Value-driven Marketing: Recent Episodes
Elena Iordache Stoica
B2B marketing that gets results today is customer-centric: focused on educating, advising potential customers and providing value. Companies that win focus on the long run instead of short-term marketing tactics and immediate ROI.
I aim to bring in the spotlight such marketing leaders and discover how they grow their companies by playing the long game of value creation in marketing.
This podcast is produced by STOICA.CO, a web design and technology agency for B2B tech brands that want to transform their website into their most powerful marketing asset.
Social selling is a term that is being thrown around a lot these days, but for most companies, it means sending automated connection requests over LinkedIn followed by “me, me” messages.
My guest Claudiu Jojatu, CEO and co-founder of Milk & Cookies Studio has a different take on what social selling done right looks like.
For Claudiu, social selling with zero BS means doing high-quality networking and getting involved in building long-term relationships.
Is social selling effective? Well, Claudiu and his team managed to generate over 1 million EUR in pipeline for one of their tech clients in a little over 9 months.
If you’d like to learn more about how Milk & Cookies Studio approaches social selling, hit play.
If you’d like to connect with Claudiu, find him on LinkedIn and on milkandcookies.studio
Bonus: Download for free this 30+ pages #NoBS social selling guide.
Companies often look at outbound sales as a quick fix for bringing in revenue. But sales is not about charm, and revenue is not about luck.
If your company doesn't have a revenue strategy in place that starts with understanding your customer needs, your competitors, defining the right pricing strategy and channels, you're most likely to end up complaining that outbound sales are "dead".
I sat down with Liana and Gabriela of SavoireFair and explored what running outbound sales the right way looks like today in B2B.
Tune in to learn:
- What B2B outbound done right looks like today
- How to build a solid outbound strategy
- Mistakes to avoid, what you can automate in your outreach process, realistic expectations, and much more
Gabriela Turcu and Liana Stoica are the founders of SavoireFaire, a Boutique consultancy helping B2B startups and scale-ups build global sales engines.
You can find more about their process and philosophy on their website www.savoirefair.com or connect with Liana and Gabriela on LinkedIn.
Paid media can be a great acquisition channel, but many B2B startups or SMEs start on the wrong foot.
In this episode, I chat with Andrea Todorova and Niko Dovidija, co-founders of Diligent Studios, a B2B marketing agency specialized on strategy - first performance marketing.
Tune in to learn:
- What are the top mistakes B2B startups and SMEs make when it comes to paid media and how to address them
- What is Diligent Studios’ framework for strategic performance marketing and how it adds value to their clients
- How to think about selecting the right paid channels
- How to approach testing new channels
- What do best-performing B2B ad campaigns have in common
If you want to know more about my guests, you can find and connect with Andrea and Niko on Linkedin or find out more about Diligent Studios on their website.
b2bmarketing #paidmedia #valuedrivenmarketing
Stacey Danheiser, Founder and CMO of Shake Marketing joins episode #15 to talk about why many B2B marketers today lack credibility in front of their leadership team, and how they can turn this situation around and deliver more business impact.
Stacey shares insights from her career of over 20 years as a marketing leader and strategist, talking about what leadership expects from marketing and how you can become an effective and reputable marketing leader.
Some of the ideas we touched on:
- Why marketers lack credibility in many companies
- What do CEOs and leadership expect from marketing?
- What are the 3 traits of an effective marketing leader today?
- The different ways marketers sabotage themselves in the workplace and how to change that
You can find Stacey on Linkedin or on her website www.shakemktg.com.
Bonus: check out Stacey’ Scorecard “The Confident Marketer Scorecard”.
Can you create a better experience for B2B buyers with website personalization?
And if so, what are the different ways in which you can leverage web personalization to help your website visitors without being intrusive?
How can you, as a B2B marketer get started, and what mistakes should you avoid on your website?
In this episode, I talk about web personalization with Eric Melchor, Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk and host of Innovators can Laugh podcast.
Eric talks about how OptiMonk tapped into the B2B space, why B2B brands need to focus on building long-term relationships rather than increasing conversions short-term and how web personalization enables B2B marketers get there, how a SaaS brand increased web conversions by 20% with a simple reminder notification & more.
