Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host. Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Scott Cate. He is the creator of 301.Pro, and has a career track record of delivering complex, high value products through invention, program management and product management. He’s also a proven technology leader who excels as a pivotal business partner. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:29

All right. Mr. Scott Cate, welcome to the show, sir.

Scott Cate  00:33

Hey. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Christian Klepp  00:35

Looking forward to this conversation, because I’m gonna say that this is probably the first time we’ve had somebody on the show to talk about this particular topic, and it’s highly relevant to marketers and marketers that are not paying attention to this should.

Scott Cate  00:51

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some people are using Link Manager of some sorts, but even the ones that are are sort of missing the boat on really how much time can be saved with just a little bit of forethought. So yeah, excited to be here, excited to share what we’ve built.

Christian Klepp  01:08

Absolutely, absolutely. So why don’t we just dive in. Right? Because, like we were saying, so for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how sophisticated link management can unlock growth for B2B companies. So in our previous conversation, you said something about like, time of day marketing, so I know what it is now, but for the benefit of the audience, please tell us what it is and tell us why it’s important for B2B marketers to know about this.

Scott Cate  01:37

So we should back up a little bit, because you mentioned the concept of link management, and some people might have an idea or preconceived notion. So we should talk about what link management is, and then once we have that, we could talk about some amazing things you could do with our version of link management that is not available, like real time marketing, where you mentioned time of day. So let’s pause on that question for just a second. 

Scott Cate  02:05

Link management is really the ability to keep track of the links that you have in the wild and then do reporting on them. That’s what the world thinks link management is. And you might be using something like one of our competitors, rebrandly is great. They do a good link management system. Probably the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Bitly. Most people that you’re listening to have probably created bitly links, and those systems are great until they’re not. So like, let’s say if you’ve managed Bitly, let me ask you this question, have you ever had to go back and update like 200 links of a campaign?

Christian Klepp  02:43

Not personally, no, but I know people who have so I know you’re going with this, but yeah, go ahead.

Scott Cate  02:49

Okay. Or, let’s say, for Bitly, you have an affiliate program, or you have a team of people, and you want to keep track of who’s clicking the links. So like every time you create a new project, you have to go create 30 new links like that. That’s the link management. And at the end of the day, our goal is to keep track of the attribution like, what’s working. That’s the reason we use the link management system, and there’s a ton more benefits from it, but that’s sort of the core of link management. 

Scott Cate  03:18

So we have… this is going to sound way overkill, but we have reinvented the hyperlink, which sounds crazy like… So first, what is the hyperlink? Everyone on the audience hopefully knows like you type in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), put that in an email, you put that in the social media, you put that in your link in bio, and when you click that URL, it takes you to the destination. But here’s the fundamental problem, and everything that we talk about today is going to fall into this box. 

Scott Cate  03:48

That hyperlink is hard coded, like if 1000 people click that link, they all go to the same place, and our fundamental problem with link management lies in that hard coding. So everything we’re going to talk about is now going to be called a pro link. So our version of a hyperlink is a pro link, or if you’re using Bitly, they have a cute name for theirs. They call them bit links, which is cute. So ours is a pro link. And what a pro link does is it stops at a rules engine, and the rules engine can change the destination. 

Scott Cate  04:26

So let’s just paint a really easy picture for people to understand. If you have a bit link, you have a short link and a long link. When people click the short link, they go to the long link, no questions asked. With our system, if you have no rules, you actually get the same thing. You have a short link and a long link. Everyone goes to the same place. So now we have a general understanding of link management. We’ve introduced this concept of the rules engine. Let’s go back to the question that you asked Christian when you started: Time of Day Marketing. Sometimes I call this real time marketing, but. But before we get into the technology, let’s ask a very simple question with an almost impossible answer. And I haven’t preceded you with this, so this is going to make you think a little bit…what time is it?

Christian Klepp  05:13

Well, on my end, it’s 3:15 Eastern.

Scott Cate  05:16

And so my time is 12 o’clock. But what if I’m in Sydney? Or what if it’s 3am for me and it’s 4pm for you? So let’s ask the question a little bit differently, what time is it on your website? The answer is, it’s all the time. Like, if there’s 1000 people on my website right now, should I be showing them all the same thing? And that’s really where the rules engine comes in, which comes back to your original question. Time of Day Marketing, imagine for a minute you have a Shopify store, and you have the same product. Let’s say it’s a makeup product. Would you sell that to the same person at 8am versus 11pm because it’s the same person, it’s the same buyer, same product, but I’m in a completely different mindset at 8am, right. 

Scott Cate  06:08

So we actually have a customer that does this, so it’s good to talk about it as an example. In the morning, their messaging is, here’s how easy our makeup is to put on. It’s going to last all day, and that in the afternoon, they’re like, stays on all day, but here’s how you reapply it. And then at night, here’s how easy it is to take off. And then overnight, after 11pm to 4am they actually do, like, a buy one, get one free, a flash sale. But here’s the thing that’s interesting, that you have that visual in your head now, how do you do it? 

Scott Cate  06:39

Let’s say you put a link on Instagram and 1000 people click that link, the magic is it’s all the time, like it’s 8am for this person right now, and it’s 11pm for this person right now. So how does your website get smart enough to actually divide that traffic? And we do that with the rules engine, and it’s actually as simple as it sounds. When you click a link, we create a rule says in the morning, whatever morning time it is for the person who clicked the link, then show them the morning advertisement, and then overnight, show them the flash sale. That’s a little more advanced. Some of your audience might be thinking, I’m not a makeup company, so that doesn’t apply to me. But like, what if you simplified it and you just did night mode and day mode? 

Scott Cate  07:26

Like, during the day, you might even have a light mode theme in your Shopify store, and at night, you have a dark mode theme, and it’s the same product. But now, when it’s 11 o’clock at night and I’m scrolling through my Instagram and I interested in your product, I don’t get blinded by a bright white background. So you can do that really quickly with a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) theme that just changes the look of the same product, light mode, dark mode. So that’s simple. People also use time of day for business hours like imagine your your support link if I’m open, then take me to live chat, if I’m not open, then take me to support an email ticket or submit an email ticket. And so that’s a different time, right? That’s literally my time where I’m saying my office hours in this time zone, like if I’m a restaurant, this is really popular for our customers. 

Scott Cate  08:19

When you scan the QR code to open the menu, I can open the right menu for you. Like, if you’re open breakfast, lunch, Happy Hour and dinner, when you scan the QR code, why make the user fumble through to find the happy hour menu? Like, if it’s three to five, Monday through Friday, or whatever the hours are that you determine. So all those are time zone examples. I did sneak in the QR code concept there, you know, when we say we reinvented the hyperlink, and we call it a pro link, if you’re using that with a QR code, then all the rules that we talked about with time of day are also applicable to the person scanning the QR code. But it’s not just time. I mean, we have 100 different variables, and we’ll get into some cool examples around location, device detection, all those things are great. When you combine them with a QR code. 

Christian Klepp  09:11

There’s some great examples. And I can see how that works if you’re, like, shopified, if you’re a restaurant. But like, let’s say, for example, that there’s somebody listening to this that’s, you know, surprise in B2B. So how would this apply to a company that’s, let’s say, for example, selling software?

Scott Cate  09:28

Yeah, completely. That’s me. Actually, I’m selling software, like 301 Pro is the name of our product. And so we use this all day long. So here’s a couple of examples. We have demos. So if you’re interested in the software, you can say, book a demo. And we have people that do demos in Europe. We have people that do demos in North America, South America, in Asia and in Sydney. 

Scott Cate  09:53

So normally, when you have this type of international audience, you ask them, like, where are you? Well, we already know, because when you click the link, we have the location detection. So when you go to 301.pro/meeting, we don’t have to ask you where you are, but if you’re in Europe, you’ll end up in a European Calendly link, and then the time zone is booking space with our people in Europe. That is Time Zone specific. So really the question to ask for B2B, or any marketer is, what’s the mindset of the person clicking this link, and can I reduce the friction to get them to give me money faster, like cutting to the chase? That’s really what we want to do, and most of the time, a link will just end up at the same destination for everybody. And you know, if you’re in a paid ad campaign and you have a one to one relationship with the landing page, then you might think to yourself, I don’t need any of this. 

Scott Cate  10:56

But let’s introduce something that’s not time of day, another very simple concept with a difficult question, A|B split testing. So a lot of the ad networks will give this to you, and so if you pay, you know, $2 for a click on Instagram, you can do A|B split testing. Here’s my landing page one, and here’s my landing page two. But how do you do A|B split testing outside of paid advertising, like even in a product or on your home page, like your support link or your pricing page. How do you randomly get people to two different versions of that? If you’re a developer, then that’s easy, because you’re in control of the programming. But in my experience, when I’m talking to a marketing agency or someone in a marketing role, we’ll call them the campaign manager, whether it’s for their individual product or they’re managing campaigns for third party for their customers, like an agency would do, that person is going to not have the capability of owning the server to do some programming for A|B split testing. 

Scott Cate  12:05

So with a pro link, you literally just give the same pro link two destinations, and then it cycles through them, or three destinations, or five destinations. And we make it really easy. When you add a pro link, we say, what’s the rule that you want? And if you want to do A|B split testing, we just ask you for two URLs. You put in the URL of landing page A and the second URL of landing page B, and now boom, you do A|B split testing at the link level. And you know, links for everywhere. It could be your email signature. Could be the navigation in your website. It could be in a PDF, like there’s lots of places that you put hyperlinks that’s outside of that paid advertising campaign.

Christian Klepp  12:44

Very cool, very relevant example. So thanks for sharing that. I’m going to segue to the next question, which is about key pitfalls the B2B marketers need to avoid when it comes to link management. So what should they avoid and what should they be doing instead? 

Scott Cate  13:01

Absolutely, this is one of my favorite questions, because it truly solves a deep pain problem for every B2B market marketer, and I call this “after the campaign”. So I worked inside Microsoft engineering for five years, and then followed up with that in AWS (Amazon Web Services) engineering and in the cloud computing space, we did a lot of product launches, because in cloud computing, there’s a new product every other Monday, every B2B listener, every B2B marketer listening to this podcast has a formula in their head for a product launch. 

Scott Cate  13:42

So let’s say you’re doing that. You’ve got a product that’s coming out on the first of the month, and you’ve got YouTube videos talking about it, you’re promoting webinars, you’ve got press releases, maybe you’re even doing something in multiple languages, so you have many links that are in the wild, and if you’re keeping track of who on your team is promoting those links, you may have a multiplication effect where, instead of just one link to the press release, if there’s 20 people on your evangelism team, you may have to create 20 versions of that short link so that you can keep track of who’s doing what. We have a problem. We can solve this problem also. In fact, we should talk about that next. 

Scott Cate  14:24

But to answer your question, here’s the pitfall. You’ve got all of this, all these links in the wild. You’ve had your best customers write blog posts about you, and the link in that blog post is linking back to your product announcement. So here’s the big question, what happens after the product launches? Like the pain point is going backwards and updating all of those links, because now you don’t want to drive traffic to the press release, you want to drive traffic to the product page. 

Scott Cate  14:59

And so, earlier, I asked you the question, like, if you’ve ever had to go back and update a library of links, it’s painful, it’s time consuming, and the truth is most people just don’t do it. And the negative effect of that is those links die. Your press release gets taken down, and now people are linking to your site through and they’re getting 404, like that. 

Scott Cate  15:22

The problem is so here’s our solution. We have something called a campaign manager, and the campaign manager, very simply, is an umbrella that connects all the links together. So when we created those 50 links to put them in the wild, we added them to a campaign, and the campaign has rules so it can do things like enforce UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) links. It can enforce that every link is universally doing something, whether it’s appending a query string for like a high rows injection for your analytics, or something for Google Bigtable or some other HubSpot link like at the campaign level, you can say all these links have to follow this rule. 

Scott Cate  16:06

So after the campaign, our rule is, if the date is after the first of the month, then change the link to go to the product instead of what it was originally doing. It literally takes you less than 30 seconds, and now those 50 links that are in the wild, now auto magically just start going to the new destination. Your reporting continues, so you still see the links that are being clicked, but you’ve been able to change the destination based on a date, and you can actually change it with any of 100 different rules. But for that specific one, your question was, what’s the pitfall? Like, what could I do a little bit now to save myself the pain and the time in the future? And it really comes down to that campaign management and the campaign rules that you can change later, right? Like, if I’m a marketing person. I know I have a product release on the 1st I might not know the URL of the product destination, because it literally doesn’t exist yet. But when it does exist, I just go back to the campaign. I update it. I say, everything in the wild. Now start going here. And you could get more advanced with language detection. You could say for Spanish, go here. Japanese, go there like it doesn’t have to just say the entire campaign now goes to one place. But the point is, I can retroactively change all of those links in the wild, very simply to match my business rules. And now I don’t have 404 as I have happy customers that are interested in the product that land in the product page. So that’s probably our biggest time saver and pitfall to avoid with the campaign management.

Christian Klepp  17:46

Yeah, no, absolutely. By the way, did you say automagically instead of automatically?

Scott Cate  17:53

I did make that word up. I think I can’t take credit for it. I think other people have used it as well. But yeah, automagically. Yeah, that could be a website. I bet $100 that domain is taken. (laugh)

Christian Klepp  18:07

Probably, probably check it out after this conversation. But you know what? Since you played it out so beautifully, it totally makes sense, because that was actually what was going through my mind as you were answering the question, it’s like, well, how do you… pre campaign and during campaign and post campaign? Like, isn’t somebody responsible for having to update those links? And that must be such a painful, just process. And like, oh my gosh, I can just imagine somebody, people on the agency side, just saying, like, Okay, we’ll leave that job to somebody else, right?

Scott Cate  18:48

If somebody is doing it, it’s painful. The reason that I know people are doing it is because it was me. I was the one updating my bitly links, and I have to do them one at a time. And actually we’ll segue into this affiliate management or team management, because on our team, we wanted to give credit to who’s doing the promotion. And, you know, you could have a contest. You could have an affiliate where it’s monetary, like you could actually pay commission on people clicking the links. And so, you know, some people have a small team. You’re keeping track of 10 people, and then your go to is like, well, I’ll just create unique links. Like, okay, Scott, here’s your link. Okay, Christian, here’s your link. Michelle, here’s your link. And then it’s easy because there’s only 10 of them, but even that’s painful, because you have to go back and update something. 

Scott Cate  19:39

Or let’s imagine you get a new person on the team. You’re like, Okay, Hi, Nicole. Here’s all the links that you’re gonna promote, but hang on, I gotta go create them. And because there’s like 20 active campaigns that we’re working with now, I’m gonna have to just painfully create 20 links for Nicole. There are people listening to this right now, like crying. They’re like, Oh my gosh, I have to do that. And we’ve come up with a very simple, very elegant solution. So let’s get a little nerdy for a second. We call that a link variation. And the important part of a link variation is that the link itself doesn’t change. And the reason that’s important is because for attribution, you don’t want to create an entirely new link. Why do you want to keep track of something else when your core goal, let’s say you have page A on your website, and your core goal is to get people to page A, it’s a product announcement, it’s a press release, it’s a landing page. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just call it page A. What most people do, because they don’t have any choice, is they create 100 different links that point to page A, which, of course, creates a management issue, creates a reporting issue, it creates an attribution issue, like, where did all of this stuff come from? And we’ve basically gotten rid of all of that, and I’ll show you how this works. It’s really simple. 

Scott Cate  21:06

So imagine in your head you have a short link. So you have a go.microsoft.com/pageA and people call them go links. It’s a pretty popular term inside the advertising agency or inside of a big company, like when I worked at Microsoft, we literally call them go links. Create a go link that ends up at this landing page, and so you have that short link. So let’s just say your domain.com/pageA and then when people click that link, it takes them to www.blahblahblah/landing page, or whatever it is, right? So you have the short link and the long link. Well, that’s what the world has today. 

Scott Cate  21:47

Here’s what we’ve introduced as a variation. We just add another parameter to the short link, so your domain.com/pagea/ whatever you want to put in there as a marker for who clicked it. So let’s say that you and I are on a team, Scott and Christian, and we want to keep track of how many page A you’ve driven and how many page A I’ve driven. So all we would do is come up with some sort of naming convention, either for our person or our team or our affiliate ID, and we tack it on to the URL. So now the URL is something like your domain.com/pageA/SC, my initials, and that forward slash sc, we call it a variation, which is a little bit nerdy, but think about it. It’s a variation of the core link. And here’s the magic. 

Scott Cate  22:48

If I’m a B2B marketer, I don’t have to set them up ahead of time. I just have to set up the page a link, and now I can add any variation I want to the end of it. It could be slash marketing, slash Twitter, slash Instagram. Or if you have an affiliate paid program, you just put instructions to your affiliates. It says, append your affiliate code, Sc123, and then if 1000 people click the Page A links, and all the variations of the page a links, I only had to set up one thing. I get reporting of all 1000 clicks that come through, and I get a nice little diagram of how many variations of each link. So Scott, you got 27 Instagram came 252 but it’s the same link, right? So I only had to create it once, but I get to use it in infinite combinations. 

Scott Cate  23:41

And so what you can do with the rules engine, you have to put this whole thing end to end, because the example that I showed you so far is only the first half. If you want to actually feed attribution into another system with whether it’s your analytic system or it’s your commissioning system, you probably need a query string when page A loads on the other side of like, who is the affiliate? Like, who’s going to actually get credit for this? The Amazon works the same way. If you have an affiliate code, you want to get people to click that link, and then when they get there, you’ll see in the URL it’s like the affiliate store is SC123, or whatever it is. So here’s where the rules engine comes in. 

Scott Cate  24:22

Remember, the domain is your domain.com/pageA/Sc123, let’s pretend that’s my affiliate code. Now you can say the rules engine, if there’s a variation, take the destination, which was the in the original link that was created, and append a query string of affiliate ID equals variation. And so without doing any more work, the marketing B2B person has to create one pro link. They have to set up the rules engine, and now they can use that pro link in infinite destinations out into the wild. They can keep track o the affiliates that are clicking them, and they can pass that through to the payload of where the landing page is loaded, which is important, because then analytics pick it up. The commissioning engine picks it up like you have full access to that affiliate code from top to bottom when they click the short link all the way through to when the landing page loads.

Christian Klepp  25:24

It sounds to me like, and I’m oversimplifying it here, right? Because I’m not a I’m not a developer, right? But like, it sounds to me like you’ve cut the Gordian knot a little bit here.

Scott Cate  25:35

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it. This is also not for everyone. Like, you could say… some of your listeners are like, I don’t have an affiliate program, then that’s not going to work. But let me show you an example where I use this because you asked the question earlier about, how do software companies use this? I have a short link called register. If I was just talking to you on the street, like we met in a restaurant, and you’re like, hey, I want to sign up for this, I would actually write down on a napkin, 301.Pro/register, and it’s not slash login. It takes you. There’s a difference. Even though the forms look the same on our website, registration has the intent to create a new account, right? You’re setting your password, blah, blah, blah. You’re accepting Terms of Service. 

Scott Cate  26:17

So when I’m promoting the registration on Twitter or x, the link that I type in, I use the variation, and I do 301.Pro/register slash x or slash IG, because I want to attribute where the traffic came from. We can actually do that based on the refer as well. So there’s a number of ways to slice and dice that particular scenario, but it’s a ton of fun to use the variation. It really amplifies your reporting to keep track of where the link came from, or at least what the source of the link is, particularly if there’s money involved, like commission to affiliates and and it’s very simple, like I, I literally, I cut out five to 20 hours of work now on affiliate management, where I just basically say, if you want to get paid, here’s how you format the URL. And that’s very easy to do in automation with mail merge. And you know when you’re onboarding a new affiliate. So yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of fun in that. 

Christian Klepp  27:23

Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. We’ve been talking about it for a while now. But like, let’s, let’s dive a little bit deeper into link management. So most especially questions like, okay, how can what components, what are those key components that need to be in there for you to consider it effective link management. And that’s the first question. The second question is, how can B2B marketers optimize their link building strategy without compromising on quality or becoming spammy? Because I think that could be an issue too, if you’re not if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Scott Cate  27:59

If you’re using the free version of many products, we actually don’t have a free version, so this doesn’t quite apply to us, but there can be some blowback on link management if you are not using a white label version. And what I mean by that is, when people like if you have a newsletter system, a lot of newsletters will automate into Bitly and it’s amazing, because they’ll basically take all of the links that are in your newsletter and they’ll convert them to bitly links. The drawback to that is, especially if you’re using it on social media, a lot of the bitly links, because of the spam, actually gets blocked. So that would negatively hurt you, because your email will never even end up in the inbox. And I don’t want to paint a negative picture about Bitly, so I just want to factually say I love Bitly. I’ve been using Bitly my whole life, but there are some things that are gotchas because of the amount of spam that is run through their system, eventually, that will happen to us as well on the domains. We’re just not as big as Bitly, so it hasn’t quite bitten us yet, but the solution to that is white label, or what some people call custom domain. 

Scott Cate  29:16

So in the example, we’ve been talking about me 301.pro, because that’s my website. But, you know, if you have your own website, I just say your domain.com, whatever that is. And every business marketer understands that you can actually put a sub domain in front of your real company domain, and then, you know, we said go.microsoft.com earlier, as the example, or go.yourdomain.com that actually does a couple of things, because it’s now first party. You get treated differently by the ad blockers and the email engines and your SMS (Short Message Service) provider, which is, you know, Twilio, or however you’re sending SMS. Are different when it’s first party brand versus something generic like Bitly. So that’s one of the gotchas that people can fall into with link management. 

Scott Cate  30:12

The other thing is sort of daunting. It’s like, how do I get started with this? And you know the answer really is, you can’t change yesterday, but you can start preparing for tomorrow. And you know, if you already have a link management system, there’s migrations. So we can actually copy from one system to another, if you’d like to switch to 301.Pro or just get started. And then by next month, you’ll have 100 links, you’ll have a couple of campaigns. And you know, you do just have to start somewhere, and there is work involved, like you do have to sit down and think about it. It’s not going to just magically do itself. But there, there’s a couple of things there to think about, with regard to to the link management. 

Scott Cate  30:57

The next thing I would say is analytics. We have a very basic analytic system, and we’ve intentionally not put time and energy into building like this huge analytics system, because it’s, it’s my personal belief you should not use our analytics system at all. You should use the your own analytics system that you’re already using for networking or for paid ads, for Google traffic, Google Trends, and there’s 100 of them out there. A couple of our favorites are Hiro. There’s another one called Fathom analytics. Of course, the 800 pound gorilla is Google Analytics, which is amazing because it’s free, but it’s also not that great at the same time. And I say, not that great, not in a technical sense, all the data is there. Some people talk about data being delayed. Some people talk about the confusion of how difficult Google Analytics is. And if you listen to a company like Hiro, which I don’t have any affiliation with, but I do actually have a lot of customers that use them, they claim to have better, easier, cheaper, faster, easier to understand analytics. So the whole point of that is, if you’re using link management, you might rely on me for something like a click number, which you could sort of visually quickly see popularity. But ultimately, your analytics engine, you should you already have that, and maybe it’s snowflake, if you’re a larger enterprise, or maybe you’re dumping data into Google big table, or maybe you know, you’re doing something more advanced. On your side, it’s my opinion that we should fall in line to what’s happening there. 

Scott Cate  32:35

So we have a couple features. One is called real time analytics. Every time a link is clicked. In our link management system, we can actually push data into your analytics in real time, so you never actually look at the 301 dashboard for analytics. It’s a little bit more advanced. Not everyone is going to qualify for that, but most agencies will have a good set of analytics. And of course, we work with Google Analytics, you know, we enrich data on the query string that flows all the way through to Google Analytics. So if you’re using Google Analytics, I don’t want to, you know, turn you off to it. I’m just saying there’s a lot of alternatives, and there’s pros and cons to everything, but we have just basic analytics, which effectively gives you click count, locations where people are clicking, from what time of day people are clicking. It’s enough to understand that your link is working, but it’s really not going to give you deep analytics about conversions and if your traffic is, you know, working the way that you want it to. We think there’s another better system for that on your side of the fence.

Christian Klepp  33:39

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning, where you were talking about like white label, right? And just from your experience, have you seen situations where marketers are choosing not to go down the white label route, and then that gets them into trouble when it comes to like, link building?

Scott Cate  33:59

The white label is a small hurdle that you have to jump over in the beginning, but it’s also a set and forget, so once you’re done, you probably never have to go back and change it. The difficulty that we have in support with white labeling is it’s a little bit more of a nerdy part of the internet, and you have to get into the domain naming system of the domain, which is going to be your GoDaddy, or your Cloudflare, or your Name Cheap, or it’s sometimes where the domain was registered. But it also can be a different DNS (Domain Name System) Made Easy, or some other DNS system, because in order, the way white labeling works is, if you were to use a go sub domain, then you have to basically tell the internet when somebody clicks on go.mydomain.com, that go, the ‘go’ part of the domain is called a subdomain, and you have to basically tell the world that you want that to come to the 301.pro servers. 

Scott Cate  35:05

Now you’ve probably done this with Gmail and with HubSpot and with any of the other white labeling systems out there. The benefit is that now you’re on brand instead of using Bitly or rebrandly or 301 pro, like not 301.Pro/ my home page. Go dot your domain. That’s the white labeling part that we’re talking about, of just being able to brand your short links. If you want to send text messaging, it’s very important to have your primary domain, linking in the message a lot of systems, and I know that I’ve had a problem with like go high level and bouncing a message through Twilio. You have to have that 10 DLC, the 10 letter domain certification. Maybe it’s, I don’t remember it exactly, but you have to basically prove I’m a real person, I’m a real business, and these are how I’m going to be sending my text messages. And the networks will block non branded domains, like if you’re sending a bitly link or a generic link of some sort that’s not matching your domain, then you’re going to have a much lower throughput and send rate on those messages, but you still have to pay for the messages that you didn’t send, the blocked messages. 

Scott Cate  36:31

So while there is a little technical hurdle, because the marketing person typically is not the same person who has access to the domain registration and the domain name services. It’s really worth it that for the day or two that it takes to get all those parties involved, to have a nice, white labeled system. And then once it’s working, you probably will never have to change it again, but it’s definitely worth the time. You’re going to get a much higher click through rate, much higher return on ad spend when you have an on brand domain, versus something that’s generic.

Christian Klepp  37:08

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. That totally makes sense. All right, my friend, we come to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty to work with already, but let’s just assume, as you’ve said before, that there’s a B2B marketer listening to this and going, Wow, this Scott really knows his stuff, um, but I really want to take action on this right away, because I don’t have 12 months to deliver, right? So what are, what are like, three to five things you would recommend they do to leverage link management for better growth?

Scott Cate  37:43

Well, I mean, the first thing is to get started. The second thing is pricing. Our software ranges from $50 to $500 a month, and on that lower level, what you’re really limited with is team size and the number of rules that you can create. But for most small teams, you can start at like at that $50 range, and then it will go up from that. You have to just start somewhere if you think that this is valuable, if I can save you 5 to 20 hours a month, like we talked about, for the affiliate marketer, or give you the ability to retroactively change an entire campaign without having to go back and spend the hours of updating those links. Then, of course, your time is valuable, and that’s a small price to pay for some software to automate it. 

Scott Cate  38:35

I do have a coupon code that gives you two months of free software, and I just actually used your initial ck, so if you, if you’re on the checkout page of 301, Pro, and you buy any of the products, then you can use the coupon code ck, and it will give you two months free. We don’t have any free software. We do have a demo the demo links are, you’re limited to five demo links, and they’re not for production, but it lets you actually exercise the software to see if it’s working. The two months free, literally will give you 60 days at zero cost. You can then use all of the features of the plan that you’re interested in, and you know, you can cancel if you if it’s not working for you, or if it is, then you know, you found some magic, and for a small monthly fee, you have this, you know, masterful link management system. So I would say, get started. You know, we’ve talked a lot about when I say 301, technically, that’s a mistake. So here’s a little quiz for you. Do you know what a 404 is?

Christian Klepp  39:40

That’s what shows up on a web page that’s no longer that no longer exists, like an error, right?

Scott Cate  39:45

That’s right, 404 is broken link, 301… so 404 is the internet status code for broken link, 301 is the internet status code for redirect. So that’s where the name of our company comes from. 301 Pro and. And here’s a funny little story. When I once asked the user to give me feedback, I’m like, my website is 301.Pro, and they type in the URL 301.Pro, and it doesn’t come up. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, our website’s down. Like, what’s wrong? But I look at it on my phone and it’s working. So the problem was the user actually typed in the number three and the letter O and the number one. Because I’m so nerdy, I say 301 Pro, and I just assume that people know that that’s 301 like the error code is 301, so since then, I had to buy a whole bunch of new domains. And if you actually do go to 301.Pro. It now works, but yeah, so 301 is redirect, and that’s what we sort of build for professional marketers, which is the name of the product, 301.Pro. So get started. Use the code CK for two months free, and we hope you love it. 

Christian Klepp  40:59

Very cool. Very cool. All right, two more questions, and I’ll let you go. All right, okay, so a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why? 

Scott Cate  41:13

I have to say it’s QR codes being hard coded. I could also add, and this is sort of related lack of QR codes. So I’ve got a buddy who does nationwide marketing in the hundreds of millions of dollars for an automobile company, and I cannot understand for the life of me, while they spend so much money on television commercials, but they don’t have a QR code on the commercial. And they’re very smart people. Let’s just say, because I have a difference of opinion doesn’t make me right and then wrong. I’m not saying what they’re doing is wrong. They have awareness money. They’re trying to just, you know, populate your head with the automobile that they’re trying to sell so that a year from now, so that they don’t have a direct call to action so to say. I don’t personally agree with it, I would like to have an easier call to action. Like, if you’re interested, click here and we’ll send you a postcard. Like, get give me some sort of instant gratification. 

Scott Cate  42:17

The other side of that is, I got another buddy who owns a software company. They do TV commercials, and their entire call to action is download our app so they have a QR code on the commercial, and they use our links with device detection. And it’s beautiful. The device detection basically says, If I’m an apple, go to the App Store, Apple App Store, if I’m Android, go to the Google Play Store, and then they get analytics on who’s what, but we don’t have to ask the customer. Like, sometimes you scan a QR code to download an app, and then it’s like, do you want to go to the Apple Store or the Android store? It’s like, why are you asking me that it’s such a simple thing to do with the user agent that comes along with the click request, and so we sort of magically do that. So to answer your question, I think the status quo is no QR codes, but when a QR code is used, I just cringe that it’s hard coded. There’s horror stories you can read from people. One of them is a national billboard campaign, and we’re talking about millions of dollars to spend with a QR code that’s wrong. Like, like, you can’t change a QR code. You can’t just, like, reprint it. This is in the wild, and so I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever print a QR code that’s hard coded to a single destination. I would always send it to a rules engine of some sort that says, let me do something. 

Scott Cate  43:42

I know we’re out of time, but can I just show you one quick example of a QR code that is amazing for us? So one of our customers, it’s in the automobile industry. In fact, this postcard might be in your house or your listeners house. So if you have one look at it, it’s a postcard that goes out to 250,000 people a week. Like this is a major expense on the marketing side, to send postcards, and the postcard has a QR code on it now. It’s our QR code. Here’s the magic, and this is what I want some of your listeners to think of. It’s the same QR code nationwide, but when your phone scans the QR code, we know the data center that the traffic from your phone is coming through, or the cell phone tower. So we know the location. We don’t know the exact location. It’s not creepy. We can’t walk on your front door, but it’s within about a 10 mile range, and within that 10 mile range, we can then get you to the closest dealership. So in the old days, it was like, hey, we need you to change your oil. Call this one 800 number, or go to our website, North American automotive.com, I won’t use the real name. We’re building a case study for them, and then I’ll be able to use it but until then. And then, on the website, it’s like, where are you? What state are you in? What kind of car do you have? But with our QR code, they literally just go right to the closest dealership to book an oil change appointment, and they’re getting like, 80% more oil changes than with calling in from the 800 number.

Christian Klepp  45:13

Isn’t that incredible? It’s like, incredible.

Scott Cate  45:15

It’s such a beautiful story because it’s so simple. There’s no more management for the B2B. The all I had to do was convince the marketing agent to put a QR code on the flyer. But they never had that capability before, because the QR code at best would just go to the national website. It’s not helpful. So like, once you understand the location marketing, especially if you have a franchise or a national or an international retail or automotive chain, there’s really some just phenomenal magic you can do that eliminates the pain point for the person clicking or scanning the link to get them to I mean, this is, this might become our new tagline, get your customers to spend money faster. Like that’s our whole goal is to make more money, and even in the B2B space, where we have a longer sales cycle, you know, we talked about the call centers in different countries. Like there’s just so much you can do, light mode, dark mode, that will help you better attract the person you’re talking to at an anonymous level. Like, we don’t actually know who the person is, but we can guide them based on time location. Oh my gosh, we didn’t even talk about weather, but we also have live weather once we know your location. Like, here’s here’s a question for B2B to ask, and the end user that’s clicking the link, are they the same person if they’re snowed in Chicago, or it’s three o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday, and they’re sunny on a beach. Like, is that the same person? Is that the same buyer? And so, like, you could do things in real time to show them a different product. We have one of the, I don’t know, top five largest clothing companies in the world uses us, and they use us for their awareness marketing. So though, in that example, they’ll either show you rain coats or they show you flip flops or suntan lotion or sundress versus mud shoes in a mud room, like snowy related product versus on a beach related product. And you can do it all in real time to just get the person to buy and connect with you faster. That’s our whole goal. 

Christian Klepp  47:23

Absolutely, Scott, we could have talked for another 10 hours, man.

Scott Cate  47:28

There’s so many good examples.

Christian Klepp  47:30

Absolutely, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Please,quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. I guess it has something to do with a QR code. (laugh)

Scott Cate  47:44

So my name is Scott Cate. I have Scott Cate as the social media on everything, even on Google, if you just Google Scott Cate, I’ve got a nice knowledge panel that gives you links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter. So that’s on the personal side. I’m also super nerdy in the marketing world. So if somebody just wants to brainstorm ideas, nothing to do with buying the software, but just like looking at or talking about new ideas, I’ve learned some stuff recently that’s just mind blowing that people are doing in the world. So I love just talking to people. I love big marketing, and that’s how to get in touch with me, personal and then 301Pro is really easy to find on all the socials as well.

