, oh, what kind of results can organizations achieve through buyer personal research.

Jim Kraus 20:02

There’s a couple of different categories of results that we see the most often. And maybe we can talk about later on, maybe we can talk about maybe results we’ve seen with a particular organization. But I would say the four main areas that we see that buyers really, I mean, our clients get really excited about, or folks that do this on their own is number one is alignment across marketing, sales and product. And you know, and I know that sounds like kind of a soft result. But it’s, it’s a really pretty powerful one, because it gets everybody on the same page, because now you’re doing unbiased, objective interviews with recent buyers that represent the marketplace. And one of the things with your buyer persona is it comes with an abundance of buyer quote, so you’re actually hearing what buyers say, it’s just something that everybody can rally around. So you’re all on the same page, you know, rowing in the same direction with every cliche you want to use. That’s number one. The other thing that we’re seeing, particularly I mentioned, I think I mentioned this earlier, is organizations are getting a lot of insight about where they should be focused, and how they should be prioritized. So it just adds like a level of sanity where you can kind of take a deep breath and say, Okay, well, it’s we’re doing all these things, right, and tough economic environment, we’ve got more than enough to do, Where’s the places that we really want to keep doing or double down or started doing fresh? And what are the things we can really just you know what, leave those alone, they’re not really having an impact. The third place, I would say, is alignment of messaging. You know, the folks that really use the personas are ones that take a look at their messaging. And instead of trying to message to every single decision maker, which is really difficult to do, they say, how do I figure out? How do I optimize my messaging at every stage in the buyers journey? You know, how do I message to them to get them to initially consider us? How do I message them when they’re really looking at their different alternatives? And how do I message communicate to them when it’s, you know, crunch time when they’re really making their final decision? And I would say the last area that we see organizations get a lot of value from these is where to focus product and service features and identifying what are the ones that matter most? And what are the ones that where we can provide unique differentiated value and double down on those? You know, I would say those are the four areas if you will, as far as results.

Christian Klepp 22:27

Fantastic, fantastic. No, thanks for sharing those. I’m actually I have one question going back to what you were saying earlier about the buyers journey and mapping that out. And clearly one of the benefits that marketers can take away from developing that as understanding what touch points along the journey will be vital to the customer. And that will also help them decide where to focus their initiatives on and also, in turn develop that content to help move these folks along. And, you know, wherever they are in that journey.

Jim Kraus 23:01

Absolutely correct. So you know, and, you know, you’re we hear a lot about every buyers journey is different, and they are, but I will tell you, having done hundreds and 1000s of these interviews, focused on specific buying decision, and there’s major things right, you can take any type of buying decision and you can break it into some pretty significant chunks of things they’re doing. And you can really rally around those things and say, How can we make this as good as it can be, put our company in the best possible light, and to also educate buyers? Because they’re, they’re craving that education.

Christian Klepp 23:35

And we all know, in the world of B2B How much time these prospective like customers and these buying groups spend in terms of research conducting their own research, right?

Jim Kraus 23:44

Absolutely. Yep. There’s a lot of things they’re doing before they even reach out to you. And then there’s a lot of important things you’re doing once they have reached out to you. So you got to you got to be on point in both stages.

Christian Klepp 23:56

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Jim, we get to the part of the show where we’re talking about actionable tips. So give us something actionable here. And I’d want to throw in this caveat that, Let’s appreciate that. You know, a lot of things that you do, they can’t be done in one day. But if somebody were listening to this conversation that you and I are having, and you’d want them to walk away with three to five things that they can implement right now, when it comes to buyer personas, right? So what can they do right now to leverage buyer personas for better results.

Jim Kraus 24:29

I’ll give you two things, just to try to keep things a little bit simple. Number one is if you’re not currently investing in and when I say investing, I mean you proactively developing buyer personas that are focused on buying decisions. I would highly recommend you start taking a look at doing that rather than the buyer personas that are just focused on individuals and roles. It really is a game changer. So that’s number one. We talked a lot about that. So I won’t rehash that. The second thing I would recommend to do is if you’re able to do these buyer personas based on buying decisions is to conduct a very simple, what we call an activation exercise. So how do you actually take your buyer persona? And you know, turn the crank and say, Okay, now what do we do with it. And there’s a very simple exercise simple in the, you know, the model behind it, but it takes a little objective, honest examination of your capability. So what you do is, think of a simple Venn diagram, where you got two circles. One circle is everything that buyers want, need to know and experience to have trust in your brand and your solution and want to work with you. That’s essentially your buyer persona. Right? So you’ve got that one circle. The other circle is your capability. So what is your organization able to do, able to do well, and in particular, things that you do that are differentiated, take those two, and what is the intersection of those two, because in the middle of those two things, is the sweet spot, because now you’ve identified, here’s a place where we know, buyers have wants and needs related to their buying decision. And we know that we’ve got a good story to tell, we’ve done the work to examine ourselves and say, here’s where we can really deliver. And what you’re going to identify is, you know, a small number, typically, we see organizations anywhere from four or five, maybe six, overall value proposition themes that emerge at that intersection. And these are the four or five things that you can really bet on, right? When you’re developing marketing assets, messaging, when you’re developing sales plays, these are things you can really focus on. And use those use that exercise to identify what those value proposition themes are, and use those really to guide all your marketing and sales efforts. That has a huge impact. And we’ve seen time and time again, that companies that do that exercise, after they develop their buyer persona, really get significantly better results for the investment.

Christian Klepp 27:11

Okay, okay. I mean, but that certainly is helpful. I hope the folks that are listening to this will immediately go and implement these because, like Jim said, You’re gonna do yourself a favor. Right? Okay. And we were gonna get to this point in the conversation. So give us an example of an organization, you probably have hundreds of examples, but just give us one, an example of a company that’s used by buyer’s persona most effectively.

Jim Kraus 27:37

Yeah, so the nice thing about the work that we do, and some of the work that we, we see that our clients doing is, they tend to get pretty passionate about this approach, because it really guides a lot of their decision making and the things they’re able to do. So you know, one client I was thinking of, I don’t want to name the client, but it was a recent B2B tech client. And you know, they, they really ran with it, we develop the buyer persona with them. And then they just went out and just started taking a lot of great action. So some of the things they did is they updated their tagline. They refresh their messaging across the board, they refresh it on their website, they refresh it, and on their demand gen and lead nurture nurturing campaigns, they updated across all of their sales materials. They even changed their, their value proposition and the content that we’re putting out at conferences. The other thing that they did was… it sparked a lot of new ideas for new thought leadership content. So you know, trying to decide, you know, regardless of what the channel of thought leadership they were using, they started developing new content that they knew would help them at different stages in the buyers journey. This particular organization, they did a buyer persona with us about a year ago or so. Since that time, they’ve doubled their leads year over year from the time before that, and they’ve made significant improvements in their conversion rates, which is really exciting. I always get excited about the improvement in conversion rates. Because that tells you that now you’re really understanding buyers, you’re really understanding those perceived barriers and decision criteria that I mentioned earlier. So whenever we hear that somebody’s using a buyer persona, they make the investment in something like this, and they use it and they start really converting more. That’s pretty exciting, because that just shows a depth of understanding the buyer and a real commitment to making changes in marketing and sales, to see real results. So that’s always exciting.

Christian Klepp 29:48

Absolutely, absolutely. And that was indeed an incredible case study. That was one question that that I wanted to ask you as a follow up, which I probably should have asked you earlier but how often, in your professional opinion, how often should companies or marketers review the buyer personas that they have and update them?

Jim Kraus 30:09

Yeah, so we get that question quite a bit. I don’t have a hard answer for you. But I will say, a couple of things I think we were talking about earlier worth repeating. One is, if you’re really sensing in the marketplace, that there is a shift in the buying market, meaning that either buyers are wanting needing different things in the space that you operate in, or you’ve got certain competitors that are offering features, capabilities, even whole new business models for how to deal with the specific needs that your solution addresses. Those are all good reasons or even a change in the buying process. The other thing, too, is I think part of it is companies just know, right, they just they get a sense, they start seeing that, hey, our stuff starting to feel a little stale, a little dated, we’re not getting that lift that we used to see, the conversations that we’re having with our with our prospective buyers aren’t as easy as they used to be. That’s another kind of sign to do it. So you know, two, three years is often very typical. But it could be quicker than that. It could be longer than that, depending.

Christian Klepp 31:19

I mean, the long and short of it is it really depends, or it really depends on all these different factors that you just mentioned. Right. On to the next question, which is, are buyer personas are more or less important today than they were 5 to 10 years ago.

Jim Kraus 31:37

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I’m probably a little bit biased here, right. This isn’t my day to day, and I think they were so critical five to 10 years ago. So I’ll answer it this way. I mean, I think you just have to… the thing that we always try to do is we try to put our shoes in the buyer and the buyer shoes every single day. Right? You know, it’s you know, a lot of times you’ll hear this, folks say selling is hard. Well, I could argue that buying particularly high consideration products and service is even harder, right? So think about the proliferation of information that buyers are exposed to every single day. You cannot waste an opportunity with them, right, you need to be relevant to them. And you need to be consistent throughout their buyers journey. Right. So to do that, to be relevant quickly. And to really give them what they need throughout the buyers journey, you need to understand them really, really well. So that’s number one. And I would say that’s, that’s increasing, not decreasing as far as the information that, that’s at their disposal. The other reason I would say they’re more important is just the level of anxiety about making smart buying decisions. We are finding, you know, I’ve seen some really good studies over the last three or six months about how much indecision is such a driving factor in companies not getting business and how a big reason for the indecision is buyers are just afraid of messing up, right. It’s the fear of commission, which is, you know, fear of changing the status quo. So there’s a lot of anxiety right now. And again, you go back to the buyer persona, if you understand their perceived barriers and the decision criteria and what they’re looking to get from the investment. You’ve got everything you need to decrease the level of buyer anxiety by making them feel like hey, you know, this company gets me, they’ve got the product and services to be able to help me, they’re helping me visualize how I can get to a successful outcome. Those are, you know, indispensable. So I would argue that they’re as important probably more important than they were 5, 10 years ago.

Christian Klepp 33:47

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, I would, I would pretty much say the same thing because the market, I think it’s under extreme stress. Things have become certainly… there are higher levels of complexity across different economic environments and ecosystems. And it calls for, as you said, like just the regular monitoring of the market, keeping your pulse on what’s going on and understanding what’s changed in the customers world.

Jim Kraus 34:16

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 34:17

Absolutely. Okay. So, one of my favorite questions on the show, a status quo that you passionately disagree with, and why.

Jim Kraus 34:31

Yeah, I’m gonna sound like a broken record on this one. But, ya know, I’m gonna say the status quo is against settling for, you know, either giving up on buyer personas because you just have some view about what a buyer’s persona is or isn’t. And that view right now is that there’s a value in them. I would encourage you to think about redefining and looking at a more modern buyer persona, which is what we’ve been talking about during our discussion, because they really are they really are game changers. The beauty of them is that it’s not only because they’re very actionable, they’re very logical. They just make sense, right? It’s something the business can look at and say, Oh, this makes total sense. And now that you’ve put it in this framework, and you’re going to talk to recent buyers to get these insights, wow, that’s something that we can really get behind, you know, so that’s the thing that, you know, that’s the torch that I carry every day, so to speak, to try to send that message into and to communicate another way. Another approach.

Christian Klepp 35:36

Yes. And rightly so. And rightly so. Fantastic. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. So please, quick introduce yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Jim Kraus 35:50

Yeah. So thanks for having me, Christian. I really enjoyed this conversation. So thank you for that. And I guess two places is buyerpersona.com is our website. Feel free to stop by there. We put a lot of thought material out there, as well, as well as templates and different things that you can use. And then the other place if anybody wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m at Jim Kraus. Try to publish things as much as I can out there. I’d love to connect with you on that on that platform as well.

Christian Klepp 36:21

Fantastic. Fantastic. Once again, Jim, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Jim Kraus 36:27

Thank you, Christian. Take care now.

View Details

How to Leverage Technology to Improve Customer Experience

As markets and customer behaviors change, it is imperative that the different functions within a B2B organization work together to continuously improve customer experience (CX). How should this be done? How can you get the different teams to work together?

Join us as we sit down with martech expert Dan Radu (President & Founder, Macromator) and talk about the role that digital technology can play in enhancing customer experience. During our conversation, Dan elaborates on how a company can scale with good CX, how digital technology can be leveraged, and what mistakes to avoid. He also talks about how implementing regular feedback loops, frequent communication, and the alignment of goals can help to close the gap between different business units. Dan also cites examples of situations in CX that should be handled by people and others that can be replaced by technology.

https://youtu.be/mVga7JjaV_E%20

Topics discussed in episode

• Dan explains how B2B companies can scale customer experience the right way [2:23]
• Some common mistakes when leveraging digital technology to improve CX, and what should be done to address these [6:19]
• Dan talks about a challenge that he has helped a client to solve in the past 12 months [10:42]
• Dan elaborates on the different components required to effectively enhance CX with digital technology [13:32]
• Actionable tips: What B2B marketers can do right now to successfully improve CX with digital technology [17:55]
• Some metrics that B2B marketers should pay attention to [19:02]

Companies and links mentioned

• Dan Radu on LinkedIn
• Macromator

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Dan Radu

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for change makers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:45

Okay, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to partner with global marketing teams looking to scale. So coming to us from Toronto, Canada, Mr. Dan Radu, welcome to the show.

Dan Radu 01:09

Hi, Christian. Thanks for having me. I’m very glad to be here. I’m very excited about your work.

Christian Klepp 01:15

Likewise. So it’s really great to have you on the show, Dan. And let’s jump straight into it. Because man, the topic we are going to talk about today, let me just say if B2B companies are not thinking about this, they should. Right?

Dan Radu 01:30

Yes, yes, globalization is upon us. And with that, it comes close customer experience enabled by technology.

Christian Klepp 01:41

Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s get started. So Dan you’re obviously an expert in the field of marketing technology. And through your company, you’ve helped a lot of B2B companies and firms to grow their business through a combination of, I’m gonna say, strategy, execution, but also technology. But as you said, let’s focus today on the topic of leveraging digital technology to improve the customer experience. And I’d like to start with two very top level questions. One being how can a company scale with good customer experience? And how can digital technology be an essential component of that scaling up?

Dan Radu 02:23

Good question, digital marketing technology, it’s a key component of the customer experience that’s being created. So think about all the interactions that you have with the company, starting with the marketing you’re exposed to is how you interact with the marketing, does it provide you the right information at the right time? And then if you are interested in buying, how, how does marketing then transform into the sale? Is that a smooth interaction? Are you still getting…. It’s an overlap. Of course, you are getting…. Are you getting the right marketing message, even though you’re interested in, you’re already a warm lead, or in the sales process of B2B companies, we work with a very long sales processes. So different strategies and techniques are required every stage. So how can companies scale the good customer experience? Well, they can certainly accelerate the sales cycle by ensuring that the tools have the same data, to track the same interaction, to track the same interest, that product or service that you’re trying to buy. There’s also companies that are global, so they can scale globally by reproducing and adjusting the customer experience for different regions. And then, like I said before, most importantly, you have to know when and what marketing tactics are required for each stage of the sales and then can you reproduce that for different product lines or business units as well?

Christian Klepp 04:04

Okay, okay. No, thanks for sharing that. I did have a follow up question for you Dan. And let me see if I can try to simplify this because I think this is a frustration that many I’m gonna say. It’s both parts of the ecosystem, the customer and also the company, at what points do you think in the customer experience process, like you require human interaction? And at what points you can just simply rely maybe on technology to do that job? And it’s really just in terms of just trying to make the process more efficient.

Dan Radu 04:43

Yeah. Well, at the moment, the biggest trend that we’ve seen in the past 10, 15 years is that a lot of customers want to do a lot of research before they even approach seller. So think about both at home and business to consumer, both in business to business cases. When you have… you do your research, you make your shortlist and then you approach those buyers. So a lot of the B2B companies, for example, I know specifically that they choose to buy on the top rated Quadrant for wave of companies. A lot of marketing can be automated in this in to help with that research. So if you request a certain information, to document read, can you get additional information that is relevant for you, that will move you down the cycle that prompt you to buy or…

Christian Klepp 05:42

Okay, okay. No, that’s, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Moving on to the next question, which I am sure you will have no problem answering, right? The common mistakes and misconceptions that you’ve seen when it comes to leveraging digital technology to improve CX? Because I think in your field, you know that it’s never really as smooth as you want it to be. So what are some of the things that you’ve seen? First part of the question, and the second part is like, what should be done to address these issues?

Dan Radu 06:19

Well, there’s a lot of things that we see, most importantly, what’s called Tech depth. So when we having too much technologists and you become a slave to your own tools, and technology, in that case, technology becomes a drag on the business, as oppose to enabling the business. So tools should exist just to provide some functionality to help you live your life better, or do a better business process. So but if you are too much… spend too much time managing tools or troubleshooting tools, troubleshooting integrations, figure out making decisions based on bad data. It’s counter intuitive. It’s not what… it’s not what you’re trying to achieve. So it happens when marketing team want to buy the next shiny object or knowing for example, how we fit into the market stack, or what business process it supports, is the most common situation that we see.

Christian Klepp 07:23

Okay. Okay. And it’s interesting that you mentioned that, because it’s a, it’s kind of a segue to another question I had, which probably also addresses this issue. Because you see, a lot of companies becoming caught up, as you said, with increasing the pile in their tech stack or getting, you know, buying the latest software. But do you think that this problem can also be solved if the companies did research and, you know, formulate the right strategy? Before they start, like leveraging like all this digital technology to improve CX?

Dan Radu 08:02

Absolutely, yes, absolutely. But then what does it take to test strategies? There are many dedicated teams in organization to review those tools, is there a team that will manage and execute that has time to test those tools before they use them for the rest of their business or rest of the tech stack? Or let’s say you introduce a new tool, can you spend half a year testing it in vacuum for while it works before you even use it in your business? How possible is that? Yeah, executives, for example, will look more at the Gartner, the Foresters for how certain vendors are categorized, they’ll try to understand from there, how does that improve the bid how they can achieve better business outcomes? Based on that, and then the directors and the managers or even people in charge of technology, they would look at maybe specific cases, or they’ll look at demos, they’ll try to understand what’s the right solution, which products they should buy to support their business, and all of these are very long sales cycles. And the customers must have a good experience in all these stages of the cycle.

Christian Klepp 09:26

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it was also about last sentence, that last part that you said, which is so important, right? Because at the end of the day, how is all this technology or the software… How’s it going to impact the customer? Is it going to make their experience better? Or harder? You know?

Dan Radu 09:42

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you know, like, think about it. When you go to those websites. What is your experience with chatbots? For example, like, when you type to a chat, how useful did you find those, those chatbots? And when do you just want to speak to real person?

Christian Klepp 10:01

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I lost count of how many times I, I was going nowhere with a chatbot. And then I said, Please put me in touch with a customer service representative.

Dan Radu 10:14

Yeah. And this is where I think that this is where AI is not really gonna replace everything.

Christian Klepp 10:20

Right, right. Absolutely. I mean, that one in itself is gonna be another podcast episode.

Dan Radu 10:26

I’ll talk about that. Next.

Christian Klepp 10:27

Yeah. Staying on the topic of leveraging digital technology to improve CX. Talk to us about a challenge that you’ve helped the client to solve in the past 12 months, just one, just one case.

Dan Radu 10:42

We’ve solved many challenges. But let’s think one, the market is very interesting now. And it’s something different than what it was in the past 10-15 years that I’ve seen is there’s a lot of layoffs in tech. But then there’s still the go to market strategy, it’s still on the same timeline, it doesn’t get delayed. So how are companies going to execute their, carry out their go to market strategy without resources by doing more with less. So we’ve seen, we’ve seen a lot of companies hiring or seen a lot of companies laying off people. So it’s very strange, it’s very hard to understand what’s going on in the market. So what we saw for our private clients in that time is we want to be a digital marketing partner of record with global resources. So we work with their clients. So in this case, we can add resources, we can work in partnership with our clients to add resources to their accelerate projects, or just be an extension of their team. So if they might find a simple cost effectively, provide scalable and cost effective in the way we do it. So the challenge that we are tackling is just this, this idea of not enough resources, not enough time, not enough people, too much tech to you is the race is running too fast.

Christian Klepp 12:27

Absolutely. I mean, you know, it seems like you hear that over and over again, right? That a lot of companies out there are facing this exact same challenge. They’re probably at different stages of their of their cycle. But somehow these problems keep emerging, right?

Dan Radu 12:44

Yeah, yeah. So every time we go to a client or meet a team, I was trying to understand we sit down and we’re like, okay, is this too much technology and not enough people? Is this the go to market strategy is too high level, this way to bridge that gap to implementation? Or where’s the real value that we can add in our partnership with our clients?

Christian Klepp 13:10

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Dan, I mean, like, you know, you’ve mentioned some of these things already, but break it down. For us. I call this like the Lego approach, you know, you take apart the blocks. talk to us about the different components that you believe are required to effectively enhance CX with digital technology.

Dan Radu 13:32

I think you have to think about all business functions part of CX, not only sales, so it’s the marketing as an extension of sales that ties directly to sales, the support experience, the delivery, in the support experience, I think all of those are important elements of the customer experience with the company. So in order to do that, you have to make sure that they all work together, they will…. all the functions are aligned. They have the same objectives, that they support the interests of the client, they’re focused on revenue. So everything what you do when you adopt the technologies and use the technology, the the stakeholders internally that have to work the teams, the roadmapping that you do the planning, everything that goes into that has to has to take this into account on this touchpoints of the customer experience.

Christian Klepp 14:40

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. You brought up something earlier in your answer, and I want to go back to it. And I want to ask you a follow up question because I am. I’m gonna say 98% sure that you’ve encountered this. You’re talking about alignment of teams. So how, what happens if are not aligned, which I think is also a common issue. How do you get them aligned?

Dan Radu 15:07

Yeah, like sales and marketing alignment, it’s a big topic. That’s another podcast in itself. Well, like in many companies, and I’m surprised every time when you work with a new company, when I see this happening, like the proper feedback loop between marketing and sales, sales and marketing might have even the wrong idea of what the ideal customer profile is, or different things happen. Like, there’s different campaigns, the sales wants to do, the marketing just doesn’t support. Marketing has email marketing tool to send the emails and sales, they get their own tools to send the emails, and it becomes very difficult to manage the message, the audience, the subscription preferences, you know, if I want to be unsubscribed here, am I really unsubscribed there. Those things are unaligned. Maybe the sales goals are not clearly communicated to marketing. So sales organizations, whether they focus on selling certain products or groups or, or services, or they want to focus on certain regions, you want to make sure that you align the same focus and the same resources in marketing to support that. Is their revenue goal that has to be jointly worked towards that. Is there a good feedback loop between the marketing and the sales organization, their constant meetings or the review of leads? Is there… can marketing plan that campaigns that are required to support those, those sales goals, revenue goals?

Christian Klepp 16:47

See, I knew you were you’ll be able to answer that question. No problem at all. No, fantastic. Absolutely. I think there were a couple of things that you said that were that were so spot on. So first, first of all, um, there needs to be a feedback loop. And it needs to be one where that helps the teams to be aligned. Another one, I think that you said, which is also really spot on is planning that campaigns, also based on the feedback based on these conversations with the salespeople, because these are conversations most likely they’re also having with the customers. So it all it all should try to work together like a like a well oiled machine.

Dan Radu 17:24

Yes.

Christian Klepp 17:26

Okay. So, you know, part of a big part of the show is talking about actionable tips. So give us something up actionable here, Dan. And let’s appreciate that. Not everything that you do in your line of work can be done in one day, right? But what do you hope B2B marketers who are listening to this conversation that you and I are having – What are you hoping they can do right now to successfully improve CX with digital technology?

Dan Radu 17:55

Make sure. So make sure you understand what business function and what experience outcome do you want to have at every stage and then which tool or technology will support that experience. I think mapping that out, it’s very important that you cannot underestimate how much… how important and how much time the mapping exercise it will take is for every single experience, every single time in the… you want to create your customers, like what is the function that will create that experience? How does it all come together? What is the streamline approach there that you can manage?

Christian Klepp 18:44

Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s a nice segue into the next question, because love it or hate it, you need to have some kind of indication of progress, that things are working. So what metrics do you think B2B marketers should be paying attention to? And why?

Dan Radu 19:02

Well, usually the biggest metrics, the main metrics is revenue, right? But then you want to dig a bit deeper, and now you want to break that down a bit. So when, when I help my clients, I say, okay, you can look at efficiency in the organization as well. Throughput, what are you? What is the organization? What can you actually get out of this? You can look at how successful the programs were, how do you measure success? What do you benchmark it against? Those things are very important. Are you you know… is measuring marketing qualified or sales qualified leads? Is that a real measurement? Does that metric work for you? or is it something more than that, or maybe you’re interested in more a acceleration of the pipeline as opposed to just the number of MQLs generating?

Christian Klepp 20:02

Absolutely, absolutely. What is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why and some, I have a feeling you have a few.

Dan Radu 20:16

The status quo that I start this we always encounter is this idea of different goals between sales and marketing. Like I rarely see organizations that have a true revenue operations function and process where they are able to align the marketing goals with a sales goal. It is just… there’s differently leadership, there are different budgets, there’re different teams that have to do this. And it simply… it just becomes acceptable that different teams there’re different teams with different goals as opposed to thinking of themselves as one unified goal. So unfortunately, that’s the status quo.

Christian Klepp 21:03

And the way obviously, that you, you address that is going back to what you were saying earlier, right? It’s it’s getting these two, these two teams, these two groups to talk to each other, are keeping the communication line open, having these feedback loops, right?

Dan Radu 21:21

Yes, the alignment exercises.

Christian Klepp 21:24

Right. All right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Dan, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for your time. So quick introduce yourself and how people can get in touch with you and I know that you’re based in Toronto, and you run a global marketing firm, and you’re originally from Romania, so you forgive me my Romanian is a bit crusty, but I know how to say “Bunvenit” and “Multumesc“.

Dan Radu 21:52

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Trance Christian. Yeah, Macro global marketing agency with global B2B marketing clients. So they come to us when they need specific expertise in Adobe, Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, and we work as a natural extension of their team.

Christian Klepp 22:12

Fantastic, fantastic. Once again, Dan, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Bye for now.

Dan Radu 22:20

Thank you so much.

View Details

How to Leverage AI and Machine Learning for Better Content Marketing

There’s so much talk out there about how platforms like ChatGPT and other forms of AI and machine learning will slowly replace the work done by people in B2B content marketing. Is this true? Should we completely rely on these new technologies to improve our B2B content marketing and promotion?

Join us as we discuss these topics and more with expert content marketer Ren Agarwal (CEO, StoryAZ Studio), who helps to debunk some myths around AI and content marketing. During this conversation, Ren talks about the importance of leading with strategy and research, and how content marketers can leverage AI and machine learning to improve their work. Ren also highlights the mistakes to avoid, the limitations of AI, and elaborates on some future trends that he believes will greatly impact B2B content marketers.

https://youtu.be/oqfnqzygOOo

Topics discussed in episode

• Ren explains why we should not be afraid of AI tools such as ChatGPT [3:18]
• Some of the most common mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to ChatGPT [5:10]
• What roles strategy and market research play when it comes to effective B2B content marketing [11:52]
• How marketers can use a combination of tools to deliver a more effective outcome in B2B content marketing [19:32]
• Ren elaborates on why he doesn’t think AI can or will replace content marketers [25:30]
• Ren shares an example of ChatGPT’s limitations [34:03]
• Ren shares his view on AI and ChatGPT’s future impact on content marketing [41:26]

Companies and links mentioned

• Ren Agarwal on LinkedIn
• StoryAZ Studio
• OpenAI
• ChatGPT

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Ren Agarwal

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help clients strategize, write and edit content from A to Z for better growth. So coming to us from San Francisco, California, Mr. Ren Agarwal, welcome to the show.

Ren Agarwal 01:09

Thank you, Christian, happy to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Great to be connected Ren and hold on to your seats everybody because we are going to be talking about a very, very pertinent topic, which is, I would say impacting anyone in the world of copywriting and content marketing or marketing in general, wouldn’t you say?

Ren Agarwal 01:31

Yeah, maybe.

Christian Klepp 01:33

All right. Well, here we go. Let’s kick off this conversation Ren with a quote from the American theoretical physicist and futurist somebody called Michio Kaku. So he said, there are dangers, but only dangerous if people don’t understand where technology is taking us. So the reason why I bring up that quote is because in today’s conversation, we are talking about how chatGPT and other AI or machine learning platforms could signal the end of content marketing as we know it, potentially a controversial topic. But over to you. Why should B2B marketers and anyone responsible for content out there take this topic seriously?