If you want to follow Eric’s content, listen to his podcast on Spotify/Apple or follow him on Linkedin.
Check out the resource Eric recommends: optimonk.com/customer-value-optimization-guide
B2B buying doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a sequence of events that impact a decision long before people reach out to your sales team.
How well do you understand what triggers buyers to take action? What influences their decisions, what makes them trust you? Who ends up on their short list of vendors, and how do they make the final decision?
If you don’t know how people make buying decisions, it will be very difficult to influence them through your marketing.
In episode #13, I talk to Ryan Paul Gibson of contentlift.io about running customer research interviews that don’t suck.
We talk about:
- What running investigative customer interviews entails
- How to prepare for a customer interview, so you make the most of it
- How to uncover behaviors instead of opinions
- How to use the learnings in your marketing
Find Ryan on LinkedIn or on his website contentlift.io.
We need to change how we do marketing today because focusing purely on customer acquisition is becoming increasingly expensive, and it’s not sustainable long-term.
Instead, we need to view marketing as a holistic way of growing a company throughout the entire customer journey: from acquisition to activation, retention, and expansion.
But to get there, we need to challenge how most companies and leaders think about marketing, step away from trying to measure and attribute everything and have marketing and sales compete for resources and recognition.
My guest Jennifer Montague shares her vision of what marketing’s role in a company should be and how she’s building that vision at IoT start-up Onomondo.
Listen to the episode to discover:
- How Jennifer came to view marketing as holistic growth, and what has led her to this vision
- How you can get started in realigning marketing to have a holistic impact across the customer's journey
- How Jennifer thinks about roles and skills in the growth team
- How Onomondo will grow in the next 2-3 years, and what marketing levers they are pulling to get there
Confused prospects don’t buy. And when you are trying to say everything about your product or service all at once, you’re creating just that: confusion.
This is where messaging strategy comes into play: it helps you identify the most essential things about your product or service and why that matters to your audience. So your company is remembered for the right things and cut through the noise.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of chatting to Diane Wiredu of Lion Words about messaging strategy in B2B.
Listen to the episode if you’re curious to learn:
- Why messaging strategy matters and how to know if you need to work on your messaging
- What good messaging sounds like
- The 4-steps process Diane uses for building effective messaging
- How to prevent yourself from sounding like every other company out there
- How to test your messaging
- Bonus: find out what jobs Diane wanted to have as she grew up
You can follow Diane on LinkedIn or learn more about her messaging strategy & consulting work on her website lionwords.com.
Everyone seems to be talking about growth marketing, but what is growth marketing exactly, and what is not?
If you’re interested in running growth experiments to learn faster what works in your marketing but fear you're not ready or that you're behind the curve, this episode is for you.
I invited Katya Sivkova, Founder of Boom & Bloom, a growth advisory and growth consultant, to discuss how to run experiments the right way.
Here are some of the topics we tackle in this episode:
- When it’s the right time in a company’s development to start running growth experiments
- What are the foundational steps you need to take before you start experimenting
- What are the best practices to formulate realistic hypotheses
- How to select your channels to experiment and scale
- Katya’s top learnings from mentoring startups & scaleups and pitfalls you want to avoid
Katya is the Founder of Boom & Bloom, a growth advisory. Her mission is to help tech companies grow & scale. You can find and connect with Katya via her website KatyaSivkova.com or on her Linkedin profile.
Some of the resources mentioned by Katya:
- Growth Tribe
- Reforge
- CXL
- Growth Mentor
If you're interested in learning about Go-To-Market strategies for B2B brands, this episode is for you.
In episode #9 I sit down to discuss with Stefan Repin, fractional CMO and GTM Strategist, everything related to GTM and working with a fractional CMO.