Christian Klepp  48:26

Fantastic, fantastic. Scott once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Scott Cate  48:32

Thanks for having me, Christian. Take care. 

Christian Klepp  48:34

Thanks. Bye for now.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Brandon Ring. He’s a marketing leader and a content engine, HubSpot, SEO and ABM expert, who, over the past 15 plus years, has built and scaled robust, data driven marketing engines that accelerated revenue growth. He specializes in aligning revenue teams, implementing cutting edge marketing technologies and executing high impact demand gen strategies that drive measurable business outcomes. If your marketing team is looking to leverage and maximize HubSpot, this is the episode for you. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:44

Okay. Mr. Brandon Ring, welcome to the show, Sir.

Brandon Ring  00:48

Howdy. Thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp  00:50

That that in itself, that howdy is already, um, a clue as to where you’re dialing in from. But um, great to have you on the show, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because we’re gonna go a little bit deeper than most on I think, a topic that’s, I would say, near and dear to you, but it’s also, like, highly relevant to marketers that may or may not be dabbling in this. And I’m gonna, like, stop keeping the audience in suspense, and I’m just gonna cut to the chase, and let’s dive right in. All right. 

Christian Klepp  01:22

So Brandon, you’re on a mission to build and scale data driven marketing engines that accelerate revenue growth, optimize lead conversion and streamline marketing operations for B2B and SaaS. But for this conversation, let’s focus on how teams can leverage HubSpot for B2B marketing success, right? So in our previous conversation, you mentioned that if marketing teams aren’t using HubSpot, they’re setting themselves up for failure. So why do you believe that?

Brandon Ring  01:54

Alright, so we’re going to start with a hot take, huh? Okay, so I’m a part of a lot of HubSpot communities, and I keep, you know, tabs on the latest and greatest that’s coming out of HubSpot. And I came to this conclusion that they are offering so many tools and functionalities that if you’re using a cobbled together marketing tech stack, you’re setting yourself up for failure when you could be using a holistic all in one platform such as HubSpot. So I think now let me frame the conversation just a little bit before we get any outrage type of emails. 

Brandon Ring  02:43

So let me be clear, I’m no expert on CRMs, and my experience is really limited to Salesforce HubSpot and a few other smaller tools, but I have been using CRM HubSpot for over 15 years now. Salesforce also, in fact, two of my opportunities I’ve been with, I installed HubSpot, synced it with Salesforce, and then eventually we got rid of Salesforce, and went 100% into HubSpot. So I do have some experience when it comes to this. And the reason being is that I’ve never worked at a large marketing team. I think the largest in my stop has been six people, but most of my time has been spent with either just myself as an individual contributor or team of three or four. So this is really where I believe HubSpot shines, because it brings in all the tools and functionalities you need as a marketer, but it also brings in all the tools and capabilities you need as a salesperson, the CRM, even accounting, reporting. That’s really bringing it all together is really what’s going to help B2B, small team, small marketing teams Excel and really feel like they are a large marketing department.

Christian Klepp  04:08

Right. No, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. What would you say, like, what do you see as a common thread or a trend in terms of people’s hesitation to use HubSpot, especially when it comes to marketing.

Brandon Ring  04:26

That’s a good question. I mean, undoubtedly, folks are always nervous about transitioning to a new CRM or even just setting up a brand new and if you’re setting up you’re probably a small team already, but I think that hesitation just really lies in, am I getting what I need out of it for the price I’m paying? Is it going to be adopted across the organization? You know, am I is there going to be a long, ramp up to understanding how it works and making it effective. 

Brandon Ring  05:04

So I think that’s some of the areas that would give them concern. But you know, nine years ago, when I really started investigating into the different CRM options, I demoed with Salesforce Pardot, Marketo and HubSpot, and I found that really, HubSpot is the easiest to use, is the most user friendly back then, and then since then. I mean, I wish I had bought stock in HubSpot, because it’s just growing like gangbusters. There’s a reason why folks like me and I’m not being paid by HubSpot by any means. But there’s reason why folks like me in the marketing world that are excited about marketing, because it just gives you so it allows you to do so much with, you know, a small team.

Christian Klepp  05:56

Right, right, right. So just building on what you said, like, what do you think are some of these untapped opportunities, right? So that HubSpot presents, and how can marketing teams optimize them?

Brandon Ring  06:09

Yeah, so again, just to reference that nine years ago, so we had Salesforce at the this one opportunity, and I was getting by with, you know, limited marketing functionality, and I kind of became frustrated when I would execute a campaign and I’d say, Great, look at all these wonderful leads. Pass them over to sales, and they’d look at each of them say, Oh, I talked to that person a year ago. I talked to that person two years ago, three years ago, and it was almost like marketing did not get any credit. 

Brandon Ring  06:12

So one of the things that I think HubSpot really attracted me to HubSpot is their marketing attribution models and being able to capture the data and then report on it easily. So we had Salesforce, and this was before Salesforce went to Lightning. So for any of those folks out there that know Salesforce before that, you could you probably already know how limited it was in the reporting, or how difficult it was to really get down the road with what you needed quickly. So that was the first thing that attracted me to HubSpot, but the marketing attribution and since then, it’s just, you know, it’s made it even more easier. The attribution models are really robust and effective. 

Brandon Ring  07:32

But outside of that, you know, today, ABM (Account-Based Marketing) marketing is a very hot topic, or it has been for just a few years, and HubSpot really does a great job of executing their ABM. So especially if you have your website tied to HubSpot, you can quickly clone a page, modify it to the new account that you’re creating an ABM page for and just start building that out through your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). So ABM is a definitely a big topic, or a big area that HubSpot shines. But outside of that, you know, workflow automation is a big part of HubSpot. So they have a mantra that says, automate the mundane, but personalize the Wow. And that’s something I want to, you know, I try to do when I bring into a new workflow, automation so being able to eliminate the low value marketing and sales efforts so that you can focus on the high value efforts when it comes to marketing. And HubSpot does a great job in all those areas.

Christian Klepp  08:39

Yeah, automate the mundane and personalize the Wow. Is that what you said? Yeah, that’s right. Interesting. Interesting. I want to go back to something you said earlier, and because I know some of these words get thrown around a lot like you’re talking about robust attribution models. Could you give us a specific example just for the benefit of the audience, that, again, may be somewhat like at a top level, like, you know, familiar with HubSpot, but haven’t really like dug deep as you have.

Brandon Ring  09:11

Well, you know, I know that there’s between four and six mainstream attribution models when it comes to marketing. Really the I like to distribute it across the buyers journey. Some people in B2B use last touch, but I think it’s important to try and capture all the efforts that led up to either an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) or a closed one project, and the marketing, having HubSpot being able to track every single step that went into getting that lead to convert is invaluable, and it really proves the marketing’s efforts and worth when it comes to bringing in revenue. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. One of the big things, and I’ll talk about it later, is lead scoring, being able to capture the buyers intent, engagement through HubSpot and lead scoring is a great way to do that.

Christian Klepp  10:18

Fantastic, fantastic. Moving on to the next question, some key pitfalls that marketers should avoid when it comes to HubSpot, and what should they be doing instead?

Brandon Ring  10:32

Well, like I said, I’ve had 9 plus years using HubSpot, so I’ve definitely run into several pitfalls. I mean It by no means is the perfect piece of software. There is no such thing, right? So there are some areas where it shines, and some, you know, some pros and cons to it as well. But pitfalls I think that I’ve run into, you know, I’m a marketing director. I’ve also been a marketing coordinator. I find the automation so fascinating being able to just set it and forget it, make sure that it’s all operating the way you want it to, that sometimes I’ve been guilty of focusing too much on trying to streamline everything and kind of taking a step back from actually the marketing and execution. So I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all marketers, we still have to, you know, create the campaigns, get them out there, lead generation, things like that. So I think that’s one of the things that I think is so neat to be able to control the automation and the workflows, that it’s important not to get lost in the weeds when it comes to that. 

Brandon Ring  11:39

But after that, I think some of the pitfalls, you know, it’s spreads across just marketing in general, is just, you need to have a great alignment with sales and the C-suite and make sure that you’re really doing what you need to do, to make sure that they are being reported on, They’re getting what they need out of HubSpot. So you know us as marketers, we want to look at all the metrics that we can all the data. But sales doesn’t care about all the data. They care about. What are you doing to help them close projects so and again C-suite only cares about reporting, so making sure that you talk to them, you understand their needs and then just keep working with them to make sure that it’s refined and optimized for them. So I think that’s two areas that you really want to make sure that you do when operating something like HubSpot.

Christian Klepp  12:33

Great answer. And I’m going to dig a little deeper here. Brandon, if you don’t mind you, kind of, you kind of, I can skim the surface here, but like, if you can give us a specific example, that’d be great. How can a platform like HubSpot close that gap between marketing and sales? And I would, I would imagine that data certainly has something to do with it.

Brandon Ring  12:56

Close the gap between marketing and sales. Well, I mean, any team needs to be closely aligned with marketing and sales, the further they separate. There you just run into trouble, you know, you get siloed priorities. So, you know, I think it was a buzz word five or six years ago. You want to have Smarketing. But I think host thought really helps in just bringing all the data in front of you, in front of sales and marketing and, you know, showing what has been done. You know, there’s been plenty of times where it’s like, I don’t know what sales is doing, and marketing and sales says, I don’t know what marketing is doing. Well, if you’re on a lead contact record, you can look at everything that’s been done, whether it’s in sales, whether it’s in marketing, and then just bringing that as a holistic picture of what’s been done to get this lead up to this point. So I think that’s, that’s, you know, having all the data in front of you is a great way to keep teams aligned. 

Brandon Ring  13:02

Absolutely, absolutely and on that point, you know, talk to us about the importance of having a strategy when using HubSpot, and not just kind of like, you know, oh, just think we’re around with it, and let’s just wing it somehow, right?

Brandon Ring  14:13

Well, when I was first starting out, admittedly, I definitely just winged it, I mean, and you can do that, but you will be going back, and the more familiarity you have with the platform, you will be going back and making some changes. So, you know, looking back now best practices, I think it would be very important for new HubSpot users to fully immerse themselves in what capabilities and tools that HubSpot brings to the table, and then aligning those tools and features on what you need out of it. I think it’d be a good idea to put together two lists, a must have list, and nice to have list, and then you just start carving out what the goals are. There for for each of those. 

Brandon Ring  15:01

And then once you kind of have some of those aligned, and again, talking to sales C-suite customer success, then you can start prioritizing when you can pepper in some of the nice to haves. I think that’s a great way to approach it. But then, of course, you know any goal setting you want to do, it needs to be a SMART goal so that you can really put a close in loop on if you’ve accomplished the goal or not. So I think that’s some of the good strategies. But HubSpot, you know, it’s so flexible, customizable, that you know your strategy is can be unique to your specific business needs me personally. I think HubSpot shines using the Sandler sales methodology, but you can configure it for BANT, MEDDIC, target accounts, really, anything, any methodology use for marketing and sales.

Christian Klepp  15:57

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Let’s, let’s go under the hood here, so to speak, right.

Brandon Ring  16:06

OK.

Christian Klepp  16:07

Walk us through some of these key features in HubSpot that you’ve been working with, and talk to us about how marketing teams can best use or leverage these features.

Brandon Ring  16:17

I try and keep up to date on everything that HubSpot is rolling out. I mean, it’s almost daily that they’re coming out with free new features that you can either opt into or opt out of. So obviously, AI (Artificial intelligence) is on the forefront of everything right now, and AI is perpetuated itself within HubSpot. So you’ll, you’ll immediately see what HubSpot is bringing to the table when it comes to optimization AI, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content creation, website optimization, things like that. AI, chat bots, predictive, lead scoring, things like that. So that’s obviously at the top of the mind, getting that kind of understood. But what I think is some really cool capabilities that I think are unique to HubSpot. Now I know Pardot does some of this, a little bit of this stuff, but specifically for HubSpot, the lead scoring strategy and functionality, I think, is superior to Pardot. 

Brandon Ring  17:21

So if you’re not, if you’re doing B2B small marketing, you absolutely need to have a lead scoring methodology in place. And I reason why I’m strongly believe that is that when all else fails, you can always fall back on the lead scores that you generated through your campaign, efforts, through your website, work through your emails, buyers, intent, pricing pages, so having a lead scoring in place not only helps sales identify who is engaging with your content, but Of course, it demonstrates how important marketing is to bringing these leads to sales. So lead scoring is very robust. It’s customizable. It’s fun to see those scores go up. You know, really is fulfilling knowing that you are nurturing these leads. And you know, most of my stops have long sales cycles. So it’s, it’s been difficult in the past to prove a ROI (Return On Investment) or a marketing attribution when you do have these really long sales cycles. So you know, you can engage with somebody a year and a half ago and they’re hot and heavy and their lead scoring is high, but then they’re not able to purchase until a year and a half. 

Brandon Ring  18:47

So having a lead score in place can outline or illustrate that there was a lot of marketing effort done up front. So lead scoring big, big fan of also, I touched on it earlier, the ABM capabilities. One of the really cool things I was able to accomplish is that HubSpot knows who is on your website if they’ve been cookied. So if you filled out a form on a company’s website, if you’ve clicked on a pixeled CTA (Call To Action) through an email, chances are you’ve been cookied with that website. And why that’s important is that you can set a call to action or a button on your website that says, hey, company XYZ, welcome back to our website. Click here to view your own personalized page, and then it takes them to that said ABM page. And, you know, this is scalable, creating these ABM pages, and it is intuitive, it’s, it’s really, I think, a way to wow your leads and customers that I’m keeping your interests in mind when I’m creating these ABM pages, the content is up front that you care about. It’s meant to help you and try and bring those leads further down the funnel. 

Brandon Ring  20:12

So ABM is really slick. I don’t know if Pardot does that, but I have a feeling that it’s not there yet. Maybe it’s got a third party where you can purchase it, but within HubSpot, it’s all underneath the same ecosystem. Outside of that, campaign tools, I think are great. Lot of marketing and automation platforms have that, but it’s really great to see how a campaign has impacted the bottom line.

Christian Klepp  20:43

Fantastic, fantastic. I haven’t looked at this in a while, but I know, I know, like a few years ago, HubSpot got a bit of a bad rep for the target personas that it would develop, and things like frustrated Frank and marketing Mary and so forth. And have you seen any improvements since, since that time in this department?

Brandon Ring  21:06

Buyers persona? Well, you know, those are like the soft sciences of marketing, and I think they have their value. How you utilize them within HubSpot is really kind of up to you. Again, those were kind of just nice to haves. I mean, you absolutely want to understand your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), don’t get me wrong, and I think documents like that are very helpful in doing so. But if I’m being honest, you know my job as a marketer is to understand the ICP as best as I can. So again, it’s good to have those documents initially like a new job, new opportunity, but if I don’t know understand the ICP six months, eight months down the road, then I’m not doing my job as a marketer. So I don’t know that there’s tools or functionality within HubSpot to leverage something like a buyer’s persona. Maybe there is, but really it’s all about email segmentation, or, you know, ABM segmentation. I think that’s a better use case for understanding the different types that are out there.

Christian Klepp  22:17

Right. Okay, I mean, you touched on it earlier. And you know, this is 2025, and we, you know, it’s kind of unavoidable if you know it wouldn’t be an actual podcast conversation if we don’t talk about AI, right? So talk to us about some of these AI features on the platform, especially those that you’ve used and that you feel are like highly relevant to marketing teams.

Brandon Ring  22:44

Well, you know, it’s funny how fast AI has made its way into marketing. Well, generally everything. But I remember when ChatGPT rolled out, and this feels like it was only like six or eight months ago, but I know it probably close to a year and a half ago by now, but just being blown away with ChatGPT and seeing what it could do and generate. And then fast forward to today, where you’re finding different LLMs (Large Language Models), different tools out there, AI tools that are suited for different you know, functionalities like, I think Claude AI is really great developing content and helping you write ChatGPT is kind of like the general purpose AI. Perplexity is an amazing AI for research and things like that. So that’s interesting to me, but I will caveat. Didn’t say that. I don’t know of everything that HubSpot is doing when it comes to AI, but I can tell you some of the areas where we have used it. 

Brandon Ring  23:53

So when building up blogs within the HubSpot platform, you can have an assistant That’s right, almost like that little paper clip Microsoft Word, where it makes recommendations, or you can ask it for catchy headlines or blog posts that are related to the one that you’re creating. So it really does help with content generation, and it will automatically build out the blog for you like, of course, it’s not perfect, but you know, half the battle is getting the content on the page. Once you’ve done that, you can refine it very quickly so that you are making content so quickly. 

Brandon Ring  24:42

And you know, I’ve had leaders in the past say that you don’t want to make AI content. It’s just artificial. It doesn’t really do its job. But I will say that it’s important to have a regular cadence of content going out, and oftentimes, AI generated content is the way to go. As a marketing director, you want to pepper your ICP with relevant content at a frequent cadence. Now you do want to create content that’s really amazing, really well thought out. But in between those pieces of well thought out content, I think AI is generated content is perfectly fine, and HubSpot helps with that. It also helps with SEO recommendations. I have personally seen our keywords get higher ranked within the HubSpot ecosystem using its recommendations. So that’s pretty fantastic. 

Brandon Ring  25:50

Another feature that I’ve not actually used, but I’ve heard about, is predictive lead scoring. So like, I’m used to setting up a lead scoring model that is demographic based or firmographic based, and then another one that is behavioral based, and then you combine the two numbers and you get a good overall lead scoring. But I believe that HubSpot has what’s called a predictive lead scoring that kind of automates or does the AI, brings the AI side to the lead scoring model, but admittedly, I’ve not had a chance to use that yet. I think it also has a chat bot that’s AI. I know it has chat bot features where it goes to whoever you want to go to, but I believe that they’ve rolled out an AI assistant for a chat bot too. So those are some of them, but there might be more.

Christian Klepp  26:43

Yeah, no, there’s, there’s more, for sure. And, yeah, no, the chat bot one is something that we’ve been looking into as well for clients. And it’s, it’s one of those things where, you know, in reality, because I’ve done a certification and customer experience, and one of the things that they keep saying is that people are frustrated with chat bots on the website. But that being said, it tends to be also a situation where do you want the answer to your question? Do you want those issues addressed right away, or do you want to wait until an actual person is online that you can chat with right? 

Christian Klepp  26:43

And some of these things, and one of the main reasons why they implement these chat bots on the website is there are some very common questions that website visitors will ask, and why not prepare those answers ahead of time and just automate that sequence, right? And if it’s and if it’s something a bit more specific that you know does require a customer service representative or something of that nature to attend to you, then, there’s a way to, like, funnel them into a, perhaps a call or something like that, right?

Brandon Ring  28:01

Yeah, no. I mean, we you don’t use a lot utilize the chat bot, and I’ve seen a use case for it in several different areas. Like you mentioned, customers would just type in a question that they had about the software. And again, we didn’t have the AI set up so it would go to me, or go to one of my SDRs (Sales Development Representative) or marketing coordinators. And you know, if we didn’t know the answer, off top of the head, we would team up with one of our SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and ask them, and then we’d immediately get a personalized response to that question for customers. 

Brandon Ring  28:39

But additionally, you know, it wasn’t blowing up, it wasn’t wasting a lot of our time, but yeah, we got some leads through a chat bot. I mean, some good leads. And so it kind of speaks to there are times when folks just absolutely hate chat bots, but then other times it’s like, I kind of want to raise my hand, but I don’t know if I want to talk to sales yet. I’m just kind of like figuring out if this is a right fit for me, and chat bots are great for that. 

Christian Klepp  29:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us some already, but just imagine, as I said at the beginning of the conversation, just imagine there’s a B2B marketer out there that’s listening to this interview and listening to all these tips and recommendations that you’re given giving about HubSpot. So what are like three to five things that you could advise them to take action on right now when it comes to leveraging HubSpot for marketing success?

Brandon Ring  29:43

Yeah, so I definitely have five to six so, and I’ll try and be concise here. I already talked about lead scoring. You know, get that in as early as possible so you can start capturing all the engagement that is going into your marketing efforts. 

Brandon Ring  29:59

I think another important area is to make sure that you have established the necessary tools or steps to capture life cycle stage metrics. A good thing to do is kind of create hard definitions about each life cycle stage, what constitutes moving them through each phase of the life cycle all the way to SQL, and then even after that, when it goes over to sales, make sure you’re capturing each like time and stage. Because I personally wanted to know that information, but I know that even the folks above me really want to know how long are the folks staying in which funnel, and then you want to be able to improve upon that. So make sure you’ve got life cycle metrics coming in. You can absolutely do that through HubSpot. 

Brandon Ring  30:56

I can tell you another big function that we had in HubSpot, Salesforce and HubSpot treat leads a little bit differently. Salesforce has a lead as a contact record and it has just a regular contact but HubSpot has them both together. So making sure that you have closed loop reporting when it comes to leads is so important. So I know that HubSpot has a lead functionality area dashboard, so you can really capture and track where the leads are coming from and how they’re progressing, like I said, through the life cycle. But prior to HubSpot, we had leads that were leaking through there, or we had leads that sales weren’t was not following up on, and we were making that assumption. We’re like, are you? Did you talk to this person? This was a great lead. Oh, nothing came out of it. Well, did you really appropriately follow up on it, or are you just telling me that so you can have closed loop reporting when it comes into HubSpot and really keep everybody accountable, not just sales, but also marketing when it comes to leads, so that that is very important to have, so that no sales falls through the funnel. 

Brandon Ring  32:18

Outside of that, you know, this is kind of more of a marketing just make sure you have evergreen campaigns on your website, trigger based campaigns, so that if you’re showing somebody that’s really interested in product XYZ, you can enroll them into a trigger based campaign that really just kind of feeds them and tries to keep them engaged, knowing that they’re looking at this product or these problems. So you can, again, do that. You can optimize that campaign, do some AB testing, just a few more small ones, so make sure that you’re utilizing pixel call to actions that’s just essentially a button that has a pixel on it in emails. So you want to make sure that you’re cooking the contacts, because that way, you can track what they’re looking at on your website. If they’re just if they’re not pixeled, they just are an anonymous visitor. But once they become pixel, HubSpot is able to fill in all the past history that they were doing on your website. So making sure you’re cooking those contacts is very important. 

Brandon Ring  33:33

Let’s see build out dashboards so you can create as many dashboards as you want in HubSpot, I believe, and you can fill those dashboards with the reports that are important. So I have a marketing overall dashboard for me. Sales has an overall dashboard for them. Leadership has a dashboard that’s just for the high level reports. And then, when you talk in customer success, you talk to all these different departments, they obviously have different needs when it comes to reporting, so talking to them filling out their dashboard, and you’ll probably have to help them set this up, and that’s fine, but by doing, by setting this dashboard up for the departments they are more engaged with the CRM. They’re more they adopt the CRM faster if they’re using it. So making sure that you help them along the way with the dashboards and reporting, I think, is paramount. And then lastly, just you can set up these reports and then just review them quarterly, if not sooner than that, to make sure that you’re on track beating your goals.

Christian Klepp  34:46

Well, that’s quite the list, but.

Brandon Ring  34:51

I could go on. 

Christian Klepp  34:52

I’m sure, I’m sure you can. Let me just quickly repeat this for the benefit of the audience. So I think you were talking about like setting up the lead scoring, capturing life cycle stage metrics, tracking where the leads are coming from. So things like closed loop reporting, having evergreen campaigns on the website, which I totally agree with that’s so important, utilizing pixel CTAs. So that you can cookie. I think the contacts was the word you were trying, that you were using, building out dashboards with important reports and setting up the reports. I hope I capture that accurately.

Brandon Ring  35:40

Yep, you did a good job. 

Christian Klepp  35:41

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, moving on to the next question, and it’s time for you to get up on your soapbox. 

Brandon Ring  35:50

I don’t know. 

Christian Klepp  35:50

A status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Brandon Ring  35:58

I guess two come to mind. And I think when I started early in my marketing career, I was so concerned that the messaging, the content that I was creating needed to be professional, and it needed to sound so important. 

Christian Klepp  36:18

Right. 

Brandon Ring  36:19

And then fast forward to today, where I think it’s so much more important to show that you’re a real person. And this is, I know, AI, we’ve already talked about that, but I think the marketers are too guilty sometimes of creating what I call marketing speak, which just kind of sales sounds salesy, so backing off of some of that marketing speak and sounding a little more authentic. I don’t know if that’s a hot take, but that’s definitely something that I will make sure that I’m accomplishing when it comes to any messaging I’m putting across. 

Brandon Ring  37:01

Another one I already touched on it. I mean, the AI content generation, I think, is absolutely a must. Yes, create that call it quality content, but I know that that takes time. So in between those pieces of great quality content, you can easily kick out a blog or a social media post using AI generation. So I think that feeds the SEO algorithm and just helps you keep in front of your audience.

Christian Klepp  37:31

So they’re like a balance, isn’t it? I mean, on the one hand, to sound authentic, to sound human, but on the other hand, it’s the volume and the speed.

Brandon Ring  37:42

Yeah, no, doing more with less. That’s always the goal of the marketer, right?

Christian Klepp  37:46

Yep, yep. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Now here comes the bonus question. So at least on your LinkedIn profile, it says that you’re based in Austin, Texas. So for the benefit of those that are not from Texas, what is one thing about Austin that a lot of people don’t know about?

Brandon Ring  38:05

Well, let’s see a couple things that I’ve learned about being in Austin, there seems to be, obviously, an exodus of California is coming to Texas. But additionally, they seem to be bringing Hollywood, like I know that there’s a lot of movie studios coming to Austin, because I think it’s either cheaper or, you know, most, some of the actors are coming with it. I don’t know, but I think that’s kind of interesting, that Hollywood coming here. But additionally, you know, there’s a lot of tech companies that are making their way here, obviously, Tesla, I think LinkedIn, Google, I mean, you name a company, I think they’ve got a good presence here in Austin. 

Christian Klepp  38:49

Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I’ve heard about that online. So it’s interesting to see that trend, right? How a lot of companies are flocking to Texas, and it might, it might be for those reasons that you’ve mentioned, right? So, yeah, maybe Fantastic, fantastic. So Brandon, this has been a great conversation. Thanks again for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. Please quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Brandon Ring  39:15

All right? Well, thank you. I’ve loved this conversation too. Christian, thank you for having me on again. I’m Brandon Ring. I’m a B2B, B2G, SaaS marketer. Over 15 years of experience, you can find me on LinkedIn. If you just google search Brandon Ring, there’s a lot of content, contact information there and reach out. I hope that I haven’t offended anybody with this HubSpot, but I’m definitely a believer. I think you can do a lot more with a lot less using this platform. So reach out if you’d like any further questions, and I’d be happy to talk.

Christian Klepp  39:51

Fantastic, fantastic. So once again, Brandon, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Brandon Ring  39:57

Thank you so much. 

Christian Klepp  39:58

Bye, for now.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Tom Schwab. He is known as the godfather of podcast interview marketing. His book Podcast Guest Profits, how to grow your business with a targeted interview strategy, has been called the Bible of podcast guesting. He’s a frequent speaker and founded Interview Valet, the leading podcast interview marketing agency a decade ago. Get ready to have your view of the future of marketing shaken forever, and tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:36

Tom Schwab, welcome to the show, Sir.

Tom Schwab  00:39

Christian, I am thrilled to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:41

Great to have you on the show. I mean, like, you know, when we had our little pre interview call, we got on, like, a house on fire.

Tom Schwab  00:49

We’re gonna have fun on this conversation and go into a lot of places that are insightful and actionable.

Christian Klepp  00:57

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, that’s part of the main reason, I would say that I get folks like you on the show, right? Because, as the name of the podcast suggests, we’re on a mission to change things, right, to change for the better. And I mean, today’s topic is absolutely dynamite, and I’m not going to keep the audience in suspense any longer. We’ll just dive right into it. Shall we?

Tom Schwab  01:19

Please. 

Christian Klepp  01:20

All right, so you’re on a mission, and you’ve been on a mission to help B2B companies look at marketing for from a different perspective, for growth. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission, and that is okay. Hold on to your seats, folks. This is a mouthful. How strategic B2B marketing can help you generate bigger and more profitable clients. And who the heck does not want that, right? So I’m gonna provide our listeners for some context here, because in our previous conversation, you mentioned something that well, that made me laugh, but it also jumped out at me, because it’s so true, big fish won’t swim through marketing funnels, and here’s what works instead. I’m going to repeat that big fish won’t swim through marketing funnels, and here’s what works instead. So I’m going to kick this off with two questions. Tell us what you think works for larger accounts, and why and where do you see a lot of B2B marketing teams fall flat.

Tom Schwab  02:21

I believe that you’re not one funnel away. No matter what everybody’s selling you, you are one conversation away. And think about it this way, the big B2B companies, right? Ernst and Young, Bain Capital. Do you see them doing Facebook ads and master classes and webinars to get their clients? 

Christian Klepp  02:44

No. 

Tom Schwab  02:45

No, right? They’re talking they’re holding their own conferences, getting people in there, getting that thought leadership. So why do we think if the people that are the biggest, the people that we should be benchmarking against, we’re not doing similar things. Instead, we are listening to the influencers on social media that tell us, Oh, you’re just one funnel away, right? Spend more on these little ads and then drive them to an evergreen webinar that they can sit on at 2am and you’ll lie to them that it’s live, right? All of these things, and people are being taught this, and this idea that you can sell a B2B high level service the same way you sell a small product.

Tom Schwab  03:34

When you step back and look at it, it’s ridiculous, right? The idea that that C level executive with budget authority is going to see your Facebook ad and then buy this $7 trip wire product and then sit through a 90 minute sales pitch webinar and then hire you for six figures. When you look at it that way, it’s ridiculous. And so I really believe that today, B2B marketers, you’re not one funnel away. You are one conversation away, and that’s one conversation away from your next ideal customer, your ideal referral partner, even your ideal team members that want to come and work with you. It’s all about conversations. There’s a place for automation, but that’s not how you drive the leads into there.

Christian Klepp  04:26

Yeah, those are some really great points. I’m going to go back to something you said earlier ton. So you know, things like being the Evergreen webinar at 2am and things of that nature. Why do you think a lot of companies default to these tactics? Is it because they don’t know any better? Is it because that’s what the market’s been doing for years? Is it all of the above?

Tom Schwab  04:45

There’s a great book out there called Click Sand – How digital marketing ruin your business, right? And I love how Bill Troy, back in 2018 was the first one to say The Emperor has no clothes, right? And I think the reason we’re doing it is because this is what we’re being sold, right, that everything can be super efficient, super automated, right? And the idea is we’re getting more efficient at things that are less effective, right? In the time we’ve been talking here, you and I both could have sent a million emails. They all would have gone to spam, right? Very efficient, not very effective. And the entire marketing industry around there is sort of built up around this, right? The people that are saying you’re one funnel away, guess what? They’ve got a platform they want to sell you that will help you make funnels, right? The people that are telling you we can target your ideal C level executive on Facebook, they’re the ones that are selling Facebook ads. So it’s like they’re the industry is built up around this, and we’ve all been sold this. The carnival barkers have been out there talking about it, and I think now we’re getting to the point where people are looking and going, this doesn’t make sense, right? I don’t like this marketing. Why would my client like it?

Christian Klepp  06:12

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s that whole notion of, like, you know, you can generate leads and make money while you sleep, right?

Tom Schwab  06:20

The thing is that leads now have become the new Facebook likes, right? Every day I’m getting emails from people, oh, we can help you get more leads. Well, you know, my bank doesn’t care how many leads I have. They care how many profits I have, right, right? And so we’re optimizing for the wrong thing, especially in B2B marketing, right? It’s this idea that the sales funnel will get 1000 leads in and we’ll get one big, big client through, makes no sense, right? The cost of the sales development reps to work all of those leads and then that somebody’s going to come through doesn’t make sense, right? We had, I learned so much from our clients, and one of them talked about that he is tired of the sales funnel, right? He doesn’t want 1000 leads so he can get one client. He wants the sales cylinder, right? Let me talk to five people so I can get four clients out of it, and that makes a whole lot more sense. What works for low cost transactions of products does not scale to high relationship, high value B2B services.

Christian Klepp  07:37

Absolutely. Do you think also a part of it is, well, just the lack of understanding of who it is you’re targeting. Because, like, going back to your point C level executives and how they buy, how they make decisions, how they look for information online, I’m gonna, I might say something slightly controversial here, but like, they that they don’t that. These sales funnels don’t take that into account.

Tom Schwab  08:03

It’s interesting. Marketers are great, right? We’ll show you the data that makes us look good, and often it’ll be like, well, look at how much traffic we had here, how much engagement we had here. The problem becomes there is that our bosses, the owners, the CFO, the CEO, are looking at going, I don’t care about all of that. I care about how many clients did you get from it, how many profits did you get from it? If we keep looking at marketing as an activity as opposed to a profit generator. We’re all in deep trouble the next downturn, because if it’s seen as an expense, we cut expenses. If it’s used as a revenue generator, we don’t. And I think I can remember a client that came to us, and I asked them, like all clients. I said, Why do you want to be on podcast interviews? Right? Why do you want to use podcast interview marketing and Christian? I love this answer. 

Tom Schwab  09:10

He said, Because I think most of digital marketing is the equivalent of advertising above a urinal. And I paused, and I’m like, You got to explain that one to me. And he said, I am a high level consultant, right? He said, If someone sees me on a park bench, if they see me on the bus that goes by, if they see me advertising above a urinal, that’s going to kill my brand for sure. And in the same way, if they see me on TikTok, doing a dance, or see me on some place that lowers my status, that hurts me, he’s like, I want to be seen on the key stages. I want to be seen talking with the thought leaders there. And this, this idea of, you want to be everywhere your clients. Are. I don’t agree with that. First of all, I can’t afford to be everywhere my clients are. I just want to be where they are when they make decisions.

Christian Klepp  10:10

It’s just like that movie that won all the Oscars last year or the year before, everything everywhere, all at once, right?