Ren Agarwal 02:15

Yeah. Well, I think we have to take it seriously, because it’s a innovative technology. That is one of the fastest growing in history, if not the fastest growing, there’s over 100 million people that have in some way interacted with ChatGPT. And there’s, of course, lots of variants out there. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a movement, if you will, and it’s important for marketers to tune in understand what this is all about. Use the tool. But most importantly, you know, not to panic. And, you know, I’ve been online as everybody else has been, and who’s paying attention to this topic. And there’s a lot of, you know, kind of uncertainty and fear out there. And that I think really is unfounded.

Christian Klepp 03:13

Yeah, I’d like to dig into that a little bit further, why would you say that it’s unfounded?

Ren Agarwal 03:18

You know, because I really think about ChatGPT as a tool, and, you know, humans forever, have been creating new tools and new innovations and adapting to them. And anything that we create, whether it’s a product or a service, a group and association, there’s a value chain involved, right? There’s, if I think about an advertising campaign, you have to understand the brand, you have to understand the business objective, you have to understand the call to action, maybe the modes and methods of producing that advertisement. And so there’s so many different steps and layers involved. And various tools have come to us over the years that we use today. They change jobs, they evolve jobs, and ChatGPT will certainly do that, whether it’s in content marketing, or other kinds of professions where this kind of large model may be applicable.

Christian Klepp 04:26

Yeah, no, that’s incredibly interesting. And I think you’re right to say that, you know, let’s not all panic at the disco just yet. I mean, the machines are not going to rise up and take over the world. But we need to be cognizant of these trends on these changes and how this evolution, this technological evolution is impacting the work that people like you and I are doing on a daily basis, right.

Ren Agarwal 04:53

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Christian Klepp 04:56

On to the next question, which focuses on What are some of the common mistakes and misconceptions you see out there when it comes to ChatGPT? And what is what is it that you think people are getting wrong? And what should they be doing about it?

Ren Agarwal 05:10

Yeah. So, you know, one of the biggest users of ChatGPT might just be high school students. And the reason for that, at least in the United States, right? If you go out to Tik Tok, and you see students who are just ecstatic, I mean, they’re literally like losing their minds watching ChatGPT do things like write an essay for them, comparing and contrasting characters in The Tale of Two Cities, or writing an essay on the causes of the Vietnam War, You know, and that’s because ChatGPT has essentially taken lots and lots of information out there that already exists online. I think I heard something like they’ve ingested information, 60 times the size of Wikipedia. So it’s an enormous amount of information. And when you’re writing a report for school, you’re really looking back, aren’t you? It’s so it’s backwards looking information. And in that case, a tool that’s vacuumed up all this information is going to just regurgitate that information for you. So when people see, you know, some of these stories, they begin to say, Oh, my God, you know, this thing is just writing content. And it is. It’s writing a book summary, or is writing a research paper, or you can ask it to, I think some teachers are even asking you to write a lesson plan for a sixth grader. But that’s kind of misunderstanding what marketing and creativity, which is at the heart of marketing. And even at the heart of business enterprise is really all about, you know, creativity is really about uniqueness, ChatGPT. And these kinds of tools are about interchangeability. So, you know, they’ll go out there and find a piece of content, find another piece of content, interpolate and say, this piece of content should go after this piece of content. There’s nothing unique about that. And so I think that that misunderstanding leads, people say, Well, this thing is going to just do all the writing for me. But you know, really good writing, really good marketing, that captivates audiences that brings in new customers, is really about uniqueness. Right? We have a lot of content out there already. You know, but quantity has not resulted in a lot of quality. You know, I think this really explains, and maybe we should have a podcast on the separate topic, but really explains the Tik Tok phenomena. Because what people are really out there doing is they’re looking for authentic reactions from people. And what happens today is when they find an authentic reaction, everybody just gives it a thumbs up. Because they’re like, Yep, I feel the same way. Because in a sea of content, everything has become so you know, maybe it’s all become Hollywood, it’s so processed. And essentially, human beings are calling out for authenticity and connection, right? A contact a contact, excuse me with the reel. And if you’re going to just use, you know, ChatGPT, or one of these other writing software programs that are kind of popping up everywhere, and there’s going to be dozens and dozens of these as startups get funded. And they try to see how far they can go. You know, it’s really not the work that serious writers, serious marketers actually do.

Christian Klepp 08:44

Absolutely, absolutely. You touched on so many important points. And I’d like to go back to some of them. Uniqueness, and you know, how creativity, a big part of creativity is about uniqueness that that certainly is a point worth repeating. Why? Because I think one of the things that I tried to look up at least anyway, with regards to ChatGPT, is that it does… while it does help, like, you know, what you said, it pulls a lot of data that’s already existing online, and it helps to aggregate all this data, within a matter of seconds. Like, I think I mentioned, I, I gave it a bit of a spin like a few hours ago before conversation, and it was amazing how quickly it churned out an answer in the, in this kind of like formatted content. But one thing that I did lack, to your point, was a bit of that human touch. It didn’t feel like it was actually a person that wrote that, right? It did feel a little bit mechanical, at least in my opinion. I suppose at the end of the day, I can totally see how this kind of technology will be catering to the lazy side of human nature where people that don’t want to do the work themselves. It does serve its role I would say in Content Marketing for people that are okay. They want to churn out like this micro content quickly. There’s certainly a time and place for that. But in the grander scheme of things, I mean, to your point is, is this really the right tool to use if you want to do more of this, like higher level work?

Ren Agarwal 10:19

Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 10:20

That’s open to debate. And that might to your point be a topic for another podcast interview together with Tik Tok.

Ren Agarwal 10:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, if I could just kind of piggyback on what you’re saying is… Absolutely short form content, if you’re looking to create 140, 280 characters? Well, once again, if you think that just putting out, you know, robotic language, is going to help your cause whether you’re a marketer for a software company, or you are a social media analyst for a consumer packaged goods company, you know, I’m sorry, you know, that is not the thing that gets customers to sit up and say, of all the things that are coming through my feed, let me click on that one that sounds robotic. And so to what you said, the lazy approaches will very, very quickly become jokes and memes, you know, and they will name companies by name and say, yup looks like they’re using ChatGPT again, and you will be the butt of a meme on the internet laughing at your ability to be humorous or to connect with consumers, especially for the next generation, which is already suspect of a lot of the content that’s coming at them.

Christian Klepp 11:46

What role do you think strategy and market research and data play when it comes to effective B2B content marketing?

Ren Agarwal 11:52

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s really the foundation, isn’t it? I mean, when we work on a project, you know, we have to do a lot of homework. We want to go out and see what’s already come before. What’s the company’s voice, what’s the tone that it likes to use? Who is its audience, to the extent that we can create personas. We will try to do the to the best that we can, of course, personas are limited and lacking as well. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for what I would call real world contact. And I remember early in my career, people saying to me, you really got to get out of the office and stop just reading the manuals. So you got to actually go out and meet the customers, and understand why they’re using our products and services. Because unless you have that felt sense of any business, you can’t actually, you know, conduct business, you can’t be an effective marketer or communicator at all. So, you know, that research builds the foundation for then engaging in the creative ideas. And for any of us that have worked in marketing, worked in a in a creative way. You know, we understand that those ideas come from many places, it’s not just sitting at the desk and saying, Okay, I’m going to be creative now. You know, sometimes people say, I had a great idea in the shower, or, you know, when I was driving into the office. Well, why is that? Well, it’s because we’ve almost turned off our left brain. And we’ve let our right brain really think about the bigger issues and make random connections, you know, but ChatGPT is very much a left brained approach. Let me tell ChatGPT to give me five tweets on a new software product that I’m launching tomorrow. Well, I can tell you what ChatGPT is gonna give you already, you know, Hey, are you looking to kind of scale up your operations more efficiently? Use our software product, right. So, you know, that research, however, is something that ChatGPT can help you with, because, you know, as you said, it generate information really, really quickly. So you can ask it, questions. But what does that sound like? That sounds like a search engine, doesn’t it? So really, what’s happened is over the last 20 years, we’ve had zero innovation really when it comes to search engine technology. And in fact, search engines have gotten worse. You’ve got more ads on the search engine page. Because of content mills, unfortunately, you have a lot of sites and pages that aren’t informative at all. And then they’re just to game the SEO, search engine processes. You know, that’s been a real limitation of search engines. Well, anybody that’s been using ChatGPT will tell you that they use search engines less. Because I can just go ask you the question and it’ll bring back lots of information. Now you have to be careful. And we should talk about, you know, the problem, some of the problems that we already know about ChatGPT. But, but essentially ChatGPT is wonderful to go out and do research and bring back lots of information. Because search engines are so cumbersome, and have really not innovated for two decades.

Christian Klepp 15:33

Just give me a second here while I absorb all those insights. But um, thank you so much for sharing that. I think you brought up some really great points that I’d like to go back to some of them, one of them being like, yes, absolutely, like search engines have become cumbersome. And something you brought up earlier about, like some sites that are like ranking very high on Google that are not informative at all, well, they probably pay to be there. And that’s, that’s why you get those results, right. I mean, that would almost be the most plausible explanation. The other one is about understanding who their customers are. And this is going back to like content marketing 101. But I do remember another guest on the show, mentioning that she’s been doing this probably as long as you have. And she can immediately tell if a piece of content was written by someone who has never spoken to a customer, just by the way it was written. And also probably by the lack of understanding of who the target audience is, or the target reader are, what they’re looking for, what their motivations are for looking for this particular type of content, and how will this content help them at the end of the day? Right. So there’s a lot of these answers were rather questions that need to be answered by said content marketer.

Ren Agarwal 16:52

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 16:53

Yeah. Go ahead.

Ren Agarwal 16:54

Well, you know Christian, I mean, that is so problematic, because as you and I were talking a little while ago, yeah. When we think about the buying journey in B2B situation situations, the vast majority of these buying journeys involve prospective customers doing an enormous amount of research, even before they talk to a representative of your company. And you don’t even know that they’re out there looking for a software product or looking for an industrial product, a service, but they are accessing your content. And if you know, as your previous guest said that, you know, some of this content is being created without talking to a customer or not really speaking to the customer directly, customers will see that. And that means that your company will not be on the short list of vendors that are actually being evaluated. So the days where, you know, we would do a lot of what we call shoe leather, go door to door with our direct sales force, and sat at these meetings, and, and kind of, you know, pitch products and services. And I started my career at Hewlett Packard and, and that’s what salespeople would do, they would kind of be in the field, they would go and do meetings with people that they knew, and they would show up, and they would do a PowerPoint presentation or demo on a product. That’s fundamentally changed. That is not the way that products and services and B2B industries are being acquired. And content marketing is really the driver now, for customers to get smart on what you offer, for them to feel like you really understand their pain points, and that you might be a good vendor for them.

Christian Klepp 17:30

Absolutely, absolutely. You really hit the nail on the head there about content marketing being the driver, because at the end of the day, they are spending a lot of time conducting their own research and informing themselves before they even approach said service provider. And if you don’t help them along in that journey, and help them to make an informed decision, then you’re not going to you know, you’re not going to be on that vendor list. Right. So moving on from that to the next question, where I’d like you to break it down for us a little bit. What is it that you think people need to understand? And you’ve mentioned some of these already, but like, what is it that people need to understand about ChatGPT and B2B content marketing? So what I’m trying to say there is, how can marketers use a combination of the tools to deliver a more effective outcome?

Ren Agarwal 19:32

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a very good question because it’s very practical. You know, it gets to the heart, really, of professionalism and professionalizing, continuing to professionalize what we do and the people that are our colleagues. So the first thing I would say is that, ChatGPT or any of the other language tools out there and like I said, there are lots already and more on the way These are fantastic. I mean, I know a lot of writers that use Grammarly, for example, you know, great, you know, some people use grammar checking within Microsoft Word. You know, Google Docs has some capability to help you with grammar where it even suggests language. So we’re already using some of these AI tools every day. I think, with ChatGPT, what you need to know about ChatGPT is a couple of things, I think, really important. Number one, obviously, it’s experimental. It’s data cuts off in 2021. So if you are relying on ChatGPT for current information, it’s not there. And you know, so you’re gonna have to use search engines and, and, you know, stay current on what’s actually happening, because of that cutoff date, which is also one of the problems with these with these large language models, not only have they already consumed practically all the information that’s out there, you know, there might be some intellectual property implications to that, you know, like, where do they get the content? What’s in there? Does the client content have bias? You know, a lot of people have written about that. I know, that’s not specifically what we’re talking about today. But, you know, if it’s already brought in all this content, where’s it going to get this additional content? And how is this going to keep up to date with what’s happening? It’s not a real time product, you know, like a, like a search engine would be right. So that’s, that’s really important to keep in mind. You know, the other thing is that ChatGPT has the ability to answer questions that you put to it. And the better question that you put to it, the better response you’ll get. And you can even do, you know, sometimes you can follow up on a thread with subsequent questions that might refine the answers that you’re getting. The limitation to that is that I found that ChatGPT tends to error out a lot. So you have to keep refreshing it, which means you lose a little bit of that dialogue, because it doesn’t then remember kind of what’s happening. So asking questions, asking smart questions, you’re gonna get some more answers to it. But it is, you know, it does error out occasionally. It also do does something that, you know, computer scientists have been talking about, which is called hallucinating. So I’ll give you an example. I asked ChatGPT to go out and tell me what an article was about. And I put the title and the link in there, and it came back and I said, Oh, this article, and it was about really the upcoming problems of for the startup ecosystem, after SVB. And it was a big article in The New York Times on Monday. And ChatGPT came back and said, Oh, this article is about how SVB bank is changing its lending guidelines. And I said, no, no, that’s not correct. And so ChatGPT, apologized very nicely and said, Well, can you please give me the URL, so I gave the URL, it summarized it incorrectly again. Well, then I copied the whole New York Times article, and I put it into ChatGPT. And I said, Please summarize it now. And the third time it still summarized it, erroneously. And there are lots of examples like this out there. So you can use it to ask questions, you can bring back a lot of research, but you have to verify it. If you just rely on what it said, you’re gonna get yourself into trouble.

Christian Klepp 23:51

And there, therein lies I think the heart of the matter. And probably one of the main points of discussion during our conversation today, right? Where the reason why we’re having this conversation is because you’re trying to like raise awareness for the fact that this type of technology does come with limitations. And to that point, Ren, I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s one of the first things I saw, there was a window that popped up and ChatGPT saying that the data cuts off in 2021. So I was like, Uh huh. Alright. So that in itself was already a limitation, right? You have to be cognizant of that. Because otherwise, I think that was such a great case study that you brought up. You can keep feeding it with information, but if it’s, if it has this limitation, it’s never going to come back with an accurate answer. Right. Number one. Number two, yes, of course. There’s other tools out there. I mean, I myself use Grammarly and I have to say I’m one of those people that doesn’t always agree with everything Grammarly suggests, right. Because again, it is AI and you still require somebody on the other end of that spectrum, acumen, to then make a judgment about whether you’re going to act upon those recommendations or those corrections, or whether you’re going to say no, actually, I don’t agree with that. And I’m going to skip it. Okay, fantastic. So Ren, we get to the point in the show where we’re talking about actionable tips. So give us something actionable here. And the question is, at the end of this conversation, what are three to five things that you hope the audience can walk away with, after they listen to our discussion?

Ren Agarwal 25:30

Yeah. Well, I don’t know if there’s an order to what I’m going to suggest. But let me suggest a couple of things here. And to the best of my ability, one would be, there’s absolutely no reason to panic here. You know, I think, like any new tool that comes up, you know, you have to kind of understand how to get this tool into your toolkit. And just the way that we’ve done with Google AdWords, or the way that we’ve done with email marketing systems, the way that, you know we’ve done using WordPress, or people that use Yoast for SEO, people who use Google Tag Manager, right. These are all things that we’ve had to learn over time, and they’ve actually made us more efficient and effective, but they haven’t eliminated. And maybe this is my second point to haven’t eliminated, you know, Christian, something you always talk about, I think, very eloquently, which is the importance of strategy in marketing. You know, marketing is a strategic function, whether you’re a B2C company or B2B company, because there’s so many things that you have to synthesize to be a good marketer. And, and so, you know, ChatGPT doesn’t obviate that. You still have to be, you know, really good strategist. And as a good strategist, I would say that you have to learn how to use this tool. And one of the things that I would say is, after you kind of sat down and said, What are you writing about, you know, draft a whole bunch of questions that you have about the subject that you want to write on, and go ask ChatGPT, you know, so do research, use ChatGPT, to do some research, first of all, and ask him, What did I ask it the other day? I said, you know, what is the popularity of Pokemon Go? And it came back and it said, Well, I don’t have current data. But a couple of years ago, it was ranked 16th in terms of XYZ statistic. And, and then, so I had a couple of data points at my hand, then I could go verify those to make sure it wasn’t, quote, unquote, hallucinating. And then, you know, once I had that I can begin to kind of work with those facts and figures, which was really, really helpful. I can sometimes say, I can ask it to cite a reference, hey, where can I find a reference online? Can you give me a URL that cites that facts? That’s another really helpful way. Now you see, I’m using it as a search engine. Right? So now that you’ve kind of gathered some research, and as you know, people write in different manners, I love a good outline, as you begin to kind of outline what is your thesis? What are your sections? Where are your examples going to come from? What you can do is break it down and take individual sections to ChatGPT, you can ask it, you know, further questions, Hey, I’ve written this paragraph, can you give me some ways that I can add more detail to it? And it might come back with a lot lots of horrible examples that you’ll ever use, right? But it might, you know, also spark some ideas. And I don’t think actually ChatGPT is that great of a vehicle to give you new ideas. But what it does is it helps you rule things out. Yeah, that’s a dumb idea. I don’t want to go in that direction or this direction. And then you really kind of come back to your own creative thinking and expertise, right. As I was thinking about this podcast, doing some work, and I learned that expertise comes from the Latin meaning “one who is experienced”. And I thought that was really helpful, because as an experienced copywriter, you know, you have the expertise to understand what makes for a good article, you know, and so you can go and, you know, ask specific questions and get more data and get more research and kind of bring that in. So I think you know, using research and ChatGPT is really helpful. The fourth thing I would say is that you know, when clients say to you Well, what why don’t I just do this in house? Why do I need a copywriting agency or you know, you know, or general marketing agencies to write this for me, I’ll just write it myself. I’ve got ChatGPT? Well, I think the answer to that is some of the things we talked about earlier. Which is that, are you looking for something that’s unique? Or are you looking for something that’s just recycled? Because we’ve all been to, you know, because I’m based in San Francisco, I’ll just say, we’ve all been to software company websites. And after you spend some time on the homepage, you still don’t know what they do. So, you know, there’s a lot of content out there that, in fact, is already recycled, you know? And so that’s one thing how I would respond to that. The other way I would respond is that remember, copywriting isn’t just mashing together a bunch of words, it’s, what are we writing about? Why are we writing about those things? Where are we going to present this information? Right? What are we wanting the reader of this to do? From what I can tell so far, ChatGPT, will regurgitate a lot of words and a lot of sentences, a lot of paragraphs. But it’s not really towards any goal. You know, it’s more like, what a high schooler might use it to write a book report, or might use it to write a term paper, you know, a research project where the whole purpose of high school is to understand what’s come before so that you build a foundation. So you can go into life and build on top of that, as human society has done forever. Right. But that’s not what a ChatGPT does. But that is the assignment of good content writing, which is to understand how do you influence the direction that a prospective buyer might be interested in? Or how do you inform prospective buyer or other stakeholders? I mean, really, do you want to use ChatGPT to, to distribute internal communications to your employees? Will they not see through the fact that this was just generic generated from a robot? Do you want to write a thought leadership article from a CEO using just ChatGPT? You know. So the other thing that we also have to remember is that copywriters do other kinds of heavy lifting, don’t they? And content marketers, you know, you maintain an editorial calendar, you go and interview subject matter experts. You do multiple drafts, you go ask for input and feedback and incorporate that into your product. So don’t forget about all of the things that actually go into the creation of content.

Christian Klepp 32:44

Absolutely, absolutely. Those are some fantastic points. And thanks again for that. And you know, it’s going back to what you were saying earlier, which is something that I’ve always kept in mind with with my own work is, and one of the reasons why I’m utterly convinced that AI is not going to replace us anytime soon. I do makes… even with B2B content writing, I still throw in that occasional anecdote, those quotes. Why? Because if you’re trying to make something that’s very technical, very, to a certain degree, a little bit heavy in a particular industry segment, and you’re trying to make that a bit more palatable for everybody else. I mean, it’s always important to bring it back to something that people can relate with, something that has that, again, I can’t stress this enough that human touch when people read that, that they might even have a little bit of a chuckle to themselves, or if it’s a very heavy topic that it becomes a little bit lighter. Right. Yeah. And that’s something that at least from my own experience, AI hasn’t, hasn’t reached that level yet. And I’m not even sure if it will.

Ren Agarwal 33:50

Yeah, well, you know, interestingly, creative types in Hollywood have been tasked to go out and look at this thing to see if he can help with things like script writing.

Christian Klepp 34:02

Script writing. Yup.

Ren Agarwal 34:03

And there’s a famous example where Alan Alda from MAS*H. For those of you that might have seen it, it’s been off the air for decades. But Alan Alda kind of went to ChatGPT and kind of played with it for a long time was trying to reimagine the last episode of MASH. And his judgment when he came away from it is: I think the script writers are fine. This thing isn’t even close to being able to write a legitimate script. I heard another anecdote where Hollywood writer said, oh, yeah, you know, I was using ChatGPT to kind of imagine a scenario where there’s a husband and wife scene, and they’re on vacation. And I wanted to get ChatGPT’s help in what the dialogue would be between these two. And by the way, this is a story there’s a recounted in a new eBook out by the founder of LinkedIn, who also is an investor in OpenAI, so there’s, so this writer in Hollywood says, Now look what happens. Right? So ChatGPT kind of writes… Oh, well, you know, the husband asked the wife, hey, we don’t have any secrets. We’ve been married for a long time. And no, we don’t. And it’d be really bad for us to have any secrets with it. And, and the wife and the dialogue says, No, of course, we wouldn’t have any secrets. And then the husband says, well, who’s I can’t remember the name he used… but who’s Bob? And? And that’s, and that’s all schmalz? Right? So the Hollywood writer saying, yeah, that’s all schmalz there’s nothing there. But the Hollywood writer says, Okay, watch what happens now. And the wife says, Well, how do you know about Bob? And the husband says, I saw something, I think it might have been like a text or something, or email, and it said, you know, I’m really like to talk to you, you know, please contact me. And so he’s, uh, who is Bob? And he says, are you having an affair? And she says, No, it’s nothing like that. He said who is Bob? And she says, Well, five years before I met you, I had a kidney transplant, and I got it from Bob. And the Hollywood writer was like, isn’t this great? Well, I’m looking at that and going, No, that’s not great. I mean, you know, that’s, that’s still schmalz. So if, if a Hollywood writer is saying, hey, that’s really creative. I’m like, wow, I would have expected more from the writer, than that, you know, kind of creative impulse. But and I’m picking on Hollywood in this conversation only. Because, you know, why not? But yeah, but I think we underestimate our remarkable creativity, which is why every once in a while when one of these independent movies come out. Everybody is like, Oh, my God, how did that movie out of nowhere win the Oscar and everybody tries to create that movie concept. Well, the reason is that, you know, theater goers, people who love film aren’t idiots. They know a great story when they hear one. You know, it’s not just another Marvel story, right? We know how that’s going to go. So Everything Everywhere All At Once, this year’s Oscar winner, people were really captivated by the story because it was something totally different, right? And that’s what we expect from really great creativity. Everything else is just entertainment. And it’s kind of like, yeah, you could take it or leave it, you know, but it’s not the great punch line. It’s not the Oscar winning movie, it’s not that great song that becomes a classic, you know, that creativity, I would argue, is still very much right brain, and is very much the purview of great writers.

Christian Klepp 37:53

I think that was the perfect example to bring up on this podcast where we’re talking about copywriting. But well, thanks again for that. And thank you to all Michelle Yeoh for, for the movie. But you’re absolutely right to say, let’s just talk about that one for a second. Because, you know, we’ve got this movie that, you know, it’s unique, it’s it has a different angle, it’s got this, this different and unique cast of characters. And so completely different from, to your point, the cookie cutter story, right? That we’re all used to, and you hit the nail on the head with the MCU. Or you just take your pick, even some, some Netflix series that are out there. It’s interesting to see, like, even my wife and I are watching some of the shows, we almost know what’s going to happen at the end. Why? Because we’ve seen this type of story play out before this, this format, this template, whatever you want to call it, right?

Ren Agarwal 38:52

Yeah. And now, a writer is, you know, interested in this kind of thing, because they’re on the clock. And they have to very quickly produce stuff, even though if it’s not very creative, and very interesting and very good. But that has consequences. Right? Yeah. I mean, that’s why there’s money losing years for studios. That’s why a lot of movies flop and you, it’s not about the amount of money you put into these films. It’s about making a connection with the audience. Yes. And so we understand the economic constraints that are at play here. But we also have to understand that things that seem like they’re the next great thing, time will tell. But the really important thing for us to do, you know, in our industry, is to really understand this and begin to steer it and begin to be involved with the conversation to help educate people that know. You know, I saw a headline today that said 300 million jobs are going way around the world. Well, you know what? There’s been other incredible advances in technologies that have come. Some jobs are lost, other jobs are gained. And that’s just how innovation works. But innovation doesn’t stop. And human creativity doesn’t stop. And I think that’s a really, really important thing to be involved with that conversation. And to think really hard about these issues and not just accept what somebody might be saying about, oh, my God, this is going to eliminate all copywriters, it’s going to eliminate all attorneys, you know, I’m like, if it’s gonna eliminate legal work, that was just busy work anyway, well, great. Maybe we don’t need that level of legal work. You know, maybe we need to be focusing on really important contracts and legal work, you know what I mean? And if ChatGPT is going to do away with Twitter, hurray. Because, you know, is that adding any value to anybody’s brand? Really, you know, so if ChatGPT is going to just churn out quick tweets, and that’s gonna mean nobody really pays attention to it. That’s not such a bad thing.

Christian Klepp 41:02

I totally agree. Totally agree. Speaking of things that will happen, I mean, I usually try not to do this on the show. But let’s look into the crystal ball for a second here right. Ren, where do you see all of this going? If we were going to look like maybe, maybe not 20 years, but like, 10 years down the line? Where do you see all of us going with ChatGPT? And what kind of an impact is it going to have on content marketing?

Ren Agarwal 41:26

Yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking about vinyl records. You know, and it’s become a really big thing among young people. And they talk about vinyl records, because they like the fidelity, they like to cracks, they like various things about the sound that comes out of vinyl records, as opposed to the, you know, the bits that are sampled, you know, in the digitization of music, you know, and I was thinking about that, because I think content is unfortunately going to get a lot worse. And I think that we’re going to have maybe an entire generation of folks graduating from high school, that are going to be robbed of those really crucial four years, where you learn to analyze, and synthesize and write and think all of those great things. But I hope I’m wrong. You know, I hope that I know, there’s incredible teachers out there, I know, they’re already thinking about, Hey, how can I get students to be collaborative project with ChatGPT, you know, create even bigger assignments, because I know that they can do a comparison of literary characters now by asking ChatGPT to do it. So maybe there’s different prompts. And so, you know, I think teachers are going to try to do this, but I think there’s also going to be a lot of laziness, unfortunately, you know, kind of in the system. But I think that writing, unfortunately, is going to get worse, because there is going to be a temptation to rely on these writing tools, that once again, are just recycling content that already exists out there. And that might be wrong, you know, and that might be biased. And that’s unfortunate. But I think that that is not that big of a surprise, because look at what’s happened on social media and what’s happened in other platforms where content has become, you know, kind of plastic in many ways.

Christian Klepp 43:36

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m really glad you brought that up, because it brings me back to my high school days. And, you know, back then, when we were required to study English literature, so with the likes of Shakespeare, and what have you, there were a lot of classmates that opted to go for the cliff notes. Why? Because a cliff notes would like filter all that stuff out. And you know, you’d have these summaries of each chapter of that specific Shakespearean tragedy and what have you, but I opted to go down the harder path and read the works themselves, like for example, and that’s how I learned to, not just appreciate the writing, but immerse yourself a bit more in the story as complex as that might appear. Like, for example, when I was reading the tragedy of Julius Caesar, which is one of the classic Shakespeare ghost stories, because there was a ghost in that one, but if you just read through the Cliff Notes, you’re gonna, you’re gonna miss out on the build up to that point, right? And it’s there and it’s to your point, it’s, people are just, laziness is certainly one thing. The other one is really they just won’t, there’s people out there always are trying to look for the shortcut. And to a certain extent, and I’m not trying to like, you know, diss this AI and machine learning here. It has its time and place, but if you’re Just gonna use it because you want to take the shortcut. And I believe that was your point, then that’s the wrong approach.