Play the episode to learn:
- When it’s the right time to hire a fractional CMO & the value one can bring
- What elements should you take into consideration when you’re building your GTM strategy
- What framework for experimentation can you use
- How to measure marketing’s impact on revenue
- How to think about hiring your first marketing people
You can connect with Stefan on LinkedIn where he talks about brand, content, B2B marketing, and demand generation: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-repin-b2boperations/
The resources mentioned in this episode:
- Stefan’s GTM template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSrBSyXbfm13VPGr6r7Mui9jiYGpnj1_gAf-fsMPP1F0J91I7X18dZ_sek1UW0y1QXFXwOW_BvjK0tt/pub?gid=1692436437&single=true&output=pdf
- The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Move: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework by Sangram Vajre
- Paul Graham’s article Default Dead or Default Alive
- Wynter.io & SenseCheck.com for message testing
I speak to Christopher Nault, founder of Growth Marketing Firm, a RevOps agency with offices in California and Florida.
In this episode, we tackle:
- how to think of your marketing strategy to grow sustainably
- why you need a system of measurement in place to help you make informed decisions (and what tools he recommends)
- where to look to identify potholes in your strategy
- what is the minimum viable toolkit for your marketing and sales
- quick win marketing tactics to explore
- and lastly, how to best work with an agency if you decide to hire one
Companies that win in the long run focus on providing the best buying experience for their customers. But the way (many) B2B companies sell and do marketing today is disconnected from how buyers want to buy.
Marketing is tasked with generating contact data for sales to close. Pressured to produce leads fast, marketing teams don’t have time to focus on building valuable, informative content and a great experience for their audience. Sales then chases those leads that might not even have a real interest, just to hand over those interested buyers from one sales function to the other.
In this setup, no one wins - or as my guest, Nelson Gilliat puts it, “companies succeed despite of these tactics, not because of them”.
In episode #7, we flip the script and talk about what is wrong with the way B2B companies sell and do marketing today. And why Nelson advocates for the Buyer Centric Revenue Model, how it enables marketing & sales teams to do meaningful work and provides a better buying experience.
Nelson is the author of “The Death of the SDR: And the Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue Model”. He is the founder of the Buyer Centric Revenue Model Slack community to help people discuss and implement the Buyer Centric Revenue Model.
I meet with Cristina Șișcanu, Global MarCom Manager at DRUID AI, to discover their journey to becoming one of the fastest-growing AI startups in CEE and how they think about their marketing.
Tune in to learn:
- What has fueled DRUID’s growth so far
- Their future growth plans and what marketing levers they’re pulling to get there
- Challenges and lessons learned from working in a fast-growing startup
- Cristina’s top recommendations for other marketers
DRUID is a conversational AI platform that empowers employees, customers, and partners to digitally communicate with your business and enterprise systems in the most intuitive, efficient and human-like way.
How do grow long-term and bring value to your clients when dealing with a complex sales cycle?
This is the main theme of episode #5. I dive deep together with Alexandra Mogin, Marketing Manager at TenForce, a Belgium-based enterprise software company in the EHSQ space.
Here is what you’ll learn:
- Which channels & tactics bring the best ROI for TenForce
- How ABM helps TenForce align sales and marketing
- How to gain customer insights when dealing with big accounts and complex sales cycles
- How TenForce measures marketing’s impact on revenue
In the 4th episode, I talk to Steffen Hedebrandt, co-founder and CMO of Dreamdata, about bringing client value with a data-driven mindset.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How long is the actual customer journey in B2B?
- What misconceptions do B2B marketers have around data and attribution?
- How do you “marry” what you can measure with things that are hard to track, to get a better understanding of what’s working in your marketing?
And a lot more, from sales and marketing alignment to how Dreamdata is growing and creating value for its audience.
In this episode, I sit down to talk with Vukasin Vukosavljevic, Head of Growth at Lemlist. We discuss how Lemlist builds value for their clients, how they differentiate their content, how they balance user acquisition with brand building and the challenges of working with a growing bootstrapped company.
How to drive value and attention in the crowded space of marketing technology. With Miruna Dragomir, CMO at Planable, a content collaboration platform for social media teams.
Listen to discover:
- How Planable creates value for their customers and audience, through their marketing
- Why value creation has to intersect with what you do as a business - and how to keep your team accountable
- How Miruna and her team balance building for the long run with bringing short term ROI
- Mistakes to avoid and how you can stand out in a crowded market
How to stay authentic and build trust when marketing a complex product to a technical audience. With Nicole Lontzek, Head of Marketing atCELUS.IO
Welcome to Value-driven Marketing Podcast: discover why we created the show and what to expect from it.