Tom Schwab  10:18

That’s I don’t have the budget nor the time for that. And I think, you know, everybody, I should say, everybody, I always think sometimes of well, if I had more time, if I had more money, we are all limited by that. I don’t care if you’re Facebook or Amazon, right, you still have a finite amount of time. You have a finite amount of resources. So really is deciding where you put those into place. And had another client that I loved it. He called it Warren Buffett marketing. I said, What’s Warren Buffett marketing? And he’s like, Well, one of Buffett’s foundational principles in investing is that he will not invest in the company that he doesn’t understand right now. This caused him to miss Apple.

Christian Klepp  11:06

Yeah, right, that’s it. 

Tom Schwab  11:07

But this, this CEO told me, I’m tired of investing in marketing that I don’t understand, right? And as marketers, we’ve got to sell it to the people with the budgets, right? The CEOs, all the rest of that. And he said, for decades, I’ve been chasing this elusive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) algorithm, right? And each year we’re spending more and more money to chase it. And then we get to the point here where they’re telling me, oh, it’s not important. Now everything’s going to AI, right? And he says, I’m tired of doing this. He says, If I don’t understand the marketing, I’m not gonna invest in it. And he’s like, I can understand when I talk on a physical stage, I get business from it. When I get introduced by someone and have that referral, we get business from it. When I’m on a podcast and get introduced by the thought leader, right, which is the podcast host, and I can talk to people, that’s when I know that I get business. So from that standpoint, Marketers on a Mission, right? We’ve got to, we’ve not only got to sell our prospects, we got to sell our bosses on why they should invest the time and money with this.

Christian Klepp  12:17

That’s right. That’s right. And on that point, that’s such a beautiful segue into the next question. Key pitfalls for B2B marketers to avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Tom Schwab  12:28

This idea of more is better, or it’s all about activity right on the coffee cup that I’ve got, I have written the words better is better, and that came from one of our clients, Steve Acho, great consultant. He runs an agency that is head hunters, right? They go out and find the perfect talent. And he was the one that pointed out to me that more is not better. Better is better. And the example he used is, you know, as a professional recruiter, he said, Which do you want, right? Do you want the 7 billion resumes that you can find on monster.com or do you want me to bring three people to you? That’s I could tell you, these will change your business, right? More doesn’t help you. 

Tom Schwab  13:18

And I think as marketers, heck is people, right? There’s this idea of hustle, more is better. And so a lot of people will go and start looking at stages, either physical stages or digital stages, and say, Well, I just need to be on lots of podcasts, right? I remember a client wasn’t a client. Prospect came to us, and he said, I want to be on 100 podcasts this month. And I’m like, why? Oh, because it’ll be massive exposure. I’m like, Well, so is streaking, but it doesn’t help your business, right? You don’t want massive exposure. You want the right exposure. You want to target it. 

Christian Klepp  13:59

Targeted. I was gonna say. 

Tom Schwab  14:00

I’ve seen, oh, and I’ve seen people that come back and say, you know, I’ve been on, I’ve been on 50 podcasts, and I listened to the podcast a few of them, and I’m like, Well, you’ve done one interview, but you’ve done it 50 times. You talked about the same things, and how did those interviews work out for you? And they’ll be like, I’m not sure. I’m like, what other marketing do you do that you don’t have attribution with it, so you’re just throwing stuff at a wall, and you don’t even look at what sticks right. So instead of just doing more right, do more meaningful ones. Make sure you’re using a system with that and for heaven’s sakes, don’t, don’t try doubling down unless you know it works, right? I’ve heard people say, well, I need to get on bigger podcasts, right? Great. But if they’re not converting on smaller podcasts, you know, doubling down on that is. We used to say in the Navy, it’s doubling down on stupid if it’s not working. Now, just getting on a bigger podcast won’t work, and you’ve got one chance there make sure that you’re ready.

Christian Klepp  15:11

Absolutely, absolutely. And on that note, regarding bigger podcasts, you might just be I’m just gonna say a number and a file right? One and done, because they just go through these, you know how it works, right? They just keep going through all these episodes, and they just pump it out, and then that’s it.

Tom Schwab  15:29

Ego is the real thing, right? And I’ve got an ego too. And I remember early on being on a podcast, and it was one of the larger ones that I have ever been on at that point, right? And it was like, oh yes, I’m going to be heard by 30,000 people. They weren’t my people, right? Um, they said the word entrepreneurs in the podcast, but it was aspirational entrepreneurs, right? Um, wantrepreneurs, if you had a program on how to make six figures in six seconds with six hacks, and it was $6 you would have sold, you would have sold lots of them. But I went on this podcast, and, you know, I got a handful of leads from it, all right? Then I was shortly after that, Christian on a podcast, and the host told me that she got 250 downloads per episode. I looked at that, and I’m like, This is my perfect audience, right? I went on there, I not only got dozens of leads from that, I got dozens of customers and clients from that. And sometimes we think, Oh, there’s more fish in the ocean, right? That’s true, but if you can show me where there’s a barrel of fish, I’d much rather go there. So from that standpoint, it’s all about targeting, not just spray and pray.

Christian Klepp  16:47

Absolutely, absolutely, and Lord knows, there’s way too much spray and pray going on right now out there anyway, right?

Tom Schwab  16:54

And the market encourages it, right? Because we’re paying to do this spray and pray, right? Someone is making money off of those million emails that we just bought the list and emailed out there, right? Facebook is making money off of all the ads that they’re doing there, right? Google ads is telling me that if I just make this tweak, I’ll get a better click through rate and all the rest of that. Well, I’m not optimizing for click through rate, I’m optimizing for cost of customer access.

Christian Klepp  17:29

Right, right? There is a bit of a difference between the two, just a little bit, right, like, all right. Fantastic. Tom, you know, in our previous conversation, you discussed how B2B companies are usually one conversation away instead of one funnel away. And you even brought it up like earlier on today, and that’s with regards to securing new business, but discuss how conducting the relevant research and having the right strategy play a key role in this.

Tom Schwab  18:04

So the idea is, if it’s one conversation away, people will think, Well, I’ll just have lots of conversations. Right? If I go to New York City and stand in Times Square and have enough conversations, I’ll meet my ideal customer. Probably not right. So what you need to really focus on is, what I always think of is your super consumers. There’s a great book out there by Eddie Yoon called Superconsumers. Harvard Business Review wrote it right. And you don’t want to talk with everyone. You want to talk to your Uber fans, your ideal customers, to start figuring out where they are. 

Tom Schwab  18:41

And with podcasting, you know, we’ve been doing this a decade now, and early on, I have to admit, we were guessing, because the data wasn’t out there. Now it exists. You’ve got to license it right, and it’s expensive, but you can find the demographics. You can find everyone that goes to a website, what podcast do they listen to? Everyone that follows a influencer? What podcast do they listen to? And that can be very important, because I think of we do a lot of non fiction books promoting those with podcast book tours. And there was a gentleman that came to us, and it was great. He’s a great entrepreneur. He’s started three businesses, sold two of them. He’s a high school dropout, and he’s probably in his mid 20s. And he said, I want to be on ideacast from Harvard Business Review. And I said, we have gotten people on there. You will never be on there, right? Because they make their money off of selling MBAs and PhDs, they’re not going to bring somebody on that is the high school dropout to conflict with their business model. But I said at the end of the day, you don’t want to be on that podcast. You want to talk to the people that listen to that podcast. So we were able to go into that data and say, Okay, everybody that listens to Harvard Business Review, what other podcasts do they listen to? And how can we position ourselves there? 

Tom Schwab  20:09

The other thing is the conversation, right? You’re one conversation away. Well, what conversation is that? One of the things we always teach our clients at Interview Valet is that we’re all selling Preparation H, right. No one cares about your product or your service. They care about the pain in the rear end, right? So from that standpoint, when you get on a podcast interview, when you get on a stage, when you get in that conversation, start talking about the problem, right? Because when you can clearly define the problem, the customer thinks, wow, you understand me, right? It’s not this across the table. You’re selling to me. You know… It’s a confrontational thing. It’s more of a shoulder to shoulder. We’re standing side by side, facing this problem, and that’s much more effective, right? Talk about the problem you solve, talk about the way you see the world. 

Tom Schwab  21:09

And often people will say, well, it should be magnetic, right? I want my marketing to be magnetic. I want it to attract everyone. Well, that’s not how a magnet works, right? A magnet attracts the right thing and repels the wrong thing, right? So be very clear in your point of view, right? This is how I see the world, right? If you go back to the beginning of this interview, that first question that you asked me, I believe I said something like, well, our point of view, or my point of view is, right. If you don’t agree with that, that’s fine. If you turn off at that point, that’s fine. Save your time. Save my time. Once again, we don’t want more leads. You want people that hear that point of view and go, Wow, I agree with that too. I’m going to listen more, right? And that can be great, because the right marketing makes sales so much easier. Because if you can help have people self identify and self educate through that marketing, those sales calls become more like qualification calls than discovery calls. So all of those things in the conversation, think about it, the data to find the right people to talk to, talking about their problem, and then being very clear of who you are, who you work with, what you do, what you believe.

Christian Klepp  22:36

That was beautifully said, I’m gonna say. And it definitely goes back to what you were saying earlier, right? And this is the reason why it’s so important to conduct that right research and have a strategy. I think you brought it up earlier in the conversation. You know, when you ask customers, well, why do you want to get on a podcast? Why do you want to be on this podcast? Right? This has to be thought through, because if the guy gets on 100 podcasts that are not relevant to him, and whatever he or she is talking about is not relevant to the listeners, then it’s a complete exercise in futility, right?

Tom Schwab  23:12

We refer to our clients as the talent, and so often it could be the CMO that comes to us, right? And says, We want to start to use podcast interviews, right? But it’s the CEO or the founder that is the talent, and you’ve got to keep them excited about this. You’ve got to keep them engaged, because there’s 1000 things they could be doing during that hour, and if you lose their trust, they will implode your marketing efforts, right? So we look at that and say, Okay, let’s make sure that we get some quick wins with that, right? So not only making it easy for them, preparing them for the interview, so they can show up confident and comfortable, then repurpose the content when they see that, and it’s like, wow, I gave up an hour of my day. And you got a blog from it, you got an article, you got all of these reels from it, and it was heard by our ideal clients and the large language models that you know are going to become our best referral sources. They look at that, and then they come back and say, Oh, great job marketing, right? Let’s do more of these. Because as marketers, we’re selling to our prospects, but we’re also selling to the leadership of the company, and I think especially now, as money gets tighter, right? As we look at, you know, we’re either in a recession, coming out of a recession or going into a recession. Money is not cheap. It’s not free anymore, and the powers that be are asking, What am I getting out of my time and my money invested on this? And it’s important to be able to explain that to them, both in the quantitative and the quantitative, where they can feel it makes sense.

Christian Klepp  25:02

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s interesting, because I had a conversation with somebody else about the same topic yesterday, and it boils down to, from my point of view, three things, right? Is internal customer service, communication, and I would even hazard, I guess, to say negotiation skills, right? Because it’s not a given that your budget is going to be approved to your point, right? It might even be cut or completely taken away. And then what?

Tom Schwab  25:30

All politics aside, the other day, I heard a CEO use the phrase Doge up. We need to Doge up. And I’m like, oh, that’s become a verb now, right? Where they’re saying, okay, what can we do to come in here and, you know, cut waste, right? Either to get ready for a recession or whatever? And they’re starting to look at that. So you need to start thinking of, how can I show that this is driving revenue, this is driving results, not just vanity metrics.

Christian Klepp  26:01

Correct, correct. Or, as I like to say, we got to prune the tree somehow, right? Make it grow and bear more fruit. That’s less political. There we go. So you robbed something earlier, and that’s such a great segue into the next question. You believe that, and I believe this too, better marketing makes sales easier. So on this topic about being one conversation and not one funnel away right from your ideal customers, break it down for us, right in terms of what you recommend B2B marketers use in terms of that strategic approach and what role marketers have in making the sales process easier.

Tom Schwab  26:46

It’s one of those things where I’ve spent time as a sales rep, I’ve also spent time as a marketer, and I’ve also spent time as a founder and as a CEO, right? And sometimes I look at it as a parent, right? And I see the two kids that I love dearly, why don’t you just get along and work together as opposed to fighting? Right? It’s a marketing problem, it’s a sales problem. It’s his problem, it’s her problem. No, it’s our problem here. So I think when we can start to align that, then the organization thrives. 

Tom Schwab  27:26

And once again, how do you make sales easier? Well, if you can use your marketing assets to get leads that are self identified right that close faster for a higher initial amount and churn less. We’ve got studies that show podcast interview marketing does that, but also to have those resources that sales can use. So when we say one conversation away, right? Prime example here we’re talking about how B2B marketers can use podcast interview marketing. Well, if I’ve got a prospect coming in for a sales conversation, and I looked on their LinkedIn and I can say, Oh, they’re a B2B marketer, maybe they’re, they’re connected to Christian already on LinkedIn, right before we jump on the call, sales rep is going to reach out to them and say, Hey, looking forward to the call. I thought you might enjoy this interview that our founder, Tom Schwab did with Christian talking about this. 

Tom Schwab  28:33

Imagine that if your clients start to listen to the founder, listen to specific things before the sales call, right? It’s almost like you’re pre selling them, right? And it’s a great way to feed them information. And it’s not just, Hey, we did a webinar. I looked at the camera and read the questions and all the rest of this. It’s like, No, we are a leading company. We’re the category King, category Queen of this industry, and these, these prove it. And I think for marketing, at the end of the day, you know, they’re now talking about Chief Revenue Officers in the C suite, right? It’s not sales or marketing, it’s revenue. I think it’s going to get to a point where it’s going to be Chief Profits Officer, right? And so it’s like, if I can cut out a whole level of sales development reps, right, and just have qualified leads coming in and talking, I’ve now, I’ve made it much more efficient on there. 

Tom Schwab  29:37

So it’s one of those things where people will say, with certain types of marketing, right, how many leads does it drive? How many page visits? No, we’re always looking at how many customers. How big are the customers? Right? How fast do they close? Because, you know, speed is everything money. Money loves speed, and it’s the same way with clients. If they hear your founder on a podcast interview, and they’re the answer to prayer, right, or they know someone right that, oh, I was just talking with so and so at a networking event, and this company is starting to deal with this problem, I’m going to tell them about this podcast. It’s a great way to get directly to that decision maker, that person with the budget, and that can make marketing happy. It can make sales happy, and it makes the financials happy, which makes everybody happy. 

Christian Klepp  30:33

Yeah, you know these, these examples you’ve just highlighted, made me think about this Gartner report. And it might be, it might be a little bit dated. Now it was, it came out two years ago, but it shows the B2B buyers journey, right? And just from that diagram alone, it goes without saying that the B2B buying journey is not linear, right? I think the best adjective that I could think of as it’s haphazard at best, right? Because there are your key stages, but you keep seeing like arrows and diagrams, like going back, going back, going back, doing online research, looking at a white paper, looking at a podcast interview, asking the CEO, having a committee meeting, vetting the vendors, having a call with the vendors, and it just keeps going all over the place, right? You until they ultimately make a decision, yeah?

Tom Schwab  31:25

And, and sometimes it’s even people will take credit where it’s not.

Christian Klepp  31:30

Right. 

Tom Schwab  31:31

And Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz and SparkToro, he gives a great example, right? You hear Rand talk at the inbound conference with HubSpot, right? And you’re like, Oh, this guy is smart. I’m going to go to his website and sign up. Well, you go there, but you misspell the name whatever Google brings it to you there, and Google is going to say, I brought you. I brought you that traffic. Great, right? Now, you start to sign up. But, you know, you get distracted, something happens, and you have to leave, and Facebook retargeting brings it back there. A couple days later, you see an ad on Facebook, and you go back and you sign up. Now Facebook is going to say, we brought you all of that. Now, what’s true, is it Facebook? Is it Google? Well, I would argue that none of that would have happened if you wouldn’t have seen Rand speaking at inbound, if you wouldn’t have heard Rand on a podcast, right? And there’s this idea that everything has to be attributed, right? And unfortunately, the people that can attribute everything or claiming success for everything, right? If you believe that everything has to be attributed, then never again, you know, do an ad in a newspaper, or newspaper. I’m showing my age here. Never do an ad in a journal.

Christian Klepp  32:57

In the Yellow pages (laugh).

Tom Schwab  32:59

The Yellow Pages. Don’t do public speaking, don’t do podcasts, don’t do billboards, because I’m sorry, those all don’t get, you know that perfect attribution.

Christian Klepp  33:10

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Sir. I mean, you’ve given us plenty now, but like, provide us with, I would say these tips for somebody that’s listening to this conversation, all right, like if there’s a B2B marketer out there listening to Christian Klepp and Tom Schwab, having this conversation about generating better results through conversations and not funnels. What are the three to five things that you think marketers can take action on right now? 

Tom Schwab  33:39

First thing I would say is, do you believe what we’re saying? Right? Does this make sense? Right? Because it’s a big paradigm shift, right? Do you believe that you’re one funnel away and you’re just going to keep doubling down on what was working? Well, I can’t help you then, right? I see the world differently. All right. So think about that. 

Tom Schwab  34:00

I would also encourage you to have that discussion with the talent, right? The CEO, the who’s ever going to be speaking? Because you can be all for this idea of one conversation away, but if the talent, the speaker, doesn’t want to do it, then there’s no point in going forward. That’s the second one. 

Tom Schwab  34:22

The third one is to look at where you could start to have those conversations. And you know, it used to be, well, now we got to go to networking events. And, you know, buy a booth at this event. That’s the old world, right? Today. You can do it on podcast interviews. You can do it on physical stages. You can do it on webinars. And a great place to start testing that is a place where it doesn’t good cost a lot of money or time for the talent, right? So podcast interviews there, and some of our best clients are introverts, and you see this from a lot of CEOs, where they’re like, public speaking, sounds great. I don’t want to do it right, because giving a keynote, that’s tough, but if you can explain to them, No, we’re just going to get you on a podcast, right? You listen to podcasts, it’s a discussion, right? So, starting slow, making it work for them. So that’s the third thing. 

Tom Schwab  35:26

The fourth thing would be, make it fun for them. Make it easy for them, right? If it’s a chore, they’re not going to do it right? 

Tom Schwab  35:36

And then the fifth thing on there is, make sure you’ve got a system and a process behind it, right? This is not just sending your talent out there on a street corner to talk. No. Make sure you’ve got the data to find the right shows, right? The understanding of how podcasts are different than other media, right? So that you can set them up for success. And then, you know, even to the point of helping them the last question of every interview is going to be so, you know, Mr. CEO, you know, where can people find you? Where should they go? Make sure that you prep them for that, so that you can move people from being a passive listener to an active visitor to an engaged lead. You do those five things, and you’re going to be your CEO’s best friend, and they’re going to be talking to you and saying, Hey, when’s the next interview coming up? And now, once again, you’re not a you’re not a cost center, you’re a you’re a revenue center, and you’re a partner in helping them grow the business.

Christian Klepp  36:47

Absolutely strategic. All right. Fantastic. Let me just quickly recap that for the benefit of the listeners. So the first one is, do you believe what we’re saying? The second one is, having that crucial discussion with it, with the talent. The third one is where could you start to have those conversations, whether that’s a podcast, whether that’s a physical stage, whether that’s a webinar, starting slow. The fourth one is, which I really like is make it fun and make it easy for them, right? Because, of it, because if it’s a chore, or if they, if they start to, like, show some kind of hesitation, they’re not going to do it right? And the fifth one is, have a system and process behind it.

Tom Schwab  37:32

It’s not, it’s, it’s not reinventing the wheel, right? It’s been done before, and it’s the same thing that my grandfather did, you know? God rest his soul? He’d go to the country club, he’d go to the Rotary Club. He’d speak where his ideal customers were. He knew that when he got introduced, he could speak with them and get clients. It’s the same thing today. We’re just doing it with… 

Christian Klepp  37:59

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, sir, get up on your soapbox. I think you’ve actually been there already, but like, I’m gonna ask you to stay there. Stay there a little bit longer. What is the status quo that you passionately disagree with and why?

Tom Schwab  38:15

More is better, right? This maybe it’s an American thing, right? It’s got to be more and more and more, right? More is not better. Better is better, right? The best restaurant in town is not the $10 Chinese buffet all you can eat, right? 

Christian Klepp  38:34

Right.

Tom Schwab  38:35

It is the one with the small plates and the great quality. So I think this idea of we’ve got to have more. No, we’ve got to have better.

Christian Klepp  38:42

Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, there was one more question I forgot to ask you, because I know you were talking about attribution, and I know that some of these things can’t be measured all the time, but what if, if you had to measure them, what metrics should marketers be paying attention to?

Tom Schwab  39:02

For podcast interviews. I think once again, too often we start at the top of the funnel, right, and all that our boss cares about is the bottom of the funnel. So I think optimize start with the end in mind of things like, what clients did we get from it? What was the average sale price? What was the days to close? Things like that. Those can be very powerful in explaining why the strategy works. And then you can start going upstream from there, what offers worked best, what podcasts converted the best, going from there, but starting at the bottom of the funnel, not the top.

Christian Klepp  39:43

Yeah, that’s a great answer. And I think it’s going back to what you said earlier in the conversation. Marketers are great at like, showing everybody all this fluff, impressions, web traffic, SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead), and it’s like, you know when you’re presenting to the CEO or the C suite you got? To cut all that stuff out and just give it to them as it is. 

Tom Schwab  40:04

You want to be seen as a profit and a revenue source, not as an expense. 

Christian Klepp  40:10

Absolutely, absolutely, all right, my friend, here comes the bonus question. Hold on to your seats. So I have it on good authority that you’re a Navy veteran. And I think you brought it up already earlier on the conversation. So I’m going to ask you a, I’m going to say a US Naval History trivia question. Here we go. So the question is, who, who in history, said this, Damn the torpedoes, Captain Drayton, go ahead. Joy, full speed.

Tom Schwab  41:57

That was Farragut. He was Mobile Bay and the torpedoes. What he meant by that was mines. There were the mines in there, and for whatever reason, they weren’t working. They kept bouncing off of it, off the ships. And he just said, Damn, the torpedoes, you know, full speed ahead. And I think that’s a great thing for Marketers on a Mission, right? It’s not about being timid, it’s about going out there and Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.

Christian Klepp  42:32

Indeed, indeed. Well, lucky for them that the mines didn’t work, right? 

Tom Schwab  42:38

Once again, it’s like the things we believe, right? So a couple of them, it hit the hall already and they didn’t work. So as marketers, we can think, oh, this, this won’t work. Well, if we got a couple of bullet points, or shouldn’t say bullet right, a couple of data points that say this might work, well, maybe everybody else is wrong. Maybe, maybe it’s not dangerous here, maybe we should go full speed ahead on.

Tom Schwab  43:02

Exactly, exactly. Tom, as expected, this is a great conversation. Thanks again 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.

Tom Schwab  43:15

Yeah. So I had mentioned this before, right? How do you attribute the traffic? Send them to one place. Give them three ways to say Yes, right? Meet them where they are. So if you go to http://interviewvalet.com/b2bmission right? Everything Christian and I talk about, will be there. There’s a assessment. Will podcast interview marketing work for me? I wrote a book called Podcast Guest Profits, how to grow your business with the targeted interview strategy. You can buy it on Amazon, or if you go there, I’ll mail you a copy. If you’re in the US, if you’re overseas, I’ll email you a copy, and then I’ll put all my social media there, calendar scheduling link, if you’d like to talk about how you could use this to grow your brand, to grow your business, just go back to http://interviewvalet.com/b2bmission

Christian Klepp  44:13

Dynamite stuff, no pun intended. Tom, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Bill Rice. He’s the principal consultant of Bill Rice Strategy Group, where he helps FinTech companies scale their sales and revenue growth by implementing lead generation strategies. He’s also the Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of KALEIDICO, a digital marketing agency that specializes in helping mortgage lenders and law firms develop effective lead generation strategies. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:36

 Okay? Mr. Bill Rice, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Bill Rice  00:40

Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure. 

Christian Klepp  00:41

Right? Great to be connected. Great to have you on the show. Because, man, we are going to talk about a topic today that I think, Well, I don’t say I think, I hope, B2B marketers out there are going to listen carefully and they’re going to take notes, or if they, if they don’t want to take notes, they’re going to, like activate their transcription software and read that afterwards, right? Because we are going to get into a topic today that I think is going to be really helpful to the audience, right? 

Christian Klepp  01:09

So, yeah, let’s dive in. Okay, right? So Bill, you’re on a mission to help B2B companies to reach their potential through innovation, collaboration and excellence. So for this conversation, as I said, let’s focus on a topic that I think is extremely useful to B2B marketers, right? And that is how to create a 90 day B2B marketing plan to achieve fast and predictable growth. Let me just repeat that in case people didn’t hear how to create a 90 day B2B marketing plan to achieve fast and predictable growth. So let’s kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So first question is, why do you think this approach is digestible and more likely to succeed? And the second one is, where do you see B2B companies falling flat with their marketing plans?

Bill Rice  01:59

Yeah, absolutely. So in my experience, I found that the 90 day plan and that time period in particular is optimal. So it’s, it’s kind of the Goldilocks scenario. It’s not too long and it’s not too short. It has some nice features to it. 90 days is something that most of us can sort of envision, and it gives us the opportunity to plan, meaning it’s a little bit too long for you to just kind of wing it and do some things and sort of be very tactical. So you do have to do a plan, but it’s also short enough that you have to be discerning, you have to be focused in order to get things done. Can’t just throw everything in the kitchen sink into the plan. 

Bill Rice  02:43

And that really goes kind of to the second question is, what are they often, you know, mistake, or how do they fall flat and and this is kind of where I came to using especially as I start engagements, making sure that we start with a 90 day plan is because oftentimes marketing organizations have a tendency to make plans too big, too large. They try to sort of achieve everything, and they don’t do a really good job of time bounding things, figuring out and understanding how much they need to kind of set up foundationally to even be effective at any of their campaigns. They often don’t actually plan out campaigns in a sort of an organized way, and so they just sort of start throwing things at the wall, start running some Google ads, or start doing some email outreach. And it’s very haphazard. 

Bill Rice  03:35

They don’t have a good understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, what the metrics might be early on to see if you’re getting traction, because ultimately, we often don’t succeed immediately. We start to look for sort of trend lines and indications of traction, and then those things we optimize, and ultimately, hopefully are able to scale. And so that’s where I think these things work together. It gives us a really sort of tight, functional, time bound way to go at what we’re trying to achieve, but at the same time sort of prevents the age old common mistake of trying to do everything at once and being too big in your planning.

Christian Klepp  04:16

Yeah, man, that last point really resonated with me, because once upon a time, I was a product marketer in a fortune 500 company, and this was one of their best practices, is to come up with a five year plan, all right. And as you can imagine, Bill, you know where I’m going with this, the five year plan was 100 slides long, all right? And we spent at least four to five months working on that plan.

Bill Rice  04:43

Yeah, and so much changes in that time period. I mean, just and I’m sure we’ll get into this a little bit, but just like AI  burst on the scene and sort of changed everything in the landscape. So there’s always these little market factors we had back and this is something that affected me personally in our agency. See, but 2007-2008 in the US, we had a financial crisis that like changed all of the assumptions. So, although I’m not against sort of having a big vision and planning forward, you know, in out years or whatever, but putting sort of too much credence in that can really be, you know, it can set you up for sakes, because all those assumptions are probably going to change on you.

Christian Klepp  05:26

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the other, and I believe that was your point, too. The other problem with that is, if you spend so much time planning, that basically opens the door, especially in larger organizations and smaller ones too, it opens the door to analysis paralysis and opinionitis.

Bill Rice  05:43

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  05:44

Right? 

Bill Rice  05:44

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  05:45

Yeah, absolutely. 

Bill Rice  05:47

Yeah, no, I think you can. You can really get lost in that. You can also lose your edge, right? I mean, you’re spending so much time, and I see this a lot with marketing directors and senior level marketing folks, or even, you know folks that are new to an organization, a lot of times they haven’t done sort of the nitty gritty hands on stuff. So as they get into being strategic, because their role demands that they don’t have enough sort of tactical knowledge to know if those who are supporting them, maybe an agency or other marketing personnel are doing the right thing, right? They just don’t have a sense of that. So I think being too strategic, you can kind of lose that edge of like, what feet on the street marketing can accomplish, or should be accomplishing, or what tactics you should be using.

Christian Klepp  06:38

Totally agree, and that’s, as I mentioned before, that’s one of the objectives of the show. It’s to help the audience who are probably in that moving in that space that are a bit more on the strategic side but less of the tactical, and also serving those who are more tactical but not very strategic, right? So it’s always, it’s a bit of a balancing act, isn’t it? 

Bill Rice  07:02

For sure, for sure, it’s important to have, you know, facets of all of that in place, and as you go up, more strategic, like I said, knowing the tactical or having enough knowledge to make sure that your team, or, you know, like I said, your agency or whoever supporting you is kind of on the right track, right? Because you’re just kind of sitting in the tower and you’re hoping they get it right. You know, you could be surprised at the end of the quarter.

Christian Klepp  07:29

Yeah. I always jokingly used to call it sitting up on Mount Olympus and looking down at the land of the living right? 

Bill Rice  07:35

Yes, yes.

Christian Klepp  07:37

Yeah.

Bill Rice  07:37

Right. 

Christian Klepp  07:38

Fantastic. I’m going to move us on to the next question about key pitfalls that B2B marketers need to avoid when they’re coming up with this 90 day marketing plan and what they should be doing instead.

Bill Rice  07:51

Yeah, I think you know, as you’re building out the 90 day plan, some of the things that can kind of get you hung up on, is, what I always start with is, I think oftentimes we will lay down a plan that is very optimistic, idealistic. So I always start a 90 day plan with an inventory. So I want to inventory the organization, and again, depending on you know where you are in your role or entering an organization, if you’re if you’re new to the organizations particularly important, but even if you’ve been there for a while, a good inventory of what you’ve done before, what skill sets you have, what foundations or campaigns or platforms that you have built, and looking for the gaps. 

Bill Rice  08:40

So again, from a pitfall standpoint, it goes back to your Mount Olympus analogy, right? You don’t want to sit up there and be idealistic in your planning. And so I’ve found that a good inventory, asking a lot of questions, going cross functional, talking to your product people, talking to your sales folks, talking to your operations people, figuring out, sort of, you know what you have in detail, and then things that you’ve done before. And this is particularly true if you’re entering an organization as a new marketing executive or director, is to come in there and really don’t always try to, sort of, and I say this all the time, don’t try to defend your ego or intellect. Ask a lot of questions. See what has worked in the past, see what has been done. See if there’s any sort of analytics or metrics around what has been done. 

Bill Rice  09:29

And then one of my secret weapons, too, I talk cross functional a lot, is to talk to your sales counterparts, your operational counterparts, your product and your tech technology folks, a lot of times, those have been at other organizations, and they’ve seen some successful marketing in the context of what they do. And sometimes those can be as you’re doing this inventory, this can be really good resources, because that they most likely have seen some successful marketing strategies before on the types of things that they the reason they were brought in, the organization, the types of things they work on, and so they can be a really good resource. Again, try not to let your ego or your intellect be bruised. Go in with a lot of questions as you start to build the plan.

Christian Klepp  10:17

Absolutely, absolutely leave the ego out the door basically, right for sure? No, I think that’s a really good point. And I’m sure you’ll agree it’s important to find, for lack of a better description, internal champions that will also advocate this, not necessarily advocate you, but if you use this more collaborative approach, where you get other members of other business units or departments involved in the process, they will feel like they have a stake in this, right? As opposed to, oh yeah, marketing is doing something, not sure what it is, right, or they’re asking for our feedback about something, right? Like, then this is, this is the more collaborative approach, where they bought in because you’re asking, you know, you’re asking for their opinions. You’re asking for their input, things of that nature. 

Bill Rice  11:06

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from small startups all the way up to, you know, Fortune 500 companies. You know, to some degree, when you’re building out these plans, there’s kind of a business development, sales element to it, right? You do want to identify the pain points, what’s, what’s making their job hard? What can you do to make it easier? What can you leverage that they’ve already done? I think that’s a really kind of important skill to hone as you go in there, to again, to figure out in a sales sort of way, you know, what, what are their pains? What’s their vision? What are they looking to do? And that can be really helpful to nurture that champion sort of and collaborative sort of mentality as you start to build these things out.

Christian Klepp  11:52

Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s move on to the topic of market research and having the right strategy. So I know you said a couple of minutes ago, that folks shouldn’t spend too much time planning. And while I agree with that, it’s important to also do your homework, right? Like do the due diligence and what have you. But again, because a lot of this is time bound, because let’s face it, 90 days isn’t an awful lot of time in the grand scheme of things, right? So speed is also the name of the game, but you got to do it the right way. So here comes the question, so how can B2B companies and their marketing teams conduct just the right amount of research to formulate a plan they can implement?

Bill Rice  12:33

Yeah, so obviously, I come from the perspective of an agency, and so we have multiple clients, so one of the things that we do right off the bat is sort of, now this is done in Notion. So it’s digital, but we create a file, right? We want to create a file that gives us context around that company. So in that file is competitive research, product information, positioning, messaging, all those sorts of things. So even as an internal marketing director or executive, I think it’s really important to have those materials at your fingertips. So as you’re building new campaigns, or you’re building new marketing plans, you have a deep familiarity, or you’ve already done the base research on the product, where it sits in the market space. You know, how the audience is resonating with it, or a position. 

Bill Rice  13:25

Because, again, in B2B, there could be a lot of different, you know, phases to where your organization and your product is, like, is the market, you know, aware of the problem? Are they aware of the solution? Opportunity? Like, where are you in that cycle? So I think it’s really important from a research perspective. And this takes a little more time at the beginning, is to sort of assemble that core base around messaging, product information, how you position, how you want to position, and then, of course, those things you gathered in the inventory, what sort of platforms do you have available in order to run your campaigns on, you know, do you have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) that will allow you to run outreach campaigns? Do you have the capabilities to run, you know, LinkedIn campaigns? Are you reliant on paid advertising? Have those sorts of things like I said, assembled in that file, I think is really important. 

Bill Rice  14:19

And then the other thing that just necessary needs to be added, is AI has changed this immensely. So I can go in and this is getting better. I mean, the ChatGPT just, I think yesterday, released a deep research tool that allows you to even do more of this. But one of the things I love to do with AI is have it as a research assistant. So not only can it kind of go out in a more efficient way than I could searching the web and doing competitive but it can now also do some reasoning and some thinking. And then my favorite application of this is to. Actually give it a role. So this could be a role inside the organization as the product manager, could be a role as a potential ICP or ideal customer profile, and then ask it questions. 