Ren Agarwal 45:06

Yeah. I mean, you know, Julius Caesar, at the beginning of Julius Caesar, right. Julius Caesar’s wife is, has actually convinced him to not go to the assembly where he’s ultimately killed in the assassination. And Julius Caesar accepts that. But then somebody from the Assembly actually comes in said, but you’re Caesar, nothing can, you know, nothing can kill you. So there’s all of these omens there, that this isn’t the right thing for Caesar to do. And unless you read Julius Caesar, you know, you don’t actually understand the beauty of that language of how it unfolds. And in fact, there are many omens out there today, that say that we need to really be progressing with this kind of technology very carefully. Either we will see these omens, or it will be the Ides of March for our professionals….

Christian Klepp 46:10

I was just gonna pull that one out, the Ides of March, but you beat me to it (laugh)

Ren Agarwal 46:15

You know, or for jobs or for careers. But we have to pay attention to these omens, we have to pay attention to the limitations that really are here and that are staring us right between the eyes.

Christian Klepp 46:29

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Ren, if you’ll oblige me. I did play around with ChatGPT before this conversation, and I did ask it one question, which is pertinent to this discussion. Wait, let me pull it up. I asked, Will ChatGPT replace copywriting in the long run? Alright, and this is what it…, this was its answer, so just hold on to your seats. As an AI language model, my main purpose is to assist humans in generating high quality content more efficiently and effectively. While I can generate text and provide suggestions, I do not think that I will replace copywriters entirely. And that was the AI saying that right. And that went on to say, copywriting involves more than just producing text. And this was really to your point. It’s frightening how similar it is. It requires creativity, critical thinking, and a deep understanding of the target audience and the brand’s voice and message. While AI models like ChatGPT can assist with generating ideas and providing suggestions, they cannot replace the creativity and strategic thinking that a human copywriter can bring to the table. And I’ll just read this last sentence before we continue. Furthermore, copywriting involves understanding and interpreting complex cultural and social nuances, which can be difficult for AI to fully comprehend, if at all, alright, in my opinion, while AI language models are constantly improving, they are not yet at the level of understanding and interpreting cultural and social nuances with the same level of nuance and depth as humans. That was ChatGPT’s answer to my question.

Ren Agarwal 48:10

Right. And the reason it can answer this way is because some human has actually written about this already and put it out on… whether it’s on Wikipedia, or one of the other search, the websites, which ChatGPT is gone and vacuumed up all that information. Remember, I said, you know, there might be some intellectual property issues here, because where did you get all this content to begin with? Humans wrote this content. And so some human is actually talked about what copywriters do, all ChatGPT is doing is it’s going out there, bringing that information in and saying, here’s the answer, because that’s what the humans are saying. And so that’s why it might seem like Oh, my God, it sounds so human like, Well, the reason it sounds human-like is because it’s looking at binary bits of information, language that already exists out in the internet, you know?

Christian Klepp 48:59

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I thought that was an interesting one to share for this discussion. So a lot of thanks for your patience. But once again, I mean, Ren, we could have gone on for another five or six hours, just talking about this, and of course, other topics. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective, obviously, based on your expertise and experience. So quick introduction of yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Ren Agarwal 49:26

Oh, sure. So my agency is called StoryAZ.studio. We are based in San Francisco. We are a copywriting and content marketing agency. We work on all forms of content creation. Our clients tend to be healthcare, education software. We work with startups. We work with financial services companies. And you know, really the reason that is clients bring us in is because they are looking for expertise on how to capture so many variables that express our brand, with our customers to engage with them in a very personalized, authentic way. So you can come to the website at StoryAZ.studio and check us out and also check us out on LinkedIn. Follow us. We post regularly we’d love to hear from you.

Christian Klepp 50:31

Fantastic, fantastic. Ren, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Ren Agarwal 50:37

Thank you, Christian.

Christian Klepp 50:38

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Grow Any B2B Content Platform from Scratch

When B2B customers (or any customers for that matter) try to find a solution to their problems, they educate themselves. And how do they educate themselves? The answer lies in good, interesting, and relevant content. We also know that promoting that content and distributing it through the right channels is equally (if not more) important so that it reaches the right people at the right time.

Join us as we talk about how to grow any B2B content platform from scratch with marketing expert and advisor Ali Schwanke (CEO & Founder, Simple Strat). During our conversation, Ali discusses the importance of growing B2B platforms to organizations and what mistakes marketers need to avoid. She also elaborates on the different components required to effectively grow your B2B content platforms, what metrics to pay attention to, and what actions marketers can take immediately to improve how they scale their content platforms.

https://youtu.be/Wx8NEQo8ys4

Topics discussed in episode

• The importance of having strategies to grow B2B content platforms from scratch [1:51]
• Ali’s advice on how to select which form(s) of content to produce [3:45]
• The common mistakes and misconceptions with regards to growing B2B content platforms, and what should be done to address them [10:20]
• The roles of researching and having the right strategy in growing B2B content platforms [15:35]
• Ali shares her experience in generating good content ideas [20:31]
• Ali’s thoughts on the key components to effectively grow a B2B content platform [24:27]
  • Think about the purpose of the content: Awareness vs. lead generation
  • From awareness, consideration, to decision-making content
  • Search-driven (i.e. capturing demand) vs. Creating demand
• How to establish a unique point of view [32:45]
• Ali’s shares an example to highlight how she grew her own content platform [35:10]
• Quality vs. quantity: Which one should you focus on and why? [40:21]
• Metrics that marketers should pay attention to in order to grow their B2B content platforms [45:01]
• Ali’s thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing humans [49:18]

Companies and links mentioned

• Ali Schwanke on LinkedIn
• Simple Strat
• Youtube Channel: HubSpot Hacks
• HubSpot
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• Of Batter and Dough

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Ali Schwanke

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Okay, folks, welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies double down on content marketing to grow awareness, influence and leads. So Ali Schwanke. Welcome to the show.

Ali Schwanke 01:09

Thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Great to be connected Ali. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Because as you rightfully pointed out in your LinkedIn profile, content marketing is so important to B2B companies for a whole lot of reasons that we’re gonna get into in a sec. All right. So, Ali, you’ve been a successful B2B marketer for many years, and you’re an expert in content as well as HubSpot CRM marketing. But for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of strategies to grow any B2B content platform from scratch, which is no small feat. So talk to us. Yeah. So talk to us why you believe that’s so important in the world of B2B marketing? Off you go!

Ali Schwanke 01:51

Yeah, exactly. Well today, we all believe in being empowered to buy and nobody hopes to be sold to, you and I included, our customers included. So when we go to find a solution to our problem, or even an aspiration of something we hope to do, we educate ourselves. And we only educate ourselves with content. So whether that’s written content, video content, podcasting, like what we’re doing right now, social content, we every single piece of information that we bring in, helps us understand our problem more effectively, and then ultimately leads us toward the path of a solution. And because that’s such a pleasurable experience for a lot of companies. At the end, when you buy, you end up feeling like you, you bought it, you weren’t sold to. And that’s really what we’re all after. So, where that comes to head for me is we’ve been growing that way as a company since we started. And we believe that content is how people want to engage with us. So we’ve been growing a podcast, or excuse me, a YouTube channel since about 2019, mid-2019. And right before the pandemic, and we kind of just lucked out that everybody obviously had to go online at that time. And you know, ever since then we’ve sort of been known as the folks that teach HubSpot tutorials online. And then we’ve been helping other folks launch their podcasts and video mediums as a result of that as well.

Christian Klepp 03:09

Fantastic, and just for the benefit of the audience of what’s the name of your YouTube channel.

Ali Schwanke 03:16

Yeah, our YouTube channel is called HubSpot Hacks.

Christian Klepp 03:19

HubSpot Hacks. That’s an easy one to remember.

Ali Schwanke 03:21

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 03:22

Thanks for sharing that. And I just wanted to go back to something you said earlier, and you’re talking about the different types of content. And you probably know where I’m going with this. But do you feel any of these forms are more important than the other?

Ali Schwanke 03:36

I think people wish I had an answer for that. I think they wish that one of those things could be something they could focus on. And really, when people ask that they often it’s because they’re overwhelmed by the let’s call it need to have to create multiple forms of content. And so if you’re not doing a really great job today of using content to nurture your customers along their journey, the idea of writing blogs, and then doing webinars and then doing video and then doing podcasting, that all sounds really, really overwhelming. But usually what you can do first, before you start doing anything is identify what’s going well in this space, who’s doing blogging? What is their angle? How are they doing it? Who’s doing video? What are they doing? How are they handling it, and you’ll start to see some trends emerge. And that means that just like any football team, soccer team baseball team, you’re gonna have different resources and different strategies based on who you’re playing, who the players are on your team, what your talents are, are you playing the short game, the long game, and all of that’s going to be important and coming up with a content strategy. So if you happen to have someone on your team who has a background in broadcast journalism, you probably are going to have an easier time deploying video and podcasting or audio, than you might be doing written content. So think about the resources you have internally. Our team happened to have some background in video and myself. I happened to have done a lot of that in my career. So launching a YouTube channel seemed like a natural step for us. Now people have told us, Ali, you make it look so easy. And I’ll say, Well, what you don’t see is you don’t see the years and years that I spent doing, you know, play and drama and all the things that I learned a lot of at acting lessons in my early days. So when you get started with content, and people think what channel should I start with? One, you have to be where your audience is. So if you’re going to launch a, let’s say, a very active, ask me anything, Reddit thread, that’s a piece of content, a type of content. If your users aren’t on Reddit, or your customers on Reddit, that’s a terrible idea. But if you say, how do my users go to YouTube, and search for things? Usually, it’s how-to content is typically what performs quite well on YouTube. What will they be looking for on YouTube? And then, do we need a hosted show? Do we do a interview show? Do we do like how you do the content then becomes specific based on what gaps exist in the market. So it’s kind of a two pronged approach. What are you really good at in creating content? If you can write well, start there. If you then analyze the market, and come back to it and say, I think there’s a need for this, like right now, I’ll tell you we’re launching a podcast that’s very, very short form. Because there is very, there’s very little competition for podcasts that are 10 minutes or less.

Christian Klepp 06:23

Yeah, those are really interesting points. And thanks for sharing that. You brought up two things that I wanted to go back to on the past couple of minutes. So one about like, making it look so effortless. It almost, I think one of the greatest analogies for that as thinking about somebody like Lang Lang, who’s a world famous pianist. And if you’ve ever seen him in concert, and if you’ve ever seen Lang Lang play, he can play pieces by Chopin, which I think, undoubtedly are some of the most difficult piano pieces to play. And he can play those with his eyes closed. Right?

Ali Schwanke 06:57

Certainly. Do you play the piano, Christian?

Christian Klepp 06:58

No, I don’t. Well, I did when I was in first and second grade. But that’s, that’s about…

Ali Schwanke 07:05

I do play the piano. Yeah, I do play the piano myself. And I can play with my eyes closed. And I can play with all… I can listen to a song on the radio and just play it. But that’s hours and hours and hours and hours.

Christian Klepp 07:18

That was exactly the point I was just getting to, because people were saying like, how does he make it look so easy, and so effortless, and what they don’t see. And this is something that he said in an interview is that he practiced six to eight hours a day. Alright, so they don’t see the blood, sweat and tears and the effort that he puts behind looking so effortless on stage. Right? So that’s the first thing. The second thing, which I thought was such a great point to bring up is also that you’re creating content that addresses the problems that the target audience has. But also, it’s, it’s structured in such a way that it helps, or it’s designed to take into consideration how your best customers buy. Right. And I thought those are really like two things that you said in the past couple of minutes where I’m like, okay, that bears repeating that bears talking about again, right?

Ali Schwanke 08:13

Yeah, I think that a lot of times we forget that customers may have things that they’re wondering about that they feel actually scared to talk to us about, because by admitting that they don’t know what something means. So how many times have we been in a situation even in a sales conversation, where we have used an acronym, and we just assumed the other person knows what it means. And if they just stop and raise their hand and say, I don’t know what that means they risk looking stupid, they risk looking like that, they’re not going to have that same level of professionalism. So when you create content around these kind of lesser known things, you can also then empower them to come to the table in have a better sense of understanding as to what they’re buying how it’s helping them solve that problem. I’ll give you an example. So when you’re in the world of CRMs, which we are. Sometimes, if you go to the HubSpot website, for example, there’s starter, there’s free, there’s pro, there’s enterprise, and then there’s marketing hub, sales hub, operations hub, CMS hub, service hub. And so it becomes this like, wait a minute, is CRM the same thing as all these things. But if I ask Ali, if the CRM is the same thing as a service hub, is that dumb? Do I look stupid? So we literally have a blog post called what is HubSpot? And what can I do with it? Because that is what people are searching and they don’t want to get on a sales call and have the risk of them being sold something that they don’t understand. But they would never jump on a sales call and say, Now Ali, can you tell me what HubSpot is because they’re afraid that that opens then the vulnerability and that content therefore helps them feel more secure in that conversation.

Christian Klepp 09:51

Absolutely, absolutely. 100% and I and I thought was so good that you brought that up, because that’s such a great segue into the next question, which focuses on mistakes and misconceptions that you’ve seen out there. But let’s zero and again on that on our topic of discussion for today, which is growing B2B content platform. So specifically, mistakes and misconceptions you’ve seen out there around this topic, and what you believe she’ll be done to address those.

Ali Schwanke 10:20

Yeah, a couple of mistakes that I see people making when they’re starting content from scratch is their understanding of what it takes to build consistency is often just like anything that’s new. It… once that pizzazz and the flash kind of fades away, it becomes more of a grind. And it’s true. And so anything new, there’s this I, I wish I knew who made it, and I wish I knew the name of it. But it’s this kind of diagram where you see this like really great heightened thing. And then it goes down to like the trough of despair. And when you get into the trough of despair, and you need to create getting content, you often hear that people will say, well, it isn’t working. Or it’s, you know, we need to switch direction, and I can pull up our YouTube channel, I can pull up our blog. And every single time I can show you where we had a conversation of should we keep doing this. And we knew like when you’re in it for the long haul. Like if you ever run a marathon, if you ever get to mile 20… I’ve run a marathon, I’ll tell you at mile 20, you’re like it is a good thing that there’s a finish line up ahead. Otherwise, we would be bailing out right now. And that’s what happens in content creation. So there has to be like a minimum investment into the time for you to even get something from it. Now, the other mistake that I also see people making is they write a lot of content that is in the voices, in the words, in the terms of them. But it’s not how the customer talks. So again, back to that what is HubSpot? And what can I do with it? if I was going to write that in a very like marketing-y way, it would be like discovering more about the marketing automation platform. That’s the number one choice of something or other. Like at that point, marketing automation doesn’t even really mean anything to the audience, because they’re just like, I heard about this HubSpot thing. I don’t really know what it is. So the way to overcome that is to talk to your customers. And really just listen. So discovery calls for me are wonderful, because I can just say, hey, what brought you here today? And you know, what were you looking for online? Good questions asked might be, you know, what’s the last thing you typed into Google? And you start to understand their frame of reference and the paradigm that they’re coming to the table with. And if you don’t understand that paradigm, and that empathy, from their point of view, you will you will fail with your content initiatives.

Christian Klepp 12:35

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, like, you gotta get into their, into their mind and see their thought process, right. Like, what are they looking for? What are they looking for online? What kind of information are they searching for? But even going back a step, a step backwards, what questions are they asking, right? Because it all starts with questions, right. And I love how you brought that up, that first point about consistency, that becoming a grind. That almost reminds me of a diagram. I’m sure you’ve seen it more times than you care to count. It’s the diagram of the entrepreneurs journey. Oh, yeah. Like the way the outside world perceives it and the way that you know, and then the other diagram shows what an entrepreneur actually goes through. And it looks like the Mariana Trench almost right?

Ali Schwanke 13:21

Yes, yeah, there has to be some sort of stamina there. And that is, again, I think it’s one of those things that if you like, one of the shows that I used to watch and enjoy the journey back in the day was the biggest loser. So you loved watching these people kind of go through this transformation. But there was a lot of content behind the scenes that I’m guaranteed never got aired, because it was just boring. It was just boring. They were just doing the same workout, the same thing. And a mentor once told me that success often is misguided, because in the middle of it, it looks like it’s just boring. Like success, when you consistently execute is just boring. Well, there she goes, again, it’s doing the same thing. But then three months later, they all want to talk to you about like, Well, what did you do? What did you do to get here? And you’re like, did you not see me every single day publishing on LinkedIn? That’s how I got here.

Christian Klepp 14:09

Absolutely. Absolutely. And to the point you brought up earlier about playing the piano, I’m a I’m a drawer, a sketcher. And it was something it was an on a hobby I had for many, many years and you know, throughout high school and whatnot, and then I stopped, right. But then I took it up again during the pandemic, right, but then I had to relearn how to draw and I do post on Instagram and Facebook and what have you, but I started by posting the finished product. But now what I’ve started to do is to post the process so people can see how much work goes behind such a detailed drawing and it’s hours and hours of tinkering away and using different types of pencils, you know, they’re darker and lighter and so forth so they can …. that the people can understand how much effort goes into coming up with one piece of artwork, let’s put up that way.

Ali Schwanke 15:02

Yeah, I love that. I think people are in… They’re intrigued at how something comes together. And they do. Yeah, you gain a lot more respect for the craft, when you can see it in that way.

Christian Klepp 15:12

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. On to the next question, and I’m pretty sure you’ll have no problem answering this. So what roles do you believe researching, and having the right strategy have in growing your B2B content platform? Because it’s not exactly like, you’ll just press submit or go and then boom, there you have it, you have your content platform with your community of followers, right?

Ali Schwanke 15:35

Yeah, really, there’s, so there’s kind of two sides of this. And it’s kind of like a pendulum. And so I will say that some people swing their pendulum over to the Strategy and Planning side. And you can get stuck over there simply planning and strategizing your life away and never actually publish any content. And that it’s a good practice to do your due diligence, because you do have to make sure you have a purpose for your content. However, if you swing the other way, you end up maybe creating something that either your audience does not care for it, it’s on the wrong platform, you’re not even really well equipped to understand what goes into it. So I will say when you when you look at what your goals are, and I’m gonna give you a couple of different types of goals. Sometimes your goal when you’re first starting a content initiative, is to learn how to do it. So if you’re podcasting for the first time, and you’re simply learning how to put together a good episode, a good strategy would be go listen to some episodes from people and companies that you like, try to model yours after theirs, and then just see if you have a good episode. In that case, the products what you’re after is a good episode, you should not correlate that with I want to have 1000 followers, because followers come when you actually create content that they want to hear in the way that they want to hear it and, you know, create episodic type of things. So when it comes to creating content, the single biggest thing that often gets missed is, why are you creating this show? Who is it for? And what do they want to hear or learn about? Because at the end of the day, if you don’t answer those questions, you might really just want to talk into a microphone. And that’s okay. If you just want to talk into a microphone and interview friends and build relationships, that’s fine. That is totally fine. But you typically don’t build an audience without having that really clear picture. And then someone said this on a podcast I was listening to yesterday, they said, when someone subscribes, they subscribe to your content with the intent to get more of what they just heard. So if you all of a sudden get the idea to veer off, because you’re interested in something else, you then violate your listeners, because they expected this from you. And now they’ve gotten that. So that’s you have to pick something that you can talk about exhaustively and not get bored. Because if you get bored, your listeners will get bored.

Christian Klepp 17:58

100% agree. And, you know, back to your earlier point, I think it’s so important for people to understand, you know, people like who are starting out with podcasts or launching them. I’m gonna use the French term, but like, what’s your raison d’etre. Right.

Ali Schwanke 18:14

I like that term. Believe me, I cannot say that that was good.

Christian Klepp 18:19

Sorry. I just, I just had to sound a little bit fancy, but like, you know, but long story short, what’s the reason for being and that’s back to what you were saying, right? Like, why are you launching this? Is it to become famous? Or is it because you’re genuinely trying to solve and this is the topic of the conversation today? Are you genuinely trying to solve a problem that your target audience is facing with this content? Right? And back to the ideal listeners, because not everybody’s gonna listen to the podcast, right? Like the people that subscribe to your YouTube channel, I mean, if they’re not on HubSpot, then why would they even go there? Right?

Ali Schwanke 18:53

Yeah, we that’s one of the things we did find. So for example, when we did our research into our channel planning, we identified that the folks that were doing some of the videos that we thought we could do online, were filled with a lot of topical, we’ll call them offshoots. And so you found that listeners would appreciate or in this case, like viewers would appreciate content for a while. And then they would find that all of a sudden, they’re doing an interview with someone over here that just kind of seemed a little bit off. So you know, imagine watching College Game Day, and suddenly one Saturday they cover a hockey game and not a football game like that would just like ESPN would never let that happen because it’s College GameDay, it’s football. But that’s that is what you do to your listeners and your viewers when you veer off topic, because it’s interesting to you, but it’s not relevant to what they you know, signed up to get from you.

Christian Klepp 19:41

That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. I’m gonna throw in an additional question there, Ali. Because you know, this is, this is on the topic of growing your B2B content platforms and we all know that one of the… it’s not the only thing obviously, but one of the important aspects of successfully growing your content platform is to keep your content fresh. Right? And I know that sounds pretty broad and generic, but let’s narrow it down. Like, you know, from your own experience and your perspective. How do you do that? How do you… like to what you said earlier? How do you keep your content from getting boring and dry? And like, Oh, we’ve, you know, we’ve seen all this before, you know, going on LinkedIn, and like, okay, it’s a post about this topic again, how do you avoid that falling into that trap? Let’s put it that way.

Ali Schwanke 20:31

Yeah, I mean, I think if we could reframe this, it’s really like where do really good content ideas come from? And I know people ask me this a lot, because I’m always it’s kind of like this muscle that the more you exercise it, the better it gets. So if you think you don’t have a lot of good ideas, it’s probably because you haven’t gotten through your really bad ideas first. Really, like, there was a copywriter that I was following online, and he did this experiment, I wish I could think of his name right now, if I think of it, I’ll send it to you to put in the show notes. But he did this experiment, where he wrote 100 headlines every single day for like 25 days or something. And what I thought was fascinating about this, because this is kind of the mantra that I also, you know, have as well as I have these files and files of Evernote, which is the software where I just keep ideas. And I have one Evernote called ideas from the treadmill. And literally, when I’m running, if something pops in my brain, I just throw it on my phone, sometimes later. I’m like, where did that come from? Like, what was I thinking? But it definitely it’s like Jerry Seinfeld would do that when he was thinking about jokes. You know, Ellen DeGeneres has talked about, that’s the way she generates ideas. But this copywriter was talking about the fact that you get through your first I’ll say, 25 30% of your headlines. And those headlines are all kind of like, Oh, you think you’re doing a good job, and then you start to just suck a lot. So in the middle, they start to get really terrible. And then you kind of overcome what we’d call like the cliche, you know, this is like duh sort of content. And then once you work through that, then you start to really make your brain go in different directions. And you come out with these really different ideas, but you have to work that muscle and 100 headlines, if the headline is what gets people to read the article, you should spend more of your time on the headline than you should on the article. So I think that when it comes to content ideas, I spent a lot of time studying, like, I’ll go through LinkedIn one day, and I’ll write down all the headlines that were in my feed. And I’ll just run them down. And then I’ll study them. What did they all have in common? What were they different? How can I emulate some of these? I’ll do the same thing with Tik Toks. What kind of Tik Toks came up on my feed today? Same thing with YouTube shorts. I spent way too much time two nights ago. I was gonna be on there for a couple minutes. And I was studying shorts. What’s the format of them? What was the lead in that they use? Did they have some sort of like virality to them, studying other people’s content, it’s really a great way to do that. And then what I like to tell people to do is come up with what you have is like a playbook. So for our playbook couple of things that we do. One is product releases. So if there’s a product release on the HubSpot platform, that’s a good thing for us to talk about. Another one is going into Reddit. What are people talking about on Reddit? Are there questions on Reddit that we can answer? And the other one is the HubSpot community. People are asking questions in the HubSpot community? Can we answer questions there. And so really, you just start to have all these plays you can run and that’s ultimately if you do that enough, you will never run out of content ideas, that it becomes about prioritization of the ideas and which ones are most impactful.

Christian Klepp 23:31

Just give me some air to digest all that.

Ali Schwanke 23:34

Right, I’ll just share with you my Evernote folder.

Christian Klepp 23:37

Well, I appreciate that not just… I’m sorry, I’ve just been furiously taking notes here. And I hope the the listeners out there are doing the same thing. Because… thanks so much for that those are really those are really some interesting points and highly relevant. Yeah, absolutely. You should focus on the platforms where you’re, you know, where your customers are looking for content, looking for information. And I think that was your point, too, right? It’s not it’s not that everybody should go to Tik Tok right now, if your audience isn’t hanging out and Tik Tok, then you probably shouldn’t look there. Right? But okay, fantastic. Now, you’ve talked about it already a little bit, but break it down for us just think of this like a Lego set, and then you’re just taking it apart again, right before putting it back together. So tell us about the different components that you feel are required to effectively grow your B2B content platforms.

Ali Schwanke 24:27

Yeah, so really, you have to think about what your purpose of the content is. And also, in most cases, B2B content is going to serve as both awareness and lead generation content. And by awareness, that could be both brand awareness as well as well. I’ll use the word and I’ll define it here in a second, but thought leadership which thought leadership is attributing specific ideas to your company, as a leader in an industry. So for example, you know, my company’s thought leadership is attributed to us being experts in HubSpot which therefore means we understand how to drive revenue with your CRM, so on and so forth. And our channels, an example of that. And then obviously, this podcast as we talk about that is an example of that too. But your components, as you’re building up this, this content journey is, really you have to start with that awareness funnel, and all the questions people would ask at every stage of their buying journey. So to make it super simple, stupid, at the awareness phase, they have a problem. And they sometimes don’t know what the problem really even is. So if someone in our case, might end up needing help with their HubSpot CRM, they might think that they need a better salesperson. So they don’t even think that they’re tracking the right stuff in the in the system, they’re just like, I just probably need to have two salespeople instead of one. And it might turn out that one salesperson actually is terrible. And they don’t have a way to report on that, because the reporting in their CRM is terrible, right? So we could help them with that. So there’s problem and then there’s awareness once they become aware of those things. And so that that, we call it consideration content. So consideration content is going to be that middle of the funnel, where they’ve identified a direction they want to go, now they need to figure out what is the best way in which to solve this problem. So I could maybe either hire a sales consultant, I could, you know, upgrade my CRM for better automation functionality, those are two options. And then that what we call decision making content, which is usually things like, you’re gonna have, we call the bottom of the funnel, but you’re gonna have case studies, you’re gonna have testimonials, you’re gonna have how-to videos of like, what to do on your platform for very product specific stuff. Because at that point, whether you’re a service provider, or you happen to be a software, you’re going to be deciding that like, should I move forward with this software or this service, or not? Sometimes the or not, is actually your biggest competitor, the or not is like, that’s too much work, I’m just not going to do anything. Like you’re sometimes competing against nothing, seriously, nothing. And then post-sale, a lot of companies have a huge opportunity to do much better onboarding, and customer advocacy content, which would be things like, like Hrefs, is an excellent, excellent example of this content across the full spectrum of their funnel, because they’ve got how to content all the way down to how to get the most out of their software, and every single one of their videos as well as Brandon, it’s highly understandable, regardless of your use of their product or not, it’s super great on brand in terms of like production and consistency. And then you just feel like they care about you when you when you use their product. So all those four pieces are going to be part of the program. If you’re just starting, you’re probably going to start with content as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible. Because if you don’t have case studies that show your relevancy to someone who’s trying to make a decision, don’t spend your time on the top of the funnel, because they’re going to leak out of your bucket down at the bottom before they actually get to a sale.

Christian Klepp 27:52

Well, that’s fantastic. Well, thanks for sharing that. No, you’re absolutely right. I think, at least from what I’ve seen, many marketers get carried away with trying to do everything. Kind of like that movie that just won the Oscars, right? Everything and everywhere all at once. Right.

Ali Schwanke 28:08

That’s actually an excellent… Like that’s the content strategy do not do as according to the Oscars.

Christian Klepp 28:13

Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Michelle Yeoh. All right, Ali. So this show is also about actionable tips. So give us something actionable here. And let’s step back for a second and appreciate that you can’t do all of this in 24 hours. But if somebody were listening to the conversation that I’m having with you today, what are probably the three to five things that you would want them to do right now to improve how they’re growing their B2B content platforms.