Bill Rice  15:11

So an interview that I wouldn’t necessarily get the opportunity to do or it wouldn’t be time efficient. I can give ChatGPT, or my favorite generative AI tool a role, and then I can interview that person and get a lot of good information. And then the other sort of sizable benefit to AI is as a B2B marketer, having done this 20 plus years, I always say I’ve got my tried and true, my bread and butter that I know is going to work, and I probably is, is the thing I’m always going to do. But now I’m more open to kind of going to AI and saying, what’s the whole range of possibilities here? Like maybe I, you know, haven’t done certain types of campaigns traditionally, or I’m not as comfortable with, let’s say, Field Marketing and conference. I’m mainly sort of a digital guy, but like, are there opportunities in conference appearances? Are there opportunities in podcasting? Is there opportunities in video? Is there opportunities and again, some sort of field marketing that I haven’t thought about? AI is really good at looking broad, bringing you sort of all the possibilities, and then you can sync that up against your inventory and say, hey, well, in this particular organization, they have a real advantage, you know, they’ve got a lights out thought leadership executive team who’s comfortable on stage. And there’s a real, sort of conference opportunity or a thought leadership opportunity. So anyway, again, AI can help us sort of broaden our field of view. And so that’s kind of another little shortcut to research.

Christian Klepp  16:48

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, this wouldn’t be a podcast in 2025 if we didn’t talk about AI at some point, right? 

Bill Rice  16:56

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  16:57

No, but I mean, and I think that was your point, there is certainly a time and place for AI and that that is definitely one of those situations where it can help to expedite the process a little bit. Because, I mean, to your previous point, if you’re coming up with a 90 day marketing plan, you don’t have the luxury of conducting a six month like research, right? Because, again, it’s about speed, but it’s about doing things the right way, right? And doing things accurately, ethically, things of that nature.

Bill Rice  17:29

And you want to, you know, obviously maximize your probability for success, right? So, and in 90 days, again, with all of its advantages, the disadvantage is it’s a fairly quick period of time to get results so.

Christian Klepp  17:42

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Okay, my friend, we’re gonna come to like a very, I’m gonna say the juicy part of the conversation, right? Because this is where we start unpacking everything that you’ve that you’ve been talking about in the past couple of minutes. So walk us through this process of creating this 90 day marketing plan, specifically highlighting what the key steps are and what those key components are that need to be in this plan. 

Bill Rice  18:10

So, my framework generally has about five key components to what’s going to be in this plan, and then there’s a time component to it. So the first part you’ve already heard me talk, you know, pretty extensively about is that inventory process. I think this is an often missed opportunity to really leverage up, because, like we said, 90 days is a decent amount of time, but you’ve got to take some shortcuts. So that inventory is going to show you where you have points of leverage. 

Bill Rice  18:41

And then the second thing goes around, and at the top of every one of these programs and planning documents, if you will, there should be some very specific set of SMART goals. So we talked about Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and kind of Time bound. And time bound sort of is inherent in the 90 day plan. But I reiterate this, this sort of, that SMART framework is a good way to make sure that you, you have some goals in there that are well articulated, because too often this is where you drift off into the the Mount Olympus, and you get too lofty, and the plan becomes too big. So I think the SMART goals helps, again, keep some constraints on this, because they’re necessary. 

Bill Rice  19:25

The next section is a very specific action plan. And in this action plan needs to be who’s going to do it, and what are they going to do? So oftentimes, we’re really good at putting together lists or outlines of like, Hey, we’re going to do all these things. But then the missing component, and where we often fail is we’re not really sure who owns that. So that can be just a misstep of like, no one grabs the ball and runs with it. But the other thing that’s probably the more frequent misstep in this section, is. We don’t have the skill sets to do what we’re planning right? So we don’t have the expertise in Google ads. We don’t have a database full of excellent ICPs to run a successful email outreach. We don’t have the ability or the understanding of how to acquire audience in such a way to make a thought leadership or a social campaign work in our favor. And so the Action Plan gives us a good validation of like, do we have everything we need? And then, as I’m defining that, it becomes very clear who owns it, and this is sort of a checksum on do we have the skill set to actually execute? 

Bill Rice  20:46

Then the other thing that I like to do, because it helps the the overall team, feel a level of success, and if there’s an executive level above this plan that sort of is evaluating you as you’re executing, I like to have a section that carefully identifies the quick wins that I expect and the long term plays that I’m building. So again, that first 30 days in particular is probably going to be a little nerve wracking, because we probably got to set up some foundational stuff. And we’re probably not going to get a lot of actual action. And so to put in there some quick wins, some things that I know I can get, some sort of, you know, feel good impact is really powerful. And articulating, like, how I’m gonna do that is really important. And then for that executive level who’s kind of watching you and observing and hopefully getting and gaining trust in you. Those long term plays give them an understanding of what you’re building for and why you have to do some of these initial building steps, particularly in that first 30 days. 

Bill Rice  21:54

And then the last piece is, kind of the tools and resources section. So again, oftentimes, especially in sort of the modern era where a lot of this is digital or takes place in a sort of a virtual way, we need to make sure that we have the correct tools and resources. I mean, just simple things, if we’re going to run an outreach campaign, do we have a scheduling tool? Is that scheduling tool allow us to fully use our sales team, you know? Or is it like I’ve seen this before, is like one scheduling tool and then somehow we’re de conflicting, like, five sales people schedules, right? And so we don’t have the proper tool, or we haven’t set it up. So tools and resources are really important. Resources often goes to budget, too like, what are we going to have to be sort of resourceful in this plan and kind of use what we have at our disposal, and what are we going to sort of ask for, or try to expand to or capture some budget? And so I think that’s really important. So that’s kind of my five step framework to actually building out the plan and the steps I need to go through to make sure that the plan is viable at the end.

Christian Klepp  23:06

Wow. Just give me a second here. I think my hand is a little bit sore from all that writing. Well, fantastic framework, and just for the benefit of the audience, let me just repeat the five key components. Yeah. So Part one was the inventory process, which I totally agree with, right? I mean, sometimes you don’t have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel. There are assets in place. Some of them might be hidden and buried in some ancient archive, but, you know, there’s something there to work off of. Right? 

Christian Klepp  23:37

Number two, SMART goals, absolutely, because, and I think you really hit the nail on the head, let’s not, let’s not get too like, you know, all the way up there with, um, you know, we aspire to be the most innovative B2B tech company, and, you know, all of that kind of, like, fluffy language, right? Like, really, have something that, have something, I always say, have something that people can grab hold of right? 

Christian Klepp  24:03

Third one is a specific action plan, and I’m all about that, right? Because it’s, it’s really spelling out, like, Okay, so you’ve got the goals. Now, what exactly are you going to do? Who’s going to do it? Right? So, and also, what outcomes are you expecting, right? 

Bill Rice  24:20

Yeah, totally. 

Christian Klepp  24:21

And that, that next bit was, um, I hope I’m formulating this prof up properly, but it’s being able to manage expectations from the get go in terms of, these are the quick wins, and this is more long term. So people actually see that there is a, there is an end game here, right? 

Bill Rice  24:42

Absolutely. And that’s what gives you a little bit more room, you know, to maneuver in the than the plan.

Christian Klepp  24:48

Correct, correct. And then the last one being tools and resources. And I did have a follow up question on Part Five, because there is a temptation. And I’m sure you know what I mean by this, there’s. A temptation to like, okay, let’s just have a tool for everything, right? Because that’s just gonna make the work so much easier. And what sometimes ends up happening is, you’ve got too many tools, and all of these tools somehow don’t sync with each other, or, you know, the software is not they’re not talking to one another, and it ends up being this big mess. How do you in your experience? How do you prevent that from happening?

Bill Rice  25:25

Simplicity, you know, is often kind of the best solution, right? Is like, what is the simplest test we can do? What is the simplest campaign we can run to see the initial traction? What’s kind of the most reasonable investment we can make to see if this is going to work, probably in the B2B space. One of the more specific example of this, which is almost always a disaster, is in the CRM space, right? So oftentimes we’re running some sort of outreach campaign, or we’re leveraging our customer base, or a series of list, pipelines. 

Bill Rice  26:10

And so in comes the marketing. Hey, we’re going to do these kind of campaigns. Our CRM won’t let me do like what I’m familiar with. So let’s throw out the CRM system. Let’s implement a new one that’s got all these bells and whistles. We had this great demo. They say they can do everything for us. And the fact of the matter is, you know, in the CRM marketplace in particular, which I think in this stat, I think is still accurate, it is the largest meaning, the most solutions in a software space, by like, exponential amount. So there’s so many different solutions, but they’re roughly all, you know, parity. You know, they’re all about the same, right? 

Bill Rice  26:55

So, on the tools front, what I often say is, how can we use the least amount of tools, the least amount of complexity? And again, it goes back to your inventory. Let’s leverage the resources and skill sets that we have, because if you have someone administering the CRM, or you have all your sales people on a CRM, and you want to do some outreach to maybe an age set of leads in that CRM. So it’s past, you know, deals that you’ve tried to work on, or clients, or you want to engage new folks, like, I bet someone in that organization who probably has is deeply seated in that CRM can help you do what you’re trying to accomplish. Or, if not, like, again, be flexible. So I think on the tools front, I think you’ve hit on a, you know, a really important problem set to try to avoid is, let’s not get too complex. Let’s not assume that any technology is going to be a panacea and do all my work for me. And let’s try to use the simplest and the least amount of complexity inside of this 90 day plan. And then from there, we’ll know exactly what we need to leverage and scale. I think, at that point of trying to scale something, that’s where technology becomes a big leverage point, and you can be a little bit more considered in sort of analyzing the technology. But most everything you need to do, especially in your first 90 day plan, you probably should be doing less with tools and technology.

Christian Klepp  27:06

Absolutely, absolutely do not be seduced by the shiny objects.

Bill Rice  28:34

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  28:35

Okay, so Bill, you’ve given us a lot now, but if there’s somebody out there who’s a B2B marketer that’s listening to this. What are three things that you think they can do right now to start creating this 90 day marketing plan?

Bill Rice  28:49

I think you know the first thing, and this helps in a lot of things in life, in your career, is start building some cross functional relationships, right? So within your organization, make sure you know you’ve got a close working relationship with the sales director, the product folks in particular, especially B2B, there’s usually some sort of product or service delivery involved here. So whoever is directly involved in developing that product or service and then interfacing with the customers, build those relationships. I can’t talk enough about the inventory, like really understand what you have available in your organization, what they do well, you know. What skill sets and talent your people have, again, cross functionally, right? Not just within your marketing department, but what you know is, is your CEO? Is your CMO, is your COO like, are they a personality? You know, is it somebody that you can leverage for thought leadership, or, again, really do a nice assessment of that. 

Bill Rice  29:56

And then I think the other thing is, like we’ve talked a lot about and why I came to this sort of 90 day plan, is try to simplify what you’re trying to accomplish. So instead of trying to boil the ocean with your marketing strategy, let’s pick some very specific, you know, well defined, things that we’re going to do that can give you some quick successes. Because again, depending on where you are in your phase or your role, whether you’re new or maybe you’ve been in there for a while and haven’t had really a big win for a while, you’re probably in some sort of trust building phase. And so getting something that is small and can be accomplished, and you have high confidence in and maybe in some degrees, you have more control of your success and your performance can be a really good way to sort of bite size some of that, get some wins, build some trust, and then from there, you can again, whether it’s your role or your campaigns or your overall marketing strategy. Once you get some of that traction and trust, then you can, of course, scale from there and do really big things.

Christian Klepp  31:07

Absolutely, absolutely. So fantastic. There was something that you said which is such a great segue into the next question about metrics. So you’ve been talking a lot about quick wins. Is there a way that you can, I wouldn’t say, quantify, but like, talk to us about metrics when it comes to quick wins, like, what should B2B marketers be paying attention to?

Bill Rice  31:29

I mean, I think at the highest level, I mean, ultimately, we’re trying to generally and B2B marketing, we’re trying to give sales more opportunities, right? So that’s, that’s probably our kind of overarching metric. And I think a lot of times we forget that, like we’ll do things that, like, look pretty, they feel good. The CEO likes it when he sees it online, and stuff like that. So we can, we can get sort of intoxicated with just like, the creativity of it, and doing something clever or interesting. So I think keeping a North Star of hey, we’re trying to create as many opportunities, high quality opportunities, as we can, for sale, as for sales, as that overarching, sort of, you know, metric. And then I think kind of going the opposite direction as we’re building these sort of bite-size early campaigns or things that we’re trying to do, be a little more forgiving of those metrics. So looking for things that are trend lines or that are traction so that could be our audience is growing in a particular channel or on a particular platform, or our traffic is starting to increase the and then you can, kind of, you can start to stair step it, like, Okay, I’ve got traffic and audience. Now I’m getting engagement. Okay, now I’m getting engagement, now I’m getting conversion, and now I’ve got conversion. Those are opportunities. What is the quality of those opportunities? So I think that’s kind of the other piece and metrics is be specific, oftentimes, to the channel, and what’s important in the channel that you’re running campaigns, and what are the most appropriate metrics there, and then sort of stair stepping them up to your ultimate goal, which is, again, more opportunities for sales.

Christian Klepp  33:17

Absolutely, absolutely. And I like that you kept it simple, because especially when it comes to metrics and attributes, I mean, you can go down this deep rabbit hole, yeah, right, or you just get caught up, like, measuring the wrong metrics or paying attention to the wrong metrics. I should say, right? 

Bill Rice  33:34

Yeah. Well, that’s a good like realm where we talk about starting small and building larger like, I love dashboards, and I love being able to get in there and look at the data in real time and see if we’re moving the needle. But sometimes people will start a six month program to sort of aggregate all of their marketing analytics get the right dash and again. So then you get back into that five year plan sort of scenario, and you know, you could be fired before the dashboard comes alive, right? So we’ve got to be discerning when we’re looking at these projects.

Christian Klepp  34:08

Absolutely, absolutely, all right, my friend soap box time, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why? 

Bill Rice  34:20

I think, you know, one of the status quos that I see a lot is we get stuck in just sort of the old way of doing B2B marketing. And quite honestly, a lot of B2B marketing has been a heavy reliance on heroics from our sales operations and teams, right? So I’m a big believer in collaborating very tightly. Sometimes the team now with kind of this CRO or Chief Revenue Officer thing, sometimes these teams are blended, which I’m a fan of. So as tightly as we can get for marketing supporting sales. And not forcing the sales operations to do his heroics and to even out the distribution of performers on the sales team. Because of that heroics, a lot of times you’ll see, and I hate when I see this in an organization, is like, you’ll see like 10% or maybe 5% of the sales teams are the top performers. They do 80. You know, it’s the 80/20 rule. But it doesn’t need to be like that. If we’re doing B2B marketing appropriately, and we’re giving a lot of opportunities to sales, that distribution should blend out, and we should be getting more from the whole team, sort of lifting all boats, so sort of sitting back as a B2B marketer, and just thinking that our only role is to provide beautiful sales collateral to heroic sales people, I think is probably what you see in most organizations. And it’s really a disservice to not only the sales operations, but your organization, just in general, in aggregate, not just the marketing team, is going to underperform, if that’s your approach. And I still see that as a big, pretty common model.

Christian Klepp  36:15

Absolutely, absolutely, it has to be a collaborative effort. The marketing team has to be more visible, and that’s one of the reasons why I started the show, right? Because the way that marketers, in order for marketers to initiate that change, they need to be the change. They need to evolve. They need to push themselves out there and not sit in their Ivory Tower or Mount Olympus, you know, like, pick your analogy, right? Absolutely, totally agree with that. All right, here we go. Bonus Question time. So I have it in good authority that you used to be in the Air Force, so I thought it’d be a good idea to, like, ask you some trivia questions linked to well Top Gun.

Bill Rice  37:02

Well, that’s Navy, but we won’t hold that against you, so.

Christian Klepp  37:08

Something with a plane in it, but I love it.

Bill Rice  37:11

One of my favorites. Hopefully I’ll do well. 

Christian Klepp  37:14

So I’m gonna read you a quote, and all you need to do, Bill is tell me which character said it. All right, so here we go. I’m gonna try to do it in the person’s voice, but you know, let’s see how it goes. “You’ve been busted. You lost your qualifications, a section leader three times put and hacked twice by me, with a history of high speed passes or five air control towers and one Admiral’s daughter.”

Bill Rice  37:42

I’m not gonna get his name right, but it was the commander on the aircraft carrier right after he and goose did their high speed pass. 

Christian Klepp  37:51

Oh, the flyby. Yes, yep, yes. So the character’s name is Stinger. 

Bill Rice  37:55

Stinger, okay.

Christian Klepp  37:57

Played by the actor James Tolkan, who today is 92 or 93.

Bill Rice  38:03

Wow, yeah, he always played a tough guy. I like him, he is a good actor.

Christian Klepp  38:07

Yeah, and at least in Top Gun, he had the, he had the cigar in his mouth, right?

Bill Rice  38:12

Which would not have flown.

Christian Klepp  38:15

I mean, by today’s standards, I mean just the thought of smoking in an aircraft carrier, right?

Bill Rice  38:20

Like, yeah, I know I was an Air Force officer, and it was even back in the day, and I’m older, but even back in the day, it was kind of frowned on to smoke period. And then in those kind of facilities like the, and I’m not a Navy guy, obviously, Air Force, but I do know that, like, the number one, like, worst, scariest thing is a fire on a ship. So I guarantee you that was not standard protocol.

Christian Klepp  38:47

There are some clues. There are some clues. But like, you know, thank you for being such a good sport, and my apologies for mixing that up. But like,

Bill Rice  38:54

Oh no, it’s all good. Yeah, I won’t go into I’ve got some funny stories around that, so.

Christian Klepp  39:01

I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do, Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how folks thought that can get in touch with you. 

Bill Rice  39:14

Yeah, so obviously, I’m Bill Rice. I’ve been doing B2B and marketing in general for 20 plus years. I’m probably longer than that, but we won’t, we won’t fully disclose how many years. I have an interesting sort of thread as to how I got into marketing. Like you said, I was in the Air Force. I did counter intelligence and and oftentimes people are interested by like, go from Intel to marketing. But one of the things that’s always been fascinating to me, and I think is really important for B2B marketers, to try to harness a little bit, is one of the things that we did in Intel, particularly as we were starting to do what’s now sort of categorized as information warfare and some more digital sort of Intel activities, was we were constantly looking for patterns to tell us what was going on, or if something was going on. 

Bill Rice  40:04

Marketing has become more and more analytical, and so I think as you’re building plans again, looking for those trends, those patterns, as you go into your organization, using some of those, some of that pattern recognition to give you an advantage as you kind of move into a new organization, or try to kind of re-energize your organization for more success. That can be really valuable. So that’s kind of my background. As far as what I do today, I have actually two agencies that I work with. One is more B2C focused. And then, of course, what we’ve been talking about B2B focused is Bill Rice Strategy Group. And in the context of that, we help organizations come in there build those strategies at very different levels and phases, right all the way from strategic planning to full execution. And so we love it, because we get to see a lot of different use cases and examples, and in particularly, we focus generally on fintech. And so that’s a really exciting space right now. We’re seeing blockchain, we’re seeing AI, we’re seeing all kinds of, almost a full transformation of a lot of our financial services and financial institutions and infrastructure, and we’re heavily involved in that, and it’s sort of fun space to be kind of on the edge as we move forward and doing marketing for those really interesting innovations.

Christian Klepp  41:33

Fantastic. That’s a heck of a background story. But how can people get in touch with you?

Bill Rice  41:38

Yeah, so there’s really kind of two ways. Obviously, you can go to https://billricestrategy.com/, that’s our website. I encourage people to get on my newsletter, https://www.myexecutivebrief.com/ the neat thing about that is we’re constantly trying to equip executives, whether this is something, a space you’re moving into, to really give you that full view, because we’re curating, sort of the most important things and trends that you need to be on top of. And then, of course, LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn, you can find me at Bill Rice. I was early, so if you search for Bill Rice, you’re probably going to find me relatively quickly. Always involved there, doing both video and content, to try to give back as much as I can. I love the education portion of what I do, so you’ll definitely find me and can interact with me on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp  42:27

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

Bill Rice  42:33

All right. Awesome. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. 

Christian Klepp  42:36

Thanks. Bye for now. 

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be speaking with James Hurman. He’s part entrepreneur, part brand strategist, part VC (Venture Capital), part advertising effectiveness expert, part company leader and part author. He’s also the founder of Previously Unavailable, an Innovation Studio that provides new product, brand and business, design and development, innovation and customer experience consulting. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:36

Okay. Mr. James Hurman, welcome to the show, Sir. 

James Hurman  00:41

Thanks, Christian. It’s awesome to be here all the way from New Zealand, the first cloudy day we’ve had in ages. It’s been a beautiful summer here and now we’re, yeah, heading into cloudier times. 

Christian Klepp  00:54

Ah, then you should, you should come to Toronto, because we’ve had cloudy days for about six months, but like a pretty long and cold winter, but we’re slowly coming out of that. The snow is melting and what have you. So we’re looking forward to spring, and I know that in the southern hemisphere, it’s the reverse, and that that just makes it all interesting, doesn’t it? 

James Hurman  01:14

Sure it does. 

Christian Klepp  01:15

James, I’m so glad to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because this topic, I think, is also near and dear to my heart, and I will keep the audience in suspense for a little while longer before we dive into it. All right, so I’m just going to start off by saying that you’ve been on a mission to help companies understand that when they’re more creative, they’re more successful. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I would say is going to be very useful and pertinent to B2B marketers. So what am I talking about? It’s how advertising with great creative qualities leads to better results. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with this question, why do you think that creativity is so often overlooked in B2B?

James Hurman  02:03

Yeah, I think there’s probably a number of reasons. One is that B2B hasn’t got into the habit of being creative, right in the same way that B2C marketers have been for a long time. And so that can make it feel, I think, to B2B marketers, that creativity is not the way, because not many people are doing creativity and and and reach a sort of erroneous conclusion, I think that, you know, others have figured out how marketing works and B2B, and it’s not creative, and that’s how it works. So that’s how we should do it, which the data doesn’t support. 

James Hurman  02:39

I think the other reason is we tend to think of B2B, you know, business as a serious thing, right? And we ought to be, you know, very professional in business, and doing anything that’s too kind of fun or too creative might leave people with the impression that we’re not a serious business, right? Which, again, the data does not support. And I remember a long, a long time ago now, it was probably back in the kind of mid 2000s. I worked, I was the planner on the Vodafone Business in New Zealand, so big telco, and they had obviously a consumer retail kind of side to their business, and they had a business team, right? And they were a B2B, telco too. And their business team were really, really resistant to the consumer brand doing anything that was kind of too fun or too creative, because they thought that it would impact poorly on their business customers perceptions of Vodafone being a serious business telco provider. 

James Hurman  03:54

And I remember looking at the looking at the data and and being able to show them that actually, if you look at their business brand metrics around, you know, trust and professionalism and all that kind of stuff, when the consumer side of the business did do something that was creative and fun and sort of noisy, and, you know, they the business metrics went up, not down, right? 

James Hurman  04:21

And so we could prove pretty easily, right, that when the consumer side of the business did something really creative, the business side of the business did better because of it. And so this kind of idea that we, you know, we mustn’t be too fun or creative and business, you know, it’s it doesn’t play out in the data and the reality and so so I think, you know, that’s probably the other reason people just feel like it’s sort of not the right thing to do. But in fact, certainly in my experience and when we look into, you know, the data, or in B2B advertising effectiveness. Uh, creativity works just the same for businesses as it does for consumer brands. 

Christian Klepp  05:06

Absolutely, absolutely. And I know we’re gonna get into the meat of that in a second, but I did have one follow up question for you, James, and I’m probably, I’m almost confident you’ve heard this more times than you care to account, especially in the world of B2B marketing, I say there’s, there’s a camp that says, oh, you know what? We should draw inspiration from B2C and use those B2C playbooks for B2B marketing, because, you know, it’s to inject that much more creativity into all these initiatives that we’re rolling out. But I’ve also encountered B2B marketers from the other camp that are saying that that’s absolute nonsense, and that they’re saying, Oh, that’s a very dangerous mindset to have, because B2B doesn’t operate the same way. What are your thoughts on that? 

James Hurman  05:57

I think there are certainly some differences in B2B marketing, right? So I think there are certain aspects, like, you know, there’s a lot of sort of sales enablement and B2B marketing, right? So, so really trying to generate warm leads for the sales team and, and that’s different in B2C. You don’t usually have that sort of, that, same sort of link between sales and marketing. 

James Hurman  06:24

I think there are certain channel differences, like, you know, with our B2B brands here in New Zealand, we use LinkedIn lots, right? We do lots of marketing on LinkedIn, which we wouldn’t really do for our consumer brands. So there are some differences, right? The audience is a bit different. The way, the way it all works, is a bit different. But I’m probably talking about, you know, between 2% and 5% of of marketing is different and needs to be, kind of, you know, approached slightly differently. The other 95% is exactly the same. The way that brands grow, the way that advertising works, is exactly the same in B2B as it is in B2C. And, you know, and we’ve really, over the last, certainly, kind of 15 years, as we’ve gotten, you know, much more advertising and marketing effectiveness data, much more of a marketing science community. Those organizations and researchers have now done really, really significant research on how marketing and advertising really do work, and that’s all very evidence based and backed up with, you know, big data sets and and principles that are found uniformly across those data sets and, and that’s largely, you know, at the start, largely happened in B2C. 

James Hurman  07:54

And then what happened was two really clever guys, John and Peter from LinkedIn B2B Institute, they started to ask us and the effectiveness community, can we, kind of, can we replicate these studies using B2B data? And so the Ehrenberg-Bass did a big, a big project with LinkedIn B2B Institute to see do the principles in how brands grow, and the principles that they’ve found at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, do they hold true and B2B? And they found, they absolutely did. Peter Field and Les Binet, you know, the principles in big studies, like The Long and the Short of It, do they hold true and B2B? Yes, they do. Me what the… We reproduced, a big study I did called the Effectiveness Code with B2B brands. Do the principles hold true? Yes, they do. And so we’ve really, there’s been a lot of work to kind of really check. You know, does marketing work differently in B2B, and can we find differences? And as I say, we can find some small differences, but largely it’s it’s all, it’s all just the same. 

James Hurman  09:06

So I think using the B2C playbook, I wouldn’t call it using the B2C playbook. I think that language is like, it does feel like, why are we using a  B2C playbook in B2B? I would actually reference it as using the marketing playbook, which has now been really well established, proven out with a great deal of evidence, and so I would regard it as using the kind of evidence based marketing playbook in B2B. That would be, you know, that would be better language to use. And if you do use that playbook, the results are incredibly predictable. So it’s, you know, it’s really good to understand all of that marketing science and effectiveness research and apply it to our brands, because it really does work.

Speaker 1  09:56

Absolutely, absolutely, I love how you keep going back to… that it’s evidence based, and going back to the data that’s available to prove this, and it’s the planner in you are coming out, obviously.

James Hurman  10:09

Yeah, and I think we should, you know, we ought to be evidence based, right? We ought to take the scientific approach to this, and we can, and we have, and I think it’s a really good thing that marketing and advertising have gone from, you know, up until the 2000s really being a whole lot of reckons about how these things work, and lots of sort of noisy voices and opinions and philosophy and all the rest of it to this century really kind of going, Okay, well, let’s really test that out. You know, which of those philosophies and perspectives and ideas are right and which are wrong? 

James Hurman  10:46

And now that we’ve got these huge data sets of effectiveness data, we can, we can look at those and ask those questions. You know, how do things work? Do they work in the way that we thought, that they did? Do they not? And what we’ve found is that sometimes we were right, and things do work the way we thought, and sometimes we were dead wrong and they didn’t. They, in fact, don’t work the way that we thought. And that’s, that’s a real enlightenment, right? That’s an enlightenment moment for marketing and advertising, and it’s awesome that it’s happened and so. So, you know, there’s no reason not to understand all of that and apply it to what we do.

Christian Klepp  10:46

Absolutely, absolutely. So I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is, what are you know from your point of view, what are some of the untapped opportunities you see in B2B when it comes to creative work?

James Hurman  11:38

Ah, there are just so many untapped opportunities. 

Christian Klepp  11:41

I know, I know. 

James Hurman  11:45

I think what the like the biggest untapped opportunity is just the fact that very few B2B brands market themselves particularly well. And when you’re in that environment like, over my career, I’ve really, like, there been so many examples of going into a category that maybe you know is historically not really being very creative and doing more creative things. And you actually stand out in that context a whole lot more than if you go into categories where there’s already lots of creativity, right? 

James Hurman  12:25

So B2B is, is a world where there hasn’t been much creativity, there hasn’t been much really, truly great brand building and so you it’s quite easy to gain an advantage over your competitors and your category as a B2B brand, if you deploy creativity in the right way, because very few others are doing it. And so that presents like an amazing opportunity, I think, and I think about what we did. So we in our company, we create companies. So we created a brand tracking business called Tracksuit, which now operates in North America and your market. And it’s growing pretty fast up there, and and, and, you know, market research has not, you know, traditionally been the most exciting end of marketing and advertising, and the market research brands are pretty dull, right? 

James Hurman  13:25

And what we did when we created Tracksuit was we thought, you know, we need to be a brand that celebrates brand building that is out there in the industry being a kind of a… being a really fun partner to marketers and brand builders and so we like when I do, when I speak on behalf of Tracksuit at conferences, I wear a tracksuit, right? Because tracksuits are kind of funny and fun and cool and, and the whole brand, really is, it’s packed with kind of energy and fun and spirit and, you know, and, and the products the same, you know, it’s kind of, it’s really beautifully designed product. And again, which is, stands against a lot of the, you know, traditionally quite, quite poor or quite clunky design in the market research industry. And we are just killing it right where Tracksuit is one of the fastest growing startups ever out of New Zealand. We are just on the most amazing growth path. As people are drawn toward the Tracksuit brand. They want to be part of this world. And, you know, and we are, you know, a brand that’s very creative and very fun. And, you know, if you follow the, you know, the idea that business doesn’t care for that sort of stuff, then we should not be growing as quickly as we’re growing, right? 

James Hurman  14:59

And so I think, you know, for us going into market research, and we’ve now done two companies and in that space, Tracksuit so, and another one called Ideally. Ideally is kind of rapid research platform for very fast, very affordable kind of concept testing. So it’s a real kind of, it’s a great research platform for creativity and that’s also, you know, similarly, that’s a really beautifully designed, fun brand out in the world doing cool stuff and, and that’s also growing very, very, very quickly. And so what we’ve done is gone. We can go into this kind of historically boring category. We can be fun cool brands. And that will give us a huge advantage over all of the others. And that is playing out absolutely, you know, right? Those two companies have created in the last four years, something in the order of $400 million in enterprise value. So, you know, that’s the opportunity, I think, to if you’re playing in a B2B category, and it’s pretty dull, and you are the one that like actually looks fun and attractive and creative and all the rest of it, you will have a big advantage over your competitors.

Christian Klepp  16:10

Wow, that’s incredible. And we’ll be sure to include the links to those companies in the show notes. Thanks for sharing that, James, you actually answered… kind of answer, one of the follow up questions I had, right? Because I’ve been dealing with this like pretty much throughout my professional career, right? Because I’ve been mostly on the B2B side of things, and I’ve always been running up against this brick wall, if you will, where people are like, No, we can’t be that creative because it’s B2B. I mean, you know, we’ve had this conversation before, right? It’s going to be factual, it’s going to be logical, it shouldn’t have any emotion in it. 

Christian Klepp  16:48

And at the end of the day, Christian, boring wins in B2B, right? And I know that you strongly disagree with that, right? And the second bit, which you’ve kind of answered already, but I’d like to unpack that a bit further, because I know you can answer that, but for those folks who are B2B marketers out there that are listening to this conversation that you and I are having and thinking to themselves, you know what this James guy has really inspired me to like do something different, but I’m never going to get buy in to do something creative from a senior management consisting of, well, people in a non marketing role, right? So here comes the question, what advice would you give them to address or deal with this pushback? 

James Hurman  17:37

Yeah, and it’s the same in B2C, frankly, right the you know, I think in B2C, although the marketers, at least the ones that I deal with, are pretty fluent in this kind of marketing science, effectiveness research stuff, they kind of know it, they understand it, they buy into it, they want to do it. But often they have non marketing stakeholders within their B2C organizations that are pretty resistant to some of the ideas because their views were formed a long time ago about how marketing works when we, you know, there were lots of fallacious ideas kind of floating around. And so often it’s the same in B2C. You know, how do we convince our non marketing stakeholders to let us do the work that we know we ought to be doing. 

James Hurman  18:21

And so in B2B, just like in B2C, it’s about education. There’s no one easy answer or one quick chart that I can give you, that you can show, you know, show your executive team or your board or whoever, and they’ll instantly become advocates for all of the, you know, right ways to do marketing. You’ve got to take them on a journey, and it does take a bit of time, and it requires educating them with all of this data and with all of this research and and showing that to them, and showing it to them many times over time, you know, and really setting up a, you know, almost a function within your marketing team, which is about educating the non marketing stakeholders who have influence over the process, and going to them and saying, look, we’ve got, we’ve now got a lot of evidence right about how things work and and I really want to take you through that so that we can both be working from the same kind of body of knowledge as we’re decision making about what we do and what we don’t do. And so actually gathering up all of that stuff, gather up the stuff from the B2B Institute. 

James Hurman  19:34

It’s all free. You can access it. You don’t need to pay them anything to do that. You know, read through all of that and figure out what the important bits of data that we need to show the rest of the business to help them understand how we’re seeing things and that’s a process that, like I said before, it’s not one and done. It would be great if it was, but it just doesn’t. You need to kind of spend time. And, you know, trying to on a regular rhythm, kind of get together with those people, show them, remind them, you know, and eventually they will come around. You know, people are teachable. And most people, you know, it’s, it’s not that they’re stopping you because they’re idiots or it’s because they’ve just, they’ve got an idea about how things work that’s been stuck in their heads for ages, and you need to sort of help them unlearn that and learn what the evidence really says. And so take them on that journey. That’s the way to do it. 

Christian Klepp  20:39

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It certainly is a journey. And as I like to say, You got to roll that out in phases, right? Like, similar to the way that you would roll out a campaign, the way that you would educate senior management is in stages. Because if you give it to them in one go, it’s just going to be overwhelming. 

James Hurman  20:59

Yeah. It’s totally Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  21:00

It’s like, if a CFO came to you one day and, you know, he started talking like, you know, talking about financials, and he walks you through that in one hour, your head will melt.

James Hurman  21:11

Exactly, yeah. So you do it over time. Chunk it down. Do it over time. Keep reminding and eventually, you know, eventually they’ll come around. I think the other thing that is, sometimes there’s quite an aha moment for people, is this reality that in any market, whether it’s a B2B or B2C, market, doesn’t matter. In any market, at any point in time, there’s a small group of people who are in the market and ready to buy, and there’s a much larger group of people who will definitely come into the category at some point in future, but are not ready to buy just yet. 

James Hurman  21:53

Now, when I talk at conferences, I often do this, this audience participation thing, where I say, you know, can you put your hand up if you’re in the process of buying a new mobile phone at the moment? And say, there’s 100 people, you know, maybe two or three of them put their hand up. And then I say, Okay, can you put your hand up if you think you’ll buy a new mobile phone sometime in the next two years? And everyone puts their hands up, right? And that’s a demonstration of the fact that in any market, there’s a few people that are in the market ready to buy right now and a whole lot of people who aren’t. 

James Hurman  22:26

And we’ve got this, we’ve one of the sort of myths about how marketing and advertising works is that it causes sales to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, like this sort of funny idea that if we go out with a great ad, it will make people buy. In fact, what advertising does in the short term is it just speaks to that small group who are in the market, and hopefully says something that, you know, means that they’ll choose us instead of our competitors. But it doesn’t make people that aren’t in the market come into the market. You know, very, very rarely does that happen and B2B, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute estimated that about 5% of people are in B2B. Customers are in market at any point in time, and about 95% of them are not, but they will come into the category later. 

James Hurman  23:18

Now, the thing about marketing and building brands like how it works is that we’ve got two jobs to do. One is to do that sort of short term, quite sales focused stuff, to convert the current demand in the market. And our other job is to create future demand by warming up all of those people who come into the category, you know, next month or next year, making them more familiar with us and making them feel good about us, so that when they come into the category, they gravitate towards us and they spend more with us. You know, that’s really what the role of brand building is, is all about, and I’ve recently done some research in in the United States markets, just assessing the shape of different categories. So, you know, for example, in the in the telco, telecom, mobile phone, kind of space, same as I do my thing on stage, and it shows that there’s probably about 10% of people in the market for a new mobile phone at any, you know, any given kind of you know, month or whatever, and and 90% are not, but they will come to the category later. 

James Hurman  24:28

And most categories, with the exception of something like milk, which is bought every day, just about nothing is bought every day, right? Even, like most FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) categories, like you’ll buy from that category maybe once every six months, something like that. And so most people spend most of their time, not in the market, but they will come into later. That’s often, often quite a kind of eye opener for people to think about their marketing like that. You know, marketing is not sales. Sales is sitting in front of genuine kind of, you know, qualified leads, and giving them a sales pitch because they are in the market and they’re ready to buy, marketing is not doing that, right? Marketing is talking to a much broader audience, of people who are not qualified leads. They will come into the category later. We can do the salesy stuff with them, but in terms of warming them up, we need to talk to that much bigger audience and grow our familiarity. 

James Hurman  25:22

You know, research shows that in B2B procurement processes, if you have low brand familiarity, like you’re a brand that hasn’t been, you know, is not familiar to the procurement team or whoever’s making the decision on what they purchase. If you’re an unknown, or if you’re unfamiliar, you are not likely to be chosen. Doesn’t matter how good your product is. Doesn’t matter how good you know the proposal that you put in is, procurement teams, businesses, B2B buyers. They gravitate towards brands that they were familiar with before the procurement process started. And that’s exactly how it works in B2C. It’s exactly how marketing works everywhere. So a big part of our job is to make sure that we don’t get out of that procurement list, and we’re really unfamiliar brand to the procurement team or the people that are making the decision. We’ve got to do that work to give ourselves a much greater chance of making the sale. So that’s what brand building is in B2B, just as it is in B2C.

Christian Klepp  26:23

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It’s a trust and credibility building exercise, really. And, you know, I’m going to oversimplify what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, but it’s the whole like, know, like and trust, yeah?

James Hurman  26:36

You know what it’s not even that like, trust and credibility. Like, yeah, sort of but that doesn’t mean we need to do ads that go for trust and credibility and have also your sensible information. It’s really like, a big, big, big part of it, Christian, is just being familiar.

Christian Klepp  26:56

Yes. 

James Hurman  26:57

Right? Just having people have heard your brand name and seen it around a bunch, right? That does most of the heavy lifting, just that familiarity. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t know just about anything about you, or you haven’t done anything to convince them that your products are very good and, you know, trustworthy, and all the rest of it, like familiarity actually breeds trust by itself. We tend to, you know, our human brain, the way that we are wired, we automatically trust things that we’re more familiar with more right? And, and that’s, you know, and that is just that’s been proven out in the behavioral science. The familiarity bias is a very real thing. We choose things that we’re more familiar with, despite them often not being, you know, functionally the better choice. And that’s how it is.

Christian Klepp  27:49

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Staying on this topic, what are some of the key pitfalls that B2B marketers should pay attention to, and what should they be doing instead?

James Hurman  28:00

Yeah, I mean, one of the pitfalls is just budget and how that’s, you know, how that’s spent, you know, B2B, brands tend to spend far too little on, you know, on marketing, again, one of the kind of principles and the effectiveness research is something called Extra Share of Voice, when we spend relatively more than our competitors, spend relative to our our market share size, we we we grow, and when we don’t, we we shrink. 

James Hurman  28:30

So what the really interesting research that’s been done shows is say, if we have a 10% market share, if our share of voice, our share of spend, is also 10% we’re likely to maintain the market share that we’ve got. If it’s 15% and we’re at 10% market share, but our share of spend, or share of voice is 15% we’re likely to grow, and if our share of voice is only 5% we’re likely to decline in market share. So there is real evidence that how much we spend relative to our size and our competitors really underpins whether we grow or whether we don’t. And I think and B2B, marketing budgets don’t usually take those sorts of aspects into account. And and, you know, a lot of the time the marketing budget is sort of like just what’s left over after everything else is being bought that year. You know?

Christian Klepp  29:24

Not even that sometimes…

James Hurman  29:26

Yeah, so, so budget is important, you know, it’s, it’s, as Liz Bennett once said, you know, you can’t, you know, there’s the you can’t underspend, but no, you’ve got to spend money. But no one wants to hear that, you know, and so, but it is a reality. And when you look at, you know, the largest technology businesses, so everyone, you know, there’s this kind of, really, there’s this big myth that those kind of modern technology businesses don’t spend any money on advertising or brand building or any of that kind of stuff. You know, Amazon doesn’t do it, and Google doesn’t do it, and Meta doesn’t do it. And, you know, and all these companies have proven that if you just build a great product, then people will come to it and you don’t need to worry about all that fluffy brand stuff. 

James Hurman  30:19

And last year, probably five of those tech brands, so certainly, Amazon spent more than $20 billion on advertising. They’re the biggest advertiser in the world. Google, about 8 billion. Meta, about three. I think. Spending billions of dollars on advertising. Very unusual those companies, you know, there’s about five companies that make up about 5% of total global ad spend. You know, five companies. There are millions of advertisers in the world, right? These companies advertise way, way, way, way more than the average company does. So there’s a bit of a myth there. 

James Hurman  31:02

They spend an awful lot of money on advertising and so, and they obviously are kind of… they are B2B businesses, or at least they’re partially B2B businesses, and so spend is important. So, that’s probably number one. You know, just not spending enough money to actually underpin growth for your business. 

James Hurman  31:25

I think, secondly, that you know that the targeting pitfall, you know, it feels like we just want to target people who might buy our product. So how do we kind of, you know, get really, really niche on kind of identifying the perfect person within a business who’s might want to buy our product, and sort of really trying to just target them, and forgetting that there’s actually many, many influencers in a B2B purchase, right? That famous line, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. What they didn’t mean by that is that no one got fired for buying IBM because IBM’s products are the best. What they meant by that is no one got fired for buying IBM because everyone from the CEO to the most junior person in the organization had heard of IBM. Kind of knew IBM were a, kind of, you know, big company, and so if you chose IBM, no one else in the organization was going to go, that’s a weird choice. They were all going to go, Oh, I’ve heard of that. That sounds sensible. 

James Hurman  32:30

So they built their brand IBM in a way that made them a kind of obvious choice, because it was such a familiar brand to so many people. So actually, B2B brands, you know, if you want to get get very big, if you want to grow into a very big brand, you actually are best to talk to the whole market, like people who in companies, right, which is kind of just about everyone, and build your brand among those people, and you know, go really make sure that you’re a familiar choice, not only to the procurement person or the particular person that you’re trying to sell to, but that you’re also familiar to the people around them, because those people will influence that decision, sometimes directly, and sometimes they’ll influence it, because that procurement person or that buyer will go, I want to make a choice that I think everyone else in the organization will kind of understand and won’t penalize me for going off on one and choosing like a weird thing they’ve never heard of before. Because if that doesn’t work out, right, if something goes wrong, or the product’s not as good as we thought it was going to be, or whatever, right, I’m going to get the blame for choosing the thing that no one’s ever heard of. 

James Hurman  33:45

So it’s really important for us to actually build the brand among the employees of the business that we work for, as much as the sort of person who’s in charge of the buying decision. So that’s one, targeting, I think, like woefully underspending on brand. So once you’ve got budget in place, kind of in B2B, you should be spending about half of it on brand building, and about half of it on more sales focused advertising. And so when you’re doing that more sales focused advertising, you’re trying to convert the current demand in the market, and you want to be doing the type of advertising that does that, but more informational, doesn’t need to be that creative. You’re talking to people who are in the market looking to make a decision at the moment. They’re looking for information to help them make that decision. The brand building job is completely different. So you’re talking to those people that won’t come into the… won’t come into the category until sometime down the track and they have no need for your information at that point, they will just filter it out. They will ignore it completely. 

James Hurman  34:08

What our game is with those people is to do something that grabs their attention and makes them remember us, so that when they come into the market, you know, they feel familiar with us. They remember us. That requires a totally different style of advertising, informational advertising doesn’t work at all because, as I said, we just filter out irrelevant information. And we do that completely subconsciously, and we’re very good at it. And so there’s no point trying to put information, give information to people. They’ll just filter it out. We remember feelings far more than, far longer than we remember facts. Again, there’s lots of science around this. If you tell people a fact, they will have forgotten it by tomorrow or next week. If you make them feel a certain way, they’ll remember that feeling for much, much, much longer, like many months, many years. 

James Hurman  35:39

And so if we’re trying to get people to remember us when they come into the category in six months time, we’re much better to leave them with a feeling than a fact. And that’s why emotional advertising works much better for creating future demand and building our brand among future customers. 

James Hurman  35:55

And then creativity, the reason creativity is so effective, particularly at creating future demand, particularly about at sort of speaking to that much broader group, is that, like I said before, if the category is is not something they’re shopping at the moment, they’re not interested in ads for it, and So you can’t you need to actually earn their attention, rather than them just giving it to you, right? So let me give you an example. Are you Christian in the market for buying a commercial truck?

Christian Klepp  36:33

No.

James Hurman  36:35

Have you ever been?

Christian Klepp  36:36

 No.

James Hurman  36:37

Do you think you ever will be?

Christian Klepp  36:38

No. 

James Hurman  36:40

Until you watch an ad with Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits on two reversing Volvo Trucks. 

Christian Klepp  36:47

Yeah? 

James Hurman  36:49

Why you have no… you will never have any need to buy a commercial truck. It’s completely irrelevant to you. It’s a total waste of your time to watch that ad, right? It’s a completely irrational thing to do. You shouldn’t have watched that ad, waste of time, but you did. Why did you? Because it was creative and it earned your attention.

Christian Klepp  37:10

Right.

James Hurman  37:11

Right? And that’s a B2B ad, right? That’s a B2B ad talking to truck procurement people. That is the case for creativity in B2B marketing, you need to speak to a whole group of people who aren’t interested in your category right now. You need to do something that earns their attention. And creativity does that and that’s how you know that’s why we ought to be more creative in B2B marketing.

Christian Klepp  37:38

No, fantastic, fantastic. No, absolutely. Well, I probably, what I keep telling myself is the reason why I watched that ad is because Jean-Claude Van Damme was one of my childhood action heroes. Which movies come to mind are Double Impact, Bloodsport, you name it, right? I’ve watched them all and yeah, but, but, but the fact that he did the split on the truck. 

James Hurman  38:04

Yeah.

James Hurman  38:06

And that’s another sort of pitfall, not just in B2B, but in role of marketing is, is they invested a lot in the execution of that ad, right? So it would have cost them lots of money to get Jean-Claude Van Damme, that ad was beautifully, you know, shot and produced. They would have spent quite a bit of money on executing that ad. What the data really tells us is, when we’re converting current demand doing that more short term or informational advertising, it doesn’t, you know, executional quality matters a lot less. We can sort of, you know, put something together, as long as it’s not completely rubbish. You know, it’s fine. 

Christian Klepp  38:06

That’s what brought me.

James Hurman  38:41

When we are creating future demand talking to that much bigger audience. Executional quality actually comes, actually becomes really, really important. Spending enough on production to earn people’s attention and to leave positive memories in their heads for when they come into the category later, production and execution or craft quality plays a really big role in that. So we see it in the numbers. It’s actually, you know, when we’re doing that, more long, longer term form of marketing and advertising, the campaigns that spent a larger amount of their production, their total budget on production and and really worked at the… making the executional craft really, really great. Those, those do a whole lot better, and and so. So sometimes we think, like, now that we’ve got the idea, shouldn’t we just find the most cost effective way of producing this idea? And that’s not the case. 

James Hurman  39:37

You look at the movie industry, right? The movie industry spends usually about 97 to 98% of the budget goes on the execution. About two or 3% is spent on the script, right? So the idea they, you know, the idea is, needs to be executed really, really well. And when you look at the dynamics of the firm. Industry is this really paradoxical thing where really big budget films are actually a lot less risky than small budget films. So what the movie industry has learned is, if we spend a lot of money on executing this thing, amazingly, then lots and lots of people will come to the theaters and watch it. And if we make something which is executed a little bit more, kind of modestly, it’s likely to be a complete flop. So small movies, small budget movies, lose a lot more money than big budget movies, and so and are actually more risky than big budget movies. So, you know, this is something that that you know, again, sort of tells us the importance of executional excellence. You know, it does make a huge difference. And if the movie industry said, Great, now that we’ve got this great script, how can we make it as cost effectively as possible, the movie industry would not be the huge industry that it is. And, and, yeah, so execution is really important.

Christian Klepp  40:57

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and you’ve given us a lot already, but like, if you were to advise B2B marketers to do talk about three to five things that they can do right now, not in six months, not in 12 months, like right now. What they can do in terms of leveraging creativity to generate better results for B2B? What would those things be?

James Hurman  41:26

I think, first thing, go to the B2B Institute website and download all the research reports and read them again. That doesn’t cost you anything. They’re not particularly arduous to sort of read and you’ll get a lot out of it.

James Hurman  41:42

Secondly, like we were saying about non marketing stakeholders, like, just, just put a little plan together, you know, how could we on a monthly rhythm, you know, get the important people that weigh in on marketing? How could we get them in a room for half an hour and tell them about one of those reports, or one of those bits of information, you know, help them understand there’s now lots of science and research and evidence around how marketing works, and begin to take them on that journey. 

James Hurman  42:11

Third, I’d think about, you know that that difference between current demand and future demand in your category right. Who are the customers that are in the market right now? Who are the one? Who are all the ones that will come into the market later? And and think about how you might sort of separate out those two jobs and do them with a different style of advertising and, and I don’t mean completely different, like, still have one brand look and feel, you know, you can still have one kind of, you know, brand platform for your brand. It’s just that when you execute that, you know, do it in a more creative, emotional way to build your brand among those future customers, and do it in a more sort of informational, functional way when you talk to those that are currently in market. So you know, have a think about that. How many is that? 

Christian Klepp  43:05

Those are good. 

James Hurman  43:06

Yeah. I mean, I think those would be a really good place to to kind of start, and, and, yeah. And, I guess the other thing about creativity is it helps to work with really good creative people. So, you know, think about who are you using to make that kind of work? Are they… You know, is it the best agency, or are you working with the best creative people? Because they really do make a difference. You know, creative people have spent their lives doing creative things. They are very good at it, and that’s valuable, and they’ll get you to a better place than you know, if you’ve got an internal kind of team, you know, they will probably be really good for the sort of day to day stuff. But, you know, you really want great creative people working on that, that longer term advertising, you know, people who really understand how to have great ideas and craft them beautifully, and all of that’s important. So think that’s another thing to, you know, for B2B marketers to think about.

Christian Klepp  44:10

Well, absolutely, absolutely. It goes back to the point you were making a couple of minutes ago about the importance of the quality of the execution, right? 

James Hurman  44:20

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. It’s a signal, like, if you want people to feel that your business and your product is of a high quality, right, when you execute your marketing with a really high quality, it sends a signal to people. There was a really interesting study done at the Stockholm School of Economics back in about 2009 by a team there who they showed… they got 1000 people. They split them into two groups of 500 people. They showed one of those groups. They got them to look at an ad for a brand that was not particularly creative and not particularly well executed. They got the other group to look at an ad for the same product from the same brand, and it was creative and much more well executed then what they did afterwards is they asked a series of questions, not about the ad, but about the company behind the ad. And they asked questions like, do you think that this is a company that we’re spending more on? Do you think this is a company that makes high quality products, these sorts of questions, and the group that had seen the more creative advertising gave the company much higher scores on those metrics. 

James Hurman  44:22

So what they sort of managed to prove out was that advertising, you know, in one sense, is about communicating a message about a product or a brand. Another sense, it’s about communicating something bigger about the company, right? If the company puts this much effort into their advertising, they probably put this much effort into everything else that they do. And if a company puts a very small amount of effort into their marketing and advertising, and it’s not very good, then they probably don’t put much effort, you know, into everything else that they do. So bearing in mind that you know when, when we advertise, we kind of we send signals to people about how good we are at everything. And so that’s another reason to, you know, produce good marketing that’s people. People judge us on what we put out into the world. And so if you put out rubbish, what are people going to conclude? 

Christian Klepp  46:34

Absolutely, absolutely, I would even dare say that this is probably one of those situations where you should be judging a book by its cover.

James Hurman  46:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

Christian Klepp  46:48

All right, James, thanks again for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. I mean, this was such a great conversation. I was furiously writing notes as you were talking, but please a quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

James Hurman  47:05

Sure. Hello, I’m James, so I spend a lot of my time on marketing and advertising effectiveness, writing, publishing, research around that, and books and so the book you can get a hold of, which talks a bit about some of the concepts we’ve been talking about today, is called Future Demand. So if you just have a search for that, you can download the eBook off Amazon, or you can buy a physical book from my company’s website, but you’ll find it on Google. And I also am an entrepreneur and an investor. And so in my company, we create companies. We create startup companies. Often they are B2B SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) businesses and sometimes they’re B2C businesses too. And so we create companies. We invest in companies through our venture capital fund and we work with lots of startup. We kind of specialize in startups, whereas my marketing advertising effectiveness practice specializes in businesses of all sizes and and, yeah, I spend my time kind of bopping around the world, teaching people how to do more effective marketing and more creative marketing and and have a great time doing it, but you can find out all about me at https://www.jameshurman.com/ and, yeah, you can learn a bit more about me there.

Christian Klepp  48:33

Fantastic, fantastic. So once again, James, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

James Hurman  48:39

Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp  48:40

All right. Bye, for now.

Christian Klepp  00:01

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking with Rai Cornell. She is a marketing psychologist, strategist and the founder of Cornell content marketing. Together with her team, she helps to transform the way companies market to their audiences by leveraging a deep understanding of human behavior, behavioral changes and neurotransmitters. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp  00:32

 All right, I’m gonna say Rai Hyde Cornell, welcome to the show.

Rai Cornell  00:37

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Christian. 

Christian Klepp  00:40

Great to have you on the show, and I really enjoyed our previous conversation and the conversation that we had just before I hit record, because I think I’ve learned more about you, I should say, in these past 20 minutes, than I have in the past couple of months. And that’s always a good thing, right?

Rai Cornell  00:56

Yep, always is amazing. What comes up just in those little GET TO KNOW YOU little tidbits of connection there. 

Christian Klepp  01:02

Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s dive into today’s topic, because I’m going to say we’ve had many guests on the show talk about B2B content marketing from different facets and perspectives, but we’ve never quite had anybody come on the show that is going to be discussing this next topic, which I’m not going to give too much away right now, but let’s just say it’s highly relevant, not just for B2B content marketing, but for B2B marketing in general. 

Christian Klepp  01:30

But it very rarely gets discussed, and part of that might be because a few people actually understand how to approach it, all right? So I’m gonna, like, stop keeping the audience in suspense, and I’m going to actually reveal what the topic is, right? That might be a good way to start. So you’ve been on a mission for a bit now, to help B2B businesses become thought leaders by creating long term demand generation strategies and eliminating short term manipulative tactics like ads. 

Christian Klepp  02:00

So today we’re going to focus on a topic that I think is going to be useful to B2B marketers, and it’s how to get 90% of pre-sold buyers using psychology driven marketing. And I know that that seems like a very, very deep kind of term, but let’s unpack it here, right? And we’re going to kick off this conversation with this question, why do you believe that psychology driven marketing is so important in B2B?

Rai Cornell  02:29

Because ultimately, you know, a lot of B2B businesses, they take it literally when they think they are business to business, and that lends itself. That kind of thinking lends itself to being very sterile in your communications and very logic oriented, where all you want to talk about are features and benefits and cost savings and ROI and of course, those are important elements to the decision making process. But it’s not businesses that are making a decision. It’s humans, and humans are driven by psychology. And, you know, we’ve talked even just in the short amount of time, we’ve thrown out a lot of buzz words. We’re talking about thought leadership, psychology, demand generation, B2B marketing, organic, without all the manipulative tactics. You know, we’re throwing around a lot of these terms, but really everything that that comes back to is helping businesses heal the relationships between their brand and their buyers. And the reason psychology is so pivotal in all of that is because the way to heal those relationships is by treating people with respect and treating them like humans, not treating them like transactions.

Christian Klepp  03:49

What a great way to kick off this conversation. Absolutely, absolutely. And I did have a follow up question for you, Rai, just based on what you’ve been saying, right? And you’ve probably seen this online, especially on LinkedIn, more times than you care to count, especially in B2B content marketing. I don’t know if you have a feeling, you know what I’m gonna say, but like, there’s a lot of talk out there, and several camps of people in the specific field of yours that are saying that no, in fact, B2B, content marketing has to be sterile, has to be factual, has to be logical, because it should appeal to a buying committee that consists of people in procurement and people that deal with vendors and and all these different other functions, right? So I bring all of that up to say that B2B content at the end of the day must be boring. Boring wins at the end of the day. So I’m going to get off my soapbox now and over to you your thoughts on that.

Rai Cornell  04:56

So the thing is, yes, there is a place for that very clinical, cut and dry, black and white. Here’s what’s included. Here’s what’s not, here’s what you can expect. Here’s the ROI (Return On Investment). There is a place for that. But the problem is it’s at the bottom of the funnel. We as humans tend to like to think of ourselves as very logic oriented, very rational, level headed decision makers, and we’re not. We are very emotion driven. And the thing that I love about this marriage of psychology and marketing, and it’s so funny that, you know, back in the day, if I go back 18 years ago, I was on a path to be a counselor in the prison system, and I worked in drug rehab centers and community counseling centers and a mental hospital, and I had this deep understanding of the paradigms of how we look at the world as human beings, how we shape our behaviors, and then to completely pivot over to something like marketing and for our models of understanding of human behavior to match up so perfectly with the marketing funnel of brand awareness, interest, decision, action, and then I always like to say there’s a fifth stage that a lot of people forget about, which is retention, but for that funnel to map so perfectly to the way we process information in the way we form bonds, in the way that we decide to take steps closer to people and things in our world.

Rai Cornell  06:30

It tells me that there is something so valuable here, and what a lot of the people who you’re referring to who say, Oh no, B2B marketing and content has to be very clinical and cut and dry and logical? Well, you’re never going to get to that point of the decision, because the initial stages. There’s two forks here. One is usually the people who are bringing you to that logic oriented table and conversation are the gatekeepers who make a decision based on, Ooh, I like this post, or, I like this article that really helped me get closer to satisfying a request that my boss sent me on. Or, oh, this branding is very intriguing and interesting. And of course, these are all subliminal things that people are processing beneath the surface, but they have to like you and feel comfortable before they’re even open to processing the logical information and bringing you to that you know, superficially logical decision making conversation, even though there’s still emotion and relationship built under there. And the other thing I’ll say about that is I don’t know a single person in the business world who wouldn’t agree with the statement that a huge part of business success is not what you know, but who you know, which tells us it’s all about relationships and using content to form emotional bonds and relationships with people before they have a conversation with your sales reps. That goes a long, long way to giving you more cachet in that conversation when it does get to the logic point.

Christian Klepp  08:15

Absolutely, absolutely. And also you’ll agree with me on this, I’m sure. But nobody wakes up in the morning and says, You know what I want to do today? I’m going to read some boring content, right? 

Rai Cornell  08:28

Yes, there was a study I was just reading the other day about what lasts longer in someone’s memory and joy, laughter, those are things that cause memories to be more deep seated. There was a study that did this kind of exposure of someone looking at a page that had competing ads and non competing ads. Competing ads were, let’s say, two brands of laptop computers shown on the same page and another page of non competing ads, where you may have had a laptop computer, a cell phone and a keyboard, where they’re not selling the exact same product. And the study showed that when people were delighted, when they were introduced with humor and joy, they remembered the brands far longer in both instances than if you lead with scarcity tactics and trying to create a negative mood. So it’s this, you have to focus on how people feel, and if you lead with that at the top of the funnel, then they’re willing to come closer to you, learn more, spend more time with you, consider you more. And you can get to the logical part of the conversation, which is when all of those you know, battle cards and case studies and things like that, really. Come into play. 

Christian Klepp  10:01

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which is about key pitfalls that B2B content marketers need to avoid and what they should be doing instead.

Rai Cornell  10:14

Yeah. So this really goes back to respecting your buyer. I think a lot of us in B2C relationships with brands have had the experience where we feel duped, or we go up. It had got me. The ad got me. Because you see something eye-catching. You see this grand promise, you click it, you engage with it, and then suddenly, Oh, it’s not what I thought it was. And how did I go down this rabbit hole? And, oh, I feel a little manipulated. I feel a little duped. I feel kind of lied to. 

Rai Cornell  10:50

We can’t do that in the business to business world either, because that’s really where we start to break down trust and in business to business deals, the sales conversation lasts so long. Months, sometimes even years, and if you’re breaking down trust at the very first encounter with these manipulative scarcity FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), you know, trying to pressure someone into Making a decision before they’re ready. Sorts of tactics that those are the biggest pitfalls I see in marketing that is going to make sure that you’re let you’re leaving a bad taste in their mouth, as opposed to if you do the opposite, you build trust, you go slow, you allow your buyer to set the pace, and you are there for them every step of the way, answering questions and guiding them along the stages of change model. That’s where you’re going to be the one with the endurance to make it to that final decision making conversation at the end of that long buyer journey.

Christian Klepp  11:57

Absolutely, absolutely. And I’m totally with you on avoiding the use of manipulative tactics, or creating the sense of urgency. I mean…

Rai Cornell  12:07

Yes.

Christian Klepp  12:07

I don’t know about you, but creating the sense of urgency, I get that, but especially in these, like you said, some of these B2B transactions. I mean, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? You can’t be using the same, I’m gonna call them supermarket tactics, right? Like the promo expires next week.

Rai Cornell  12:26

Right, right. Or get those flowers before Valentine’s Day, or whatever the case may be. Those are situations where, yes, a clock is relevant. But nowadays, buyers are so much more savvy than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and if you use those tactics, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. And the problem is a lot of companies focus too much on ROI in a short time frame, and what they’re sacrificing is more ROI over a longer time frame.

Christian Klepp  12:58

Yep, Yep, absolutely. I have one follow up question, just based on the things that you said earlier, actually, your take on injecting humor into B2B content, what are your thoughts on that?

Rai Cornell  13:11

Yeah, I love it. It’s one of the things that it’s so disarming and in B2B relationship building. We are all so readily armed. If you think about just the way that you interact with your own LinkedIn profile, where you log into your account, maybe you check your messages, you see who sent you an in mail versus who sent you a connection request. How often is your default assumption? Oh, this person’s just trying to sell me something. Why is this person reaching out to me? Why do they want to connect? What are they trying to get me to buy? We are also armed and guarded, whereas, when you use humor, the simple fact of making someone laugh, and I tried to do this on all of my quote, unquote sales calls, which I call them because people know what sales calls are, but I never think of them as sales calls. They’re problem, solution brainstorming calls. But I always try to get somebody to laugh, because they’re only going to open up to me and really get into the meat of what we can actually accomplish together. Or if I’m not the right one to work with them, at least tell me what I can do to help them connect with the right person. That’s only going to happen. We’re only going to get to the most valuable information when they are at ease, and laughter is the quickest path to ease.

Rai Cornell  14:29

So if you can make someone laugh with a LinkedIn post, an article, a video, an ad, an infographic, something that not only tells them, oh, this company would be enjoyable to work with, but also, oh, my God, they get me like we can both laugh about the same shared experience and how ridiculous or how painful, or how, you know, mind numbingly challenging it is to encounter. Then you’re starting on. Shared ground. And that’s really what laughter and humor does, is it brings you together on that shared ground.

Christian Klepp  15:05

Well, it’s the best medicine, as they say, right? And by the way, I’m going to steal that one for a LinkedIn post, laughter is the quickest path they ease.

Rai Cornell  15:15

Yeah, good. Absolutely, the more people who are doing this, the more people who and that’s really when we talk about marketers on a mission. My mission is to heal those relationships between businesses and buyers, and if you can share a laugh together, I mean, instantly your relationship is a little bit more healed, and so the more people we can get using these tactics and being more human to one another. Mission accomplished.

Christian Klepp  15:42

Correct, correct, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which we’re I’m not gonna say we’re gonna psychoanalyze people, but let’s dive into the psychology aspect of it, right? And you can’t talk about the psychological aspect of it without conducting research, right?

Rai Cornell  16:02

Right.

Christian Klepp  16:03

So when you’re leveraging psychology driven marketing, as I said, conducting the right research, having the right strategy also are important, right? So how can B2B marketers go about doing this quickly and efficiently? Because, let’s be honest, not everybody has 12 months to do research and then implement these initiatives.

Rai Cornell  16:25

Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, research is important. Yes, outside data is important. But I think a lot of companies, especially when they’re faced with a fork in the road where they have to decide, okay, either we are going to commit to this long journey of research and go all in on that it’s going to take 12 months, or we could do this shorter route and commit to learning along the way. They often discount how much knowledge they really have inside of their organization, and this is when marketing often misses an opportunity to speak to other departments within a company. 

Rai Cornell  17:09

So for example, one of the first things that I like to do when I start working with a new company is set up this feedback loop between the sales team and the marketing team, getting these two departments working in the same direction, as opposed to being rivals who point the finger at one another. Marketing also needs to talk to service delivery. They need to talk to customer support. They need to talk to the people who are talking to the people, and really figure out, what do we know about our dream customers, the ones that we hope stay with us for years and years and years. What do we know about them? What are they struggling with? What are they asking for help on how are they using our product or service? When you tap into that wealth of knowledge that you already have and do that internal data analysis, you can leap yourself forward in magnifying your results of more of what you want, you already have some great clients and customers. Magnify how much of that you have by examining that particular subset of data.

Christian Klepp  18:15

Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally agree with that, even just from previous experience, that it’s really important for content marketers, especially not to like, pick whatever analogy you want, like working in silos, being up in their ivory tower, working in isolation, they have to work through this ecosystem within the organization. And I agree with you, it shouldn’t just be through the sales. It should also be through customer support. I was in a previous role where we had inbound and outbound sales complete. They’re both sales, completely different scenarios, though, right? And, and even for the BD (Business Development), are you talking about retainer accounts? Are you talking about project based accounts, I get different situation, right? Yeah, and each of them comes with their own unique set of challenges, objectives. The clients also have different goals and motivations for working with the company, right?

Rai Cornell  19:16

Exactly. And you know, you’re asking about, how do we start to kind of psychoanalyze quickly, if we can look at that internal subset of data. And then one of the things that I love pulling into marketing conversations is what’s known as the CBT triangle. So CBT is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it’s a really popular psychotherapy modality used to help people with depression and anxiety. And the reason that it works so well is because this triangle, which consists of thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and it kind of, you can kind of think of it like the recycling triangle, where they all feed into one another, and it all cycles back around and around and around.

Rai Cornell  19:58

If you look at those three elements of your ideal customers, thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and you see, okay, where are they going off course? You know this is what we do in therapy and in counseling. Is we go, okay, your thoughts about this particular experience are causing you to have these particular emotions, which are causing you to choose these particular behaviors. And if you can look at that cycle and see where things are going awry, where people are flying out of your funnel instead of getting more comfortable in your funnel and going further down the process, that’s where you can interrupt. You can course correct. You can change those thoughts. You can change those feelings and emotions, and you can then change those behaviors. 

Rai Cornell  20:44

And if you really understand what’s working and what’s not, for the people that form the majority of your ideal clientele base, that’s when you really start to find not only your brand voice, but in that’s your marketing messaging, but you also start to find your marketing methods and mechanisms, whether that’s going to be particular types of content, like how to content or motivational content or data reporting content, you know, depending on what is really driving that particular segment of your target audience, and then also your mechanisms. Where are they consuming it? How are they consuming it? Video, text, podcasts, infographics, AI (Artificial intelligence) search, whatever the case may be. But it all starts with that internal experience that your ideal customer is having based on their thoughts, emotions and then the derivative behaviors.