Ali Schwanke 28:43

Yeah, well, I’m gonna take a step back to strategy first, and then we’ll talk action because really, it depends on which direction you’re going. So really, there’s really two kinds of content that exists for B2B companies. And we should have covered this earlier. But we’ll go here. So first one is going to be Search Driven. They know exactly what words to type into Google to solve whatever problem that they have. And that’s going to warrant something down the line for you. And a lot of times you talk to talk about this being capturing demand. So you’re capturing the fact that someone has a search about this, and they’re winding up on your website in some way, shape, or form. And then we have creating demand, which is much more about education, agitation of the market, shaking them up to realize they do have a problem, or they there is a better way to do this. So depending on which one of those you do, you’re going to have to deploy different tactics. So actionable wise, if you happen to be deploying the I’m going to capture them online, you’re going to want to make sure you understand and go make a list of all of the different types of searches that would be in someone’s Google search, for example, that would, you should be creating content about. And some people say well, I don’t know how to do that, I’m not sure which ones to write about. Start with simply the ones that you already know are being asked in the sales process. So again, back to the example we knew, we knew people were asking what is HubSpot? And what can I do with it based on both search data from something like SEMrush, if you use SEMrush, or Ahrefs that will give you that were suggested as another good tool that can give you that as well. And then secondly, on top of that, if you’re going to capture demand, you need to interview your customers. So again, go back to them, ask them questions, like, if you were to type something into Google to find the type of problem we solve, what would you type into Google? And that question is really interesting, because you’ll often get things that people will say, and you’ll be like, huh, I never thought of it that way. Because their paradigm is so much different than yours. Now, if you’re capturing demand, you’re gonna have to think about how to make this interesting, entertaining and relevant to me, when I already am not looking for it. So this is where studying some of the ways that your competition is capturing attention. I’m not saying go copy that. But definitely understand what the competition’s doing first, before you do anything else, and then you have to establish a unique point of view. Otherwise, capturing demand will just look like a me too exercise. So if you’re capturing demand, for instance, if you now create a channel with HubSpot tutorials, yeah, that’s a good measure. But there’s a lot of people doing that now. Like, we’ve been doing that for three years, there’s other people jumping on the boat, if you created I don’t know, a Tik Tok channel that had short pithy things about a CRM and was humorous. That might be interesting, okay, so you got to think about how to capture that attention. And then also make it so that they pay attention and not just, Well, that’s cute. And then I just kind of move on. So you have to pick a direction, either capture content or captured demand or create demand. And then out of that, that’s going to determine your next steps. And if you again, have nowhere else to start, talk to your customers and make sure you have content that answers their top questions.

Christian Klepp 32:06

Absolutely. No, thanks for sharing that. Um, I want to go back to something you said earlier. And that’s not because I want to play devil’s advocate, just out of curiosity.

Ali Schwanke 32:13

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 32:13

Right. Because I while I agree with you, like establish a unique point of view, you know, you know, as well as I do, how often that gets misinterpreted, right? Because there’s folks out there that think that having a unique point of view means like saying something controversial, it’ll piss everybody off. Sure. And I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant. Right? So please, elaborate.

Ali Schwanke 32:33

Yeah, this, I do think that I mean, given some of the political climate and things like that people may be this disposition to think that that’s the way that’s interpreted. However, the point of view is, if you think about your values as a company, and you think about the problems that your product or service solves, there is going to be a reason why that exists. So it is the way I’ve had people back up and think about this is there are things that you fundamentally do and say over and over again in your company. And if you took time to write them down and say, why did we say this? Where did this come from? What is the origin story of this belief? Or what are some origin stories? And then, when I talk about these things, what do I want people to feel and do as a result of these stories.

Ali Schwanke 33:24

So to wrap that all together, I’ll give you an example. I believe that marketing can be both short term and long term, but there is a strategic investment over the long term in order for you to be successful. And where that story came from, is, I have worked with far too many entrepreneurs who have given up on their marketing strategy and tactics right before the breakthrough point. And so all of the efforts that have been put into this are typically abandoned in light of new strategies. And I now am sitting in front of you as a person running a channel for about two and a half, almost three years, that has achieved a level of lead generation and visibility that most companies wish for, because we chose to play the long game. So that is one of the point of views that we have. Now. We also believe that we’re testing out YouTube shorts now, because we need to test out the short term strategies while we demonstrate the long term. So that’s a point of view that again, like makes sense for us.

Christian Klepp 34:20

Absolutely, absolutely. It may not be very timely or pertinent for me to use this comparison, but it’s almost like investing in stocks, right? You don’t cash out after three months. I mean, you have to be in it for the long run. I again, Let’s appreciate that. It depends on what kind of stock we’re talking about. Right? Yeah, I’ll probably just stop there because he’s getting into trouble.

Ali Schwanke 34:44

Yeah, we’ll have a disclaimer at the end of this episode, just in case.

Christian Klepp 34:47

Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Ali, you brought up. You brought this one up earlier, but like, I just wanted you to like talk about an example to highlight how you grew your own content platform, so just walk us through that process if you if you can, about what you did, and what worked, what didn’t work, and what the results were.

Ali Schwanke 35:10

Yeah, so we’ll give you a couple of examples when we first started our table in our blog, and that was back to that creating discipline around things. When we first launched our YouTube channel, it wasn’t a separate channel. It was a hypothesis. And it was a… we already had some clients asking us for videos that would help them do some common things in HubSpot. And at the time loom was a fairly new Chrome plugin, I knew that we were using it to just create these short videos. So send them to the clients, and we thought, one of the gaps again that we identified in…. so we take a step back. So we looked at all of the YouTube content out there related to HubSpot. And one of the things again, we noticed was, people were having less and less tolerance for the long like, here’s my life story kind of the way we all complain about recipe blogs, where they talk about their life story, and I’m just like, I want the recipe. That is that, you know, that happens on YouTube too where they talked about.

Christian Klepp 36:08

Sorry, the jumping does not drive you nuts like that. Yeah, every time I look up some recipe, and they talk about what they like to do. And I’m like, well, where’s the recipe?

Ali Schwanke 36:18

Yeah, well, you know, it’s funny though. It’s like a sidetrack. But is I follow it a gal on Instagram called Of Batter and Dough. And like, her Instagram is amazing. I will read all of her stories, because I become bought into her story. But I didn’t stumble upon her recipe first, I stumbled upon her Instagram first. So but I still don’t read. I don’t read the whole story on our website unfortunately, I read it just on Instagram. And then I’m like, I can’t make bread. Like I tried her bread recipe. And I was…. it was terrible. It was basically like flat. It was like pita bread.

Christian Klepp 36:49

It’s so small feet. But I’m sorry for interrupting. Please continue.

Ali Schwanke 36:52

But I think that what we discovered when we were studying that is, you know, Hi, my name is Ali. And I want to talk to you today about all the things… if you study, the reason why people stay engaged with content is they open their videos with a promise of what’s coming. And it’s not about them. And you get into it right away. So we identified that as the opportunity. So we thought what if we just made better versions of these How-to videos, and just instead of blabbering on for three minutes, we just go, Hey, do you want to know how to hook up your HubSpot inbox to your Gmail? Let’s dive in. And we learned that was it. That was the genesis of the whole idea. So we created some looms, we put them online and added some intros and whatever to them. And we amassed some views from that. So we use that sort like little bit of data to then say, Okay, what would be the result if we put this on its own channel and create an audience around it. So we have these kind of small bets that we put into the mix before we took the big leap into it, which I think is a really important next step. Now, if you’re thinking about this in terms of like a podcast, you can’t take a leap into it and say, I wonder if I can get a couple of listeners. Okay, podcast discovery is much harder. And there’s a lot of them. So that’s not necessarily a good way to do that. But I think like, I’ll give an example. Right now, I’m launching a podcast as well, I had a tweet that I sent out. And I said, I’m launching a podcast, I’ve got an eight minute episode, I’d love for anyone to listen to it, give me some feedback, I had 90 replies on that tweet of people that were willing to give me feedback, I did not send 90 DMs. But I did send about 20 DMs and I had probably 10 People listen, provide feedback, good or bad. And now I’ve got this interesting feedback to kind of build with my community in public. So again, back to that, like when you first start, analyze, make a small bet. And then what we did is we created the first initial pieces of content based on what we knew would be searchable headlines, some of the most common problems that people have that are new users, we looked for like a high level of search volume. And we created those pieces of content. You can’t analyze the performance of your content until you have a minimum viable amount of content. So I think again, people think they want to go back and analyze their performance. Okay, you can’t analyze the performance when you got four videos, and they’ve been up for four weeks, that’s just not possible. It’s like weighing yourself on a diet on day two, like waterway, you know, woo hoo, but like, you’re gonna go ahead and eat lunch, and you’re gonna be back to where you started, right? So when you’re analyzing, for us, we had to get to that six month mark. At the six month mark, our growth line still looked like a person that was dead, like it was not going anywhere… But once we got to this inflection point, we said we have six months of data. Let’s really dig in and we started doing a analyzation of like, how many subscribers did we get? Where did they come from? What were the search terms? We reverse engineered all of that and said you know what, we found three key insights that drove our content calendar for the next six months, and that then started to build a compound effect, as we created more content. So it’s, it’s so much like everything else in life where the more you do it and the more you study it, the more you learn. And it has to be an iterative process. And then ultimately, like we learned, you know, shorts and snippets and social pieces and whatever. But that’s really the genesis of how it all kind of came together.

Christian Klepp 40:21

Amazing, amazing story. And I think, with sharing that experience with the audience, you’ve also answered the question about quality versus quantity, which is, I think, a question that everybody in content marketing asks themselves or gets asked, and I think you just answered it, right? It’s something that happens progressively over time. You don’t you know, you don’t start with quality like I certainly didn’t.

Ali Schwanke 40:21

Yeah, there’s a couple of things that you have to keep in mind based on platforms. So I will say written content. Quality means you have to have an intro that captures me, otherwise, the rest of the article doesn’t matter. And there has to be something I learn that either inspires me motivates me or causes me to think differently. If you don’t achieve that in a written piece of content, you then get to the answer. Think about these pieces, where it’s like 10 Things You Didn’t Know About XYZ. If you read the article and go, I knew all of that, like you’ve, you’ve let the reader down, you know, so you have to have something that delivers on its promise. Podcasting, you have to be able to get rid of things like vocal tics, you have to really listen to your vocal inflection and your tonality, those things matter. On a podcast. If you’re not really good at that now, Toastmasters, public speaking lessons, those are all going to be important. But you can speak eloquently, if you don’t talk about something that people are interested in, who cares? Who cares how eloquent you speak, if you’re, if your strategy is not right. On video, again, same sort of thing. If you’re not watching your videos overtly, I don’t know if you do this Christian. But I’ve talked to a lot of people that they have a podcast, or they’ve been on video, and they never watch or listen to themselves. I’m telling you, if you have any sort of content, if you write it, you need to read it. If you record it, you need to listen to it. If you record it, you need to watch it like you have to analyze your own performance.

Christian Klepp 42:18

100% agree! And you have to answer your question. Yes, I do watch my own videos, and I do listen back to myself. And every now and then I’m like, argh, did I really say that?

Ali Schwanke 42:29

I mean, that’s a necessary evil, I think we’re afraid of what we sound and listen, like, or and look like. And I tell people every day, this is terrible to say this way, but like, I look at you, and I listen to you. So at the whole world is experiencing something that you think is not worth listening or watching, I find that hard to believe.

Christian Klepp 42:48

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, it was something also that I have to struggle to like unlearn, for example, because you know, it’s human nature, right? These pauses, or these gap fillers, you know, like what I just did, you know, you know, ahh’s and ummm’s. And, and I tried doing that, like with a friend of mine, who’s a, you know, she’s a public speaking coach, right, for example. And I asked her, like, you know, Tina, give me some tips, like, how can I get rid of this? And she said, Well, it’s human nature, you can’t really 100% get rid of it. But what you can probably do, instead of saying ahh or you know, is just take a breath, take a breath, and keep your mouth open without any sound coming out. And as awkward as that looks.

Ali Schwanke 43:36

I’m gonna tell my kids that too.

Christian Klepp 43:38

Yeah. But, but try getting people to do that. Right? You know, you and I, we’ve been doing this, we’ve been running our own podcasts for a certain period of time, and I still catch myself doing it. Alright.

Ali Schwanke 43:50

It’s because we’re all on Zoom every day, it becomes something that we’re accustomed to, since in our calls, they’re not performances. Yes, when you are on a performance, it is a little bit more difficult to remember that. But repetition and review. And every single athlete that I’ve ever watched or read their documentary, or watch a documentary is, they watch themselves compete, they see themselves in game performance. That has to be the way we think about ourselves as content creators. If you’re not the creator, if you’re the strategist, and you have a team of creators, then it’s up to you to be the coach of that team as well. So, identify that if that’s your executive, they’re probably going to have a little bit of an ego, and that your ability to help them realize their shortcomings and have that comes across to their customers. That’s a topic for a whole other episode.

Christian Klepp 44:44

Oh, yeah. Part two coming soon. Metrics, love it or hate it. Right? Which metrics would you recommend marketers should be paying attention to if they’re trying to grow their B2B content platforms?

Ali Schwanke 45:01

Good question, there’s going to be metrics at each level, or each stage of the journey. And ultimately, most marketing programs that are driven by content will have some sort of lead generation metric. So if you are utilizing webinars, for example, as one of your content deliverables, you will want registrants. If you are using blogs, and they are Search Driven, you want keyword rankings, and you want search traffic. If you are using YouTube, you want views and conversions from YouTube or on some sort of lead generating content. So I do think that I gave a talk once at a conference called metrics that matter. And what we don’t want is we don’t want vanity metrics. But usually, the way I tell people to do metrics is think about your dashboard as like just all the things in your car. So when you’re looking at YouTube, you want all the subscribers, you want that level of engagement, you want your average click through rate, or average view duration, those are very important for the algorithm, on your blog, you want click through rate, you want keyword ranking, you want time on page, all those things are important. You then analyze that on a monthly basis, and you do a couple things. So pretend that your executive only has five minutes to read your analytics report. What are the three driving metrics that matter? Here’s a link to the whole dashboard. And then here are three insights from that. And then here are three things we need to do as a result of those insights. So if you think about that, again, that’s kind of the way that we function, when we go to the doctor, here’s your blood report, here’s what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, you’re great, you’re not whatever. That’s how we interpret that data. Otherwise, you can get buried in metrics, and then you actually get in weeds that don’t really drive anything. And instead, they just, they look fancy, but if you got five more subscribers in the last month, it’s not a big deal. And it might, you might find that it’s accidental, and you have no idea how you got those additional leads or, or drivers.

Christian Klepp 46:59

Yeah, yeah. no, you know, that’s such a great answer. And I’ll tell you why. Keeping it short and simple, especially for senior members of management, because we’ve all been in those meetings where it’s like, oh, no, this has gone on for far too long, this meeting. And the report is way too long. And we’re losing them at some point, right. And to your point, I’ve seen this happen a couple of times where marketers are throwing all this data out there, but they actually sometimes don’t know how to interpret the data properly. Or they don’t prepare, or they don’t anticipate the question from the board, which tends to be. So what’s the point? What are you trying to get at here? Right? Yep. So how do we solve… Okay, so we know that there, we see this data, we see this chart, we know that there’s a problem, but how do we solve it?

Ali Schwanke 47:47

Oh, yeah, best practice in understanding metrics is the other benchmarks, both your benchmarks as well as industry benchmarks. And if you have been tracking data for three months, that becomes your three month benchmark. So your job as a marketer, your job as a content marketer is to help everybody makes sense of the what seems like crazy data. And I will tell you, the minute you show a chart that’s got any sort of down arrow and any red anywhere, regardless of how amazing your metrics look, that little teeny box with the red in it will just draw everyone’s freakin eye. Which is why it’s numbers and stats are so important to figure out what is your comparable because if you’re comparing time period or time period, and you had some sort of like, complete anomaly, like COVID. Okay, that isn’t actually a measurable year, like we had a really weird digital year, that year, because nobody went outside. So making sense of the numbers in light of the context is what your job is. And then And to your point, anticipate the questions so that you address them before they even think about them. And they know that you are actually ahead of all of that, and they’re not going to try and catch you off guard.

Christian Klepp 49:02

Absolutely. Absolutely. So we’re getting to the end of the show, but I’ve got two more questions for you. All right. Get up on your soapbox. The status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Ali Schwanke 49:18

I mean, there’s a lot of conversation right now around AI. And I’ll kind of go there because the I think anytime something’s new and unknown, there’s both a anticipation of amazement. And there’s also this fear of replacement. And anytime you go from the current known to the unknown, regardless how amazing it is, there’s this kind of treacherous journey. And what I disagree with is the idea that, again, we’re all going to be replaced by AI. I think a lot of the things we do are going to be replaced with AI. But I think the thing that I leaned into super hard I just tweeted this this morning is because we’re going to start to see human voices powered by AI, human faces and avatars powered by AI, what I think it makes a wonderful opportunity for you and I and content creators is go create content that is just so human that you can’t help but watch and engage with it. So if we did this podcast while we were walking, that would be different because you can’t do that. Right? You know, can I somehow have back to like, Jerry Seinfeld did his comedians and cars. Okay, that’s interesting, because, you know, that’s something you can’t do right now with that that AI component. So I do firmly believe there are things that humans want to see from other humans. And we’re, we’re going to crave that the more that that’s taken away from us.

Christian Klepp 50:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. And to your point, no the machines are not going to rise up and take over. Not just yet.

Ali Schwanke 50:53

I mean, we need to be careful… like this. There is a lot of experimentation. But there needs to be some healthy fare for some of the use cases of this. And that’s definitely, I think, on a lot of people’s minds.

Christian Klepp 51:05

Totally agree. Totally agree. Ali, as expected, this was an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your experience and expertise with the audience. quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Ali Schwanke 51:18

Yeah, well, thanks for the invite. For those that didn’t catch my name earlier. I’m Ali Schwanke. I’m the founder of Simple Strat and one of the hosts of HubSpot Hacks over on YouTube. We have a lot of great resources over at simplestrat.com you can find me on LinkedIn, I have tons of stuff there weekly newsletter. And, again, if you Google Ali Schwanke, there’s only one of me that I know of. So you’ll be able to track me down and I look forward to having conversations out of the show and hopefully maybe doing this again sometime.

Christian Klepp 51:46

Fantastic. Fantastic. So Ali, once again, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Ali Schwanke 51:51

Yep, thank you.

Christian Klepp 51:53

Thanks, bye for now.

View Details

How to Build Trust With Storytelling in B2B

With so many channels and so much content put out on a daily basis, B2B companies struggle to rise above the digital noise in a way that differentiates them. As such, how can companies create better content that is interesting, insightful, and delivers true value?

Join us in this week’s conversation with expert B2B content marketer Chris Rapozo (Marketing Specialist, Hannon Hill) as he talks about building trust with target audiences by telling better stories. During our discussion, Chris talks about why B2B companies need to focus less on their product or service features and more on how they are able to solve their customers’ challenges. He also elaborates on the mistakes to avoid, the importance of first-party data and research in storytelling, the role that emotions and rationale play, metrics to pay attention to, and what B2B marketers can do right now to improve their storytelling approach for better results.

https://youtu.be/57HtvF_Sx8I

Topics discussed in episode

• Chris talks about some common mistakes and misconceptions with regards to B2B storytelling and what he thinks should be done to address these. [5:40]
• Chris explains the relevance of first-party data and research to good storytelling. [9:15]
• The role that emotions and rationale play when it comes to storytelling and B2B. [14:15]
• Actionable tips: [21:02]
  • Check out TED Talk “The magical science of storytelling” by David Phillips
  • Experiment with data and use it to tell a story
  • Read the book: “Storytelling animal” by Jonathan Gottschall
  • Learn about your customers through your sales team and customer success team to help craft better stories
• Chris shares an example of great storytelling in the world of B2B. [24:55]
• The specific metrics that marketers should be paying attention to when it comes to B2B storytelling. [28:21]
• Chris shares a status quo in B2B storytelling that he passionately disagrees with. [32:44]

Companies and links mentioned

• Chris Rapozo on LinkedIn
• Hannon Hill

TranscriptSPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Chris Rapozo

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help. Let me see if I get this right to help create quality B2B content that is interesting, insightful and tells a compelling story that resonates with your target audience. So coming to us from Atlanta, Georgia, Chris Rapozo, welcome to the show.

Chris Rapozo 01:16

Thank you, Christian, I’m humbled to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Christian Klepp 01:19

Great to be connected, Christopher. And before we start, shout out to Robb Conlon thank you so much, sir, for making this connection. Right. Okay. Fantastic. So Chris, let’s kick off this conversation. And I’m going to start with a quote from an article I read in Forbes. And I think I did share that with you. And it was written by a gentleman called Samuel Timothy. Alright, so his quote was, if you manage to tell a good story about your product or service, you will be able to communicate its value without listing all the features explicitly. And clients will love it. Over to you, your thoughts? And what would you add to that?

Chris Rapozo 02:00

I’ll start off with a quote as well from our company founder who says “fall in love with the market, not the idea”, okay? So too often entrepreneurs or business people or marketers, they fall in love with that grandiose idea of that product that they have without getting the input from the market and to see if they actually would utilize their product, right? We’re all familiar with the movie Field of Dreams that many of us are, you know, if they build it, they will come. But rarely in the real world does that actually work that you just build a product, and then people just want to flock to it. It’s not like the iPhone, right? That doesn’t happen very often. So we got to make sure we think market first not idea first, be ingrained in the market. Just get to know the market. It’s like when you go on a first date, right, you’re not asking somebody to marry you on the first date, you get to know them, you court them. And you would do the same with your market, with your audience to know what they really want. And once you really know what they want, what triggers them and what they’re attracted to, then you’ll be able to tell a story, after you’ve built the trust that they need from you, without having to hard sell them on your features or the benefits. You’ll have the connection, you have that trust and then the story will flow organically when it comes to your product. That’s what I would say.

Christian Klepp 03:35

Absolutely, absolutely. And yes, indeed. Build it and they will come is probably one of the biggest misconceptions of our time. I love how you talked about building trust, because while in B2B, it’s, it almost seems like it’s obvious. But it’s interesting to note how many companies and marketers for that matter, don’t lead with that. Right? They might. They might have it in the mix somewhere somehow, but they don’t lead with it. And that’s, that’s a dangerous path to go down if you don’t, if you don’t lead with trust, right?

Chris Rapozo 04:12

Yeah, I’m a big fan of social proof. You know, if you have great customers, you know, make sure you have those case studies, those customer spotlights, even the employee spotlights, you know, people do business with people. So you want to make sure that even if it’s B2B marketing that your customers and your clients they get to know you and your employees that they’re going to be dealing with on a day to day basis.

Christian Klepp 04:40

Absolutely. Okay, Chris, you know, we’re focusing on the concept of storytelling for B2B and we have had guests on the show previously that I’ve talked about this topic, but I think one of the reasons why I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with you is because one of the things that I like about the show is we encourage diversity of thinking. So people can come and talk about the same topic, but offer their own perspective and that perspective, more often than not, there, there are some commonalities, but they also tend to be very different perspectives, which are all very meaningful and constructive. So on that note, on to the next question, talk to us about some of the things that you’ve seen, from your own experience some of the common mistakes, and we spoke about misconceptions already mistakes and misconceptions that you’ve seen out there with regards to B2B storytelling and what you think should be done to address this.

Chris Rapozo 05:40

One of the problems that I’ve seen, and that’s happened to me too, when somebody is trying to pitch me is that companies make it about themselves, make it about their product. And we just have to realize that it’s not about us, right, especially in this connection economy that we’re working in these days, we always want to make sure it’s about the customer, it’s about the market, it’s about the client, and we want to bring value to them, right. This is like the service industry, we’re here to serve them, they have an issue, they have a problem. And our products are there to address that problem to help them to lift them up. So when you tell a story, when you tell it to your customer, you always want to make sure you make them the hero in the end, right. So if it’s a B2B, VP of marketing, and they’re needing a content management system, or anything that helped them get better reach or get more leads, or more signups for whatever they’re doing, you want to make sure that they look good in front of their stakeholders when they decide to go with our product. So even though we have a great product that will help them, we don’t want to make us look like their Savior, right, we want to take it around with the focus on them, make them the hero, so our product is the solution to their problem. And we want to help make them shine. And I’m a big follower of Simon Sinek. So you always want to make sure you start with why right, why is this product there? Why are you getting up in the morning? Is it to simply make a lot of money? Or is it to solve a problem, you know, it’s better to give than receive, you know, that’s my motto that I live by daily. In our company, for example, we serve higher ed institutions, and higher ed institutions, they serve the next generation of leaders, right. And we help them with their messaging on their website. So if we do a good job, and if we’re able to reach them, to help them build a better website that attracts better future leaders and equips them, you know, we’re doing a good job to help better our our nation, even if we’re not directly involved in the teaching, but we’re helping those higher ed institutions get in front of those students that need to hear about them and their service.

Christian Klepp 08:04

Absolutely, absolutely. I love that you brought out like Simon Sinek about starting with why. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier. And it’s something that I encourage guests that come on the show to explain in greater detail, because you talked about bringing value to customers. And we all know that. And you probably see this on LinkedIn more often than you care to count, but people talk about oh, add value, bring value. And you know, you have to, you have to show your value. In your own words, define what you mean by value.

Chris Rapozo 08:38

Value means that I’m able to equip someone to be a better version of themselves and show them that they can do more like… sometimes we have this this ceiling that we think okay, we can’t go past that. But if we bring them a product that would help them elevate to break through that ceiling to the next level. That’s the sort of value that I’m talking about.

Christian Klepp 09:00

Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. On to the next question, love it or hate it. But this is extremely important when it comes to good storytelling. Explain the relevance of first party data and research?

Chris Rapozo 09:15

Yes, definitely. So where I went to school, Communications College Journalism College at the University of Florida, they’re big on primary research. So we learned a lot about that. And primary research or first party data, it helps marketers create a more purposeful message to build a direct relationship with your audience. So as a marketer, you want to be super in-tune and close to your sales team, and your customer success team. So in tech, there’s a lot of customer success teams that I’ve heard of and we have a great customer success team where I work and they do check-in calls with the customers to see you know, are they getting the most out of their subscription. And then our success team, they write up a recap of all the conversations that they have with clients: what’s going well, what’s not going well, what the client would like to see updated in the product in order to help them even more. So we have big shout out to Charlie and Rebecca on our success team. They’re a phenomenal team. And they always helped me become a better storyteller, because I hear about that itch that our customer has. And if I know that I’m able to scratch that itch with a compelling copy, May there be a FAQ, or a short form video series on how to do certain things with our product, right? So you want to have that first party data directly from our clients, because chances are that if they’re in the same industry as a prospective client, those prospective client, they’re probably dealing with the same issues. So you’ll be able to write up case studies, write up customer success stories, or customer spotlights to showcase: Hey, somebody in your position had that issue. And that’s how they overcame it. And it’s instant social proof. Right? Instant social proof right there.

Christian Klepp 11:18

Absolutely, absolutely. Identifying, you know, to your point, what’s keeping the customer up at night? And not even not even necessarily just that, but like, what is it that they need to do in order to succeed in their role in their job? And if you can help them to get there, right? What a compelling story that would make right? Fantastic.

Chris Rapozo 11:41

Bringing value, you know.

Christian Klepp 11:43

Yes, yes, indeed, indeed. You brought up something earlier, and I’d like to go back to it. It’s about video series, or just the concept of videos in general. We all know that it’s becoming more and more important in the world of content, you know, from your point of view, and from where you sit in the B2B content marketing space. How important are videos in your work?

Chris Rapozo 12:08

It’s immensely important, especially, you know, everybody loves Tik Tok, or at least the Gen Z generation, I’m not on Tik Tok, but I love YouTube, I love YouTube Shorts, bite size, instructional videos, or even videos that entertain me. But I believe that videos are the future in marketing, because people are always on the go. And if you can just like this podcast, for example, if you can just listen to it on your commute, to and from work, or if you’re doing the dishes, or folding laundry, whatever it is. You don’t have to watch it, but at least you have the audio. So video is huge. Or for example, when I need to fix something in my house, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t google it, I go to YouTube, and I search for it to see, hey, can somebody show me how to do this real quick. And also, you know, since we were children, we were conditioned to sit in front of the TV. So a screen… you see a screen you’re like, hey, I want to pay attention to this. Right? And it’s the same video. That’s why we’re so drawn to, to videos. And I think that’s why video marketing or advertising is so effective.

Christian Klepp 13:17

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I’m ashamed to say that every time and you can appreciate this living in the United States. But every time we have to, you know, there’s Daylight Savings Time, and you have to adjust the time on your watch. And I’ve got a G shock. And every time it comes to the date, where I have to change the time, I’m like, Man, am I really going to read through this 40 page manual. I’ll just look it up on YouTube. Alright. And there you go. That was one… the other the other day I saw like, it’s like 56 seconds. Bam. There you go. Yes. On to the next question, which is one of those things, you know, where people say, Oh, you don’t need this in in B2B marketing, because B2B marketing is all factual and information. But I’m gonna throw this out there anyway. What role do you think emotions and rationale play? When it comes to storytelling and B2B?