Christian Klepp  21:47

Great answer, Rai, and I wasn’t, I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic there. I mean it however, I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate now, all right, because you’ve probably run into this before. I mean, especially working with B2B, you brought up so many very profound insights regarding behavior, thoughts, emotions, what triggers people, what motivates them, what motivates them to look for a specific solution or product, things of that nature. How do you take this psychology aspect of it and package it? How should I put this for a customer who has a senior management consisting mostly of CFOs, CIOs, CSOs, you get the picture, right?

Rai Cornell  22:38

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  22:39

That are going to look at. Are going to look at everything that you’ve just said and said, and would react like, Okay, how is this actually going to help us. 

Rai Cornell  22:48

Right, right. 

Christian Klepp  22:48

How is this going to move our business forward? We get what you’re saying, Doc, right? But like, how is this going to help move our business forward, and how is this going to impact the initiatives that the marketing team is going to roll out.

Rai Cornell  23:02

Right. So when it comes to those C suite decision makers, particularly the ones that are focused on revenue drivers, I think it all comes down to finding a common ground. And I think everyone can agree. And this is why, even though it may feel trite and overused the marketing funnel is that common ground for all decision makers, and what I mean by that is, everyone wants the conversion at the bottom of the funnel, right? But I think everyone can agree, both logically and experientially. If you look at your past history as a marketer that in order for people to get to the action stage, they have to get to the decision stage. And in order for them to get to the decision stage, they have to have interest in your brand, and in order for them to have interest in your brand, they have to be aware of you. 

Rai Cornell  23:55

And each of those things ties to parts of what you’re going to execute in your marketing. So brand awareness is all about visibility. Interest is all about traffic, traffic to your website, your landing pages, and then the decision in action is all about engagement. You want people to take action and actually show initiative of coming towards you. And so if you can all agree on that, then it becomes very clear, and it becomes very metrics oriented. If you look at your metrics and your visibility metrics are poor, and your interest metrics are poor, and your conversion and engagement metrics are poor, well then where do we need to start? We don’t need to start at the bottom. That’s not going to do you any good, because still, nobody’s going to get into the funnel. You have to start at the top. You have to start with your visibility. 

Rai Cornell  24:46

And even though, in my experience, and I think a lot of people have had this same experience, the Chief Revenue Officers and the Chief Financial Officers, they care about conversion. They can all agree, there’s nothing to convert if you don’t have brand awareness. And so you have to look at the numbers very objectively and see where are we strong and where are we weak. And you know, I have worked with companies that have fantastic brand awareness numbers. Their visibility is great. Their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking numbers are great. Their followers on social media, especially LinkedIn, are great, but they’re not getting the traffic and they’re not getting the conversions. If that’s the case, well then that points you exactly to where you need to start fixing the problem, and that means your top of funnel is doing really well. You’re doing great with your top of funnel content, but now you need to focus on the interest aspect of it. 

Rai Cornell  25:46

And this is where, again, psychology really comes in tanned because what that means, and this is where I like to reflect it onto the stages of change model. What that means is your target audience may be aware of the problem. So in the stages of change model, there’s the pre problem awareness, there’s problem awareness, there’s pre contemplation, there’s contemplation, and then there’s action. And again, voila, that maps up perfectly to the marketing funnel Exactly. And so what that tells you is, if your top of funnel content is performing really well, the metrics say so then they know that there’s a problem. What they don’t know is that there’s a solution that they need to contemplate changing too. And so that’s where you can really focus. This is where the big, ginormous question in any marketing room is, what do we talk about? What do we create? And that’s where psychology points you to, exactly what you need to create.

Christian Klepp  26:48

You’ve clearly been asked this question before.

Rai Cornell  26:53

It’s it all you know, when we start talking about marketing and psychology, it sounds very heady, and it sounds very like this amorphous conceptual idea and this philosophy, but it’s very practical, and that’s why I love pairing data analytics with the stages of change model in the CBT triangle and the marketing funnel, because they all point you in the same direction. It’s like using triangulation when you’re trying to find someone’s cell phone out in the forest. You are triangulating exactly where you need to start and where you need to solve problems in your funnel when you use all of these tools together.

Christian Klepp  27:35

Absolutely, absolutely, no. I do love the way that you’ve packaged that and how you’ve it’s it’s almost like telling a story, right? Like the different components in the story are interconnected. And I think what you’ve shown us in these past couple of minutes, is the strong correlation between all these, we can say moving parts, because there are a lot, right? No, that’s, that’s, that’s absolutely right. So on to the next question, just from your experience, and I know that it really depends on the industry, the company, the stage the company is at, but like just from your own experience, are there any content formats or assets that you would recommend to B2B marketers just based on what you’ve seen out there?

Rai Cornell  28:19

Yeah, so there’s what people want, and then there’s how they find what they want. And these are two very different questions. You know, I think we’ve all in marketing, heard that phrase of, if you try speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one. And so a lot of companies try to create all different kinds of format content. They’ll create text based long form content, and then they’ll chop that up and create infographics from it, so we have static images. And then they might also create videos or create kind of like a podcast version of that long form content, and then they might chop that up into short form videos that can be distributed over social and unfortunately, I have to tell everyone listening to this, that’s what you have to do. You have to do that. You have to create all the different formats of content, because humans will want to consume it in different ways. You know, prior to hitting record on this episode, you and I were talking about how, you know, I’m one of those weirdos who would rather read a 2000 word article than watch a two minute video. Just do not put a video in front of me. I will read and read and read and read all day long. I will listen to audio books, but I will not watch a video. And then you’ve got someone like my husband, who’s the exact opposite. He’s like, I will not read two sentences, but I will watch a two hour video on how to do this thing. So you have such diversity in how people consume content nowadays, so you have to be catering to that. 

Rai Cornell  29:55

But ultimately, if that feels overwhelming, what I recommend is. Focusing on what’s going to make Google and now SEO in the time of AI very happy, and the reason you have to focus on that is because when you cater your content modalities to the humans, you have to do everything. And you’re never going to please everyone by focusing on one particular thing. You just have to do it all, whereas, if you focus instead on them even finding your content before they decide if they even enjoy your particular modality, you have to please google and the AI search. And now my answer would have been very, very different four years ago, but now long form content, which includes snippets of quick, short answers that the AI can grab as a feature, coupled with a focus on images embedded within your content. And here we go again video you can progressively work through these things. So that’s typically what I do with companies. When we’re trying to figure out how to triage all of this content that we have to do, you start with the long form text, because that is, if you can get that right, everything else is derivative from it, and it’s going to be so much easier to make all the other criteria satisfied.

Christian Klepp  31:24

Thank you for breaking that down for us. And it almost sounds to me, and I’m going to oversimplify it now, Rai, but it almost sounds to me like somebody that says I’m going to, you know, I want to get a six pack, but they don’t want to put in all that work. They don’t want to put in and they don’t realize that it’s not just about doing the cardio, it’s also about watching what you eat or not eat, right? So there’s this whole combination of factors involved there, and I, and I agree with you, because I do quite a bit of this, like content, development and copywriting myself, that you have to put in the work. You have to put in the work of writing out the long form content, and then you can, I’m just gonna throw in another analogy here. Get more juice out of the squeeze, right? 

Rai Cornell  32:13

Yeah, absolutely. 

Christian Klepp  32:14

Or chop it up, as, I think, another popular term that everybody loves to use now, like, especially with video, like, chop it up into snippets or clips or like what you said, extract them, extract some insights from that long article, and create an infographic out of it, right? So something that would have been very dry and factual can actually now be very visually interesting because you’ve turned it into an infographic, right? Things of that nature.

Rai Cornell  32:39

Yes, and it’s very difficult to go from having something like, okay, so a lot of companies nowadays, they think, Oh, we have to do video, video that’s so powerful online. So let’s do video.

Christian Klepp  32:52

Right.

Rai Cornell  32:53

And yes, they’re right. It is extremely powerful online, and I highly recommend any business does video. But the problem is, when you start with video, you get overwhelmed. There is so much work that goes into producing videos, coming up with the script, doing the actual recording, figuring out, are we going to make this a 30 minute long video, or are we going to focus on doing a 90 second video that can be used as a reel or a clip or a short? Those are way too many questions to ask. So why not start long start with the thing that’s the easiest for people to get out, which normally is written content or dictated content. So hey, let me just talk into my text to what is it called, talk to text feature on my phone. Or let me record this audio clip and send it to my assistant and have it transcribed. Or, you know, whatever the case may be, that is usually the easiest way to get started. And then you can create all of the derivatives from there. And it reduces that investment barrier. It reduces that energy commitment barrier, and it reduces the overwhelm by just simplifying it so it’s all about the order of operations and making sure that you’re working smart, as opposed to just trying to jump your way up to the top of Mount. Everest. Right off the bat.

Christian Klepp  34:17

I completely agree with you, and I’m grinning because I’ve been in situations like that, with clients in the past where, you know, they got they they went really deep down this rabbit hole of how, how we should produce this video, and what type of video, and it got into the stage where there was so much analysis paralysis that it was almost like, Okay, why don’t we just call Steven Spielberg or Jerry Bruckheimer, right? I mean, let’s just Hollywood stock production, right? 

Rai Cornell  34:43

Yeah, yeah. 

Christian Klepp  34:44

Which they don’t need. And you and I both know that, right? Like, it does not have to be overly produced. 

Rai Cornell  34:50

Agree.

Christian Klepp  34:51

That said. And I’m gonna throw in this caveat there for people that are gonna take my, take my word, you know, at face value, and say, I’ll just take out. My iPhone and film something that’s not what I that’s not what I mean either, right?

Rai Cornell  35:04

Correct, and it has to come down to quality. That’s another you know, at the beginning we started talking about that. In order to heal your relationship as a brand with the people who you want to buy, you have to show them respect. And I think we’ve all kind of been in those situations where you see something that a company or, you know, personal brand has thrown together, and you go, Oh, you’re you’re really winging it here. You’re really not trying. This is and you lose respect for that person, and you want to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward. You are putting out the highest quality content that you can, however, and this is the caveat that we all kind of find ourselves in throughout life, not just in business or in marketing, but perfectionism is the depth of creativity, and you have to accept that while you strive for high quality standards and you want to put out the best quality content that you can done is always better than perfect.

Christian Klepp  36:08

I used to work with this creative director that absolutely hated that phrase, um, but he was, again, to your point. He was one of these people that got caught in this trap of perfectionism and then the work always got delayed, right? So going back to your original point, absolutely, absolutely.

Rai Cornell  36:28

Within my team, we call it full life content. And what we mean by that term is we all start out in life clumsy and, you know, falling down and rough around the edges and awkward, and we get to this gangly stage, and eventually we evolve into figuring out who we are, and we have richness, and we have depth to us, and then we have something to offer the world, that is the lifespan of humans, and that is the lifespan of content and ideas we need to start, just to start, because that’s at least going to teach us something that’s going to get us traction in the world, and then as that content lives and we learn, we know exactly how to improve it, and we can make improvements over time that gradually enrich that content and make it more and more and more valuable to our audience. But we can’t just jump to the ripe old age of an 80 year old perfect, self aware human. Neither can we do that with our content and our marketing.

Christian Klepp  37:29

Absolutely, absolutely. We get to the point in the conversation, we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, so I’m gonna narrow it down to three important things, all right, so just on this topic, right of leveraging psychology driven marketing for better results, what are three things that you think B2B marketers can do right now?

Rai Cornell  37:52

Yep, so you know, it’s funny. I was actually just talking to a colleague this morning about how there’s this tendency in B2B marketing for companies to over segment and over analyze and over personalize. And ultimately, what that ends up doing is it costs you more time and energy and resources to speak to fewer people. And so I think for a lot of companies that feel like they need to make a big change and they don’t know where to start, which that is one of the biggest analysis paralysis issues that we see in the marketing world, is pick your largest group and focus on that first you will always find spin offs and subsets and subcultures eventually down the line. But even if that largest group is something as simple as you know, the example my colleague gave earlier was Johnson & Johnson speaking to women, just women, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, mothers, just speaking to women. If you start there and you start creating content that are going to help women make this decision to come closer to you and choose you as their brand they’re loyal to, you’re going to learn so much, and you’re going to create so much that’s valuable to you, not just in the short term, but in the long term. So actionable tip number one is, choose your largest segment, whether that’s 40% of your audience, 80% of your audience, choose that focus there, start there. 

Rai Cornell  39:32

The next thing is, if you think about your marketing methods and mechanisms, particularly your methods, meaning, how am I reaching people? Always, always, always do this litmus test of, how would I feel if I was on the receiving end of this marketing, if you do not feel respected, if you feel duped or pressured or deceived, do not do. Yeah, it’s, it seems like such a simple thing, but it’s this golden rule of treat others how you would want to be treated. And I can’t emphasize enough how important that is in marketing. 

Rai Cornell  40:12

And then the third actionable step, I would say, is go back to the numbers. So many companies think they need to double down on the bottom of the funnel, when they’re not even getting anybody into the top and middle of their funnel. So go back to the numbers and let those point you in the direction of your absolute top priority. And do exactly that. Focus on the top priority, the top of the sales funnel, the part of the sales funnel that the numbers are showing you are in need of help more than what is below it and what is blowing. What is blowing?

Christian Klepp  40:47

Well, I love it. I love it. Let me just quickly recap for the benefit of the audience, right? So choose your largest segment and focus on that was the first step, or the first tip, the second one was, I would say, for lack of a better description, empathize with the target audience and put yourself in their shoes. And if you see this content, or you see this marketing, how does it make you feel? Do you feel like you’re being manipulated? Do you feel like you’re being pressured? Do you feel like you’re being pushed to make a decision right now, right? And number three is going back to the numbers right and focusing on those excellent, excellent Rai I’m going to ask you to stay on your soapbox a little bit longer, if that’s okay with you. But the question is, what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with and why? And my sense is that you have a lot of things that you disagree with, but just pick one.

Rai Cornell  41:46

I do. There’s a lot, you know, even though I am a marketing professional, there’s a lot that I don’t like about the marketing and advertising industries. But think the one that I think really encapsulates everything that we’ve talked about today is that a lot of people, especially decision makers, in their attempts to be very logical and be very rational, which that’s all about the ego, right? We all want to feel like, oh yes, I’m very level headed and pragmatic, and I just follow the numbers and I just do, you know what the most logical decision is they lose sight of what’s actually going to be required for their long term success. And if you focus purely on revenue, you’re going to have some short term success at the cost of alienating a huge population that could set you up for a slow, steady, stable growth over time. Instead of prioritizing revenue at all costs, prioritize humans. Prioritize relationships. If you focus on those things, those two things, relationships and the humans you’re in relationship with the revenue will come. Whereas, if you focus on the revenue only, the humans will not come.

Christian Klepp  43:09

The humans will not come, but the robots will no. Sorry,

Rai Cornell  43:15

And is that what we want? I don’t know. Every sci-fi movie tells us no.

Christian Klepp  43:19

Absolutely not, absolutely not, no. But I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. And I know there are many out there that are very well, let’s just say they subscribe to a different school of thought. And that’s putting it politely, right? They’re more of the transactional kind that believes that it’s speed, it’s speed to revenue, right? And I get that right? I get that you don’t like I said before, you don’t have 12 months to produce results, but not at the expense, and I think that was your point, not at the expense of destroying potential relationships and tarnishing your brand and your company’s reputation.

Rai Cornell  43:59

Right, and there’s a whole, I’m sure we could do a whole other episode on short term ROI solutions that don’t destroy relationships and that don’t destroy your brand’s reputation long term. There’s so much we could go into there. It’s, I’m not saying it’s one or the other. I’m saying you have to use the goal of forming relationships and having those healthy bonds with the humans who are going to determine the success or failure of your company. You have to use that as your guide. Post. That is your North Star.

Christian Klepp  44:30

Absolutely, absolutely okay. Two more questions, and I’m going to let you go right to the bonus question, if you had the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world. Where would it be and why?

Rai Cornell  44:46

Is this a purely personal question? 

Christian Klepp  44:49

Yes. 

Rai Cornell  44:50

Okay, Thailand. I have been dreaming for years, potentially decades, of going to Thailand and interacting with the elephants there. I. Saw this video one time of somebody wrestling with a baby elephant, and this, this baby was like 300 pounds, and so this person.

Christian Klepp  45:06

Wow.

Rai Cornell  45:07

You know, struggling, but it’s just, there’s something so magical about elephants and just Thailand is such a magical place to me. I That’s absolutely my number one choice. If you were to give me a plane ticket, yeah, I’d be on my way. 

Christian Klepp  45:24

Yeah. No, no, it is an amazing place, and I’ve been there before. I was there for about two weeks, yeah, spent a couple of days in Bangkok. And Bangkok is an eclectic mix of being a beautiful and wild place all at the same time, right? 

Rai Cornell  45:41

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  45:42

But, um, but, but you’re absolutely right. It’s a wonderful country, and the people are very warm, and they are really, really, very welcoming, and they smile a lot, and they’re happy. And there’s just something about that, that aura, right, that vibe, right, that you get from them, that that, I suppose, appealing to people from the west who are always, you know, at times, overly worked.

Rai Cornell  46:10

Yes, yes. It’s very, it’s very attractive seeing the culture, commune with nature, the way that they do in Thailand.

Christian Klepp  46:18

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Rai, this has been a great conversation, and thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners I might take, I might take you up on that idea, though, for another podcast episode. So for those of you listening, stay tuned, but please quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Rai Cornell  46:41

Absolutely. So as you said, I’m Rai Cornell. I’m the owner of Cornell Content Marketing, and you can find me on LinkedIn. My first name is spelled a little weird. It’s Rai Cornell, like the university. And if you are looking to get started with any kind of psychology driven marketing, I want to make as many tools as I possibly can, available to anybody who wants to do this, even if you don’t ever work with me. Just please take these tools and run with it in house. And we do have a great starter kit, which is called the demand generation brainstorming kit, which you can get at www.cornellcontentmarketing.com/demandgenkit.

Christian Klepp  47:17

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

Rai Cornell  47:24

Thank you so much, Christian. 

Christian Klepp  47:25

All right. Bye for now.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Chris, welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today I’ll be talking to Dan Balcauski. He’s the Founder and Chief Pricing Officer of Product Tranquility, who helps high volume B2B SaaS (Software as a Service), CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. His approach emphasizes understanding customer segments and measuring value in ways that drive long term growth. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. All right. Dan Balcauski, welcome to the show, sir.

Dan Balcauski  00:37

Good to be here. Christian, thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp  00:39

Great to be connected, Dan, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because this is going to be a first for the show. We’ve never had anybody on to talk about this topic. Nonetheless, it is very relevant and very pertinent for B2B marketers. So let’s dive in. Shall we?

Dan Balcauski  00:57

Let’s do it. Hopefully I can clear the high bar you’ve said already for your listeners.

Christian Klepp  01:02

No pressure whatsoever, none. Okay, so Dan, your mission to I think what you called it was help dispel B2B, SaaS pricing illusions, right? So for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how to leverage customer segmentation in pricing for B2B. So I’m going to kick off the conversation with this question, why is segmenting your audience crucial for setting prices that reflect true value and maximize revenue?

Dan Balcauski  01:33

Well, I’m really excited to dive into this topic, and I’m going to actually probably do a faux pas right off the bat, which is I’m going to ask the host a question to his question. So Christian, what should a beer cost?

Christian Klepp  01:50

Where is it brewed? Is it imported? Is it local? Ingredients, alcohol content, I don’t know. Maybe $1?

Dan Balcauski  02:02

Maybe $1 okay.

Christian Klepp  02:03

I’m hoping it’s $1.

Dan Balcauski  02:05

Okay, so, Christian, you just articulated several different, what we call attributes of that product. What type of beer is it? Where is it brewed? What’s the alcohol content, things you didn’t comment on is that beer in the grocery store. Are you at a bar or nightclub? Are you at a sporting event or a concert? That same beer that might cost you $1 you’d be happy to pay $1 at the grocery store. You’re at your sporting event, they’re going to charge you $20 I don’t know what the Canadian US conversion is this day, so I’ll stay in the US denomination. I think it’s about parity, last time I checked. But nonetheless, that context is incredibly different. 

Dan Balcauski  02:51

You know, I’ve asked this question before, and people are like, well, I don’t know. I don’t drink beer. I’m not a beer drinker. So they’re a non market participant. So I think it’s interesting, because where your head went to is incredibly common when we’re working with technical teams, technical founders building software products. Hey, why is your product better? Well, we have feature a, b and c, and our competitors don’t have they don’t have those or or they have x, y, z, but they don’t, aren’t as good as ours. 

Dan Balcauski  03:22

Value, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s only exists in the consciousness of men, and it’s contextual and relative to everything else. When you’re at the ball game and the guy’s selling you that beer for $20 you may not be happy, but what are your alternatives for you may be in a celebratory mood, okay? Whatever I knew kind of getting into this, but there’s also very legitimate what we might term price fences. There’s security at the front, patting you down, making sure you didn’t bring in your own alcohol. The cruise lines know this extensively, heavy screening on your luggage, because that cruise ship ticket relatively cheap, almost no margin. They make all their margin on alcohol, so they want to make sure that you’re buying what they have on ship at a captive audience. 

Dan Balcauski  04:16

And we could play this it’s not just alcohol. We could play this game with any commodity. You’re walking down the street and you stop, it’s a hot day, you pop in a gas station, buy a bottle of water. I guarantee you your valuation and how much you pay for that bottle of water be very different if you were wandering in the Sahara desert for seven days. What does all this have to do with the topic that you hinted at the beginning is that customer segmentation is important to pricing because the value rests in the eye of the consumers. And what we do with customer segmentation is we try to create relatively homogenous subgroups of customers that. Have similar needs or in or in similar contexts, and that way, we can create offers, create products and price them to meet the needs of those specific customers.

Christian Klepp  05:14

Wow, you went really deep, really fast, and all of that from man, I just wanted a beer like but um, you brought up something earlier in the conversation then, and that was a great segue to the next question, because you and I both know the word value gets thrown around these days, and there may or may not be any context, but I know in your world and in your area of expertise, there is context to it, and I’d like to get into that a little bit deeper here. So let’s talk about value, and what are some of the different ways to think about value concerning pricing, I think is one part of the question, and the second question is, why is a clear definition of value essential for successful pricing strategies, and you hinted at it earlier. 

Dan Balcauski  06:03

Well, I’ll answer the second question first, because I think it’s simpler and helps ground the first part. I imagine at some point, many of your listeners took some sort of ECO (Economics) 101 course, where they were introduced to this thing called a demand curve. Supply curve, demand curve, they intersect. Where they intersect is a market, what they call the market clearing price. Those are great tools for economists, and yes, price does have a relationship to volume, but unless you’re probably the professor teaching that every day, a detail that they you probably have faded with the Sands of Time is that those curves often depend upon a very specific market context, which you tend to get taught in Your ECO101 classes are two very specific and rare market situations, the situation of the pure commodity I’m selling, pork bellies, steel, gold or the pure monopoly, I’m the only provider of a good in a market. The rest of us live in this messy middle, and I think most of our econ teachers just didn’t have enough time in the semester to go over what happens when you’re living in that messy middle. But unfortunately, most of us work at companies that are not on those extreme ends, probably for the good, because it’s really hard to be on either of those ends. And you know, the government tends to go after you if you’re a monopoly, might seem like a good thing. Seem like a good thing, and if you’re a pure commodity business, it’s hard to be a go to market leader, because you’ve got a real tough job on your hands. The other foundational relationship besides volume that pricing has is to value. And so it’s one of these areas that folks we really need to understand what that means in order to do a rigorous pricing well, and especially as we’re developing innovative products, because value clarification is a really crucial lever. 

Dan Balcauski  08:14

Again, going back to the technical teams who are building products, we tend to talk in feature language, but put yourself on the other side of that table on a demo call. We’ve got feature a, b and c, and you’re leaving it as remember those old textbooks, they say we leave this as an exercise to the reader to figure out you have left as an exercise to the reader what feature a means in the life of your customer, and so not only in pricing, but also in being able to properly describe how we’re going to make an impact in a customer’s life. Value clarification is the most has the largest room for improvement. So as you mentioned before, value tends to be really over abused, vaguely defined, probably just as much, if not more, than customer segmentation I find. I rest on the shoulders of giants. 

Dan Balcauski  09:09

I use a couple of frameworks that really help to make this specific. So I’ll just name them quickly, and then we’ll kind of elaborate them a little bit more. So the first is what’s called the value cascade. It was elaborated, as far as I could tell, first, by a gentleman named Tom Nagle who wrote what might be considered the Bible of pricing, the strategy and tax, the pricing. If you’re really, really into this topic, it’s kind of a must for anyone who’s serious about this topic. It’s a little bit dense, but he outlines this concept called the value cascade. And then I use a lot of Jobs To Be Done, which has many fathers, Theodore Levitt, famous Harvard Business School professor back in the day, Clayton Christensen, Bob Moesta, Tony Ulwick, many people have contributed to the evolution of Jobs To Be Done. And both of these come together to really give a crisp understanding of value. 

Dan Balcauski  09:16

So the first part of the value cascade. So why is it called the value cascade? Thomas Nagle, he drew a diagram. Sorry, this is not a visual medium, but I’ll try to briefly describe it. If we think of it. What is a cascade? Cascade is another word for waterfall. So if we think of a bar, a series of bar charts where each bar proceeding from left to right is shorter than the one next to it. In order, you have use value, exchange value, perceived value, and then willingness, customer’s willingness to pay and eventually price. So it really helps us understand how we get from understandings of value and tying it to price. So the first part of that is what’s called use value. So this is where something like Jobs To Be Done is super helpful, because use value is really the sum of all benefits a customer could potentially receive from a product. Economists might use a term like utility within the frameworks of jobs to be done. We tend to focus, especially a lot in the B2B world, around what jobs to be done might call functional jobs helps me make more money, save money, decrease risk, save time, those type of things. 

Dan Balcauski  11:09

Why do I love jobs to be done, though? Is because jobs to be done helps remind us that functional jobs aren’t the only type of value we get. We also have emotional jobs, which jobs theory breaks into both personal and social job. So what would be a personal job? Personal emotional job is, help me increase my status, help me increase my confidence. We see this all the time. A Rolex and a Timex have the same functional equivalent. They will tell you exactly what time it is. Why do people pay $20,000 for a Rolex and $20 for a Timex? Because they’re paying for status and emotional value, right? Social value very useful if we’re working for the government or NGO (Non-governmental organization). So, you know, we’re humans. We’re social creatures by nature. We don’t do things only for our own good. Thank God. So we would have things like increasing access to education or health care or voting rights, right things like this. So those would be social benefits. So that’s kind of where the economists lay right. It’s like, okay, what are all the benefits that someone would get out of this? But we don’t live in that pure world, because, especially when it comes to pricing, like use value is almost never relevant in a pricing exercise, because there’s always some option, some status quo. We live in a market environment, again, assuming you’re not in a monopoly situation.

Dan Balcauski  12:30

So Tom introduces this idea of exchange value. So exchange value is okay. I have some reference value. I’m getting some job done, and then I’m positively or negatively differentiated from that other option. So example I like to use would be, imagine our good friend Elon Musk is he’s swapped place with Tom Hanks is on the Cast away Island, and he stranded there for years, and he finally sees in the distance a ship coming. Ship captain arrives on shore. Says, Elon, I’m here to take you to shore. The use value for Elon is tremendous, right? It doesn’t matter that he’s got $500 billion in the bank. All of that is useless to him, like getting back to civilization should be the only thing that matters. So his economic cost is equal to his use value. He should be willing to say, I will give you, let’s leave the ethics of the situation aside, a bit willing to give you all my money and borrow from all my friends for whatever you want to get me off this island. 

Dan Balcauski  13:34

But then, while they’re having this discussion, ship Captain B shows up. Elon’s lucky days he hasn’t had anyone for years or two show up at once. The ship Captain B says, Hey, Elon, you don’t need to pay him your entire fortune. You only need to pay me a million dollars. So now we have a new market price. So now ship Captain A has a decision, right? He could bow out and say, Well, okay, I couldn’t get 500 billion. I can only, you know, now there’s a mark rice. Or now you start creating this situation where ship Captain A says, Hey Elon, I’ll do it for, you know, 1,000,005 but you can sleep in my captain’s quarters, and I have a band on deck, and we’ll entertain you. And, you know, with free flowing alcohol, whatever you want. And so now they’re talking about differentiated value. And this is the, this is the area we most live in but it doesn’t stop there with this value cascade. So this is the transition from use value exchange value. 

Dan Balcauski  14:26

Because even though we may, we do this all the time as marketers, we say, hey, our widget is so much better than what you’re doing today. I’ve got a spreadsheet that proves it. If you’re pumping out this many widgets in your factory per hour. We’ve got, you know, case studies, etc, that prove that, you know, we could increase the amount of revenue in your fact, your factory will generate for your company by 50% that only matters to the extent that your buyer understands that value and believes that value. And so this is where the. The next level comes in, which is customer perceived value.

Dan Balcauski  15:02

Why does this matter? Because humans are not spreadsheets. It’s a very messy economic world. Rarely do we have just a choice between two options, two ship captains trying to outline just between two things. Anytime you’ve gone to buy a complex piece of B2B, hardware or software, what do you do? You ask a couple friends for Hey, what have you used to your companies? You go to G2 or Trust Radius or one of these review sites. You get a kind of short list of candidates. You go to their websites. You look at Logo Gardens, which you know, hey, this is used by Samsung or Disney or JP Morgan. Oh, okay, does everyone go to the pricing page and look at all 300 features, if that’s even available, publicly listed, and if they could, could they even understand what they were looking at? No, because we only can have time for so much where most people are, what economists would call satisficers, not maximizers, like we’re not going to the finest detail on every single piece. And so again, this idea of value only exists in the consciousness of men, and therefore, I guess you should be politically correct, using it for mankind. We have a lot of work as marketers to increase the perceived value of our product. That’s why we use things like customer testimonials, case studies, logo gardens, etc. So and perceived value is finally what drives customer willingness to pay. So that’s how those things tie together. 

Christian Klepp  16:28

Yeah, no. Thanks for, thanks for packing that. Because I kind of knew that this wasn’t going to be a very straightforward answer, right? You’d have to, you’d kind of have to get into the weeds of it, right? I did have one follow up question before we move on, and do you feel that from your experience with the folks that you’ve worked with, you feel that perhaps their lack of understanding of this value cascade leads them to do things where they just default to, well, they compete on price, which then means They’re competing with features, instead of actually understanding, to your point, how their product or their solution delivers value to the customers.

Dan Balcauski  17:10

It constantly boggles my mind how common it is for companies to not understand the value they provide to their customers. I wish I had a bulletproof explanation for this, because I am not the first and only person to say, talk to your customers, figure out their world, where you fit into it, why people made a choice so I would say too often. You know, I have talked to CMOs, VPs of marketing in charge of very important large B2B software companies, who say we have no differentiation. And I’m sorry that is a cop out, if, if the brand manager of Evian can charge a 3x price premium over Dasani, which is charging a 10,000x price premium over in the US, what is almost perfectly suitable substitute coming out of your tap. You as a B2B software person. Do not need to say, cannot say, we have no differentiation. You just have not thought deep enough about why customers choose you. It’s even more extreme, because in many situations, especially as you get into higher dollar value B2B goods, you don’t just usually have one person making the decision. You’ve got one person who maybe this vendor is interacting with, but then they’ve got to turn around and make a justification to the CTO (Chief Technology Officer), or maybe the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and the CFO (Chief Financial Officer), right? Why we charge? Why we go, Oh, we’re buying a CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Why did you guys just go Salesforce? We went with this other company because XYZ. 

Dan Balcauski  18:49

So if you’re CRM, VP of marketing, and you’re like, we have no differentiation, but they, they bought you, like, at some point, your end buyers had to go have that conversation. It just reflects that you, haven’t done your due diligence to go do that, and therefore it creates a lot of confusion for the rest of the go to market organization, because you’re then sort of left guessing and guiding everyone in terms of, what should we put first? How do we talk about what we do, why we’re better? So yes, I agree, lack of this understanding is incredibly prolific, and I think it leads to a lot of dysfunction down the line. 

Christian Klepp  19:30

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. All right, I’m gonna move us on to the next question about on the topic of leveraging customer segmentation and pricing for B2B, what are some of the key pitfalls to avoid and what should be done instead?

Dan Balcauski  19:45

So there’s a couple of different pitfalls that I would highlight. So the first is maybe the most extreme, and probably your audience of marketers don’t run into this themselves much, but they may run into. It from the C suite executives that they have to talk to, which is we don’t this idea of customer segmentation can be anathema. Within an organization, all our customers are the same. If you are in an organization where your C suite talks like that, I might leave that organization. Might be my point of view, because you’re gonna have a really hard time doing anything well, what you’re probably going to have to do a lot, if that is a situation you’re dealt with, is the product or innovation teams are going to build a product, and then you are going to get told, Hey, go position it for why audience. But it almost never is a good I was saying it is never a good strategy to have either a vague group in mind when you develop a product and go try to sell it to another, or have or have one group A in mind, then try to go sell to Customer B, because there’s just going to be misalignment. 

Dan Balcauski  20:56

So that leads me to step two, assuming you’re not an organization, or a kind of tactical approach too, which assuming you’re not an organization where you’re in that I would say first is look around the building and see if everyone is on the same page in terms of how we’re thinking about customer segments, because it’s more common than you’d imagine, where maybe product and design have a set of personas that they developed, because somebody in their agile training said that they had to have a persona so they could write a user story, and so they went and did some work independently. And then marketing maybe has some personas that they’ve developed. And then maybe sales doesn’t think of personas, but they’ve sort of developed demo scripts or kind of walk throughs based upon some qualifying questions. And if those things aren’t in harmony, you kind of end up in that same situation. So kind of walking around the building and trying to figure out, okay, hey, we’ve got these things, but is everyone on the same page in terms of who we’re talking to? 