Chris Rapozo 14:15

Yeah, I guess it depends on the on the product that you’re buying, or let’s say a customer decides to buy an enterprise level software that’s going to cost them a tremendous amount of money. You know, to run their infrastructure, they, they have to be rational in their decision making, they can’t just buy on impulse, because a wrong decision could put the company’s future in jeopardy or, you know, and as a follow, of course, that person’s job if they’re just aloof and just, you know, jump on anything that kind of, you know, excites them right away. So you have to be rational when you make decisions. So let’s say somebody identifies a problem and they do their research, choose their solution right, even though they’re rational, they’re doing their research through to find a solution, but then you come in with your storytelling and you bring that emotion in to just convince them of their, you know, their issue can be solved, while they’re doing their research, let’s say through. Again, I always go back to the social proof, because I’m just such a big fan of it with the case studies and a customer spotlight. So they’re, they’re rationally looking for reviews, they’re looking for some sort of an example of how somebody had the same issue and how they overcame it. And when they evaluate their options, you want to be top of mind, you want to stand out with, with your emotional storytelling abilities, when you tell the customer success stories or the customer spotlights, how a different… let’s say universities, because we deal with universities, overcame a certain challenge, if I may, I wrote up a customer spotlight about a Canadian school, University of Alberta, and they have a lot of international students in China. And in order to communicate with them, they use Google Forms. But Google has been blocked in China, so they could no longer utilize the Google Forms to communicate with their Chinese international students to make a smooth transition to their Alberta campus. So they use our Clive forms a personalization tools, our forms in order to what I called, penetrate the Great Firewall of China. So I wrote a story about that, how they did that, and how they were able to bring those Chinese students over to Canada, and then bring it from the airport to campus, right, bring that emotion in to show them, hey, they are there not just for the tuition, they are there to bring a good experience. So people go about it when they look for a product in a rational way. But then they get swayed kind of by the emotional storytelling part of it. That’s what I believe, should answer your questions, I hope.

Christian Klepp 17:04

Yeah, yeah. No, no, that’s a great example, by the way. And yeah, they I have heard it being called that as the Great Firewall of China or the firewall, right. I was talking about it in another podcast, but you know, it’s not a physical wall, per se. Right. It’s actually a it’s actually an entire ecosystem, if you will. It’s a combination of legislation. There, there’s definitely a software and the censorship apparatus in place. So it’s a combination of all of these, these elements, right, that make that censorship, but like, great example of what was clearly an impediment. Right? And how they overcame that by just using another channel or using another alternative, using another approach. Right, fantastic. Fantastic. And with that story, that’s a great segue into the next question, because, you know, break it down for us just think of this like it like Lego blocks, and then you just, you’re just taking them apart to show us the pieces, right. So from your perspective, what do you think is required for effective storytelling and B2B? And you have mentioned some of them already.

Chris Rapozo 18:09

Yeah, you have to know your audience, you have to know them deeply. You have to know how to build your personas, in order to know how to talk to the individual. You know, what’s important to them, what you mentioned, what keeps them up at night? What are they worried about? You know, what do they care about? And then you want to tailor your message to their needs. But you also have to understand that not every story resonates with everyone, you know, you may have different personas, for us for examples, our target audiences are VPs and CMOs of marketing, but also IT Directors. Now if I share a story about how to effectively create content with an IT Director, he couldn’t care less, he’s worried about security, system security, right? So we have to tailor that message for that particular person in that way. Or if it’s a web developer that we’re trying to engage, we have to show them that they can use different coding languages, that they’re not just don’t just only have to use HTML or CSS, they have different options with our product so that they know what the what to expect if they go with our product. And you also, and I said this before, like existing customers stay hero, you know, tell their story, how they overcame a certain challenge that they faced before. So I think that’s the way to effectively tell a story in B2B marketing is always go back to the social proof and just give examples, you know, show don’t tell, I would say, show people, this is what our product did for somebody else that was in your position, and that’s where you can be if you go with our product.

Christian Klepp 19:57

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those are great list, I’d like to throw one other element in there. It’s absolutely like, knowing your target audience, I think is paramount. The other one is what I’ve seen in my own experience is understanding their buyers journey. Right? Like what they go through, which touchpoints to them are critical. And then going back to your overall storytelling / content strategy and understanding how that content will influence their journey and move them along, essentially. Right?

Chris Rapozo 20:33

That’s right. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 20:33

Okay. Great. So Chris, one of the things I told you in a previous conversation is that this show is about actionable tips. So we get to the point in the show where you give us something actionable. And let’s, let’s, let’s appreciate that. You can’t do all of this, like, you know, in five minutes. All right, well, what are some things let’s say three to five things that you hope the audience will walk away with, and that they can do right now to improve their storytelling approach? Off you go.

Chris Rapozo 21:01

Off you go, man, I’ll give you one thing go to ChatGPT. ChatGPT does give you a lot of your list. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. (laugh) When somebody’s watching this episode, but ChatGPT is huge right now. Everybody’s talking about it in March 2023. So I don’t know if that’s still gonna be relevant by the time somebody’s listening. But I would say if you only have an hour today, I would suggest somebody go to TED, watch a TED talk on storytelling. That’s how I learned about storytelling. I recommend one by David Phillips, the magical science of storytelling, which currently has about four to 5 million views on YouTube, it’s really practical and helps somebody you know, tell better stories. And then, right after that, probably a lot of people that listen to this podcast, they’ve been in industry for a while, they know their audiences. And I would just say, like, we talked earlier about short form videos, you know, you don’t need a big production, just prop up your smartphone, tell a compelling story, or in 59 seconds or less, and upload it to your YouTube shorts and see what happens. And experiments but experiment with data. That’s what I’ve been doing lately, just tried my hand on YouTube shorts. And it’s fantastic reach there. Because it’s popular right now. Another thing if you have about a week or so I would say pick up the book, Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. I don’t know if you heard this one before. But that was recommended by one of my mentors, to me, who’s an extremely great storyteller, and a great presenter. And it’s just this book, The storytelling animals, it just explains the life’s complexity of social problems that are brought out through storytelling. And then I would just say, Sit with your sales team and your customer success team, you know, figure out what worries your customers, and how your product can help them and then use that information to craft your your stories going forward. And then practice, practice, practice, you know, you have to sit down and you have to create videos, it’s super awkward at the beginning, when you hear yourself talk or see yourself on video. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the same with writing compelling stories, story articles. If you sit down the first time, you’re like, oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to write. Or you think in your own head that it’s a terrible way you just crafted a story. But I always say write for one person, right? You don’t, you don’t want to write for everyone. I say if your piece or your content, helps one person, you know, then your job was well done. If you affect somebody out there that you may never get in contact with, they may read your content on LinkedIn. And they may never like it, comment or reach out to you, but it may have affected them positively. And if you do that, as a storyteller job well done.

Christian Klepp 24:04

Yeah, those are some really great tips. And, you know, to your point, though, one of the clients I got like about a year ago was somebody that never engaged with the content, my content on LinkedIn. So, you know, it’s just a message to, you know, the listeners out there never underestimate people that, you know, they don’t comment, they don’t share, they don’t engage with your content. That doesn’t mean that, you know, just because they don’t do that, that doesn’t mean that they’re not reading it. Right.

Chris Rapozo 24:31

Yes. Yes. That can be frustrating at times, you know, it feel like… if you think you have a great piece, and then you don’t get that feedback, but again, you do it for that one person, you may never know who it is.

Christian Klepp 24:42

Absolutely, absolutely. So you brought up a couple of great examples already. But give us another one. Give us an example. You know, from your point of view, an example of great storytelling in the world of B2B.

Chris Rapozo 24:55

I did a little bit of… I thought about that quite… And I, there was one commercial by Salesforce team Earth, it’s called, or it’s actually called the new frontier. It was a Superbowl commercial in 2022. And it was pretty timely because it was, during a time where there was some turmoil in the United States, you know, lots of conflict in a racial conflict, and a lot of tension between different groups. And so the commercial shows Matthew McConaughey in an in a hot air balloon on the edge of space, and you’re talking about the new frontier spaces, the new frontier, and he’s like, You know what, I don’t think so. And then, you know, I can, let me look up the script here real quick what he says. He says, you know, it’s not time to escape, it’s time to engage with other people. Because, you know, if the turmoil that we had, you know, he says, It’s time to plant more trees, it’s time to build more trust, you want to build more trust with each other, because I don’t want to get political here. But it doesn’t start in Washington in the United States. It starts in our neighborhoods, it starts in our households, it starts in our companies, right, in order to get along with each other, we don’t want to look at somebody that we’ll never see we’ll never talk to, we want to make sure we we communicate with each other. And that we just build that trust and get to know each other. And this what this commercial base that he talked about his sight, it’s it’s time to make more space for all of us, you know, be more inclusive. And you know, so while others look at the metaverse or go to Mars, and it was also during the time with Jeff Bezos, Branson, you know that there’s space based travel, it’s he said, It’s time to stay here and restore our world, right, it’s time to blaze our trail crossed a new frontier, he says It Ain’t Rocket Science, the new frontier is right here. And it was through Salesforce, you know, our CRM, or you have always, you know, make connections with others. So I thought it was a really timely message to what was going on in our world, and how to connect with one another. And that’s basically what Salesforce does, you know, it’s it was a great storytelling there in their way to bring up the emotions as well as they, as they, you know, shot that commercial for their CRM.

Christian Klepp 27:23

Yeah, yeah. Perfect example. And what a great message. I mean, like, you know, to your point, it was, it was timely, it was pertinent. And it’s, it’s really driving that message home about like, stop locking up, you know, up there and locked down here. Instead, we’ve got plenty going on down here, right, that we can, that we can be paying attention to, and that we should be paying attention to. Yeah, no, fantastic example. On to the next question. Love it or hate it, right. But at some point in time as marketers, right, we can come up with creative campaigns, and we come up with amazing content and videos and what have you. But at some point in time, we’re going to have to show proof to someone higher up that all the stuff that we’re rolling on is working, right. So from your point of view, what specific metrics should marketers be paying attention to when it comes to B2B storytelling?

Chris Rapozo 28:21

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Google Analytics. I look at it all, especially my blog page, you know, because I put a lot of content on my blog, see what resonates. I just say what the videos but the short form videos, you know, who’s looking at it, or getting engagement through it? Do people watch my videos? Do people stay long enough on my on my blog, to actually read the whole thing? Or do they just stay there for 5-10 seconds and then bounce because it’s not relevant to them. And then with that data, you know what, what sparks someone right, and you can hone in on that. It’s like an A|B test. You want to make sure that you create content that speaks to your, to your, your audience. I always like to put a call to action at the end of my blog post, you know, if I get a if I get a demo request, then I know it worked. So that’s something I always want to look at. What else? Let’s be honest. We talked about this a little bit earlier with lurkers on social media, a lot of people they don’t look, they don’t engage with their stuff, but I still look at it. You know, do people share my content? Do people like it? So a couple of weeks ago, I created a 10 must listen higher ed podcast and you probably know about this one because Robb told you about it. That list and it was shared by so many people because I I tagged every podcast host and they liked the recognition. So they shared it with their network and that got a tremendous reach. Right? So this is something I look at so like how can I get outside of my network with my posts by tagging others but I don’t want to be creepy about. I just want to tag people just just to get the reach, I want to bring value to them and then bring so much value to them that they’re inclined to share my posts with their audience, you know? So that’s kind of like the metric stuff I look at. Do people like it? Do people share it? Do people comment it, do I get negative feedback in the comments? It was something I got to look at too, because sometimes I approached my storytelling from a certain angle that it may upset somebody. So I want to make sure I don’t do that, again, even if I didn’t think it was upsetting. But if a number of people feel the same way about my content, I’m like, Okay, I need to pivot, right? I can’t do that approach anymore. So you always it’s always in marketing…, it’s the beauty about marketing, you always, you adjust, you have to adjust all the time, you adjust to the market, and to the beat of the market. So there’s… those are like the metrics that we’re looking at. And you just want to make sure that you don’t get in an echo chamber, right, you are there. You gotta see what’s what clicks, what doesn’t, what’s trending.

Christian Klepp 31:03

Absolutely. Well, I mean, to your point, I mean, it’s, it’s a work in progress, right, that you have to continuously iterate. I mean, that’s, that’s marketing in itself, right, like, summed up and summed up in a sentence. But you said something earlier, which I thought was super interesting, because we, we all know, people who do that on LinkedIn, and I think it has a specific name, but they start tagging, like everybody under the sun, right? And like, Okay, Jeff Bezos, come on, like Simon Sinek, like way in here. Give us your two cents worth. But I think, to your point, if you tag thoughtfully and meaningfully, which is what you were doing, obviously, by giving recognition to the podcast hosts, then you might see better engagement, but if it’s, but you know, people, people can see through, you know, someone’s intentions, if you’re, if you’re just like trying to voice your opinion, and you’re trying to like, tag all these influencers out there, then you know, that’s an exercise that could clearly backfire. Right?

Chris Rapozo 32:06

Yeah. When somebody shows up in the comment section that brings no relevance to it with their comments, and or yet somebody uses their company page to to write a comment about it in front of this person’s audience. It’s like, I know what you’re doing. And that’s not gonna work.

Christian Klepp 32:25

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s a great segue into the next question. Okay. gentle on your soapbox here, man. What is the status quo in B2B storytelling that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Chris Rapozo 32:44

It’s all about the bottom line, man.

Christian Klepp 32:48

Yeah, of course. Of course.

Chris Rapozo 32:50

Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s the status quo that I passionately disagree with. Because in today’s connection, economy, you know, it’s not all about the bottom line, man, it’s about building connection, trust, familiarity. And establishing yourself as an industry expert, which again, increases trust with potential clients. Now, sure, I’m not stupid, I know that there’s some part about the bottom line because you got to keep the lights on at the end. You know, overall, this is a it’s a business you want to keep the lights on. But if you’re just concerned about the bottom line, you know, you come over pushy, you come up with desperate and then you come over annoying, you know, we’ve all had this connection request by somebody with like, oh, new friend, and all of a sudden you get you get that that pitch from them. But you didn’t earn that, right? You didn’t build that connection with me, I didn’t give you permission to pitch me. Like what makes you think that you can just pop into my messaging and try to pitch me without getting to know me, getting to know my needs. So absolutely. There’s this connect right there. You know, it’s like, not working. So make sure it’s all about the customer, knowing their pain points. And once you have figured that out, and you build a relationship with them, like we do right here, I can’t just ask you to come on your podcast, if you don’t know me, we build a relationship before, you know, and hopefully I brought some value to your audience and to your life, the short amount of time that we met each other, known each other so that’s the way you want to go about it, you know, build relationship. It’s not all about the bottom line, I understand. It is in some point because you got to run a business and you got to play your own toys but don’t come over desperate, you know, build a relationship first, then go from there.

Christian Klepp 34:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, that’s such a great point. And I mean, you know, one of my all-time favorite pitch slaps are the ones that they send out this message under the Are you texts that they’re trying to like, they’re interested in what you do, or they’re trying to try to find some way to collaborate with you to a certain degree. But then when you start reading between the lines, it really is just a veiled the pitch slap, right? Yeah. So it’s just, it’s just them trying to sell their product under a false pretext of actually being interested in your company, which turns out, they’re not interested in you at all. Alright, they, they just, they’re just trying to hit their quota. Right. And so there’s plenty of that stuff out there. But, um, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. And you know, for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. So a quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. Und ich habe auch ein Paar Gerüchte gehört dass du Deutsch sprechen kannst.

Chris Rapozo 35:47

Ja, ich spreche auch Deutsch. Vielen Dank. So I’m bilingual, German, and English. Born and raised in Germany, and, you know, moved out west to find the American dream, which I did. Also recently made a career change from the legal industry to tech marketing. So I’m currently the marketing specialist at Hannon Hill, makers of Cascade CMS content management system. And as well, we have a product called Clive that’s a personalization tool that integrates with any content management system out there to share or target content to specific audiences. So each visitors that comes to your website actually gets the content that’s most relevant to them that just stale generic content. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, I’m big on LinkedIn. Like to create there. So Chris Rapozo on LinkedIn or send me an email at Chris.rapozo@Hannonhill.com. That’s Hannonhill.com.

Christian Klepp 37:02

Fantastic. Fantastic. So once again, Chris, thanks so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Chris Rapozo 37:09

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

Christian Klepp 37:11

All right. Bye for now.

View Details

How To Successfully Address the Challenges of Global Multilingual Marketing

Implementing your B2B marketing campaigns across different geographies, languages, and cultures is no small feat. We often tend to forget that while technology and rapid globalization have brought the world closer, things do sometimes get “lost in translation”. As such, how can B2B companies successfully translate their domestic strategies into international sales and profits? What should they be mindful of?

In this week’s episode, we have an incredibly insightful conversation with cultural wordsmith and language expert Wendy Pease (President, Rapport International) about how businesses can become culturally relevant with the wonders of high-quality translation, localization, and interpretation. During our discussion, Wendy talks about how successful global marketing should start with the right corporate strategy and why it’s also important to understand the language and culture of the market that companies are entering. She also provides tips on which mistakes to avoid, the importance of conducting the right research, and what metrics marketers implementing global campaigns should pay attention to.

https://youtu.be/7yb87E-86z0

Topics discussed in episode

• The common mistakes and misconceptions that B2B marketers make when they roll out global marketing initiatives, and what should be done to address these [5:01]
• Wendy explains what the term ‘translation’ could mean [11:06]
• Wendy shares a global marketing challenge that she helped a client to solve [18:27]
• Wendy shares some actionable tips she would give a B2B marketer thinking about implementing a campaign/activities in a different geography [22:13]
  • Get the Book “The Language of Global Marketing”
  • Think about your company strategy
  • Develop the relevant marketing strategy
  • Think about your process
  • Review and identify the technology you need
  • Determine what type of quality of translation you need to have
• Wendy shares her thoughts on machine translation / AI / ChatGPT [31:20]

Companies and links mentioned

• Wendy Pease on LinkedIn
• Rapport International
• The Language of Global Marketing book
• The “Global Marketing Show” Podcast
• Wendy Pease’s Linktree page

TranscriptSPEAKER

Christian Klepp, Wendy Pease

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is a show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help business leaders become culturally relevant with the wonders of high quality translation, localization and interpretation. So Wendy Peace, welcome to the show.

Wendy Pease 01:09

Thank you, Christian. It’s great to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Great to be connected Wendy, as they say a mandarin, jian dao ni fei chang gao xing (nice to meet you), alright?

Wendy Pease 01:19

Xie xie ni (thank you), even though I don’t know what you said. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 01:22

It’s basically just a polite way of saying pleased to meet you.

Wendy Pease 01:26

Ah, I said xie xie ni, which means thank you.

Christian Klepp 01:29

Correct, correct. And that’s a great segue to kick off this conversation, because today we are going to talk about your area of expertise, which is about language, languages, I should say plural. Translation, how sometimes people get lost in translation, and the importance of language on a global scale. So let’s kick off with the first question, which is basically that you are not just a cultural wordsmith, but you are indeed, in every sense of the word, a global citizen. So if I read your LinkedIn profile correctly, you grew up in Taiwan. As you said, a couple of minutes ago, you spent some time in Los Banos in the Philippines and other countries to name a few. But for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of the language of global marketing, or as you like to put it, translating your domestic strategies into international sales and profits. So talk to us about why you believe that’s so important in the world of global B2B marketing.

Wendy Pease 02:31

Okay, well, as you know, since you’ve had international exposure, and that there’s a huge market out there, there are lots of people out there, they’re there… you know, people want to buy goods that solve their problems. And it’s funny, both of us said, some Chinese and you’re from, you know, you didn’t grow up in China, you live there, I lived in Taiwan, it’s not one of my languages. I speak more Spanish, French and Italian. Because I also lived in Mexico. And I wrote the book, the language of global marketing, translate your domestic strategies into international sales and profits, because I noticed that in running Rapport International, a language translation interpretation company, people were asking a lot of the same questions. And it starts out with why should I translate? Well, there’s a huge market in there. And I go into a little bit of, you know, markets and different countries that you can go into, then I talk about the buyers’ journey. And that’s changed. It used to be you’d buy local, whatever your Main Street store had, you were forced to buy, because that’s all you could access. Now with the internet worldwide, people get your goods from anywhere. And I even heard of a company that consolidate shipments here in the US to send over to Africa, I think the country was Kenya or Nigeria, I can’t be sure. But then it’s probably both places. So people can order from US Amazon website, it consolidates in the US and then it’s a mass shipment overseas. So they can get the goods. And I see people making mistakes, number one and not having a strategy to reach out. And the second is how they’re trying to connect with their consumer. So across the communications. So in the book that I wrote, I talk about how you think about strategy, and then how you do your communications to connect with the people so they’d find you and buy from you no matter where you are in the world.

Christian Klepp 04:38

Absolutely, absolutely. I love how you brought that up. And that was actually my segue into the next question about mistakes and misconceptions that people make with global marketing. And so besides not having the right strategy, what are some of the other mistakes that you’ve seen out there and what do you think people need to do to address those collectively.

Wendy Pease 05:00

I think the first mistake is not having a good corporate strategy, because your corporate strategy drives your marketing strategy, which drives your global marketing or your multilingual strategy. So first, you’ve got to make sure those are in alignment. I see a lot of companies that go, Oh, we got a request from here, we should translate our website into this, or we need a brochure into that, and so they’re reactionary, they’re starting with the tactics, rather than the strategy. Then there’s a lot of different you know… so I think that’s one mistake. The second mistake is people’s thinking, Well, my domestic market is good enough, you know, so if you’re in the United States, you’re probably thinking that way. You know, less than 5% of the companies export. 98% of those are small and midsize businesses. And those that do have higher revenues, these are exporters have higher revenues, higher profits, higher salaries, higher valuations, and more stability. Because as the US market drops, other markets could be going up. So this is all research from the Department of State, to show that if you think about exporting, you know, if you actually export, you’re going to do better. And they have all sorts of grants and programs here in the United States to help support. And this isn’t… you know, I live in the United States. So I know more about those. But I’ve researched some of the other countries, and they have supports to help their companies export, because it’s bringing more money into the country. So you know, if you’re from outside of the United States, go contact your department of commerce, or an embassy for the country that you want to go into and talk about how to do international trade, because it’s huge. So I think, you know, aligning your strategies, looking outside your domestic market. And then how do you do your communications, think about your buyers journey. You know, your buyers first come online, when they’ve got a problem. And they’re saying, I’ve got this problem, how am I going to solve it? So they want to find content that identifies their problem and talks about the solution. So you’re not even selling yet. You’re just informing. And then when they find you and read about it, they go, Okay, well, tell me why you’re better. Tell me why I’d want to work with you. Tell me, you know, how much does it cost? What are the other options. So this you have the Attract phase, you have the Engage phase, and then the delight is after they become a client, what do you do to retain them, upsell them and get referrals from them, because happy clients are going to refer you. So long, those three stages, you want to make sure that whoever you’ve identified in your strategy, know what language they speak and provide content in language on those three stages. So you’re, you’re hooking the people in and they become raving fans, and then send you more business, that’s what spins the wheel to grow. Where I see mistakes is people will, you know, they’ll start in marketing, and then they won’t have the engage. And something like 85% of the people won’t buy again, if you don’t have post-sales support in language. Okay, so that’s another mistake is the communications thinking about the stages and not providing in a language. And then the fourth mistake that I have to bring up is using machine translation. Before we started recording Christian, we were talking about Google Translate, and how some of your employees will do it to talk to your client in China. And they just don’t get it. They don’t understand. And so there’s machine translation, and then there’s AI and ChatGPT. And we continually watch it to say, is this going to put us out of business and so far, the quality is not there. You know, if you really want… if it’s something that’s going to increase your revenue, or increase your liability, those are the things that you need to provide high quality human translation for. Now, there is a need for machine translation. And I talked about it in the book, like if you get tons of customer reviews, it’s hard to translate all those in the… They’re also going to look at the rating. If you’re getting five star ratings, then the people are going to know okay, whatever is under underneath here, I can get the gist of it. But I know it’s a good review. That’s the kind of thing you can use machine translation for. You get an email and you don’t know what it means. Pop it into chatGPT or whatever machine language, you know, machine translation you’re using. It, you know, this is, you know, is it a unrequested solicitation so that you know, you can delete or is it something you need to deal with? And then you got to figure out how you’re going to deal with it. So those are the big mistakes that I see in global marketing.

Wendy Pease 05:35

Wow, that was a handful. But yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, especially in that last point, There is certainly a time and place for AI and in machine translation, but in my experience, it’s not going to replace folks like yourself anytime soon. I mean, to your point, but I did have one follow up question for you, Wendy, which I’m sure you will have no problem answering, besides the translating into the, into that specific geography language, how important… I mean, I probably know the answer to this already. But how important do you think it is to, you know, for B2B branded a B2B company to understand the nuances of the local culture? Because not every not everybody is the same, right? Not everybody thinks the same way, purchases the same way makes decisions the same way. Correct?

Wendy Pease 11:06

That… Okay, so you’re bringing up the whole how do I define the word translation? Okay. Which is you brought.. It’s a great point. So yes, you know, it needs to be culturally adapted. Okay. But let’s talk about translation as a term. I look at translation is the generic term, and underneath it, you have globalization, localization, transliteration, transcreation, cultural adaptation. So all these terms are a type of translation. So I use it in the general sense, because I don’t expect people outside the industry to know the definitions. What I expect them to do is call me or one of my team members or their expert in the market and say, This is my strategy, this is what I’m trying to accomplish. And then we can work through them what they need, and then we can tell them whether it’s localization, globalization, trail, you know, whatever the term is, but it’s, it’s irrelevant, it all goes back to “what is your strategy?” Okay, when I’m talking about high quality translation, I’m talking about culturally adapted translation. So say you create something for your market in Toronto, right? How you’re going to adapt that for the Chinese market, is going to take somebody that no is not only bilingual, English-Chinese, they are going to have to be a native Chinese speaking person, preferably from the area where you’re going to use the content. So if you say something in in there, that doesn’t make sense, like, hit a home run, which, you know, there’s the Toronto Blue Jays, so you know what that means, and somebody might use that in their marketing material. But using that in China isn’t going to make sense because they don’t follow baseball, like people in Toronto, or in the United States. So the, the translator might come back and say, This isn’t gonna make sense, you know, can we come up with something else that will make sense, and that’s how they’re going to adapt it. So it really connects. Now, machine translation isn’t going to do that, it just doesn’t have the capacity for it. Because you think about even in the United States, or Canada, there’s a real difference between geographic regions. I mean, in Quebec, you’ve got to have French there. But you know, out on the west coast of Canada, you don’t need as much French out there, because it’s not… you don’t have that region. So there’s a whole cultural mix there. So when I talk about translation, I’m in my mind, you know, the translation we do is culturally adapted high quality translation, then you might have to get into globalization or localization, which is the level of culturally adapting that you need to do it. So you thought it was an easy answer. But there’s so many complexities and deeper layers to it. I’m glad you asked the question.

Christian Klepp 14:09

Well, thanks for sharing that. And yes, I knew it was, it wasn’t going to be a simple yes or no answer. There was definitely like, more levels of complexity there. But as you were talking in the past couple of minutes, you reminded me of one of these anecdotes of which I have many of my time up in China and there was a colleague of mine who was an architect in the German company, right? So they were having a meeting with their, their Chinese counterparts they used English is the lingua franca. And I remember his boss saying, like, you know, they reviewed the drawings and she was satisfied with the work that the team had produced. And, and she says, okay, it seems like we’re all in the green area now. And what that actually was, was she was translating directly like a quote from German because in German you say, when you say that you wir sind im grünen bereich – That means we’re in the green area, which means everything’s okay. It’s great. It’s fantastic. But for the Chinese counterparts that completely threw them off, and they just looked at her with utter confusion, and they said, green area, what are you talking about? The drawing of the park is over here, right? (laugh) You’re absolutely right. And you probably have tons of stories like that where things just get lost in translation. And it’s not just from the linguistic point of view, but from the cultural aspect as well.

Wendy Pease 15:35

Yes, yes. That’s the kind of thing that if you’re, you wrote that in German, and we were translating that that would it wouldn’t say in the green area, we’d have to change it to, you know, we’re all in agreement now.

Christian Klepp 15:47

We’re agreement. Yes. A consensus has been reached or something different effect.

Wendy Pease 15:51

Yes. Yeah, I’ve heard cultures define “putting something on the table” differently, like, let’s lay it all out on the table means, you know, you could talk about it later, or let’s talk about it right now. So all those little things that we throw in there, you have to be, and that’s, you have to be very careful about. And it’s a really good reminder to anybody that’s listening that writes content. Yeah, it’s all fun to be creative. But if you know it’s going to be used in a global marketplace, or being translated, then think very carefully about the words that you’re using, try to use shorter sentences, write very clear and be direct and to the point, so the point can be translated accurately.

Christian Klepp 16:39

Correct. And to and to one of your previous points is understand the local market where this is going to be rolled out and right.

Wendy Pease 16:47

Yes

Christian Klepp 16:48

And there’s so many examples, but one of my favorite ones just very quickly is a Rolls Royce came out with a with a new model. I think it was back in the 90s. If I’m not mistaken, it was called Silver Mist. Right? And then they rolled that out into the German speaking countries. And they realized they were surprised to find out like, why were the sales not very high, right? Or why weren’t they making any sales at all? Until they realized that the word mist in German actually means garbage.

Wendy Pease 17:20

I think there was, there was another product that came out as mist too. Yeah, there was a whole slew of IKEA products that came out with funny names and the pinto in Brazil. I mean, when I speak, I have all sorts of examples. And I’m making that point, you’ve got to research it. And we, we do. We’ve tested brand names, that’s one of the services that we do is okay, this is the brand name that you’re talking about. Are you going to translate it? Are you going to use the original name? Like, how are you going to trademark it? Or you are… Are you going to adapt it? And then we’ll take it out to people in market and test it and ask for images. You know, images that can conjure in their mind? Or do they have any associations with it? To make sure that you don’t run into something like that.

Christian Klepp 18:13

Absolutely, absolutely. So onto the next question, and you probably have many, but just pick one talk to us about a global marketing challenge that you’ve helped the client to solve in the past 12 months?

Wendy Pease 18:25

No, I’m going to talk about the one that we did in Staples and I can’t tell you if it was in the last 12 months or you know, a few years ago but I love this one. Because they came up with it actually it was probably longer because they might have changed their tagline now. They pulled back more into a domestic strategy but they were expanding internationally and they had the tagline “make more happen” creative they could take the more out and they could put “make work happen” “make art happen”… make you know that so they could they had like seven or eight different terms that they could take out and rotate in to create those different creative marketing campaigns. And so they asked us to translate it and we couldn’t bookend it the same way that they did in English. Because how you got that point across in other languages won’t allow for the book ends. And so we had to be creative on how we adapted the message they were trying to get across to make sure that we work on their international campaigns. That was one part of it. The second part of it is one of the campaigns was make refrigerator art happen. Now, okay, you’ve lived in various places. Do you know what refrigerator art is? About half the people know half the people don’t.

Christian Klepp 19:57

Refrigerator art. Yeah, you’re not talking about like, drawings that you stick on the refrigerator with magnets right or is that…?

Wendy Pease 20:04

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, typically parents do it for their kids, you know, they put it up there to proudly display it. Well, the French translator came back, she was from Paris. And she’s like, in France, we don’t do that, you know, the refrigerators for keeping food cold. We don’t have refrigerator art. So that was a campaign, we had to go back and say to them, Well, do you want to use this? Do you want to come up with something else that would be more appropriate for the French market? Or do you want to just do away with that campaign in France? And then ultimately, they decided to do away with it. And just use it in the US.

Christian Klepp 20:45

Yeah, yeah. No, I can imagine I can. I can totally imagine. I did remember, working out in Asia, Asia Pacific, there were a couple of campaigns that were global campaigns that they had to locally adopt or do away with in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. And it was mostly not because of language. It was more because of religious issues.

Christian Klepp 21:05

Yes,

Christian Klepp 21:06

Wes. So there’s that.

Wendy Pease 21:07

That’s all part of the culture.

Christian Klepp 21:08

Yeah.

Wendy Pease 21:09

Yeah, yeah, whether you can show the bottom of the foot or paint, pat the head, or, you know, like, thumbs up is an expression we use in the United States. But that can be offensive and other places just like the occasion, so if you’ve got, you’ve got, I mean, that’s all part of it is we do the content translation. But we also like to see how it looks in the layout, to do a final proof to make sure there’s no drop text, but also to make sure that colors and images and pictures are all appropriate.

Christian Klepp 21:38

Absolutely. So we get to the part of the show, where we talk about actionable tips in granted that you know, you can always take, like your many years of experience, and just implement them all in 10 minutes. But if people listening to the show, we’re gonna walk away and implement something, what are like, say the top three or five things you would want them to do? Specifically, in terms of rolling out a marketing campaign in a different geography or geographies?

Wendy Pease 22:13

Okay. Number one, you helped me keep count, because I got I got a lot of action steps. Number one is buy my book on Amazon, the language of global marketing, I think the audio version is even free now. So I recorded it’s in my voice, but that will give you a play map for what I’m going to talk about. Number two is to think about your strategy. So think about what’s one market that you could go into now and try to expand, you know what to do in that strategy, you can look at your Google Analytics to see where you’re already getting traffic, you can think about what’s geographically close, you can think about what makes sense. Or you can reach out to your local state trade adviser and ask them to help you walk through a strategy. Okay. Number three, then is to think about now that you’ve got your company strategy. What is your marketing strategy? Do you have content across, attract, engage and delight, and which of the content is most popular? Again, go back to your Google Analytics, pick out a few of those assets from each of those stages, and think about what language you’re going to translate that into. Now, You know, I’m just saying naturally translate, because a lot of companies in their strategy will say, Oh, I’m gonna go into another English speaking country, like the UK or Australia. But we do translation from English to English to go into those markets. So even if you’re going into there, you know, have a talk with your language expert to see whether you need to translate it or not, it can depend on your specific instance. So that is your marketing strategy, then that aligns your multilingual strategy. Okay, so you’ve got the strategy. I think I’m up to number four. Now, my four? Yes. So number four, then is to think about the process. What are all the things that you need to do for exporting? And what that What’s that process going to need to be? You know, can you distribute through Amazon? Do you need a logistics provider? This is all something your state trade export can do. And then how are you going to manage your translations? You know, I’m narrowing in on this, this part, because it’s the part I know best. But I’m also connected to people that I mean, the global export community is small. I mean, we all know each other and share resources because we’re all trying to help the companies doing it. People who help exporters are very passionate about it. So think about your process where you know, now you’ve defined what you’re going to translate. What’s that process is going to be. Number five, is look at your technology. Okay? So if your web site is built in WordPress, there’s some things that we can hook it up to, to pull down the translation to push the translation back up. You know, do you take your buyer through the complete journey and have people online? Are we going to use a translation memory as part of the technology? Because you’re going to reuse the content over and over again. So we got strategy, process, technology. And then number six, I would say is quality. You know, when you’re looking at your global marketing, where do What quality do you need to have? Does it need to be high quality where you’re working with an agency that only does human translation? Or is there some content that isn’t as important for high quality that you can leverage the machine? Okay, so once you’ve defined all that, you know, and write down a few paragraphs on each page, you’ve got your exporting strategy that you’re going to do. So I would say those are the next five or six tips. Oh, in for if you’re really brainstorming on it, and you want more information, of course, you can get the book, if you’re not a book person, you can listen to my podcast, which is the language I mean, the “Global Marketing Show”, just search Global Marketing Show online, I’ll take you to a website where you can listen or you can get it on all your podcast listening places. And then our website Rapport Translations, RAPPORT, just like the French word Rapport Translations. We’ve got a whole learning center. So you can go in there and search for anything. It’s not gated content, it’s all free, because we want to help you understand what you’re doing.

Christian Klepp 26:41

Fantastic. Yeah. That’s a pretty good list. Thanks so much for sharing that. And to the listeners, we will drop all the links in the show notes to the podcast, the website, the link to the book on Amazon that Wendy just mentioned. So thanks. Thanks so much, again, for sharing that. That was a great segue into what is almost the inevitable question. So you’ve laid out now the six steps that B2B marketers need to be thinking about if they’re rolling out campaigns globally, on at some point, they’re going to have to have that meeting and a presentation with a board of directors to show results, to show that what they’ve rolled out this work. And so just from your experience, what metrics do you think they should be paying attention to one another? And I know you can go in different directions with this one, but over to you.

Wendy Pease 27:30

Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the attract, engage and delight. So on attract your good watch your Google Analytics, what how was the visitors ship rising to your website to those translated pages that you’re doing? You know, are your salespeople selling to other markets? Are they demanding translated brochures? How many of those are are you sending out? Or what are your click throughs? When people are, you know, with your, you’re putting links into your email and sending it out? So just, you can watch Google Analytics, and you can pull up a lot for that in the Engage how, how is your business increasing? You know, you’re watching your sales funnel? Are you getting more inquiries? Are you getting more requests? You know, so you can measure that. And then, you know, the engages is what are your sales doing? And what’s your retention rate? So you can watch it all the way across? One thing, if anybody’s listening and you’re tracking this, and you have an English only website, I would love to know the intersection of are you getting visitors from other countries? And is their bounce rate higher and faster? I would love to have some time, I’m going to figure out how to research that because my premises is if you have machine translation or the Google Translate plugin in your website, my guess is people are going to come in see it’s not good. And they’re going to bounce out. And so I’ve just been starting to play around with that to show how important it is to have good translation on that. So if you’re measuring that, let me know.

Christian Klepp 29:10

Absolutely, absolutely. And when you’re talking about translation, you’re not talking about like inserting the URL into a Google translation browser. And then presto, right.

Wendy Pease 29:22

There’s so many other problems with that if you’re using the Google Translate plugin, I mean, I see people number one you’re putting at the bottom of your page and so you know, if I don’t speak Chinese and I go to a Chinese website, and I can’t immediately see the Google is a translate the translation, I’m gone because I can’t see it. You know, now Google is coming up, you know an offering “Do you want us to naturally translate” that but if you’re putting the plugin, it is causing problems with your search, you can’t navigate to it when you finally navigate to it. Oftentimes, the languages aren’t even translated. So I went to a Chinese web I found the Google Translate plugin. And then I looked at the list. And English was written in Chinese, so I couldn’t even I couldn’t even navigate to it. So if you want to, you know, best practices is to put a globe up near the top right hand side, somebody can access it from there, make sure the language is translated that you get into. And you don’t have to do your whole website, you can do your whole website, which can be prohibitively expensive. Or you can do a microsite, which gives the answers to the questions helping the people through the buyers journey. Or you can do a landing page. And we’ve had clients that want to do a landing page, see how their metrics are, and then they can add content in as they go along. And that’s a benefit to your website. Because if you continue to add content, it’s going to show up more and more in the search terms. We didn’t even talk about search terms. But…

Christian Klepp 30:58

Yeah, that would probably be a topic for another episode. All right, Wendy, this is an opportunity for you to get up on your soapbox. But, um, and you’ve mentioned some of these things already, I’m sure. But what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Wendy Pease 31:20

Yeah, we’ve I’ve mentioned it, I don’t think that machine translation, or AI or chatGPT is gonna take away the need for high quality human translations. I mean, Google Translate came out, what, 10, 12, 14 years ago, and we’re like, oh, is this gonna put us out of business? It didn’t. And the industry just grew. Because now I have in the taxi cab, and I can communicate with somebody, it’s good enough. So you have to think about do you want good enough? Or do you want high quality. And then I just read a research report on what people want in markets, and they want it fast, and they want it on demand. And they want it quick, like 98% of the respondents want this. So this seems like ooh, technology would be good. But then on the other hand, 88% of people, particularly younger people have a real nationalistic pride, and they want you to pay attention to their culture. And so it goes back to business school 101, you can’t have it fast, and cheap, and good. So I don’t think ChatGPT is going to replace high quality translation just with the number of words that are added and the understanding of culture and all that. But on the other hand, I think it’s fantastic that you can get a good enough for just translation if you’re trying to read through something.

Christian Klepp 32:53

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Wendy, this has been such an incredible conversation. And, you know, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. quick intro to yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Wendy Pease 33:09

Sure, I’d love to have you get in touch with me. I have a link tree. And if you don’t know about link tree, it’s awesome. You can put all your links on there. So you can go download a couple of free chapters of the book, you can get the link to Amazon, you can find our website you can find all my social media. So I post one tidbits all the time about the you know, Miss mistakes and I love that Rolls Royce one I hadn’t heard that before. So link tree is just linktr.ee/wendypease. So linktr.ee/wendypease, you find all my links there.

Christian Klepp 33:54

Fantastic. And we will be sure to put a link to that in the show notes. So for the for the benefit of the audience. Wendy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’d like to leave everybody with some thoughts about translation, if you’ll indulge me, I pulled up this quote. And there were many but this one really from Nelson Mandela. The late Nelson Mandela really jumped out at me, right. So he says, if you talk to a man and the language he understands that goes to his head. But if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Wendy Pease 34:26

That’s, that’s perfect. And you now all marketing is about connecting with emotions and feelings. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 34:33

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’ll throw in just another one for you know, for the sake of variety, it’s by the famous. I think he was a literary critic called George Steiner. So he said “without translation, we will be living in provinces bordering on silence.” I thought that was pretty, pretty amusing, but it’s so true. It’s so true.

Wendy Pease 35:00

Yeah. Oh, those are fantastic books. Thank you so much Christian for sharing those.

Christian Klepp 35:04

You’re welcome Wendy once again, thank you so much. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Wendy Pease 35:10

Okay, gracias.

Christian Klepp 35:12

De nada. Bye for now.

View Details

How B2B Marketers Can Improve Their Revenue-Generating Activities

We can all agree that in today’s fast-paced world, interruption is the enemy. With this in mind, B2B marketers need to continuously improve the way they are building trust, credibility, and likability for their brands among members of the target audience.

In this week’s episode, we have a conversation with B2B marketing expert Tom Hunt (Founder and Head of Account Management, Fame) about what marketers need to do to stay at the top of their game. Tom elaborates on how using a niche-focused podcast adds incredible value to a B2B target audience, what mistakes to avoid, the trends and shifts that are impacting B2B marketing, and what marketers can do right now to improve their revenue-generating activities.

https://youtu.be/-86JR4MMmmE

Topics discussed in episode

• Tom elaborates on what he means by ‘Interruption is the enemy” [1:53]
• Tom shares an example of how you can get your target audience to like and trust you by providing them with highly relevant content [4:55]
• Tom shares his observations on the potential reasons why many B2B companies are impatient in terms of getting results from marketing [9:56]
• How a niche-focused podcast adds value to a B2B target audience [12:26]
• Tom talks about how he helps his clients by using the “fame formula” [14:07]
• What good content should be and look like [17:01]
  • Experimenting with the format
  • Getting the insights from deep expertise
• Major trends or market shifts that could impact the way that B2B marketers are rolling out revenue generating activities [20:25]
  • Problem of attribution
  • Attention prices on social platforms
  • ChatGPT
• A status quo that Tom passionately disagrees with [27:03]

Companies and links mentioned

• Tom Hunt on LinkedIn
• Fame

TranscriptSPEAKER

Christian Klepp, Tom Hunt

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to make your B2B business famous in a specific niche. So coming to us from London, England, Mr. Tom Hunt. Welcome to the show, sir.

Tom Hunt 01:08

Chris, absolute honor to be here.

Christian Klepp 01:12

Great to be connected, Tom. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. If you don’t mind. We’ll just dive right in. Because we’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover.

Tom Hunt 01:21

Yes, please. Let’s do it.

Christian Klepp 01:23

So Tom, I’d like to go back to something we discussed in a previous conversation. And I really liked that quote you mentioned. So let me see if I can quote you accurately here. “Interruption is the enemy,” couldn’t agree more. In fact, you wrote two posts about it on LinkedIn. And that got some pretty decent engagement. So for the sake of the audience that are not aware of these posts, could you just elaborate a little bit more on why you think these interruptions are doing more harm than good to B2B brands?

Tom Hunt 01:53

Yeah, I think the fundamental difference between B2B and B2C marketing is like the sales cycle. So you can convince someone to buy, my flat mate, he sells deodorant online, and he runs Facebook ads, and he’s putting the ads up, he gets the buy, because it’s like a 10 pound by subscription deodorant. But if I’m trying to sell a 50 grand a year podcast service to B2B company, then that’s like a long sales cycle. And so for me, then what this means, in the B2B space, when we’re trying to do a marketing is all we really want to do is make people like and trust us. Because if we do that, when they do finally come round, to wanting to buy our thing, then they’ll come to us. So it’s not just the length of the sale cycle, it’s also the fact that the majority of the buyers are not necessarily ready to buy at that point, like I could buy deodorant. And at any point, maybe I’m only going to buy a podcast service, like once every three years. And so if we can get people to like, and trust us, then they’re going to come to us when it’s time to buy. And so what the absolute, like wrong thing to do in this case, is to make anybody that could be a buyer, unhappy with you or your brand. Because if you do that, the opposite of them liking and trusting you, they’re not going to buy from you. And so then we have to understand how we could possibly make people not like us, and one of the ways is through interrupting. And what we’re essentially doing is stealing someone’s attention for something that they don’t think is valuable for them. So what form could this take, it could be a LinkedIn ad that is not relevant. It could be an email that is not invited. Or it could be a piece of content with an audio video or written put on the internet, that it like isn’t good. And so really, the antidote to interruption is to truly understand these people that you’re trying to make, like and trust you. These people that are trying to help in their careers or in their lives, and then create information that will actually make them like and trust you. Because if the information is good, it doesn’t matter what mechanism you’re delivering it to them, whether it’s like Facebook or LinkedIn ad or a cold email. If the information is good, then it’s not an interruption, because it’s welcomed. And that means… and being welcomed is the key to being liked and trusted, which is then the key to getting that inbound demo requests, lead form generation, etc.

Christian Klepp 04:18

Absolutely, absolutely. You touched on something here. And I’d like to go back to that and discuss that a little bit further. Because you’re talking about creating information that’s relevant to the target audience, the potential prospects, I mean, whatever you’d like to call them. I’ve heard other people on the show, say, Oh, you’re going to add value to the target audience, but we all know that, that that that can be so many things, right? But give us an example of you talked about, like and trust. How can you get them to like and trust you through content?

Tom Hunt 04:56

Yeah. So the I’d like to try and understand what words mean, right and the word value, you’re getting value thrown around so much I don’t think people truly understand. If you really break down what the word means, value is, especially the de-normalization of the process, to value or valuing. And to value something is simply just to prioritize it. And so if you’re trying to create something that somebody values, then it is just their own subjective prioritization of that thing. And so therefore, in order to create something that people like, you have to understand what their problems are or what they’re trying to achieve. And so this is where… here’s probably the biggest thought I see in like any marketer, B2B or B2C, is not really understanding the problems, or the goals of the person they’re trying to sell to. Because if we really understand that, it’s going to be much more easier to make information that is going to add value to their lives, and then make them like or trust you, maybe I’ll try and get like more specific. So probably the best… I’ve been in like the marketing game for like 10, 12 years. Probably the best content I’ve ever created was about three years ago, I started doing like really big, deep dives into how SaaS companies have grown. I actually started this, I actually started as a daily email, where I do like one little staff growth hack, but then that transition into being like big two to three to 4000 word blog posts on how Click Funnels, or Zapier or SEMrush had grown. And I would spend like a week writing the things. That’d be like 17 steps. And it would be screenshots. I’d speak to the companies if I could to get there and hacks. And I’d write them all out into these monstrous, like very actionable blog posts. And so, and these were, like wildly successful, I had people trying to like by the site, I had people trying to sponsor, people trying to pay me to write them for their own blogs that I did that for Nathan Latka’s blog, or what one click funnels. And so the question is, let’s put this through the filter what we just discussed, like, who was the ideal person I was trying to get, trying to help out or get the attention of, he was a SaaS marketer. And what for, what are they trying to achieve? What’s their biggest problem? They probably just want to increase like signups or demo requests for their software. And so what did I do? I went to find companies that had done this well, spent hours and hours and hours studying, and then wrote up that information in a in a unique or different way with like, it wasn’t too wordy. It was like loads of screenshots, very, like clear and actionable. And that ultimately produce something that SaaS marketers valued. Because these case studies got a lot of views. So like, I won’t say, I’m perfect in creating content, and not all of my content really like crushes, and therefore, by definition is not valuable, and may even be interrupting. But that was probably the best time, that was the best. The most valuable piece of content I ever created. And we can link below to that blog well there if people want to check one out.

Christian Klepp 08:01

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. No, I love that. And that’s such a good example. Because if I’m thinking back to what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, what you’ve done by creating this type of content is you’ve saved these people time, right to do that research by themselves. And this isn’t something that you just came up with on a whim. Like, I’m just quoting what you just said, you actually went and spent hours or perhaps even days or weeks, studying and probably talking to these people and understanding what their problems were and then creating these, you know, this content that’s actionable that they can act upon. Like if I’m reading Tom Hunt’s article right now. And I walk away from it, what are like the top five things that I can do? Right, right at that point in time. Right?

Tom Hunt 08:49

For sure, I think what you have to understand is you’re in competition with every other B2B marketers that are trying to add value to this person. And so it’s like just an arms race, who can put in the most effort to make the most valuable stuff because that’s the stuff that’s gonna get attention. Fortunately, for me, I think I chose the three, four years ago, SaaS marketing wasn’t as popular as it was. Now, there wasn’t any content like this. So I was like, I was one of the best. Maybe I got lucky there. And so I think the big challenge is, people not having the time or the money like to put in the work to become the best to get the attention. So the the solution there normally is just to make less content so you can put more effort and cash into less pieces, but those pieces will be more valuable and will probably end up with more attention overall.

Christian Klepp 09:38

Absolutely. I have a follow up question for you Tom, you kind of answered it already. But I’m curious because I don’t think that this is a problem unique to SaaS. But why do you think so many B2B companies out there are a little impatient in terms of getting results from marketing, which is why we’re seeing all this interruption.

Tom Hunt 09:56

Yes, probably a personality trait of like the founder. They want everything now. I’m kind of like as well, but then if you lay on top of that, like fundraising dynamics, then I think this can get quite stressful. So what I mean, I’ve never raised money, but what I can imagine happens, founder raises money, maybe they’re more of a product person than a marketing person. They are because it’s their baby totally in love with their product. So they don’t understand maybe how, where it sits in like the actual marketplace. And so then they raise money, hire marketers, pressure marketers to hit big goals, because they now have to hit these goals if they’re gonna keep the company going. And maybe the the product isn’t like what it needs to be in order to hit these goals. And maybe they’re also bringing people in to do things that are like very complex, like designing marketing strategies, sales processes, category creation, or positioning, it’s a really complex work. So maybe they’re not hiring the people that have had the skills. And so then this puts pressure on the marketers to hit these goals. And maybe that’s why everyone’s now moving away from like, the whole eBook thing, because that’s what people were pressured to do beforehand. So I think it’s probably like, founder personalities, fundraising dynamics, that lead to, to some of this impatience.

Christian Klepp 11:15

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I think if I may add to that, I think it’s also like a fundamental lack of understanding on the founder’s part about, like, how marketing actually works. Because whether they, whether they accept this or not, it’s not about them or their product. It’s about what the product does to make the customer’s life easier, or what does it do to help solve that customer’s problem. I think, I think that’s the piece, at least in my experience, that you see it out there that’s missing, right? And that’s why I wouldn’t say that’s why the marketing goals aren’t right. But sometimes that’s why the marketing goes down the wrong path.

Tom Hunt 11:52

Yeah, totally agree. This is why when I see when I look at a software company, I see the founder has a background like sales or marketing at least one of the founders, then I’m probably like, a little bit more, more bullish about the company.

Christian Klepp 12:07

Absolutely, absolutely. On to the next question, which I think you will have no problem answering at all. Um, talk to us about how you think, you know, with that context in mind, how you think using an approach like a niche focused podcast, how does that add value to a B2B target audience?

Tom Hunt 12:26

Yeah, so I think this ties in very well to what we’ve just been discussing is, can we create information that is valuable to the person we’re trying to, to make like and trust us, and is better than everything else on the market. And so the first thing that we need to make sure we do is… the ability for us to be the best increases, the more narrow our content is, the more narrow the focus is. Because if we start a marketing podcast, we’re up against companies that have a lot more time and money than us probably, well, if we create an email marketing podcast, that’s even better. If we create an open rate focused podcast, then we’re going to be number one in six months, and our content is going to be the best email marketing open rate content on the internet. And so if we are able to do this, create the show, create content that’s better than any other shows in that niche, then in theory, the people that listen to the show are gonna like and trust us more. And as we said, before, B2B buyers are probably only in the market for a solution, I don’t know, maybe 5% of the time. And their sales cycles are really long. So we just need to ensure that when ideal buyers come into the market, they like and trust us, and we do that by giving information to them, that helps them in their lives or in their careers.

Christian Klepp 13:51

Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. You’ve touched on some of these earlier, but um, this is an opportunity to like, just showcase your company as well, like, talk to us about a challenge that you’ve helped the client to solve in the past 12 months? Just one?

Tom Hunt 14:07

Yeah. So we really do one thing, I guess the challenge that all of our clients have is that they want to be more well known in specific niches. And so how we attack this process is by following why you like to call the fame formula. Two steps, very simple. The first step is, and if you think about anybody who’s ever got famous, they do it this way. So first of all, you just create a lot of content consistently. That’s really good. And consistently means like, yes. So if we think about Taylor Swift, for example, she got really, really good at creating country music. And then she got really good at creating pop music which is great and that this will get you on the road to becoming famous but isn’t everything because you needs step two. Step two is being seen around other famous people within that specific niche. And so Taylor Swift obviously, she did then country then she went on other country music artists albums, she brought them on hers. And then she just did that in pop music as well. She went on Ed Sheeran songs that Sheeran brought her on her songs. And so the here’s exactly what we would do with one of our clients is that we choose a niche that specifically small so we can create the best content in that space and become the number one show. And then we just want to be all get really good at releasing that content get better and better every time. But then speed up the fame process by being seen around other famous people in that niche and we do that by bringing other people that know about the topic, ideally have an audience or some brand awareness on that topic and bring them on the show. And the people in their market consistently see our brand or our host, which is normally someone from the client exposed by creating this content and then being exposed or connected to the other famous people, then this is how our clients would become famous. And so then the question is, why would the client want to be famous. We spoke throughout this whole so that clients or your ideal customers want to, you want them to like and trust you. The step, the precursor to being liked and trusted is being known. And so first we have to get known and then we have to get liked and trusted. So there is a process that we implement for to solve the client’s problems, which is not being known in a specific niche.

Christian Klepp 16:22

Yeah, no, that’s a really great example. And this is one of many ways, I suppose you can interpret that, but I had a guest on the show that would say like, Okay, well, if people are going to Google you, what, what, what are they going to find? Right? Are they going to find something good? Or they’re going to find that content that you’re talking about is that going to help them? Right? I wanted to go back to something that you said, because I think it bears repeating. Also for the benefit of the audience, when you’re talking about creating content that that’s, that’s really good. Please break that down a little bit more for us. Define in your own words, what good content should be or should look like?

Tom Hunt 17:02

Yeah, super interesting. So the third thing, it goes back to this competition piece, like good, in the same as the word value is just being subjective in the eyes of the people we’re trying to help. And so therefore, you have to understand their other options for their attention. So when we say good, what we should really be saying is they should be better than other people in the in the space. But let me try and make that a bit more actionable. So I think there’s a number of ways, but let’s split it down into the information itself, and then the format in which the information is delivered. I think having you engaging or interesting formats can be a way of taking information that’s like kind of average, and making that content more valuable, for example, like, creating TikTok style videos for the information could work well, or getting really, really good at copywriting. And posting that to LinkedIn could work really well. Or instead of having a podcast that’s recorded, having like a live Q&A with people there, to share that insight. So I think one relatively easy way of making content more valuable is experimenting with the format. And that can mean we have to do less of the hard work, which is actually making the information good. And so this to make the information good. You need like, insights, thoughts, or wisdom that is slightly new or different or cutting edge. And you typically only get that if the person who’s making these insights has like, a lot of experience in the space, I don’t want to say years because someone could like really immerse themselves in in a space and get really good insights in six months, or someone could be working it in a part time for 10 years. So I think the most important thing here is that you as the marketer, who maybe have only been in the industry, that have the company you’ve just joined for two years, are probably not gonna be able to come up with these insights. And so you have to go into your organization and find the person who maybe it’s the founder, maybe it’s someone else who spent 10 years in the space, and then you can get the insights from them. Because if the people you’re trying to reach have a similar, like knowledge level as this person, then there’s no way your content that you can create is going to do that. So going back to the question of good content, A) I think it’s quite easy to improve the value of the content by experimenting with formats, but then B) to actually make the information good. You need those like uncommon, new, insightful, cutting edge insights that only come from deep expertise.