Dan Balcauski  21:57

And then I would say number three, and this one is a little bit more intense, assuming that you know the first two are not a problem. A lot of B2B marketers have suffered from inheriting this idea from B2C around using demographics, which in B2B we call firmographics as primary segmentation criteria. And so what the root cause of this is, okay, hey, we’ve got a set of customer segments or personas that we’ve defined, but they don’t actually drive decision making within the organization or determine what customers buy. Because, you know, the simplest example at a high level is SMB (Small Medium Business) mid market enterprise. It’s like, okay, I get it. I guess it’s better than having an all, all one size fits all approach. But you may have an enterprise customer that is acting very much like a SMB because of their particular use case, or how their organization is structured, or the other contextual tools that the department you’re selling to is using. And so that would be the third thing is, if your personas segments are purely defined on kind of firmographic basis, and just quickly, what I mean by firmographics usually some sort of size variable, whether it’s employees or amount of revenue, industry, vertical, department, head, region like, yes, there can be differences between those, but they usually are not what’s underlying the defining purchasing criteria or why they make certain decisions over others.

Christian Klepp  23:39

No, those are some great insights. And I had a follow up question for you, Dan, and it kind of like lends or opens the door to talk a little bit more about market research. So that third point about the personas and them not basing them on firmographics, because that could lead folks down the wrong path. What do you think that they should be doing instead. So what should they be basing the segmentation, or this, these personas, on? Right?

Dan Balcauski  24:07

Yeah, it’s a great question. So there’s, there’s also right, like, who is, who should be doing this in an organization? And usually this is probably something that should be driven by marketing or and, or product, probably jointly together. It’s not something that you I wouldn’t leave it to any other group outside those two, because it does require some intense work. So let me just start at a very high level. When we do a segmentation well, at the end, we need to know two things, who customers are and what they want. The problem with kind of relying on firmer graphics alone is we only we kind of stop and end at the first part who they are, right? We do need that, but we also need to know what they want, because what they want determines the context, the and the value. Goes back to the beginning of our conversation. And so then the question is like, where do you start? And so if you are, I’ll give a little bit of a contextual frame here. 

Dan Balcauski  25:08

If you are in an organization where you have nothing, your first battle is to try to make sure that everyone understands that not all customers are the same. You do not sell the same thing to everyone. People have different needs, and so one way that you can do that is by starting with something like a firmographic segmentation, right? So if you’re starting from zero, where that’s your battle. I would not go off on a deep qualitative research project, because you may have a battle on your hands to even convince people that, hey, we need to think about our different customers separately. And so that’s a good place to start if you have nothing, or if that’s the battle you’re facing. And assuming that you have at least sort of an A, what we might call an a priori framework, right, a firmographic framework, and maybe you use something like Mark, maybe you bought a research report from Gartner, Forrester, or one of these analyst firms, right? And sort of inheriting that like, I even think of those the same way, because, because when we think of a priori segmentation, we’re using sort of characteristics that people have already defined, right? I can go to this CIA Factbook, or, you know, the World Bank, right? And these people have data sets that are already sort of sliced and diced, you know, worldwide, right, that I can already use. And so maybe you start there, and then I want to go and do the next level, which is in depth customer insight gathering, right? 

Dan Balcauski  26:36

And I’m using customer in the broad sense, because some of these people may not are, are unlikely to even be your customers, but trying to figure out, okay, these are all the different market segments that we have from our a priori. Now we want to go in depth and talk to different groups of them. And this is where Jobs To Be Done really helps us, where the idea is that we want to really understand what their context is, what they’re trying to achieve, what they’ve tried at the past. Why that doesn’t work, how they ran their process, who was involved? What were the decision criteria that they used? There’s some really good talks if you want a sort of master class on how to do this. I think it was the business of software conference. Bob Moesta did this live on stage for everyone, where he did a very in depth, jobs to be done, level interview. And I think it was about like buying a car, and I’m going to do a very poor impression of him right now, but the things that he was talking about is like framing it like a you’re filming a documentary. Who was there, what was going through your mind? And you talking to the guy on stage, it’s like, well, we were looking at this hatchback, but, you know, the earlier in the conversation is like, Oh, my wife was about to have a baby. I knew our our new co our old car wouldn’t work for our growing family, and so we’re at the car dealership, and we had the stroller with us, and we tried to put it in the back of the car, and the stroller wouldn’t fit, and he goes, I’m not living the rest of the 10 years I have this car with this struggle, right? Or however long the stroller was be needed for it, right? 

Dan Balcauski  28:08

That’s the type of thing that you don’t get out of, oh, we’ve got analytical data, you know, from our Google Analytics of the people things we’re looking around their websites. Like, no, you’ve got a real idea there of how. Like, okay, oh, people have to be able to fit their stroller in the back, right? Because, I mean, look, you can go on the website and be like, Oh, the trunk diet, you know, dimensions are 3.7 feet by 4.8 and nobody knows what that means until you’re there living it, right? And so, but that makes a lot of sense. And then you have a whole way as a go to market, as a marketer, to talk to that and then build, you know, your messaging around things like that, because you really understand deeply the customers, you know, context and why that matters to them. You know, because they’re not. They don’t need a bigger trunk in their hatchback, because they’re, you know, they’re not also looking at the Ford, f1, 50, because they’re looking at haul and gravel every day, right? And so they need it to be rough and tumble. They gotta put the stroller in the groceries and back, right? So knowing these deeper things only really comes from this in depth customer conversations. And then, as you do that, you have these patterns emerge. And then you can use other statistical analyzes, more quantitative methods, once you have those to further refine if people want that advanced class, I’m happy to go down that road, but I’ve written pretty extensively on my blog about it as well.

Christian Klepp  29:28

Yeah, yeah. I would save that for those who are going to be inspired by this conversation, and then give them an excuse to reach out to you and find out more about that master class. 

Dan Balcauski  29:40

I love that. 

Christian Klepp  29:41

Okay, now we’re gonna get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us quite a bit already, but if, let’s just say that there’s somebody out there, whether it’s somebody who’s in the who’s a B2B marketer, or maybe even somebody in the product department that’s listening to this conversation, and you you want them to. To walk away with three to five things they can take action on, based on today’s conversation, what would those things be?

Dan Balcauski  30:08

Well, I definitely would point to those things I already talked about around customer segmentation, in terms of, you know, making sure that your executive team not all understands all buyers are alike, making sure that at least, if that’s the case, the departments are not misaligned on what are those descriptions of buyers and or customers, and then go, if you have that all good going on, talking to you’re actually talking to your customers, because there is no end substitute. And I was actually talking to another CEO who had come to this realization as well, because they, you know, this is the thing. Founders know this in their bones, because they had to work so hard to figure out what customers needed. It’s when companies get to a certain scale and you bring in non founders who are trying to run this process, that insight gets lost, and if you’re still a CEO, founder running the company, potentially, you may just think that everyone has the same understanding as you do, right? But all even that information can get out of date, and markets can change, etc. And so I was asking him, I was like, Well, why don’t people do this? Because the talk to your customers is so it’s, it’s almost cliche at this point, but he’s like, it’s because it’s uncomfortable. It’s like, we like to look at our dashboards because they tell us the story we have in our minds already, and we have this confirmation bias, but we in front of a customer and they’re reaming us out because the product doesn’t work in their environment because of some situation you can’t avoid that. I guess we could rationalize anything else away, but know that it’s gonna be uncomfortable, right? So I guess that’s just, you know, know that going in, but do it anyway, right? I and learn to really love that feeling when I walk out of those conversations and I’m like, Man, I had a totally different view of how customers used our product. And now I have something different, like, now I love that feeling, right? That’s like, that’s a good day. It was like, Oh, I learned, right. So I think a reframe there is helpful as well. 

Dan Balcauski  32:08

And then look, I would say for pricing in general. You know, we could talk about a whole lot of techniques, etc, but two basic things, make sure there’s an owner in an organization that’s explicitly defined, and then have a process. And that process does not have to be perfect from day one, but pricing and packaging is a thing. Your product is constantly evolving. Your value is evolving. Your differentiated value is definitely evolving because your competitors aren’t standing still. Even if your product is the same, your competitors are moving, as some of the AI (Artificial intelligence) companies found out, unfortunately, this week.

Christian Klepp  32:45

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Dan Balcauski  32:47

And so, okay, well, what happens? Like all right, now, we have a process to revisit it. We have a cadence, right? And someone is what. Someone is in charge of that. And you know, again, one of these things that you’d be surprised how often you know it’s this thing that nobody owns, and there’s not a regular process to revisit when it’s such a powerful growth lever, right? It’s like, we have a marketing department, right? And everyone’s laser focused on MQLs (Marketing qualified lead) and sales pipeline, right? And that’s all around quantity, and that’s good, and we need that. And just you’re like, Wait, there’s only three ways to grow a SaaS business, acquisition, monetization and retention. And all the you guys are only looking at one of these levers most of the time, retention comes up when we hit a recessionary period. Then everyone really cares about their existing customers. Make sure they don’t leave, because acquisition gets really, really hard. But I would say, yeah, having a process and paying attention to it, right? And look, it’s not going to be perfect, but, you know, there’s you’ll get better over time, and those two things will go a long way.

Christian Klepp  33:51

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, on the topic of retention, you don’t want to ever wait until times are hard. And then you go, and then you get your teams to go to the customer and say, hey, please stay right. I mean, by that point in time, they might have already like abandoned ship, gone somewhere else.

Dan Balcauski  34:09

Yeah, no, I have been violent agreement with you. That is a, not a good strategy, but in times, especially as we saw in the zero interest rate era, where it was kind of growth at all costs, things like retention got put on a back burner as people were trying to do a mad land grab of capabilities and growth. So.

Christian Klepp  34:29

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, okay, Dan, get up on your salt box. Man, what is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with and why, and I know you’ve got a million, but just I’m only asking for one.

Dan Balcauski  34:46

It would probably be my general dislike of freemium, especially as it applies to B2B companies. I think this is something that was. Are imported, again, from B2C companies, where it sometimes works on the margins, but rarely is a good move, if ever, for a B2B software company. It tends to, you know, the flames are fanned by folks who wave the exceptions when it does work around, versus really understanding that those are the exceptions, and the rule is most people should avoid it.

Christian Klepp  35:28

Yeah, I think, if I’m not mistaken you, you wrote about it on LinkedIn. It’s definitely on your profile, and I think you wrote a post about it, and I’ve written about it a lot, yeah, yeah. But you know, that’s a fair point, and that’s a fair point. Okay, the bonus question, and we talked about this in our previous conversation, so let me see here, in your bio, it says that you completed a solo round the world expedition to 21 countries. That’s a handful, a lifelong dream involving several life changing volunteering experiences and a new collection of friends and good stories. So the question is, tell us about one of your most unforgettable moments during that trip around the world and how it changed you.

Dan Balcauski  36:13

The experience that I would say changed me the most was right at the beginning, which is I did a while I was traveling for a year and a half. I did two 10 day meditation retreats. But the first one, I would say, was there. Every single one I’ve done has been very, very impactful. But that has changed me tremendously. If we were talking about status quo in general that I severely disagree with it’s that we are given this incredible piece of machinery called the human mind with no instruction manual. There are ways of finding out what that really is in 10 days of silent meditation that are not available elsewhere, and the ability to clear the lens of the way you process the world and so many different aspects. You know, there’s so many ways of being that we did not choose consciously. And I’m not one to say that this is the only way to truth, or even that there is truth at the end, but it is a way, at a very powerful way, to unwind What are probably ways that you didn’t even know you were looking at the world through, let’s call it non rose colored glasses, because we all too often account our perception of reality with reality itself. So sorry if that got too philosophical there in the last. 

Christian Klepp  37:55

Very profound, very profound. May I ask where you did the Silent Retreat, or the silent meditation? 

Dan Balcauski  38:00

I’ve done several of them, and two I did while traveling. I actually did the first one here in the States, up in Dallas, and I did the second one while I was traveling down outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

Christian Klepp  38:10

Wow. Okay, so you’ve seen a bit of the world then, huh? 

Dan Balcauski  38:15

Little bit. 

Christian Klepp  38:16

Yeah. Any tips for getting over jet lag just as we’re wrapping up?

Dan Balcauski  38:20

None, none. I’m not. I’ve not conquered that as a skill set. 

Christian Klepp  38:25

That’s a hard one to tackle, huh? Like, yeah, no, fantastic, Dan, this has been an absolute blast. I mean, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your expertise and experience with the listener. So please quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you?

Dan Balcauski  38:41

Yeah, well, I really appreciate the opportunity to share what I’ve learned along the way. I try to do that pretty regularly on LinkedIn so folks can reach out to me there. Just let me know. You heard on the podcast, I get separated from the rest of the LinkedIn spam. I try to blog semi regularly, although not as much as I’d like on my website, producttranquility.com, you can also reach out to me there. And I also have a podcast myself called SaaS Scaling Secrets, where I interview CEOs of scale up B2B SaaS companies about how to grow software businesses from 5,10, 20 million and beyond.

Christian Klepp  39:19

Awesome, awesome. And we’ll be sure to drop the link to the show in the show notes for this episode. All right, once again. Then thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Dan Balcauski  39:31

Thank you, Christian.

Christian Klepp  39:32

All right. Bye for now.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Becky Lawlor. She is the Founder and Chief Research and Content Officer at Redpoint with over 10 years of experience creating thought leadership content for B2B Tech brands from startups to Fortune 500. Becky saw firsthand how original research based content could drive performance, unlike almost any other type of content, her goal is to ensure that every project is tailored to deliver thought leading, high quality content that will deliver her client’s content marketing goals. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:43

Okay. Becky Lawlor, welcome to the show. 

Becky Lawlor  00:47

Excited to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:49

Great to be connected. Becky, I’m really looking for this conversation, because I think you’re the first person I’ve interviewed on this particular topic, right? There’s a lot of folks that come on the show and talk about B2B content marketing, per se, but not necessarily so much about the research aspect of it, and that’s what I’m really excited to dig into today.

Becky Lawlor  01:10

Great. It’s one of my favorite topics to talk about. 

Christian Klepp  01:12

I’m sure it is. I’m sure it is, all right. Well, let’s dive in. So Becky, you’ve been on a mission to help B2B companies produce original research based content, I’m going to say that achieves high marketing performance. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think is going to be very useful to the audience. And that’s how to discover what content drives B2B buyers to act. And let me just say, Who doesn’t want that, right? So for context and for the audience’s benefit, your company, Redpoint, created this 2024/2025 blueprint for high impact content, and it’s a report, and in that report, you help decode the exact content types that trigger purchasing decisions. So I’m going to kick off the conversation with this question, why do you believe original research based content is the key to success in B2B content marketing?

Becky Lawlor  02:08

Yeah, so I have my own personal beliefs, but I also, as you noted, this research report that I did, I actually went out and surveyed 250 B2B buyers about what type of content they will actually share with others, give their personal data for or even make their purchasing decisions, often among a lot of other questions that I kind of asked them around, you know, impacts of the content. So what I found in that research really drove, also, what I personally believe, which is that original research just fundamentally performs better and stronger across almost every marketing KPI you can think of than any other type of content. In the report, you’ll see, you know, 91% of B2B buyers say that original research increases our awareness of a brand, and 93% say that it builds trust. And that was far higher than any other kind of like. I asked about educational content, how to content, I asked about different types of original research to to be more nuanced on like interview based or analysis of, like internal data versus survey. So there was so in that there’s a bunch of different ways. So the 91% is kind of a more overarching of different types of original research. But across the board, any type of content that had some kind of original research performed better, and I guess really quickly, I think we should just maybe define what original research is. It should be a term that people are familiar with, but not everybody is. 

Becky Lawlor  03:53

So what I mean by that is it has to have some unique insight that essentially isn’t already there. And typically, original research would be running some kind of survey, but it can also be your internal data that you have analyzed and are sharing, but it’s still data that nobody else has. It can also actually be like third party data, but you’ve done a unique analysis of that data. And the fourth type, which is probably the easiest type to get, is more what we call their qualitative data, which can just be interview based. It’s still original research. You’ve gone out, you’ve interviewed one or more people to get their insights, and now you’re delivering those insights which are unique to your audience.

Christian Klepp  04:37

Yeah, absolutely right, absolutely right. And I know we’re going to get into the details later on in the conversation, I couldn’t help but ask you this question, just based on this research that you conducted, what were your findings in terms of how, or for lack of a better word, how haphazard the buyer’s journey is in B2B?

Becky Lawlor  04:58

Yeah. I mean, I think I didn’t drill into the buyers journey really in depth in this report, but I think that it kind of goes to the point one of the things I did ask about is how often they want content published, and especially original research and buyers. I thought it would be lower amount, but they actually wanted it. The majority wanted it quarterly, and the second level wanted it monthly. So I think, to me, what that says is, when buyers are on a journey period, and we all know they kind of go all over and it’s not linear at all, they do want content. They do want a lot of content, they are looking for answers. So I think you really need to keep that top of mind, and the more that you’re delivering, again, that unique value through like original research, the more you continue to build your authority and your brand awareness, and those things are critical. When it comes to closing the deal, it’s going to be much easier to close the deal if you’ve have built a lot of awareness and authority in your buyer’s mind.

Christian Klepp  06:04

Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve got another follow up question for you, Becky, only because you brought up that word, right? That word that seems to be very loosely used these days, value, right? Delivering value, right? So in the context of the research, define what you consider valuable to B2B buyers?

Becky Lawlor  06:24

Well, I think value to B2B buyers, I did ask them, like, what made content stand out and when? And that was an open ended question, and what people responded was really the data. There are bunch of different ways it can add value. Can add value. You can add value by having data to actually be able to now go make their case for something, because now they can go to the other stakeholders internally and have real data to support kind of their positioning. Content stood out. Case studies. Was another one that performed pretty well in that report, and that is because case studies, especially if there was a problem that they felt really aligned with, it was their own problem as well, and they saw solutions to it. That was another high value type of content for folks. 

Becky Lawlor  07:15

So again, that goes to that kind of relevancy piece, just really making sure you’re relevant. But really, people were just looking for insights that they didn’t already have. They wanted something value is really giving them something new to think about, or allowing them to benchmark against other people, to understand their performance and where they maybe are doing well, but also where they really need to invest to improve. So those kinds of things were all high value types of content. 

Christian Klepp  07:44

Okay, fantastic, fantastic. Okay, I’m gonna move us on to the next set of questions, which I did say was gonna be around the research that you conducted and you brought you mentioned some of the answers already, but based on the research you conducted, what content formats do B2B buyers value the most, and why? 

Becky Lawlor  08:01

Yeah, so it really, as I said, there was I asked about different types of original research, as well as, like, how to content, educational content. And I even asked about, like, you know, thought leadership content that didn’t include original research and all of those ranked lower, but any type, whether it was industry specific data analysis interviews of peers or industry experts, or survey data from industry peers, those three consistently ranked as the highest types of content that people felt would push them to act in some way, as well as just also help build more authority and awareness about a brand. 

Christian Klepp  08:47

Okay, okay, speaking of authority and awareness, that was a great segue to the next question, what type of contents based on the research, again, did you find will help to improve the brand credibility of B2B companies? 

Becky Lawlor  09:03

Yeah, again, it’s the same thing. You really need to, I mean, to kind of beat the same drum again, but you really need to invest in doing some kind of original research. And, you know, I think the reason for that is because, when you’re investing, and you’re actually investing in your industry and really bringing new insights to that industry. It shows one that you know the space. But I think even just showing that you’re willing to make that investment helps build your authority, because you’re doing something that maybe a lot of your competitors aren’t doing right now and and you are showing that you have insights that your competitors don’t have about the industry in the space.

Christian Klepp  09:45

Right, right. I did have one follow up question for you, and maybe you found this in your research, or maybe you didn’t in terms of the different types of content. So you’ve mentioned all these different types of content, right? This, these content types. Types in this content format? Was there a particular style in which the content should be structured or written, that is, that would resonate more with the buyers? Do they want you to give it to them straight? Did they want it and with text and infographics? Did they want it to be more visual? What were your findings?

Becky Lawlor  10:21

Yeah, I did ask a question, kind of around the format that they preferred. And what we found, was that, and this actually surprised me, because I thought it would be lower down. Is that actually deep analysis? Because I asked, you know, do you want in depth analysis? How valuable is that? You know, visualization. So there were a couple of different things in there, but the in depth analysis and then making it highly visual and scannable were kind of the two highest. But the in depth analysis actually was highest. So I think that it’s important to realize that they do want you to not just present the numbers. They want some thought and analysis behind it, but then think about how to still do that in a highly visual scannable way. And I think you can do a lot with head headlines and headers and call outs to combine both of those.

Christian Klepp  11:16

That’s a really interesting finding, and it’s something also I’ve been talking to, you know other B2B content marketers about for years now, I think, right, like, and I don’t know what your experience has been, Becky, but like, you know, there’s folks that say, like, no, it’s got to be factual and boring. Because at the end of the day, boring wins. And I and in my head, I’m going said, no one ever Right. Like, I mean, even if it is a vertical that is very, let’s just say, technical in nature, they still, I truly believe that the reader, in this case, the B2B buyers, want to digest that content in a way that’s well, it’s well, it’s easily digestible. Let’s put it that way. But it’s also in a format that helps provoke some kind of, like, new way of thinking about specific topics. Am I right to say that?

Becky Lawlor  12:07

Yeah, I think so. I think that’s where I think the combination of how you visualize it, along with…, you know, I was surprised, because I think there’s also this idea that, Oh, we just need to dumb down content. Content needs to be shorter. People don’t have attention spans, you know, they’re just going to skim everything. So seeing that, I think when buyers are really in the buying stage and they’re trying to make a decision, especially on something really technical, maybe something really expensive, you know, more complex. They need some analysis. You know, they’re not… It’s true that they’re not just there for entertainment, they’re there to make a decision, so they need knowledge, but you still want to capture attention. So I think that’s where kind of hitting a nice balance of having some really kind of, you know, edutainment type of headline. So you’re, you know, you’re gonna draw some headlines from your most kind of shocking or interesting pieces of data, but then you need to go deeper about why that is, I think that’s kind of a good way to balance that sometimes. 

Christian Klepp  13:05

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so for the next question, your report also identifies what you call ROI (Return on investment) boosters. So apparently this is where you recommend that B2B companies should focus on creating high impact results driven content. And you might have mentioned this already, but can you provide some more examples of these?

Becky Lawlor  13:24

So, yeah, again, I think any type of content you do that has that original research in it is an ROI booster. My clients have seen, usually two to three times the lead generation from these types of reports, they just tend to drive more engagement. And when we asked in the survey, you know, folks said they were 2.5 times more likely to share this type of content, and they were two times more likely to share their personal data. So it is a type of content I think you still can justifiably gate to drive more of those leads, which should help with ROI. But it also is great. 

Becky Lawlor  14:07

This kind of data also works really well for sales enablement. It works on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), backlinks, driving traffic. It also and even in today’s world where SEO is getting a lot harder with generative AI search and things. This type of content is actually really effective for SEO, because it is kind of the type of content that is authoritative that search engines are prioritizing right now. So it’s going to help drive that. It’s also great for media mentions, which, again, can you know it’s a little harder to tie direct ROI too, but I’ve also seen companies use it to get, like prestigious speaking engagements that they weren’t able to get before at trade shows and events and conferences, which, again, can drive more leads and just more general brand awareness. 

Becky Lawlor  14:56

And the other piece of content, though, is also, I do want to mention, is customers’ stories. I think people already know that those are can be high value, especially later in the buying cycle. And again, those rated pretty high. So that would be the other one where I would say, if you’re not doing those, the other great thing about those is, in some ways, there are, they are still there’s not research, per se, but there are unique insights. You’ve gone out, you have a real world story that you’re telling here. And so in addition just creating customers’ stories, I would highly encourage folks to make sure that they’re really weaving the problems, the solutions and the results throughout all of their content, so that they’re like, even if they’re just writing a blog article, but bringing in those unique insights, again.

Christian Klepp  15:43

Absolutely, absolutely, I did have two follow up questions for you, Becky, and I wonder if this is something that you found as you were conducting this research or not. Certainly, with you know, folks conducting original research and that giving their content that high degree of differentiation. There’s probably two camps of professionals out there, like and the one camp is saying, like, gate, all that stuff, right? Because we’ve done so much work. And you know, the very least is that if people are coming to our website, we should be able to capture all that content information. And there’s the other camp that says, Well, I wouldn’t gate all of it. I mean, you can get some of it, but like the rest, you can just, you know, have them download it and, you know, they we don’t need to get anything in return. But what are your thoughts on that?

Becky Lawlor  16:35

Yeah, I mean, generally, I’m a don’t gate stuff kind of person, but I also live in a practical world, where, as a marketer, you know, you do need to drive leads, you need to collect emails somehow. And I feel like, as I said earlier, that if you’ve invested in true original research, whether that’s, you know, a survey or an analysis of your own data, that’s really useful and valuable, it does justify and can work as a gated piece of content. But even there, I kind of go with the strategy of like, gate it for a month maybe, but then put the whole thing on your website so that you’re then getting the SEO benefit from it. So gate it for a short period of time, try to get those you know, leads in quickly with that first kind of campaign launch and then open it up so that you’re getting other benefits from that content, and it’s not staying gated that long. That’s my recommended approach.

Christian Klepp  17:32

Yeah, that’s definitely, that’s an interesting one. So you were saying gate it for like, a month and no more, am I right?

Becky Lawlor  17:39

Yeah, a month or six weeks. But I wouldn’t go much longer than that, if you want. I mean, again, it all depends on what somebody’s goal is with the piece of content. Everybody has different kind of priority goals. But if you were trying to get, like, the most juice in a number of different ways out of it, I would say gate it for, you know, a month or six weeks, drive your ads, drive whatever towards that, get those leads, and then get it up on your blog, your website, then get the benefit of backlinks and driving that SEO traffic to it.

Christian Klepp  18:12

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Fantastic. That was the first follow up question. Now the second follow up question on the topic of case studies, or customer success stories, as they’re now also called, um, everybody likes to see that, right? It’s a type of a social proof. It’s a demonstration of how said company helped their customers to succeed, and things of that nature. So, uh, from the research, did you were you able to, like, find out if there was anything in particular that B2B buyers were looking for when they looked at case studies, like they these things absolutely had to be there?

Becky Lawlor  18:52

Yeah, I didn’t ask any in depth questions around it, so I can’t say that I got those kind of insights, but I’m planning to do this report annually, so that might be something good to consider. To go deeper on that one for this year? 

Christian Klepp  19:05

Yeah, I would hazard a guess that they would look at the results right.

Becky Lawlor  19:09

Like, yeah. I think results are always important. But I think my own opinion when you’re creating those is that you should create two levels of a case study. The first one should be deep and in depth, and that is so you can use it in all the other ways that make sense in your content. But then you need to have a really kind of short, pithy one, because a lot of times, I think customers won’t necessarily read the in depth one. But by developing it allows you to pull that stuff out in so many other ways in your content. If you just start with a short one, then you don’t have the depth to use in different articles and topics where it would apply.

Christian Klepp  19:48

Yeah, absolutely. I suppose it also depends on the situation and at what level or what stage both sides find themselves at, like the vendor and the potential customer, like, if they were, if the potential customer were truly interested, okay, they read the short version of the case study. And, okay, let’s have another call, and let’s ask the vendor to go in depth. Like, okay, we see the results here, but talk to us about your approach, your methodology. How did you implement all this stuff? Right? Because they want to, they want to see like as part of the due diligence process, right? 

Becky Lawlor  20:24

Yeah, and I think that to your point, that’s when a more in depth one is important, when they’re getting down to really understanding your processes and your approach and how you work. I mean, I think it’s really a way to show how you work with clients and whether that your culture and your approach is right for them. 

Christian Klepp  20:40

Right, exactly, exactly. Okay, so we’re gonna move on to the next question. And I know we can go really broad and or deep with this one, but just give us something top level here. So based on this report and the research you conducted, what would you say are some of the key pitfalls that content marketers need to avoid based on what you’ve uncovered.

Becky Lawlor  21:04

You know, the first pitfalls would just be not investing in doing some kind of original research. If you think that, you know, you can just go out and kind of do these generic SEO blogs and stuff like that, you’re not going to elevate your content to the point that you’re going to have a competitive differentiation. So that would be a big pitfall. 

Becky Lawlor  21:29

Another one would just be, again, not using your customer stories across broadly. There’s just so many different ways that you can use them, so you should really be getting a lot of mileage, and that would go for if you do invest in original research. I also see that pitfall, like, there’s so many different ways you can break it out, webinars, like I said, speaking engagement, sales enablement, SEO. I mean, you really need to think about your distribution channels and really maximize. I mean, that’s how you really maximize the ROI of it is that you’re putting it across so many different uses and channels to get the most out of it. 

Becky Lawlor  22:04

Now I want to talk about some pitfalls specifically in doing research, because I just see these. I think a lot of folks try to do it yourself, which I totally am supportive of. But it is more complex than just creating a piece of research. And one of the biggest pitfalls I see is people just thinking, oh, I’ll just whip out a survey, no problem. And I want people to kind of pause from it and recognize that actually the survey is so critical and so important that it’s done right. And so if you were to get help anywhere, that’s where I get help, because I see this over and over, that they don’t spend a lot of time and effort on the survey, and then suddenly the data comes back. It doesn’t… There’s not really a narrative there. There’s just a bunch of different data points, because there was 10 cooks in the kitchen, and everybody wanted to know something. But now you don’t really have a story. You just have data or the way the questions were asked. Now it just kind of makes it hard to analyze. It makes it hard to message it and in content.

Becky Lawlor  23:08

Another pitfall I see is people kind of confusing market research with content marketing original research. If you just go to a market research firm for this kind of help, I’ve seen this again as well. Like market research firms are great at doing market research, and they understand how to do that, but a lot of them don’t actually know how to write a survey again for content marketing. So you when you’re writing those surveys again, you really need to be thinking about, how does this translate into headlines? How does this translate into the message? How is this translating into a narrative? I’m going to tell because as a content marketer, you’re in the business of storytelling. You’re in the business of having a narrative and headlines. So you really need to be thinking about that right out of the gate. 

Becky Lawlor  23:50

And the third one is just the data piece that, again, making sure either you have in house capabilities or you’re using a vendor that really can do in depth analysis. This is another huge pain point and pitfall. There’s so much cross tab or analysis that can be done question by question, and if you’re not getting that done, you’re missing so many data points, so many additional stories, so much ROI from the investment you’ve already made. So make sure that you have those data capabilities, or that your vendor truly has those data capabilities, because I see that as a huge pain point often for folks. 

Christian Klepp  24:24

Yeah, no, that’s definitely some great advice there. And I’m sorry if you saw me like grin to myself there, because you just met me. You just reminded me. And I think we’ve all been in those situations before, you know, either in meeting rooms with clients, or back then, when I was in product marketing, where you’re facing the senior management. And then there’s this whole, like, decision by committee, initiative right or opinionitis and analysis paralysis. And no, I think we should add these questions in there, because this is like, so important. And then they give each other what I call the internal high five. And then. I mean, you start going out to market and you realize, like, yeah, these are not the questions we should be asking at all, or these are not the insights that we are meant to extract from this customer. And so, you know, I can totally relate. And these are some really important pitfalls to avoid. And hence, also the reason why perhaps there are certain things that the company shouldn’t be doing by themselves, and they should actually, like, outsource that to an expert.

Becky Lawlor  25:29

Yeah I mean, you know, I understand that budgets are what they are, and you can’t always do that, but I think if you can get some help, you know, it’s gonna make all the difference in terms of making sure that you’re having a credible data, you have a strong narrative with it. And again, you know, to that other point of like, you also need to make sure you’re getting insights that are interesting externally to the, you know, internal stuff. As people start like, well, I’d like to know this, and I’d like to know this, and it’s like, well, take a step back. Are you doing this for your own internal knowledge, which that’s great if that’s what you’re doing it for. But if you’re doing it for content marketing, you need to think about what your audience needs, what your goals are. If it’s media, what does the media care about? If it’s lead gen, what does what are those leads going to care about?

Christian Klepp  26:15

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Becky, so we get to the point in the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but like, just based on this conversation, if somebody were listening to this interview and you want them to walk away with three to five things they can act upon, based on this research that you’ve conducted, what would those things be? 

Becky Lawlor  26:41

Yeah, so I think a very low hanging fruit. One would be conduct more interviews with both internal subject matter experts, external subject matter experts and industry experts. I think that’s not a high bar. Most people can conduct interviews and then bring that into the content. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to do that. It’s just not as involved. Yes, it’s more involved than just, you know, whipping out a piece of content without that piece. But it’s definitely worth it to bring in those unique, original insights. 

Becky Lawlor  27:13

Again, another one would be just to create more customer stories. You know, invest in that, because there’s just so many different ways you can sprinkle that in and have that those real world insights, which are kind of similar to the interviews, but different, right? 

Becky Lawlor  27:27

And then the last one is, again, yeah, I think every company should be investing in some kind of original research, whether you have your own data, if you are some kind of analytics technology or just have a way to anonymize your data and pull it out. That is a great option. It can be challenging in its own right. I’ve worked with a lot of companies doing that, and it has its challenges as well, to get the data out from your technology and into a workable format, but that’s one option. 

Becky Lawlor  27:57

Or I think you can invest in one survey, even a year, and really get a lot of mileage from it. A lot of my clients, I feel like it’s a great foundational piece. And then you can use the data you’ve got, especially, like I said, if you get that in depth analysis done, you have data and stories and different angles and topics you can use for the entire year to fuel your content strategy. And your content strategies better, because now you know you’ve actually surveyed your audience, and you know what their challenges and pain points are and what you should be talking to them about.

Christian Klepp  28:28

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Okay, so what is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why? Off you go.

Becky Lawlor  28:41

Yes, I have one for sure. And it is this idea that you have to use a third party research firm versus producing brand owned research. And what I mean by that is, particularly, you know, this idea that you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and go with a big consultancy firm or a big academic research, you know, to do this research, which shuts out a lot of people right there just because they don’t have the budgets. But even if you have the budget to do it, I don’t think that it’s actually the best way often, because when you invest in brand owned you are setting yourself up as the industry expert and authority. 