Christian Klepp 19:34

Well, just give me a second, just furiously writing notes here as you’re providing this answer. Fantastic. I love how you talked about experimenting with formats because I’m short of stating the obvious, especially when it comes to B2B. There’s still plenty of opportunities. I’m going to say opportunities for improvement, right? I think more often than not, B2B marketing tends to, not all, but many tend to veer into the play it safe zone and then they start, like focusing too much on the product features. And you know, they go down that rabbit hole instead, right?

Tom Hunt 20:07

Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp 20:08

Yeah. No. Excellent, excellent. What are what are some major trends or market shifts that you’ve seen out there that could impact the wave of marketers are rolling out revenue generating activities?

Tom Hunt 20:25

Yeah, interesting.

Christian Klepp 20:27

Maybe top three to five.

Tom Hunt 20:30

Yeah, that’s the trend like the, the attribution problem that’s been popularized by Mr. Chris Walker, which I think is definitely a trend. And we see this, like, the solution is basically put self-appointed attribution on your on your demo or free trial form, basically, that’s what you need to do. Because then people will actually tell you, they’ll give you much better information, and then Google Analytics or any other any other tool. So that is an interesting one. But that also, it kind of is really enabling the power of good information, because the better your information, the more likely it’s going to be shared in these areas that you can’t track. And so I’m not sure how these two connects. But it’s basically a really big opportunity, I think, for B2B marketers to create amazing information, put it out, without any gating, just get as much consumption as you can. And then it will get shared in areas that you don’t see. And then you can track that back using self-appointed attribution. So I think that’s one. I think that continuous, like shifts to, to the price of attention on social platforms is quite interesting. So LinkedIn, for the last five years in B2B has been like the place to get attention for cheap. But I’m seeing this now, other people are also seeing like decreases in impressions. And so it makes sense. Whenever a platform has cheap impressions, people find out about it, they rushed to the platform, and then it’s get harder to get the impression, see the price of the impressions go up. I mean, here’s for both paid and organic, right. And when I say the price of an organic post is, you should be able to post something that was like 6 out of 10 and get 10,000 impressions. Now you post that and you get 1000. So the price is the time you have to put into the organic content versus the dollars if you’re doing paid spend. So I think that’s interesting. And we’ll see like, what happens, what were the next one is that there are a lot of talk about Tik Tok for B2B. So that could be the next one. So I think that’s just interesting for B2B marketers to be aware of, I think, obviously, the chatGPT thing. I haven’t made, like, a real decision on this, it obviously is gonna save a lot of time for writers. But, and yet, so actually, going back to the point I was making about, like good content that comes from like deep insights, which, by definition, chatGPT can’t deliver, because it’s only looking at existing information. So new original insights can’t come. And so maybe this means that the power or the reward for good content is gonna skew more to the to the heart to the higher like quality of content, because more people can produce the average stuff. So that’s the third one. You know, I think we can leave it there. So it’s the it’s the attribution problem. Is the ever shifting attention prices on social platforms, and then AI and writing?

Christian Klepp 23:25

And all those really great points. And I wanted to go back to the third point. Just what are your… you talked about a little bit, but what are your thoughts on automation and AI? Right? When it comes to like, improving what marketers are doing? Because like, I find, at least on LinkedIn, there’s two camps. Right? There’s one camp that agrees that it’s important to scale. There’s the other camp that’s like vehemently against automation and anything to do with artificial intelligence. Your take on that?

Tom Hunt 24:03

Yeah, I think there’s so much work in the marketing department that doesn’t need to be done by humans, or A) it doesn’t need to be done by high paid people in the West. And then after that, it doesn’t need to be done by any person, it can be done by computers. And so I like I see this like a lot of waste in the marketing department, where there can be automated or moved offshore, for example, fame, is like we get like 100 requests a month, have like 2 million ARR, our marketing team is one person who just does sales, and then one person in the Philippines who like organizes the stuff, and then me, probably like 25% of my role. I’m not sure if that’s like a big for marketing. It feels like it’s a small marketing team for a 2 million plus company. We’ve got like 40 people full time. So and so. I feel like it’s a massive opportunity for marketing teams to automate and leverage ChatGPT in order to, like just cut costs. And what this means is that the budget can be reallocated to areas, that’s going to add more value. So here’s what I would do if someone’s listening and they have like a 10 person marketing team is based in the US, I would fire half of them. And then I would hire one or two people in the Philippines, then I’d also hire one person who’s really good as API automations. And so the team would have the same output for, let’s say, 30% of the cost. And then with 30% of the cost, I would go find the most famous expert in the industry, even if not marketing, hire them, it’s like the evangelist Head of Community, whatever. And they’re gonna fuel the whole content machine that we’ve just been speaking about. And so the marketing team is gonna, it’ll be the same cost as the 10. person team before, but we’re going to be so much more effective.

Christian Klepp 25:56

If you don’t mind me saying that answer may or may not make you unpopular with some members of the audience. But I mean, jokes aside, Tom, I think you’re highlighting a reality that we’re seeing on the market right.

Tom Hunt 26:08

Yea, for sure.

Christian Klepp 26:09

It’s not necessarily just with marketing alone, but you’re seeing all these companies, you know, with these massive layoffs and whatnot. Right? I mean, obviously, there are several factors that have led to that, you know, the company’s going down that path. But certainly, some of the points that you’ve brought up in the past couple of minutes, undoubtedly, are part of that, right? So it’s a bit of a cause and effect cycle.

Tom Hunt 26:35

And we call this episode “why you should fire half your marketing team?”

Christian Klepp 26:39

Whichever, whatever you like, whatever you like.

Tom Hunt 26:43

All right, that’s the title.

Christian Klepp 26:44

All right. Okay. So stay up on your soapbox for a second. Because here comes the next question: What is the status quo in your area of expertise, that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Tom Hunt 27:03

It probably what I see, like the majority of B2B companies doing in the, in the content in the content space, and maybe it’s a function of bigger companies like not actually being allowed to, to create things like cutting edge or interesting, but just literally producing, where they have been distributed through official on their blog, because the information there is just not valuable, like, and if it compared to other people in the space, like, it’s just really not going to do anything for the person they’re trying to help. And so I think the big opportunity here is for the B2B marketer to spend more time understanding who they are trying to help. And then, using someone who’s an actual expert in the space, if you are great, if not, then finding that person in your business, or and if they’re not, in the business, make a business case to the CEO to go and hire somebody, or even use some other consultant to produce the insights, they’re gonna make people like and trust you. So I would say it’s the lack of information of content marketing that’s like actually good.

Christian Klepp 28:18

Yeah, and it also, it also goes back to what we were saying at the beginning of the conversation, right? It’s this whole, like, playing it safe. Focusing on product features, focusing on solutions, features that are specific to the company itself. And there’s, there’s a bit of that in there. Right. It’s almost like they have to fulfill some kind of quota and check that box to make sure that okay, we’ve, we’ve written about these products, and okay, so, so then we’re good.

Tom Hunt 28:43

Yeah, I think so that’s just an awareness of like, our clients as well, actually, we talked about our products and podcast, we just have to understand what type of content we’re creating, right? Because as soon as you mentioned your product, you bring back that content further down the funnel, there is place, there is a place for the bottom of the funnel content, probably on your website, product pages, whatever. But if we’re trying to get attention and make people like and trust us, no one cares about the product. And so the top of the funnel content, and so we would never, that would never be included. Right? And so I think people just understanding like, maybe people not in marketing, or like, Yeah, let’s write this blog post about a product and get loads of views like obviously not, I mean, there’s bottom of funnel content, any people there in the buying process are going to want to read this.

Christian Klepp 29:25

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, this was such a great conversation. And you know, thanks so much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience of the listener. So please, quick introduce yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Tom Hunt 29:38

To find me on LinkedIn, Tom Hunt on LinkedIn, Confessions of a B2B Marketer Podcast. Fame.so is the company we’ve been speaking about today.

Christian Klepp 29:50

Fantastic. Fantastic, Tom. Once again, thanks so much for your time. So take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Tom Hunt 29:56

My pleasure. Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp 29:58

Bye for now.

View Details

How to Develop the Right Language and Tone of Voice for B2B Brands

In B2B marketing, working creatively has become paramount to scaling efficiently and reaching the right type of audience with the right content.

In this recent episode, we have a conversation with webinar expert Melissa Kwan (Co-Founder & CEO, eWebinar) about how B2B marketers can effectively scale their demos as well as their onboarding and training with a personal touch by automating webinars. Melissa also explains the mistakes and misconceptions around creating on-demand webinars and demos, highlights the importance of having a strategic approach, and discusses what metrics

https://youtu.be/u3CPFO6WnfM

Topics discussed in episode

• How the role of marketers is changing from ‘educator’ to ‘advisor’ [05:55]
• Whether or not ‘dark social’ has the effect that industry professionals are claiming it has [08:45]
• Why understanding your ideal audience is so important for developing an automated webinar, especially in the context of selling online [13:46]
• Whether updating your presentation content is important, and if so when [18:27]
• Actionable tips B2B marketers can take right now to improve when it comes to creating on-demand webinars and demos [25:12]
• The importance of the medium of content delivery [33:27]

Companies and links mentioned

• Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn
• eWebinar
• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

TranscriptSPEAKER

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level. From improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer, these are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by Einblick Consulting; helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian.

Christian Klepp 00:44

All right, welcome, everyone, to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host, Christian Klepp and today, I’m joined by someone on a mission. Let me see if I can get this right to save B2B marketers from doing the same webinar over and over again, through a combination of strategy and technology. So, Melissa Kwan, welcome to the show.

Melissa Kwan 01:11

Thanks so much for having me, Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:14

Great to be connected. Melissa, I really loved our previous conversation. So, let’s let’s see this as an extension of that conversation then, shall we? And let’s dive in.

Melissa Kwan 01:23

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 01:25

Okay. So, Melissa, in a previous conversation, you were, well, we talked about a lot of things, but one of the things that really stood out was, you talked about the future of marketing, where marketers can leverage automated webinars to scale more efficiently, but before we go on to that, I just wanted to share this with the audience because it’s something you shared with me and in fact, it was a link to let me see if I guess this correctly, the 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, I thought that was a really interesting title. So, this is a report where 2 185 tech buyers were surveyed. As you can imagine, there were a lot of statistics and figures in this report, but one of them that really jumped out at me was this one. Virtually 100% of buyers want to self serve all or part of their buying journey, which is up 13% from the previous year. So over to you. Why do you think that is?

Melissa Kwan 02:21

Well, I mean, we, I think we just have to think about ourselves as consumers, right? Like when you want to buy something, and I don’t mean software, software more so than anything, but let’s say you want to buy a TV, what is the first thing that you do? Right? You look at reviews, you go on Best Buy, or Amazon, you ask your friends, you know, you might be in a in a chat group, and you see like, “Hey, has anyone purchased something recently”, right? Like you go to your community, you know, like, you go to your trusted source, which is not a salesperson, right? We’re very aware that salesperson just wants to sell something. It’s the same reaction, like knee jerk reaction when we walk into a store and somebody says, “Hey, can I help you?” immediately you tense up? And you’re like, “No, I’m just looking”, even when you’re not looking? Right? We’re kind of trained to do that. So, I think, I mean, I think the report just justifies and reassures what we already know about ourselves. When we want to buy anything at all, we want to do our own research, because we trust our community, we trust the internet, we trust people, right, volumes of people. That’s why there’s all these review sites and then when we’re ready, we go into the store, and we might go and test the salesperson on what we found and then see if they’re honest, right, and then we go and choose that salesperson that we might buy it from. So, I think that’s a pretty, you know, relatable journey, right to anybody listening and I think that’s what the report is, right? It doesn’t mean that 100% of people do not want to buy from a salesperson, it just means that they want to self serve their buying journey. It means that when I want to research and discover I want to do it on my own, because I trust me more than I trust you. Right. And that’s what I find really interesting, because last year, that percentage was 87% and I think during you know COVID, of course, this dirty word, and in the last two years, we’ve become more secluded, right, we’ve become more reliant on the internet and so it doesn’t surprise me that just a year later, that percent is now 100, which is pretty impressive, right for any survey.

Christian Klepp 04:32

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you brought up so many great points and I think it’s going back to what you said earlier, it’s almost like human nature and just the way that we behave that if I mean I am definitely one of those people that if I go into a store, and a salesperson approaches me my first reaction is like avoid eye contact. Do not look them in the eye, like look in the other direction and pretend you’re just like you spotted something on the shelf, right because It’s not even confrontational. It’s just that, you know, if they come up to you and say, “Can I help you?”, and then you have to engage them in conversation? And that’s how they kind of reel you in. Right?

Melissa Kwan 05:09

Yeah.

Christian Klepp 05:10

Right. No, exactly.

Melissa Kwan 05:12

And you almost want to like, you almost want to lead the conversation, right? Well, like what do you think about this model versus this model? Because you want to seem smart, so you don’t get tricked into buying something that they wanted you to buy, right? And what now we have the information to be able to do that.

Christian Klepp 05:30

Exactly, exactly. So building on that, moving on to the next question: let’s talk about mistakes and misconceptions that you’ve seen out there, I’m gonna say working more creatively, but what we’re referring to here is specifically around creating on-demand demos and webinars. So, what what have you see and what should B2B marketers do about it?

Melissa Kwan 05:55

Yeah, I mean, I think the number one mistake is you don’t do it, right, because you think I must talk to this person and I mean, salespeople, and I am a salesperson, are kind of notorious for that, right? Like, if I don’t speak to this person, this person will not get the value and therefore won’t buy from me, but that goes against the report that we just talked about, is people want to discover on their own, they want to control their own buying journey, but they also want the power to reach out to you when they’re ready on their time, not on your time. But there’s so many, you know, particularly B2B sales and marketers that are so stuck in their ways about how “I must talk to the person because I know everything, they’re going to have objections, and then, you know, they’re going to want me to be there”. But is that true? Right? Why is it when we’re buyers, we don’t want to give the seller any information, but when we’re sellers, we want to, you know, hold back all that information. And that is exactly the ‘B2B Buying Disconnect’ is we are we want everything but we don’t want to give everything right. So, I think the number one mistake is believing that you are more important than you are. Right? And that, and that means like you, you think the consumer is not already doing the research, but that just means that you as marketer, or a salesperson, your role has changed, right to more of an advisor role, and maybe less of an educator, right, less of an actual, like, you know, an aggressive salesperson, right? You’re there really to guide that person to make that decision, and to make them feel comfortable and I think the second mistake, is that, because they think that they have to do it one on one, they’re unable to scale their strategy because if you think that you have to talk to someone in order to sell them, then you are limiting your prospecting to your own availability and your own schedule and in this day and age where we serve, you know, 24 different time zones, if you sell around the world, or even if you sell nationally in the in the US are serving six different time zones, how can I expect that when the prospect is available that I’m available and vice versa? Right? So I think those two things kind of go hand in hand and if marketers are able to recognise the trend of people wanting to do their own research, then what they will do is put out more content, so that when the person is researching, and looking to educate themselves, that the information is there on many different channels, right? So it’s not you can you can no longer dictate when and where people look for content and look for you. You can only be there, right when they’re looking.

Christian Klepp 08:45

Those are some really great points that you brought up and brings me back to a conversation I had on the show with another guest and his name is Vladimir Blagojevich. He runs a company called the B2B Full Funnel Academy and he said basically something to that effect where it was like, marketers need to learn how to sell the way their best customers buy and I think that’s what you were trying to say in so many words. Right? Because, and just adding on to that made me think about question two, which I’m gonna throw over to you. On the topic of well, people call it different things, but ‘dark social’, how, what kind of a role do you think that plays? In what you’re talking about past couple minutes?

Melissa Kwan 09:34

I’m not sure what ‘dark social’ is.

Christian Klepp 09:37

Okay, okay, no problem. Let me let me explain it to you and once I do it, you’ll be like, ah, yeah, okay. It’s, it’s not a thing. In fact, I think it’s a, you can say it’s a it’s a collection of places in this wider ecosystem that marketers cannot directly control and what that means says like people having a chat, like what you were saying earlier, looking at reviews, people having chats and forums, sending each other emails or messages in private messenger and saying, “Hey, Melissa, have you heard about this company and other selling this kind of software? What’s your take on that?” Right? So, people are going out into the world, and asking contacts in their professional or personal network, like, you know, for their opinion for their advice for their recommendations. Right. So, all of that, and much, much more is what is considered ‘dark social’.

Melissa Kwan 10:34

That’s interesting. I guess you learned something new every day.

Christian Klepp 10:36

Yeah. I mean, it’s not a shady and illegal as it sounds.

Melissa Kwan 10:42

I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed. We’re not talking about something shady, illegal. I mean, you can call it dark social and you can say that you’re not controlling it but you are, right? Like, why do we invest in keyword research and SEO and appearing in the first page of Google? Where do you think those people are getting that information? Right, like one of our best performing articles, is, you know, the 12 best automated webinar software, who do you think wrote that? We wrote that and our logo is on the top of that blog and when someone is researching other software and sending it to their friend and sending it to their company, to look at the different solutions that are out there, it’s our voice, that, you know, they they’re reading, and then they’re, you know, regurgitating to somebody else. So, I think what’s interesting is, I came into this company thinking, I mean, I’ve been in sales for like, 1520 years, like, since I was 18, my first job was in sales and coming to this company, which I started four years ago, all I do now is create content. Like I didn’t know coming into this role that I was no longer going to sell because content is actually the new sales and marketing. But I don’t mean like just blogs, right? Like I write on LinkedIn, once a day, that’s where I met you. We create, like, you know, webinar templates that live inside our app and our website and then we do podcasts and interviews, and each one of those we transcribe into an article and then we also invest in, you know, three to four pieces of long form content like, but all of that, I guess, is to control the voice of how we are represented, when other people talk about us. Another piece of great content, where we do that is customer testimonials. If I can’t get a customer on the phone to do a 50 minute interview with me, I’ll send them the questions to get them to record themselves. And then I’ll transcribe that into a customer story, which then lives on our website. Right? So I think as dark as we say it is people are getting that information somewhere and that’s something that I think you have full control over.

Christian Klepp 12:53

Yeah, no, that’s a really good point and to be perfectly honest with you, I’m not really a big fan of that label, either. I don’t know why it’s being called that. But like, again, because it has this negative connotation, right? When you say dark, dark, this dark that, right? And it’s not. And that’s not necessarily something that could have in fact, I’m after this conversation we’re having it’s probably even to a certain degree more positive than anything, right?

Christian Klepp 13:18

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp here. We’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business?If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting our experienced consultants who will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale? Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

Christian Klepp 13:46

You brought up a really well, he brought a couple of great points in the past couple of minutes, which is a wonderful segway into the next question, because like on the topic of creating on-demand webinars and demos, not everybody thinks this way, but some might, that they’ll be like, Okay, well, you know, then I’ll just sign up for this platform. And I’ll just push a button and click away and then presto, it’s all said and done and we all know that necessarily isn’t the case. Right? So on the so here’s the question: how important do you think planning, strategy, research and understanding who these on-demand webinars and demos are for? What kind of a role does all that play?

Melissa Kwan 14:30

I mean, I think as marketers, it’s always most important to understand who’s buying your product, right? And the most important reason is because number one, you want to know where they live and then number two, you want to use their language, right? To solve the problem that they’re looking to solve. Right? when we about six months after we started this company. I went on an exercise to do like a deep dive on who our ICP (ideal customer profile) is and I just interviewed, it was like five pages full of questions, our 10 best customers and on like, you know what problem they wanted to solve when they found us, what was the most frustrating thing about that problem? What problem caught like that? What how much money that problem was costing them? Their benefits of using our solution? And then I had all this content, which I then turned into all of the content for our website, all of our nurturing emails, onboarding emails, every single marketing piece of content that we put out there is actually using our customers words. So, when they come to our demo, or they come to our site, they’re actually connecting with us, right? They feel like they feel like we understand them. Right? That’s, that’s number one. So, I think that’s part of the strategy, but the other part of the strategy that nobody really thinks about is when you sell to somebody one on one, right, like when you are live with a person, it’s very easy to sell them because you can tell by their facial expression, by how they ask you questions, what objections they have, and then you can handle it immediately. Like, you can change their mind on the spot. When you create an on-demand video, a commercial and on-demand webinar, you have to sell to someone without talking to them and that is a completely different strategy and people think, “Oh, I have a demo this way, or I have a sales pitch this way, it’s always worked for me, I’m just going to take the exact same thing, I’m going to put it into a video and make it an automated webinar, it’s going to convert for me”. Every single day I have people cancelling because they’re like, “Oh, this doesn’t work for me, it’s not as good as like a one on one demos”. It’s like, well, of course, because you’re treating it like a one on one demo. When you create a sales pitch knowing the other person can’t ask you any questions it’s a completely different strategy in the sense that you have to handle all their objections before they even come up because you don’t have the opportunity to react in real time. So, if you’re using an automated webinar platform, like Ewebinar, you have the ability to respond to a chat message in real time, or respond later by email, but you’re not always there. So, you have to also prep for the times that you’re not there. So, I actually did a workshop on this called ‘The Five Elements of an Effective On Demand Demo’, which I can share in the show in the show notes as well, on how to structure a presentation to guide people to a close without ever talking to them and there’s another book that I would recommend. It’s called ‘Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs’ by Carmine Gallo, Steve Jobs did not write it. Carmine Gallo was someone that studied Steve Jobs. It is like literally my business Bible and a lot of the sales strategies and presentation like scripting that I learned is actually from this book, so, I would really highly recommend that. So, I think in terms of strategy, number one is to make sure you’re using the language that your customers are using to describe their own problem and then to solve their own problem, so that you look more credible and knowledgeable, but number two is you need to script your sales pitch in a way that helps them understand the problem you’re trying to solve and the value that you can deliver them without ever talking to them.

Christian Klepp 18:11

One more time for the people on the back, please. Fantastic, no, two questions as a follow up for you: number one is, could you please repeat the name of that book again?

Melissa Kwan 18:25

Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

Christian Klepp 18:27

Okay. Okay, so that one, so that one for the listeners out there who are interested in number two, you brought up, I think you highlighted some really good points about the difference between you know, selling to somebody who’s there and somebody who’s well, online and you’re not physically in front of them and what have you. One of the follow up questions that I will have is like how often in your experience, how often do you find yourself, or do you see clients going back and having to update that content in that presentation? Because especially if you can’t be in front of that person, right, and you know, the market changes, customer behaviour changes, there needs to be a bit of like updating of content and so forth. So how often do you see that happening?

Melissa Kwan 19:13

Yeah, I mean, I think it all depends on you know, how often you update your product and maybe like how comfortable you are with not updating your content, like I’m very lazy. So when we rolled out our product, I ironically did one on one demos for eight weeks straight and the reason I did that was because I needed to learn the language and the objections that my customers have before I could automate my sales pitch in my demo, right until you do that. You can’t go and just automate your demo and say, ‘Oh, that’s going to sell for me”, right? You have to understand every single question that your customer is going to ask throughout the sales pitch so you can work that into your own sales presentation. So we automated that demo for about nine months and then of course, once you automate it, you start understanding. At which point do people ask me what question where, where did I miss something? What resource? Should I surface? Or should I talk more about? So one of the things might be like, for some reason, we surface the pricing page in the very beginning but within three minutes, everybody asks, where’s the pricing? Like, I don’t know, there’s something about that that they’re interested in, but they’re not reading what’s on the side, so my new demo, like after nine months of learning all this stuff throughout the 20 minute demo, I took all this learning and I scripted a brand new demo and that demo, we’ve run for the last year, all the UI already on my product has already changed, but I’m not updating that demo because the general idea of what it is has changed the only the only reason, like the only way that someone knows that the product on the demo looks a bit different than what there is now is if they really, really looked for it, like no one has actually pointed that out. So, I’m comfortable using an old demo, because I’m more about the content, and less about the screens. Right? Like kind of the general flow is kind of the same, but I know people that are obsessive, like every single UI change, they change the demo. Like I like for me, it’s just not that important, because I really focus on the big picture, and less about the actual features itself and actually the workshop that I did talks about this, right? If you if your demo is made up of many stories of how your existing customers have been successful using your product, then the actual feature itself matters a lot less, because then it’s about the outcome, and way less about the actual operations.

Christian Klepp 21:52

Right. Right. Right. That’s a really interesting point. That’s really interesting point and I suppose you’re right, it does depend on on, it does depend on several factors, right? There’s probably not like a yes or no answer to that. It depends on your product depends on how often you you want to update it or introduce a new product, in fact, to the market, right, there’s a lot of factors that come into play. Next question, giving you an opportunity to showcase your company and your your capabilities even more, but talk to us about a recent challenge, and when I say recent, like in the past 12 months, a challenge that you helped to solve for customer.

Melissa Kwan 22:32

Yeah, so one that comes to mind is a company called Later.com, of course, also proudly, Canadian. I’m also Canadian, you’re Canadian. So later.com, they were struggling with, of course scaling their onboarding and training. I mean, they’re, they’re a business technology, but really for like consumers as well as businesses and they have they’ve got I mean, I don’t even know how many users they have but tonnes of users new signups every day and prior to us, they were hosting about two live webinars every single month and that was that capacity, because while they have a support team, their support team was not hired to run webinars, not like they weren’t hired to run on boardings, right, they do many, many different things, but they couldn’t find a way to scale without losing that personal touch because if a customer doesn’t get to activate it in the first couple of weeks, you’re kind of losing that customer, right and as a growing company, you need to make sure that you know you meet and you need to make sure that people are actually converting and paying. So, after us, they were able to they were able to scale all their onboarding and training especially for new customers using you know, a video, and they actually now host over 100 webinars every single month with no live host, and spend about an hour a day like people in support, spend about an hour a day responding to questions when they come to work and their attendance has actually gone up six times as compared to before when they had to have a live person and this is someone that said to me, you know, yes, you’re running a one hour training, but it’s actually kind of half a day, right? Like you have to prep for you have to do it and then it’s stressful. You don’t know if the connection is gonna be right, the timezone is not right for everybody, you’ve got a second person manning the chat and then after it’s done, it’s just like, oh, I need to decompress for a bit. So, a one hour webinar is never really a one hour webinar, right? Especially like if you’re introverted, it might be like a full day. So that’s like one of the most recent success stories is like from two to four live at capacity to now over 100 every single month and imagine like, what, what kind of workforce do you need to actually run 100 webinars, like you just won’t be able to, so the running around the clock and then attendance has actually gone up, not down.

Christian Klepp 24:53

Wow, well, just give me a second to digest all of that, like they went from two to four live webinars, if I heard you correctly, to 100 a month? Yeah, that’s a ton and you have to answer your question. I mean, like, you’d probably need an army to like, manage 100 webinars if they were live, right?

Melissa Kwan 25:12

Well, these are not 100 different webinars. So what they’ve done is they have different tracks for different, you know, different users, different types of users, whether it’s like beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then on different, you know, different, I guess categories of the product. They have, like, you know, different types of products within. So they might be running like if I remember correctly, 12 or 13 webinars, but it’s on a recurring schedule. The best thing about automating our webinar is it’s not once a week, once a month, once a quarter, it’s recurring, as many as you want. Our biggest customer has over 300 different webinars running concurrently. It’s a publicly traded company. They’ve got, they basically have outsourced a support team just to answer questions from those webinars, but you can imagine like, what does it take to run 300 different webinars every single month? Like it’s, it’s just impossible?

Christian Klepp 25:12

A lot. A lot. Absolutely. Right. On to the next question. So one of the things what we really like to do on the show is give listeners actionable tips. So, what steps can B2B marketers take right now to improve when it comes to creating on-demand webinars and demos? Off you go.

Melissa Kwan 26:31

Yeah, I think the most actionable tip is to get started today. Right? And the thing that you can do is everybody has a replay of a previous webinar that you did, maybe you did one last week, last month, whatever it might be. Use Ewebinar to deliver your replay. Like tell people, “Hey, this is a replay, but you can still chat with me if you have questions”, and when you use something like Ewebinar, it’s not just like a YouTube video, right throughout, like, the thing that makes us unique is throughout the experience, you can programme things like polls, questions, resources, contact forms, so as a marketer, the more you run it, the more data you’re actually collecting, from your customer. Like, my first question is always how did you hear about our company? And then I actually surfaced that question again, in the middle, in case they didn’t answer the one in the beginning. So in the past year, you know, 30% of people have actually answered that question, but 3000 people have joined that demo without me ever talking to them. So that data you’re getting is super valuable, but use whatever video you have, deliver it as a replay, and just get a feel for what that experience is like, right? Because I think people are so stuck on like, well, I know what a webinar is. It’s a zoom. I’ve done a zoom. Why can I just do it on Zoom? Or like, Oh, it’s a video? Why can I just put it on YouTube? Right, this is something that you really have to experience and if you want to you can go to the Ewebinar.com. We have a demo. That’s, of course, deliver through Ewebinar as well, just to get a feel for what your customers see and the aha moment is when someone’s in your webinar, asking you a question, and you’re responding to them on your phone in your pyjamas. Like, that is the aha moment and once you get there, you would like a light bulb will come on and you will think of all the different use cases and places you can actually use this because at that point, you fully understand, oh, this type of asynchronous communication is something that we already do, but no one’s going to be offended because Christian is not there at 3am, right, my time. They’re just happy to get a response and get the content that they want at the time of discovery.

Christian Klepp 28:41

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, fantastic. So you’ve given us some actionable tips now. Now we move on to the next step, which is metrics. So, how can people if they implement these, they’ll take these steps they implement these tips that you’ve recommended, how can they tell if it’s working?

Melissa Kwan 29:01

You know, that is a great question. So, we have I want to say, probably, and I’m saying probably because I don’t want to be like too conceited, the most comprehensive, beautiful, actionable analytics report on registrants and attendee activity data that you may ever see on not just any webinar platform.

Christian Klepp 29:27

Yeah.

Melissa Kwan 29:28

But like, most SaaS (Software as a service) platforms don’t put as much thought into this the person who designed it is actually used to be one of the design leads from Apple and we were so lucky to get some of his time, but basically, we show you exactly how many visitors you had to your registration page, how many percent registered, what percent attended, what percent converted. So, whether your conversion is book of time on my calendar or sign up for a free trial or, you know, buy this product or buy this course, we can show do all that in a funnel, how effective it is and because the webinar is recurring, it’s not a one time event. The average attendance rate of all of our customers across the board is 65%. The industry average for webinar attendance rate is around 30% – 35%. Oh, so, yeah, so that’s 30 to 40%, higher than the industry average and that’s just on average, across the board, we have customers that are reporting 87% -90%, you know, 90% attendance rate, week over week and that’s really something that you have to like experience and see to believe. That’s why I say like, if you have something already out there, give it a try. Look at the metrics for yourself, because those don’t lie and then allow your brain to get more creative about the different places that that you can be using those.

Christian Klepp 30:52

Fantastic, fantastic. So if I’m hearing what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes correctly, there isn’t like one single metrics. In fact, that’s a collection. Right? It’s a group of metrics that you need to measure, right?

Melissa Kwan 31:07

Yeah, I mean, I think I always want to be super wary about quoting metrics, right? Because we all know that conversion depends on copy and you can attend, yeah, and you if you can attend, but if your host or you know, is not energetic, and not a great presenter, or if the content is not great, then you drop off. So, I don’t want to say “Oh, in this industry, the watch, you know, the watch percentages, on average of x percent”. The reason why I’m comfortable saying the attendance rate is because that’s completely across the board across almost 1 000 of our customers. And attendance rate is literally just showing up in my own demo. In the past vault once 3 000 people have joined the demo like actually attended. I’m looking at the graph right now and our attendance rate was at 87.4%, our conversion rate from attendee to sign up for a trial is 23%. Before I learned anything from this demo, the conversion rate was 17% and then we know that anyone who comes into a trial because we require a credit card and things like that, the conversion rate, depending on the month, is anywhere between 55% to 70%. Right?

Christian Klepp 32:28

Those are those are incredible statistics and it seems to me I mean, this is probably like short of stating the obvious. This is like a process of continuous improvement. It sounds like, right? It’s like something that I mean, at least from what you’ve been talking about for the past couple of minutes. It’s something that you need to continuously iterate to see what’s working, what’s not and to improve.

Melissa Kwan 32:48

I mean, isn’t that what we do? Right? Isn’t that what we do as marketers? Right? Like, I mean, I think, once you like, why do people automate things? Right? Not only for scale, but because your team is small. Yeah, like, I don’t have the luxury to not automate something because I’m bootstrapped. My team is very small, like, I am mostly everything, you know, everything except for code. So, I want to automate to lower my own support. So, the more I learned from this, the more I iterate, the less I have to actually manage that process and that’s actually my goal. Scaling is almost just a bonus.

Christian Klepp 33:27

Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. I personally think that you’ve been on your soapbox already, but this next question is another opportunity for you to stay up there. Okay. Okay, you ready? So, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Melissa Kwan 33:52

Yeah.That all videos are made equal. Like that is something that I passionately disagree with and every day I get this question, right? If it’s just a video, why don’t why can I just put it on YouTube, or Wistia, or My Knowledge Base? Right? Because content is just as much about the content as the medium of delivery, whether I watch something on Instagram, or Tiktok, or Intercom Knowledge Base or YouTube, or Ewebinar, right? My mindset is completely different. When I attend a webinar, I am blocking off time to give to you, you know, maybe 30 to 60 minutes of my time, to allow you to speak to me so that I can be converted. When I go to YouTube, I might be doing some discovery because I know I can press play, and also pause and I can bounce at any time. Right? When I go to tick tock, I’m literally just flipping when I go to Instagram, I just want to look at ads, right? Or maybe like my friends photos. I’m not really in the mindset of consuming business content, right. So if If YouTube was enough, then Zoom would not exist. Right? So if YouTube was enough, then nobody would be using Ewebinar, but anybody that uses Ewebinar understands that the medium of delivery is just as important as the content itself and that’s, again, something that has to be experienced because like I mentioned earlier in this podcast, Ewebinars not just about delivering a video, it’s about delivering an immersive, interactive, engaging, participatory experience where when you’re in it, you’re answering questions, you’re answering polls, you’re getting resources, you’ve got contact forms, you’ve got banners that pop up, you got hotspots that you can click on and most importantly, it’s an opportunity for you to reach out to the person on the other side, because we have that chat component. Whereas, nowhere else where a video was present, can you actually reach out to chat with the other person, you might be able to comment under the video, but that’s just not where people get information. Right, that context is is also different. I would encourage people to look at the different mediums and how videos are being consumed to determine what type of content is best on YouTube versus Instagram versus Facebook versus automating as a webinar.

Christian Klepp 36:25

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Melissa, this was such an awesome conversation. I think we could have gone on for another six hours or so, but in the interest of time, and, and I do appreciate you coming on, you know, such a late time over there in Hong Kong. So please, quick intro to yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Melissa Kwan 36:45

Yeah, so my name again is Melissa Kwan, spelled K, W, A, N. The best way to get in touch with me is through LinkedIn and if you’re curious about how Ewebinar can help you or your business, and if you want to stop doing the same webinar over and over again, just head over to Ewebinar.com, join the demo that we have on the homepage, and I am always managing the chat. So, if you have a question, type that to me, I’ll respond to you. If not immediately, then of course through email.

Christian Klepp 37:13

Fantastic, fantastic. Melissa, once again, this has been such an incredible session. Thanks again for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Bye for now.

Melissa Kwan 37:22

Thanks so much.

Christian Klepp 37:24

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co and be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favourite podcast player.

View Details

How to Develop the Right Language and Tone of Voice for B2B Brands

With more channels than ever before, we forget that consumers want to have a conversation with brands they love. The “velocity of language” has never been higher, and this is as relevant in B2B as it is in B2C.

In this first episode of 2023, we have a conversation with brand expert Chris West (CEO, Verbal Identity) about how B2B brands can develop the right language and tone that will improve their communication, positioning, and other facets within their ecosystem. Chris also elaborates on some of the most common mistakes that B2B brands make, the importance of starting with a solid strategy and market research, and some actionable tips on what B2B marketers can do to improve the language they use for their brands.

https://youtu.be/HPSJ1LHqios

Topics discussed in this episode:

• The velocity of language in today’s business world [02:22]
• The relationship between “visuals” and “verbals” when communicating with your target audience to authentically express your brand ethos [06:25]
• The biggest mistakes that companies make when they define their position in their industry. [11:23]
• The process of developing the right language and tone of voice for B2B marketing [16:01]
• Three really important things that language can achieve [25:48]
• What can a B2B marketer do immediately after this interview to develop the right language and tone for their company [26:08]

Companies & links mentioned:

• Chris West on LinkedIn
• Verbal Identity
• The “Thinking in Bets” Book
• The “Strong Language” Book
• Alphabet’s moonshot factory

TranscriptSPEAKER

Christian Klepp, Chris West

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission. And let me see if I can get this right, to build company-wide alignment by answering three fundamental questions. Who are we? What do we stand for? And what is our voice? So coming to us from London, England, Mr. Chris West. Welcome to the show, sir.

Chris West 01:14

Thank you very much.

Christian Klepp 01:17

Great to be connected, Chris.

Chris West 01:18

Really great to be here, Christian as well. It’s really great.

Christian Klepp 01:22

Fantastic. I mean, we had such a great time in our previous conversation. So, I would just say we we carry on right.

Chris West 01:29

We did it all that this is gonna be terrible now, because we didn’t… we shot all our bolts in that pre-conversation.

Christian Klepp 01:34

Yes, indeed, we set the bar too high, didn’t we? Where to go from here is question. But um, let’s dive in. Because this is clearly a topic that’s very close to your heart and I’m really hoping that the audience will get a lot of value out of this. So let’s dive in. So, Chris, you’re definitely no stranger when it comes to the world of branding and I believe in the previous conversation that you and I had, you talked about something, okay, let me see if I can quote you accurately here. “With more channels now than ever before we forget that consumers want to have conversations with the brands they love” and you mentioned, “the velocity of language has never been higher.” So please explain what you meant by that and how was that relevant to B2B marketing.

Chris West 02:22

This is from the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officers point of view, I think, we’ve got more channels than ever before, to communicate in for their brand and we did a, Christian, we did a back of the envelope calculation. Even for a midsize brand, the marketing director, the CMO has got to create tomorrow, more words, than the editor of The Guardian newspaper here in the UK has to put into tomorrow’s newspaper. Right? So more. Yeah. So when… it’s not just oh, here, we go to a lot on social media, it’s not just well, we’re turning over this many pages per week or per month on our website, or it’s all about, you know, all the other obvious things. It’s the language is really working everywhere all the time. And it’s, how is it turning up in your customer service communications? If you’re supplying something, which has some kind of info on how to use it, Is the language consistent? By the way blue Mikey? Those are all mics, brilliant language, when they give you a little fold out booklet that comes with their mic super. How are your team that are going out to see your clients? How are they talking about your business? When the CEO stands up next, whether that’s in house, or whether that’s an investor’s meeting, are they going to sound the same? Are they going to be saying talking about the same kind of things that your customer agent was talking about, that your letter was talking about, that you’re well, so there are all these channels. So the absolute amount of language that the CMO is responsible for is, each day, it’s kind of more words than going to the Guardian newspaper here in… the printed version of the Guardian newspaper in the UK. Now, of course, the editor of The Guardian has grown up around language, and the CMO might not have done, so they might not feel as comfortable or as versed or as just comfortable, I think is the right word in how you use or how you manipulate language or how you judge language. So that’s certainly true, but it’s kind of, you know, when I started Christian maybe 20 years ago, you could have a pre pre Twitter, pre social media, if a customer wrote a letter to one of our clients. You know, the customer would expect that letters come back in about a week of replies, that letters come back in a week. Now they put something on Twitter and they expect a response within an hour. They might write to you through customer service portal on the website, and they expect an answer in 24 hours. So it’s not just the volume, it’s the kind of speed and the directionality of the language, which is bigger than ever before. So really, what that means is, I think this about this kind of velocity of language, that the CMO no longer can see everything or look after everything, or kind of ensure quality, QC everything, actually, now they’ve got to trust that if they want to get that response out on Twitter within an hour, if they want to get that reply through the customer services web portal within 24, they’ve got to trust because they just can’t manage it fast. They can’t manage the volume, and they can’t manage it fast enough. That’s why we talked about the velocity of language.

Christian Klepp 05:47

Wow, that’s absolutely incredible. Um, it’s interesting that you mentioned that I just have one follow up question, which I’m sure is on the minds of a lot of CMOs out there, or marketers per se, when you’re talking about the velocity of language and how much CMOs needs to be responsible for the consistency of that language across the board and all channels and what have you. Is it absolutely necessary… I wouldn’t say to be a wordsmith, but to be able to write in prose when it comes to like language in the world of B2B marketing. It certainly doesn’t hurt. But is it an absolute necessity?

Chris West 06:25

Yeah, I think it is, I take slight risk, I feel slight resistance to that word wordsmith when it comes up. Because often, if we hear that in a meeting, early stage, I think we’re probably dealing with the wrong client, or the clients dealing with the wrong partner agency. Because what I’m not interested in doing, what I don’t think the job is about just choosing the right word, or just kind of, you know, can we be a bit more human or friendly or warm or approachable all those term. Actually, I think that language only ever reflects who you are, as a business, what you stand for, as a business. So to the first two of those three questions. So it’s not really about oh, can we say this word instead of that word? Really, it’s like, is this coming from the right place? From us as a business? Is this our worldview? Is this what we stand for? More importantly, is this what we stand against? And if it’s coming from the right place, is it turning up with this with the right feeling of personality? Does this sound like… What’s what’s written? Does it sound like if you’re having a conversation with someone inside our building? And that’s much more important than wordsmithing. So I think that language is, I mean, it is really important and I think half the world maybe is dominated by the visual impact, and half the world is dominated by the verbal impact. I say I wish I had never said that. I wish I never said that Christian, because I don’t think that’s true. Actually, I think it’s this. And it’s something we’ve said before, which is, visuals attract, verbals engage, looking great, it’s fantastic and that’s often what’s going to get someone attracted to you in the first place, but to maintain a relationship with this could be dated advice, to maintain a relationship, you need to have language which expresses who you are, and connects with the other person. So I think having an ability in language is critical for them B2B branding and it’s even more important for the CMO of the brand team. So if you like, know what the levers are, because they’ve grown up, and they’ve sweated for their business, the visual identity of their brand, you know, they will be able to say to me, Hey, Chris, you know, in developing markets, we shift their logo this much, right, we put that we use this color palette in that situation. And this is our photography, they can tell me that. But then when it comes to how they shape their language, so their verbal identity… is it differentiating, is it as powerful and as meaningful as their verbal identity? They don’t have the background experience to be able to do that. Often they can say that, you know, they can say to their agency or their team. That’s not right. That’s not us, but then they can’t say the next bit, which is really critical. What you need to do is, is do more of this here and less of that there, or you need to change from here to there. And then instead what they’re saying is it’s just not right, it’s just not us, have another go. And that’s kind of dispiriting for them, embarrassing, maybe even for them. I doubt in doubt, maybe that embarrassing but for that for their agency or their in house team or their colleagues, it’s kind of hard because then they suddenly feel like they’re stumbling around in the dark just trying to find the right language.

Christian Klepp 10:01

Absolutely, absolutely. And no, I don’t think that that’s dated advice at all. I do believe that you do lead with language. It’s that. I mean, you, you know, you can take your pick. You’ve seen this before, but like, you know that it’s that eternal question about like, you know, when you’re designing a website, does the design come first or the copy? You and I both know, what’s the copy that leads, not the design. There’s others out there that would beg to differ. But I would say well, I beg to differ back.

Chris West 10:30

Yeah, I think the answer is, if you’re just putting a visual style from nowhere, because you like it.

Christian Klepp 10:36

Yeah.

Chris West 10:37

You could be right, but why putting that visual style and when you get and then brief your copywriting agency like us? What are you going to say? Right, like this imagery? I don’t know if that’s right. What you want to be able to say is that here’s our strategic view, this is who we are, this is what we stand for. This is why we’re turning up like this visually. And so we would like you to work out a way of creating a brand tone of voice. So we turn up like that verbally.

Christian Klepp 11:07

Absolutely, absolutely. So, moving on, when one talks about developing the right language, as you said, in the tone of voice, particularly with B2B, what are some of the common mistakes that you’ve seen out there? And what should be done to address them?

Chris West 11:23

I think the biggest mistake out there at the moment is thinking that four adjectives on a page can suitably describe your brand’s tone of voice for all those different channels, all those different moments in those different channels, and all the different leads that your customers clients might have. And particularly Christian, if those four words on the page are human friendly, warm and approachable, which is, you know, that like the default, which, which brand would want to be, instead of human friendly, warm and approachable, inhuman, cold, unfriendly and hostile, right, it doesn’t make any sense, the opposite doesn’t make any sense. So to say human, friendly, warm, approachable, it’s default, it doesn’t differentiate you in any way, you’ve got to dig deeper. And there are ways to dig deeper for sure. And to understand who you really are as a business. So that’s kind of part one of the problem.

Chris West 12:13

And part two of the problem is unless you really know how to define your brand voice. And that’s what it comes down to, you know how to define your visual identity. If you don’t know how to define your brand tone of voice, one of the things that you need to have a definition against, then you kind of end up sounding like everyone else. And here’s the kicker, here’s the kicker. If you are the biggest brand in your market, it’s great that everyone sounds like you. Because really what they’re doing is they’re reinforcing you, your brand and your brand position. If your brand is not number one in your marketplace, do not sound like the number one in the marketplace, because all you’re doing is spending money, reinforcing their positioning.

Christian Klepp 12:58

Absolutely, absolutely. Along we came up with the warm, friendly and approachable. That sounds like a boiler plate briefing.

Chris West 13:04

The more human, friendly, warm and approachable. Yeah, we hear again and again. And it’s not… I mean it’s not. It’s not wrong. It’s just it’s kind of like of course, you would say that.

Christian Klepp 13:14

Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Christian Klepp 13:18

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp here. We’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

Christian Klepp 13:46

This is probably like table stakes for somebody you know, with your expertise, but talk to us about the importance of starting and leading with a strategy and conducting market research. So for example, things like understanding who your target audiences and what their buyers journey looks like before you dive straight into the execution. I mean, you know, we’ve seen this time and time again, where some companies tend to skip that part at their own risk.

Chris West 14:11

Yeah, I mean, I think that if you… do you know, the work of Annie Duke, cognitive neuroscientist, who then became a world champion poker player, but her first book, I think, was called “Thinking in Bets” and I can’t attempt to paraphrase dutifully what her book said. But really, that’s the way to think about it, right? If you’re CMO, you’ve got a certain number of bets you’re going to make and none of those bets are guaranteed to come off. But rather than walking into a casino, walking up to one table and saying ah on the Roulette, I think I think it’s gonna be 15, put the money on it doesn’t happen. Oh, damn. Right. That’s crazy strategy. Know what you think anyone doing that is crazy, but to a certain extent, if you don’t research, the customer segmentation, if you don’t work out what the motivation of those customers is, if you don’t look at what their next best alternative to using you if you don’t understand what the challenges are for them using you, if you don’t understand that stuff, you’re walking into a casino walking up to the roulette table, and putting your money down on 15. At least know what the odds are, at least you know, at least you should know what the odds are, at least you should know what the alternatives are, at least you should do some investigation, challenge your own assumptions. That’s what I think.

Christian Klepp 15:35

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, otherwise, you’re just well, to use another analogy for a kind of talk about analogies. It’s just walking straight into a forest at night without a torch.

Chris West 15:43

Yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp 15:48

Absolutely. I’m now focusing on your area of expertise. But like you touched on it a few minutes ago, but walk us through the process of developing that right language. And that tone of voice for B2B.

Chris West 16:01

I think it’s really important to understand where you want to get to in your guidelines. So we have a particular framework for our guidelines, which identifies every brand voice operates on three levels. So often, someone will say always to tone of voice, or if they’ve come from a journalism PR backgrounds, what they’re really interested, what they’re really experienced in rather, what they know, is what is a style guide, we use this way, not that, we capitalize them not then, we put a comma here, we don’t do this, we do a line breaker. But that’s really the nuts and bolts, that’s the ground level detail. If you come from an advertising background, often, what they’re very good at is the next level up what we would call the 1000 feet level, they’re very good at personality. But sometimes they use entirely the wrong words. And sometimes what they won’t do is really understand where this brand, this B2B brand sits in the client’s life, what their company was set up for, what it’s trying to do in the world, how it’s trying to change the world. And that’s where we recall the 10,000 foot level. So if you look at the most successful brands, and how they use language, what’s really clear in all of them, even though it’s not explicitly mentioned, what’s really clear is, this is the world we believe in. And so therefore, we stand for this, and therefore we stand against that. And that’s kind of like a 10,000 foot level, that informs what they talk about, what are the angles they take on what everyone else is talking about, come down a level as the 1000 foot has a really clear, strong personality. And then come down another level to ground level. And what you’ll notice is how much jargon to their use is consistent. When do they use it is consistent. Their grammar choice? Is it formal grammar? Is it conversational grammar, or is it something else? All of these things are carefully chosen. So each level reinforces the other levels, and provides this idea of a unified sense of the brand voice. One voice for one company, but to get there to answer your question, Christian, sorry, to get there, you’ve really got to do some examination of who you are and what you stand for. Don’t just say like, we want this kind of personality, because if you’re not careful, you’ll have writing, which is very strong personality, but talking about the wrong thing. So knowing where you’re coming from as a business, what you’re trying to achieve, how you going to get there, what you stand against, that’s important, and then using some devices and some workshops, we’ve pioneered to get the personality and then some choices around the ground level detail. So there if you like, is a simple approach, first of all, knowing what you’re trying to fulfill, and then going back into the heart of the business, and you saw, you’re gonna be kind enough to mention my book, “Strong Language” in a minute, but there are some exercises in that book that you can do anyone can do with their business, whether it’s just them, or whether they’ve got a team of people that’s going to do next more extensive review.

Chris West 16:09

Fantastic, fantastic. I have one follow up question to this framework. In your experience, like if this framework that you just mentioned, this is applicable across the board, you know, across different industries are there are some exceptions to the rule.

Chris West 19:29

We’ve not found a single exception, and it’s not really because of… it’s not like this is what you do with brand voices. This is much more fundamental. So what language is. So already as you’re talking to me, I’ve not said this is my worldview. Christian, I believe in this I stand for that right? And I stand for you’re getting an impression of that because of my choice in how it turned up today and in my choice of what we might talk about or my choice of how I might deal with a particular subject, you’ve got an idea of my personality, you know if you were to review this, you might see some ground level details that are consistent. Trying to steer clear of jargon, for example.

Christian Klepp 20:10

Yeah, yeah I do.

Chris West 20:11

That’s how language works. From a linguistics point of view, language seems to work on, it does work on these three levels. So actually, those three levels apply wherever languages is at work. So it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, or what size of business you are. So we’re delighted to have worked with alphabets moonshot factory in Silicon Valley, that place which houses all these kind of crazy, mind bending new technologies. And we’ve worked with a pre-series A data science startup in the UK, we’ve worked with global retailers, luxury brands, all of them have found this framework applies. Of course it does, because it’s language, but I’ve also found it, I think, very useful, because simple, it’s easy to refer back to.

Christian Klepp 21:01

Certainly is, certainly is. We tend to overcomplicate things at times, you know, as marketers or people in the branding world. So it’s good to have a framework that actually helps to keep everything simple. Providing an example of a great B2B brand that uses the approach you’re referring to, and ideally from your own experience.

Chris West 21:21

Yeah. Okay, so this is me. This is such a great question because when you and I talk about B2B well, I don’t know. I mean, other people have views of B2B depends where they are, but if you talk to them and talk to a lot of people about B2B, they’re going to immediately think of some of these big companies like Cisco or SAP or Accenture. Quite right. I mean, they’re hugely successful businesses and if I have any criticism, I am only like a mosquito trying to stick an elephant, you know, to get it to pay attention. But then, also, you and I, in our world, we will have certain businesses, which don’t have that kind of, which don’t sit in the same place in our heads, like Slack, like MailChimp, for your business owner, up to a certain size. Zero, for your financial package and the way those two kind of groups use language is quite different, yet they’re both B2B and it’s really funny, you know, so I won’t name names, but I just looked at someone’s website today and it says a big headline on the landing pages act quickly to manage inflation risk, is that Cisco? is that SAP? Is that Accenture? And another one of those big firm big, you know, big global brands said, as a landing page headline, Art of AI maturity. Could you definitely say one is this one is that? Don’t think you could. They all kind of sound like, yeah, so I don’t, in front of me have examples of Slacks language or MailChimp language, but I think that you, everyone that listens to you would instantly recognize yeah, that’s Slack. Yeah, that’s MailChimp.

Christian Klepp 23:13

Yes. Yes.

Chris West 23:14

So I was thinking, what’s going on? Why these kind of sitting in two different places in our heads? It’s not because of the scale of company that they’re approaching. I mean, maybe to a certain extent, but actually, I think it’s this thing of, I tell you what, before I say what I think it is, about two, two and a half, three years ago, there was a little bit of video footage that turned up on Instagram and it was a one of those guys that brings the plane in and out, docking at an airport, you know, brings them up to the jetway and I don’t know if you remember it, it was a guy that wasn’t just given the hand signals with, you know, the illuminated batteries but he was actually make it into a dance routine and it…

Christian Klepp 24:04

Yes I did see that. Yeah, yeah.

Chris West 24:07

And lots of people posted about it and I thought, why is that caught everyone’s imagination so much. And it was because he knew who the end user was. The end user was the person on the plane, and he made it good for the pilot, and good for the end user, and I think what Slack, Zero, MailChimp all do really well is they talk to the end user, and they encourage those people to build a consensus, to build a demand to ask for that software to be used in their business, and as a consequence, the ad spend, I reckon is smaller, but the loyalty is much greater. Whereas those bigger behemoths, and there’s nothing wrong with their approach the Cisco, the SAP, the Accenture. They’re good, but they’re talking to the purchasing committee, and when that decision is made, and when the decision is made, and they’re the choices imposed on people, everyone is like, Yeah, okay. There hasn’t been this groundswell of demand.

Christian Klepp 25:17

Yeah.

Chris West 25:17

So I’m not saying one is right one is wrong, it’s easy to dismiss and they will probably be right based on company size they’re talking to decision making, process everything else. But I do believe that language in Slack, Zero MailChimp, those legitimate B2B businesses and let’s not forget Slack has got a valuation north of 20 billion.

Christian Klepp 25:34

Oh yes, yes.

Chris West 25:36

Those businesses, yeah, those businesses are using language, in a way which builds loyalty, is de-positioning rivals, and it’s winning customers.

Christian Klepp 25:47

Absolutely.

Chris West 25:48

Three things really important that language can do, win customers, de-position rivals, and build loyalty.

Christian Klepp 25:53

Correct, Correct. The show was about actionable tips, and you have given some of them already, but like just off the top of your head, what is something that B2B marketers can do after listening to this interview that they can immediately implement in terms of developing the right language and tone for their practice?

Chris West 26:08

Yeah, I think if you’ve got three hours, then just get a sample of four, five, six pieces from each of your competitors in your industry, across maybe three, four channels for each one and then just say, what language do we all have to use to signal that we’re all in the same category? And then, what is everyone else using that we don’t have to use? And if we choose not to use it, how will this create true differentiation for us link to our value? So it’s really saying, at the heart of this is this idea that, you particularly B2B world, you have to use some language, which shows your member of a category, but if you use all the same language, then you’re no one in the category. So try and work out what is the language that is essential to show you’re a member of the category, and then look for the opportunities where you can use language, style or content, which means that you are different and valuable in that category.

Chris West 26:08

Then the next thing I say is, if they have one more hour, then look at your own communications, put out three or four pieces from five or six channels, and just rate just score, how do you score? for clarity, for differentiation in each of those pieces, compared to your competitors, might be that you come out, you gotta we’re doing alright, might be come out and say, no, it’s just on our website our language sucks. It might be just on our customer service communications that our language sucks. Okay, focus on that, and I would say, if you only have five minutes, then buy my book, and read far more, find some time then and read far more in it about all the different things you can do. Quick wins charts, auditing for ROI, looking for the kind of human cost of maintaining a voice that isn’t working or those kinds of things.

Christian Klepp 28:25

Fantastic. Fantastic advice, Chris. I’m gonna ask you to like, pull the book up one more time, because it was blurred on the screen. Yeah, there we go, Strong Language. There we go. Perfect. Perfecto. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time, Chris. And for, you know, sharing your experience and expertise with the audience and please, quick intro to yourself and help people out there can get in touch with you.

Chris West 28:47

Oh, thank you very much, Christian. I, my name is Chris West. 12 years ago, I started a business called Verbal Identity and I will say we are super specialists in helping CMOs, use language more effectively, but here’s the key thing. Enjoy doing it and get their teams to enjoy using language more effectively. You can find us at verbalidentity.com Or I communicate. I spent too much time I feel on LinkedIn, where if you put in Chris West verbal identity, you should be able to see me and what I’m sharing what I’m seeing in language today.

Christian Klepp 29:24

The comments on the ads that he’s seen.

Chris West 29:27

Sometimes.

Christian Klepp 29:29

The haunted houses that were being used by the real estate brokers.

Chris West 29:33

It’s Halloween. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 29:35

Oh, that was perfect.

Chris West 29:37

Perfect example.

Christian Klepp 29:38

Fantastic, Chris. As expected. This was an incredible session. So thanks again for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Chris West 29:46

Talk to you soon. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.

Christian Klepp 29:48

Thanks. Bye for now. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co and be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.

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