Becky Lawlor  29:23

When you do it with a third party, you’re actually not owning that piece of authority as much and so, because this was such a big, you know, myth that I wanted to break in my report, I actually asked me to be buyers. Who they trusted more? Did they trust research from a third party more than they trust research done from a brand? And the results were that 54% said they trust them equally. So it doesn’t really matter to the majority. They don’t care who doesn’t but of those that had a preference, of those that had a preference, 29% said they trusted brand conducted research more than research conducted by a third party. So that was more than said they conducted trusted the third party. 

Becky Lawlor  30:11

So and then I went on to ask for those that had said they trusted brands more than a third party, why? And the responses that people gave were really and it makes sense. They said the brands have to care about their reputation in the marketplace. I think buyers aren’t dumb. They know that even if you’re going with the third party, you’re paying that third party. And some folks even said, well, the third party is just getting paid to kowtow to the brand, so it’s not really any more independent. 

Becky Lawlor  30:38

But over and over, it was kind of like, you know, they know the space better because they’re in it, and their reputation is really on the line when they’re publishing this stuff. So again, that doesn’t mean, you know, like folks can work with a vendor to do it, but I strongly encourage brands to put their name on the research and own it. You know, however they do it behind the scenes to get there, but they shouldn’t think that they have to, and should only publish research by a big name consultancy or a third party. They should be doing their own and branding it as their own.

Christian Klepp  31:11

That’s right. I suppose there’s pros and cons for either one, right? So, yeah, okay, fantastic. So here comes the bonus question, if you were to go and learn a new skill right now, what new skill would it be, and why?

Becky Lawlor  31:32

For me, it would be, how to use the custom ChatGPT is a little better. I’ve been playing with those. I know that. I don’t think AI (Artificial intelligence) is going away. You know, a lot of people have different opinions about AI in writing content, but my belief is it’s just a tool, and a tool is only as good as the expert driving it, and I don’t care, like, you know, how it’s about the outcome is the content quality. Yes, doesn’t matter to me how it gets there, whether it’s all human driven or it’s AI-human driven, but is it good quality? So just figuring out how to use those kind of AI drafting tools like ChatGPT a little bit more effectively and efficiently is something that I’m working on. 

Christian Klepp  32:16

Yeah, yeah, no. That’s great. That’s great. And I think we’re all still trying to, like, wrap our head around that, right? Like, I mean, a lot of people that are out there saying that they’re ChatGPT experts. I mean, like, you know this, this technology hasn’t existed for that long, right? So…

Becky Lawlor  32:31

Yeah, I just think there’s better ways for me to, like, you know, how can I put in, like, a client style guide and, like, have it consistently check that? I mean, those are things that, like, it can be way more accurate than me, like I have to when I’m every, you know, editing something, I’m keeping all those little pieces in my head and checking this dial guide, but it’s going to do a much more efficient, effective job if I can get it set up, right? You know?

Christian Klepp  32:52

Yeah, yeah. Well, for sure, for sure. Becky, once again. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing your expertise and the in this research report, which I thought was incredibly interesting with our audience. So please quick introduce yourself on how folks out there can get in touch with you. 

Becky Lawlor  33:09

Yeah, so I’m Becky Lawlor, and I am Founder and Chief Research Officer at Redpoint content, and folks can get in touch with me at [email protected], on LinkedIn, or at my website redpoint.com which also you can download your free copy of my report. It’s actually not gated, so feel free to go there and just download the report if you’re interested in digging into the findings more.

Christian Klepp  33:38

Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. Becky, once again, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Becky Lawlor  33:44

Yeah, thanks. 

Christian Klepp  33:45

All right. Bye, for now.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today, I’ll be talking to Aya Saad. She is the partnerships team director and project manager at Vivian agency and influencer and affiliate marketing agency. Aya is also a skilled project manager who excels in affiliate programs and combines expertise in business growth, marketing and client services. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Okay. Here we are. Aya Saad, welcome to the show. 

Aya Saad  00:37

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:38

It’s great to be connected. Aya, I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because I think there’s a lot of untapped opportunities in B2B when it comes to this particular topic. So let’s dive in. So you are on a mission to build communities for brands by connecting ambassadors and their audiences to products. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, how to launch and manage affiliate and influencer programs for B2B. So let’s kick off the conversation with these with this question, right? So what do you think is the untapped opportunity for B2B regarding affiliate and influencer programs? Maybe we start out by explaining what that is, because maybe some people out there are not familiar with it. 

Aya Saad  01:23

Sure. So having an affiliate or an influencer program is basically having people who have a network of potential customers that fit your target persona, promote your product and earn commissions from doing that. So every time they sell your product, or they provide you with a qualified lead, depending on your compensation structure. And we’re gonna, I think we’re gonna mention that a little bit down the line, when we dive more into the B2B, they earn commissions per sale or per qualified leads. So that’s essentially the concept of affiliate and influencer marketing is having people representing your brand and reaching potential customers that you cannot reach in typical ways, I’d say untapped opportunities. So I don’t really see a lot of B2B affiliate programs. I mean, it’s it’s getting there, but it’s not there yet. 

Aya Saad  02:17

Compared to B2C, I think the whole thing is still an untapped opportunity, but off of the top of my head, I’d say actually utilizing niche influencers and thought leaders in your niche and in your industry to promote your product to their networks, they have the reach to those decision makers that you’re seeking after as a B2B company or as a B2B product. So utilizing them and having partnerships with them can really have a huge impact. 

Aya Saad  02:46

Another thing is actually, and this might be a bit unusual, but employee advocacy, turning your own employees, with their networks, into micro influencers who share content and can create an authentic reach and experience about your product to potential customers as well. 

Aya Saad  03:04

I’d say another thing also that a lot of B2B companies overlook is the law, what we call long tail affiliates. And by that I mean the much, much smaller affiliates, like a very small blog or a very small community or a very specific industry newsletter, these actually prove to have a much higher conversion rate just because they are very targeted towards your niche, and it’s a very closed community, and it’s kind of close knit, and people actually follow it and remain up to date with it, and it could be a great potential opportunity for you to market for your products. 

Aya Saad  03:41

One final thing, also, I see it’s overlooked a lot are co marketing opportunities. So basically, as a brand, you can partner with a brand that’s complementary to yours and create either special offerings or promote each other in a different way. These types of co-partnerships would actually put your product within reach for customers that you couldn’t reach otherwise. And also, it doesn’t really mean that you are in competition. There is no direct competition. You’re just complimentary brands that serve the same audience, and you’re working together to promote both of your products.

Christian Klepp  04:22

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely correct. And I think that there are some really great points that you brought up here, and I think it’s worth going back and unpacking them a bit more for the benefit of the audience. That is, as I said before, not very familiar with affiliate or influencer programs. Let’s start with the first thing that you said, talking about the untapped opportunities and utilizing influencers to promote companies, products or maybe even solutions. Right? So what would you say to B2B customers, if you bring this up as a proposed. Strategy, and they look at you with braced eyebrows and say, well, isn’t that more of a consumer facing tactic? Isn’t that more for like, B2C? Why would you why would you even suggest that for B2B? Like, how do you handle that kind of objection? I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered that before, but like, um, how would you deal with that? 

Aya Saad  05:20

How I typically see it is that the concept of affiliate and influencer marketing can be applied regardless of your business model, whether it’s B2C or B2B. The whole point of affiliate marketing is getting your product in front of the people who can potentially buy it, and the key to doing that is finding the people who have reached to those customers or potential customers, and while it may look a lot different for B2B, like I wouldn’t go after an Instagram influencer, for example, to promote a high tech solution for enterprises, but I can find someone who is a thought leader in that industry and can be able to recommend that product to other decision makers. So it’s really about finding the right people to get your product in front of those customers. And that’s it. This is the whole concept behind it, and this can be applied whether it’s a B2C or a B2B product. 

Christian Klepp  06:16

Okay, okay, that’s fair well, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Um, okay, so you another point that you brought up was on the topic of employee advocacy, which I totally agree with. I think this is really, there can be really a gold mine here if it’s done the right way. But I think more often than not, in B2B. Let me see if I can phrase this properly, there might be hesitation on the side of employees to push themselves out as the face of the brand, right? And that’s what’s needed also as part of employee advocacy. So how would you go about helping a client that wants to push this out? But perhaps they have employees that are not really entirely bought into the concept.

Aya Saad  07:01

So it’s actually the same way that we reach out to typical B2C influencers or typical potential affiliates in general. It’s the compensation. If they think that this is something that would properly compensate them, and they see that this is something that’s going to earn them money with, I’d say, a few posts that they make, or a few networking opportunities that they attend. If you really put your offer out there to them in the right way and actually structure that offer very properly in the beginning to ensure that it’s attractive, then you got a deal. And 90% of the time, no one really says no to money and the potential to earn and grow. Because why not? Like, instead of you just having your typical salary as our employee on top of that, you could earn commissions on every contract you bring us, and you could earn commissions on every qualified lead you bring us on or on every booked call. And this is something that’s on top of them, using things that you that they already do. So when I would target those employees, I would pick ones who already have some I’d say their LinkedIn profile has a lot of connections. They’ve already posting regularly. They have a lot of engagement. So someone you’re already doing that, so why not actually utilize it to earn extra money?

Christian Klepp  08:21

Yeah, absolutely Money Talks, huh? So no, but you were, you’re absolutely right, and it was good that you brought that up, that there are certain criteria that these people have to fulfill. It’s not just okay. You’re an employee of the organization, and then there you go. You can be, you can be an employee advocate, right? They have to have a certain number of followers. I’m assuming they have to already be putting content out there, the content and I think most importantly, it’s not just about putting content out there. I mean, there’s people that work at companies that are just putting company content out, right? They have to put out content that is getting good engagement as well, right? So there. So that’s how we build up the followers. Okay, fantastic. The third one, which I think is extremely interesting, because I’ve done this in the past as well, is partnering with other companies whose services are probably complementary to yours. And there can be a lot of benefits to doing that for B2B companies out there that are thinking about doing this but have not done it before. What advice would you give them about how to approach this?

Aya Saad  09:25

First thing is, don’t be scared to do it. This actually has been one of the most successful approaches overall, just because, as someone who is a higher up decision maker, and I’m looking for viable options for my company, whether it’s let’s assume it’s in tech, for example, and I see this SaaS option that I was really looking at is also feature that is collaborating with something that I’m already using, for example, like the project management tool that the whole company uses, recommends that SAS for this specific service. Or for this specific solution, and then this is an immediate trust that’s gained in that product. And I would definitely put that higher up on my options when comparing it to others.

Aya Saad  10:12

 Second thing also, if they have, like, some sort of collaboration opportunities where it’s they would offer companies who use both, like a certain type of discount, or if you buy this, then you get a free month of that, and vice versa, something like that. These everyone is looking to cut down on costs and the technology they use, for example, or anything basically that serves their company and having these things like a one thing fits all, one thing that has all the solutions that I need. It’s a no brainer that they would go for it.

Christian Klepp  10:50

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, there’s definitely my one size fits all, right. It depends on the vertical. Depends on what stage the company is at.

Aya Saad  10:58

Of course. 

Christian Klepp  10:58

Have they? Have they done this before? Is this their first time? So there’s a lot of factors to take into consideration, right? 

Aya Saad  11:05

Yeah, of course. 

Christian Klepp  11:07

All right, let’s move on to the next question, and this can get this list can get quite exhausted, but try to just go at it from a top level point of view. Okay, so tell us a bit about the do’s and don’ts of affiliate and influencer marketing specifically when it comes to B2B.

Aya Saad  11:23

I wouldn’t actually specify something for B2B. This is something that I recommend in affiliate and influencer marketing overall. The very first thing that you need to do when you’re starting affiliate and influencer marketing is having a proper plan and strategy in place. This just plans out everything that you want to do, what you want to achieve, who are your target, in terms of influencers and affiliates, what do you expect from them? How will you compensate them? Do you have room for bonuses? Do you have room for a tier, type of commissions, for incentives? All of this, don’t go in without planning and just launch an affiliate program and say, hey, I’ll give you this amount if you promote my product. No. 

Aya Saad  12:08

Have a proper plan and also niche down target people who are most engaged in your niche and are good representatives of your brand. Do not open this to everyone, as we mentioned, for example, for the employee advocacy, we wouldn’t just offer this to everyone, but we would offer it to someone, for example, who has pretty good content on their LinkedIn profile. They have the connections and they’re already posting, and they build their engagement. So don’t be too general when you’re offering the affiliate and influencer marketing opportunity, just because not everyone will be able to reach your target customer, and this is the whole point of it. So just seek the people who can put your product in front of the people who would buy it. 

Aya Saad  12:54

Second, third thing, I would say, affiliate and influencer marketing are long term partnerships. So do not settle for okay, I recruited that person, and they promoted me once or twice, and they’ve driven to me a couple of good leads or a couple of sales, and that’s it. This is a long term partnerships, and you need to put your side of effort in order to maintain that partnership, because if your offer goes out of date at some point and another company is offering something better, then the affiliate is just going to move on to someone else and start promoting them more than they are promoting you. 

Aya Saad  13:29

Last thing would be to prioritize the platforms and narrow down the channels first, where your B2B buyers are at. So LinkedIn, industry specific blogs, professional communities, narrow down those channels first, and I would also recommend actually looking at how your customers learned about you in the first place. So your existing customers, how did they find you? This would give you insights on what channels do they follow? And probably, if you’re at a phase where you’ve already done some marketing, overall, you’re probably mentioned in a few blogs, and you have some things out there, so social media and all of that. So knowing and learning how your customers, your current customers, found you, is also key to targeting who are the influencers and potential affiliates that you want to target.

Christian Klepp  14:21

Okay, well, that’s a really great list. And what about the don’ts? Like, what? What shouldn’t you do?

Aya Saad  14:27

The very first thing I always say when I’m asking, When I’m asked about don’ts is, do not go after a number of followers or the reach. Don’t go after that. Go after the engagement instead, and go after the relevance. Relevance is everything when it comes to affiliate and influencer marketing, because if you find someone with a lot of followers and your product is just not relevant to the rest of their content, it doesn’t look authentic, it doesn’t look organic, then it’s just not gonna work. It’s not gonna perform. So this is my biggest don’t. Go after a big follower number, go after engagement, go after relevance. 

Christian Klepp  15:04

Absolutely, absolutely. So don’t chase the vanity metrics, right? Like, as we say, as we say in podcasting, don’t always look at the number of downloads and subscribers, and especially in B2B, like, you know, do you really need 100,000 followers, right? Questionable. And it’s the same thing. And it’s the same thing for B2B. I mean, I’m just going to give an example. Let’s say you’re doing an influencer marketing initiative for a company that’s selling like automotive spare parts. Do they need 200,000 followers? Questionable. All right. 

Aya Saad  15:38

Very questionable.

Christian Klepp  15:41

Okay.

Aya Saad  15:42

How many of those 200,000 followers are actually gonna buy your product? Actually needed? 

Christian Klepp  15:47

Right.

Aya Saad  15:48

Probably a fraction.

Christian Klepp  15:50

Right. Oh, you just made me think of another like follow up question, Aya. And I don’t know if you’ve dealt with this before, I’m assuming you have, but um, what’s your take on those that are trying to push out artificial engagement there, because, you know, we You did say, like, don’t focus on the vanity metrics. But you know, it’s just human nature. Some people just cannot help themselves, because they need to show impressive numbers to somebody higher up, and then they resort to this type of tactic. But what’s your advice to these people.

Aya Saad  16:21

So my advice is that if you want something that converts at the end of the day and actually brings in the sales, then focus on the engagement and the relevance. If you just are looking for exposure, we do collaborate with like really big influencers and 100k plus, but for these types of campaigns, I don’t really focus on sales. I’m not seeking sales. I’m not seeking the engagement. I’m seeking the exposure that I could get from that campaign. So if you are after the follower count and you want that exposure, then this is just it. Your goal for that campaign is exposure, not affiliate sales or not affiliate referrals. Of course, there are a lot of influencers who do have a high number of followers along with the engagement, because they really worked into the platform. So these would work on both sides, both the sales and also the exposure.

Christian Klepp  17:21

Absolutely, absolutely. You brought it up when you were talking about the do’s for affiliate marketing and influencer marketing. But talk to us about the importance of conducting the right research and having the right strategy in place before you implement any campaigns. Like, why is it so important to do all that due diligence upfront?

Aya Saad  17:45

The importance of doing the due diligence upfront is it actually minimizes your failures down the line, so when? And it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to fail at all. There are going to be failures, and there are some things that are just not going to work out for you, but having a good solid strategy, having a good system, having done your research and targeting the people that you actually think that they can reach your target audience, and you also have some data to back this up, does put you on the road to success. When you go in and not knowing what you’re doing or without a plan, you’re basically just asking everyone who is interested in earning from this product to promote your product. And then you might end up having, like, a couple of people who are selling or doing a few sales here and there. But this is not scalable, and it’s not productive down the line.

Christian Klepp  18:43

Good. I did have another follow up question, and I’m sorry to put you on the spot here, but I think it’s important. I think it’s important for B2B marketers to understand this, especially those that are thinking about doing influencer or affiliate marketing, at some point they have to go to the senior management of their company, and try to, like, pitch this to them. And one of the hesitations, or I think the objections, that most likely is going to come back is, well, we’ve never done this before. How do we know that it’s going to work? Right? So how do you address those doubts? Because I’m sure they have them in B2C as well, right?

Aya Saad  19:18

Yeah, typically what we do in these cases, we do provide case studies of similar models. And I know this might be a bit on the rare side for B2B businesses. It might not be as feasible, but it really helps the decision maker to actually visualize the process. So basically, I wouldn’t just tell them, hey, we’re going to get those influencers and they’re going to promote us? No, I would find an example, a really solid example of that type of influencer that I’m thinking of in my strategy, and say, Hey, look at their posts. Look how much engagement they’re getting. Look at what type of people are actually engaging with them. This CEO (Chief Executive Officer) commented on their post and his interested in his insights. This CEO has been engaging a lot with that person, etc, and this is helping the decision maker visualize what their brand can do in that dynamic. Would really help them make the decision.

Christian Klepp  20:17

Okay, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Okay, so I call this one the Lego question, right? So break it down for us. What are some of these key components? And you’ve mentioned some of them already. What are some of these key components that you need in order to have a successful affiliate or influencer campaign? 

Aya Saad  20:37

I’m gonna sound like a broken record, but again, research, research, research, do proper research and have a solid strategy. And your strategy should include who you’re targeting and also how you can compensate them. And into the compensation structure, you really need to account for not having a tail a stale compensation structure, meaning that you need to always provide growth opportunities to these affiliates, or otherwise, as I mentioned, they’re going to go elsewhere. 

Aya Saad  21:08

Also, your strategy needs to be solid but flexible. So it you need to have a concrete steps of what you’re going to do next and targeting these people for this reason, etc. But it also needs to be flexible, and it needs to be adaptable, so that you can take the data of the actual results you’ve achieved and apply it and tweak that strategy and improve it accordingly. Another thing would be to be consistent with your outreach. So you need to do really consistent outreach, proper follow ups, be super organized with what you’re doing, what your choice of words is, what you’re saying, how you’re representing your product, how you’re pitching your offer to those potential affiliates and influencers, because it makes all the difference. Also ensuring that you have dedicated and consistent support to your affiliates, because again, this is even more important than compensation, because the if the partners feel like their questions are not answered, their needs are not being met, they’re being neglected, they’re just going to go elsewhere as well. So it’s not only about the money, but actually providing resources and proper support to those affiliates. 

Aya Saad  22:22

You providing that resource is actually making them believe it even more that you’re setting them up for success. Always have room for bonuses, incentives and growth opportunities. Again, in your compensation structure, you need to account for that from the very beginning. You don’t really want to go too high with what you’re offering, and you don’t want to be too low. You need to be moderate, but also have proper incentives.

Christian Klepp  22:47

Yeah, somewhere in the middle, all right, yeah, no, I like what you said about allocating the right resources, but also having, like, that dedicated point of contact. And I think that applies across the board. That’s not just for affiliate or influencer marketing, right? Like, there needs to be a person that’s responsible for working with, let’s call them partners, right? They probably all have these FAQs (frequently asked questions), these questions that they that they need answers to, and there needs to be somebody on the company side that’s going to help them and make them feel like, okay, you know, yes, you are working for us and on behalf of our company and our brand, but we are also here to support you, to ensure that you will be successful, because your success is definitely in our interest, right? 

Aya Saad  23:36

Exactly. 

Christian Klepp  23:37

Okay, I’m really sorry. I’m gonna, I just have to pull up another question again, and it’s, it’s not to put you on the spot, but I think it’s, look, it’s 2025, and, you know, we, it wouldn’t make sense to avoid this question. All right, so, AI, right. How have you seen that? How have you seen artificial intelligence impact affiliate or influencer marketing, and I’m not when I say impact, I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way. It can be constructive as well, right? But what’s your take on that?

Aya Saad  24:14

It depends. Are you asking about the AI influencer trend that we have recently been saying, or are you asking about AI technology to help with affiliate and influencer marketing in general?

Christian Klepp  24:24

Both.

Aya Saad  24:25

Okay, so regarding the influencer I really don’t mind the concept, because if they have the reach to the right customers, again, it’s fine, whether it’s AI or AI or not, it’s fine with technology. I definitely say that finding and recruiting affiliates and influencer marketing has definitely improved with the help of a lot of AI tools, and I don’t mean the basic ones, but there are super specific platforms for influencer marketing, and they do utilize AI technology in terms of filtering, finding with certain keywords, and this really helps narrow down the people that you want to contact, and makes your work overall more efficient. 

Christian Klepp  25:12

Yeah, I suppose, if it helps you to save time, makes the work more efficient, like you said, with the research, like, for example, instead of spending hours going through, let’s say, a search engine looking for those specific influencers, if AI can help you to filter them out. Yeah, filter out. I think it’s the right word. Like you tag them, or you put in certain prompts or keywords that you’re looking for an influencer in this specific industry, and probably with this many followers, this is the budget range, so you start narrowing it down a little bit, right? And if you can exactly, if you can do that search within Well, seconds, minutes instead of hours, then yes, by all means, right?

Aya Saad  25:57

Yeah, I would say, though, that I don’t think that we’re still at a level where you can completely depend on those results. So one thing, for example, that we do is that we always hand pick the influencers or the potential affiliates. So while we do utilize influencer marketing tools to kind of narrow down the millions of influencers out there to match specific criteria, we still put in the time to hand pick, check the content and make sure that this is actually 100% fit for the product that we’re seeking them for.

Christian Klepp  26:30

Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. It requires human intervention at the end of the day. Don’t rely 100% on AI, yeah, no. Fantastic, fantastic. Okay. Aya, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us quite a bit already, right? But just imagine there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this conversation between you and I, and they want to start implementing this right away. What are some, let’s say, three to five things that you would advise them to do and take action on right now, with regards to affiliate or influencer marketing.

Aya Saad  27:04

Alright. So I would put them basically, I would say what we’ve just discussed into action items. So first thing that you want to do is do your proper research, and that research is also really deep, diving into your customer personas and where your customers are reachable, online and offline, that’s a very important thing to build your strategy on. 

Aya Saad  27:25

And then, of course, building your strategy, and the strategy would not only be who you’re targeting, but also the compensation structure. I’d say that for B2C, it’s very easy to put a cost per action compensation structure, but it’s a bit different for B2B, because many of the products are not something that’s shoppable or that you would click here to subscribe or buy and pay immediately. It’s especially if the product is like something that’s customizable or has a different pricing for every company and depending on their needs and all of that. So I say, I’d say the most common compensation structure for B2B would be cost per lead, where basically the affiliates are doing lead acquisition for you, and then your sales team would, in turn close them. And then it depends you could still pay per lead. Or you could pay for per qualified lead, so CPQL (Cost Per Qualified Lead), where you have a certain criteria, and if the lead matches all of that criteria, it does. And you could also do a small payment for the lead itself, or you could and then if the lead actually converts, you end up giving them a percentage from the total of the contract. And this, I think something would be of most interest, especially for higher ticket affiliates who are not who would be really narrowing down on the quality for you and getting you those deals that has high potential to convert. 

Aya Saad  28:55

After that, you really need to identify a system of how this would work whether you would have like a tracking system on your website or even a Google form, but you need to have a proper system to be able to track your campaigns properly. And then also, you need to have a lot of transparency with your affiliates. They need to be able to view everything they have brought in, what converted, what did not, and all of these data needs to be very transparently communicated to affiliates. 

Aya Saad  29:25

And then after these three things are settled and you have a plan already, you start identifying the potential affiliates and getting contact information based on your strategy, and you plan a multi channel outreach strategy and launch your program. Or you could come to us at Vivian Agency and save yourself all the time, and we do all of that for you.

Christian Klepp  29:50

That was the point of this whole exercise. 

Aya Saad  29:54

Yeah. 

Aya Saad  29:55

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  29:55

No, but you know, thank you. Thank you for sharing that you’ve actually unpacked a lot there. Let me just. Quickly recap for the benefit of the audience. So of course, doing your proper research is the first step, then building a strategy, which includes your compensation, identifying a system of how this will work. And fourth is identifying potential affiliates and then start reaching out to them. 

Christian Klepp  30:18

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which I call the Love it or hate it question, metrics. At some point, and you’ve you’ve talked about it already, but at some point, B2B, marketers have to prove that these initiatives are working to somebody. And when I say prove that they are working, I mean that in numerical form, right? So what type of metrics from a top level point of view? Once again, because I know this can get quite granular, but what are some top level metrics they should be paying attention to? When it comes to affiliate and influencer marketing. 

Aya Saad  30:54

I would actually divide that into four categories. So first category would be just top of the funnel, which is maybe you could measure it by website traffic or the content engagement, or the impact that this content had. So maybe this certain influencer attacked you on social media, you gain the 100 followers that day, and you see the impact of the content. So this is like top of the funnel. 

Aya Saad  31:17

And then middle of the funnel would be the quality of the leads that the affiliate is driving to you. And this is something I’d say more specifically, B2B. For B2C, I’d say the quality of the sales, meaning that they’re not resulting in a lot of refunds, and they’re not, of course, something that’s fraudulent sale or something like that. So the quality of the leads or sales that they’re driving to you. 

Aya Saad  31:43

And then bottom of the funnel would be the conversion rates, so how many of the leads that they’ve driven to you actually booked demos or made a sale and actually ended up getting a contract with your company. 

Aya Saad  31:55

And then finally, would be retention and return on investment. So this also maybe would relate a bit to the lead quality and then for the retention. What’s the lifetime value of the customers that are acquired through that channel? So is that affiliate bringing you a customer that’s gonna contract you for one year or three years or just three months. What’s the lifetime value for that customer? Because this affects the return on investment. Because if you pay them that amount, but in return, you’re earning X amount, then that’s a good investment. So it’s kind of how I would measure it, and then overall partner performance on an individual level, I always look at that on a very individual level and what channels they’re utilizing, because these are the type of insights that I need to change my strategy and tweak my strategy in order to continuously improve what I’m doing. 

Christian Klepp  32:57

Thanks for sharing that. And I’m going to tell you right now that there are two metrics that you just mentioned, that the senior management and the board are going to care about, and nothing more. 

Aya Saad  33:08

Yeah, of course.

Christian Klepp  33:09

Conversion and retention and ROI (Return on Investment), everything else is going to go right, like, but no, but you’re absolutely right and, and I was kind of anticipating that the answer was going to be a little bit more detailed, because there are so many different areas to look at, so many different attributes to measure, and it’s depending on what stage of the marketing funnel the leads find themselves in, right or the campaign.

Aya Saad  33:38

Yeah, I would say that the bottom and middle of the funnel are just more of maybe the decision makers wouldn’t really care about those, but they’re really important for whoever is running the affiliate and influencer program because they are also insightful on how this is going to progress. So if I’m seeing that the content from this specific affiliate has had no engagement at all, no impact whatsoever, then I’m not really going to spend a lot of time on similar affiliates, but instead, I’m going to shift my strategy to others and so on. 

Christian Klepp  34:13

Well, absolutely, and it’s going back to a point you raised earlier in the conversation, right? To keep that strategy flexible, not be to focus on one aspect of the entire campaign or the entire initiative, right? 

Aya Saad  34:25

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  34:26

Okay, fantastic. Okay, Aya, please get up on your soapbox. What is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Aya Saad  34:39

Because we’re mainly talking about B2B and and it’s pretty obvious what I’m just about to say right now, but many B2B companies believe that influencer marketing is only for B2C, and they really passionately believe that this is the case, and it’s really not. At the end of the day, from my perspective, and why I really disagree with that is that people buy from people, and people prefer authentic experiences, and influencer and affiliate marketing bridges that gap, so it just creates this instant trust when I see someone I follow or someone I’m connected with promoting this product that I maybe was hesitant a couple of weeks ago in trying or buying, and this applies in the professional and B2B setting as well.

Christian Klepp  35:33

I totally agree with that. It’s the same, you know, when you’re talking about B2B podcasting, right? Like it’s the same, like, people are always asking first about, Okay, how many downloads? How many subscribers and like, do you really need? Again, I brought this up earlier, right? Do you need 100,000 followers? If you are a podcast, say, for example, that is focusing on aeronautics engineers. That’s a micro niche, right? 

Aya Saad  36:00

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  36:00

If you get 300 people, and all of them are in that particular vertical, then I think you’ve already achieved your goal, right? So it’s the same, right? It’s the same, absolutely, absolutely, okay. Now here comes the bonus question, and not many people know this, but you’re the first person that I’ve interviewed on this show, who’s from Egypt, right? And, and I think you’re also,  are you based in Alexandria? Is that correct? 

Aya Saad  36:26

Yeah, I am.

Christian Klepp  36:27

Yeah. So fun fact, there was the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which was built a long time ago, and it crashed into the sea during an earthquake, if I’m not mistaken, right? Yeah. So when people outside of Egypt think of your country. The first thing that comes to mind, sorry, pyramids and mommies, right? 

Aya Saad  36:48

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  36:48

So what is one thing about Egypt you wish people around the world knew more about and why?

Aya Saad  36:58

I’m really proud of the fact that people do identify immediately with the pyramids and the mummies and the very rich culture that we have, but there’s also more to that. We have, a lot more than just that culture, and many times I feel like people are just stuck in that point of time where we had the pyramids and the amazing museums and all of that, and we still love them, of course. But there is way more to Egypt than that. Brilliant people out there, brilliant developments. And I wish that people would not really look at Egyptians, or at Egypt just from the micro lens of seeing the pyramids, and that’s it. There is a lot more to Egypt than that. 

Christian Klepp  37:49

Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. So you don’t want people to just, you know, when they think of Egypt, they think of antiquity, right? Ancient times.

Aya Saad  37:58

Exactly, and we’ve evolved since then. 

Christian Klepp  38:01

I’m sure you have.

Aya Saad  38:03

Yeah, yeah. It’s just that sometimes people don’t really believe that. They think, for example, that Cairo or Giza is just the area where the pyramids is, and that’s hit, and Cairo is, like, huge. It’s a huge city, and has a lot of different people.

Christian Klepp  38:20

Yeah. 

Aya Saad  38:21

And places and everything. 

Christian Klepp  38:23

Yeah, exactly. I think I read it somewhere. Isn’t Cairo, the city with the largest population on the African continent?

Aya Saad  38:32

Yeah, I believe.

Christian Klepp  38:33

I think so, right? And you also have a very Egypt also has a very large young population, right? That’s, which is also a very interesting statistic, which also means that you have a bit a larger, younger population that is internet savvy, right? 

Aya Saad  38:48

Yeah, true. 

Christian Klepp  38:49

Right? So there’s a lot of benefits to that as well, right,?

Aya Saad  38:52

Yeah. And I feel like definitely the Internet has helped with that, and social media, and having a ton of social media influencers representing Egypt and the culture and everything else out there to the world definitely made a difference on educating people and just giving them the insights that we go beyond the culture. It’s not just we’re not all revolving around the pyramids and riding camels in the desert, you know.

Christian Klepp  39:22

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such a fun but also very informative conversation. So thanks again for your time. Please. Quick introduction to yourself and how people can get in touch with you. And one last question, how does somebody with a degree in pharmacology, find yourself in the world of affiliate and influencer marketing.

Aya Saad  39:46

Yeah, it’s a funny story, actually. So for everyone, my name is Aya, and I’m Egyptian, and I do have a degree in clinical pharmacy from Alexandria University. And. I’ve started working in marketing as early as my second year in college. I just wanted to be more independent, and just went out there and took the first job I got, but it just developed from that. So after a few years working in companies, I decided to work as a freelancer, and I started teaching myself different things and skills, and I actually landed the job as an outreach manager, which led to me also falling into affiliate and influencer marketing. And it kind of stuck there. I thought that this is something that I’m really passionate about and I believe in, and it worked out from there. So I’ve been doing affiliate and influencer marketing for a little bit over four years now. And as I mentioned, I started as a self taught freelancer, but now I’m partnership director of Vivian Agency, where we connect ambassadors with, sorry, where I connect brands with their communities through affiliate and influencer marketing or ambassadors as well. And, yeah, you can reach me at [email protected] that’s my email. And you can also visit www.vivianagency.com book a call with us, or just fill out the contact form and I’ll be in touch.

Christian Klepp  41:22

Fantastic, fantastic. A true renaissance woman in every regard. Yeah, once again. Aya, thank you so much for your time. Shukran, I’m sorry that’s, that’s as far as my Arabic goes.

Aya Saad  41:36

No, that’s, that’s actually pretty good. Not bad at all. 

Christian Klepp  41:38

Thank you. Thanks again. And take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Aya Saad  41:43

Excellent. Thank you so much. Bye.

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Laurier Mandin. He is the president and CEO of Graphos Product, who is on a mission to help innovators de-risk, position and market innovative B2B products for Category leadership. He is also the author of the book “I NEED THAT”, creating and marketing products people are compelled to buy. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:31

Okay so. Laurier Mandin, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Laurier Mandin  00:36

Great to be here. Chris, been looking forward to it. 

Christian Klepp  00:39

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s great to be connected. I’m really looking for this conversation. I think this is probably the first time that we’re going to discuss this topic on the show. So it’s going to be an interesting one, for sure. So let’s dive in.

Laurier Mandin  00:52

New ground. I like it. 

Christian Klepp  00:54

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, so let’s just say that you’ve been on a mission for a while now, to help innovators and B2B marketers create and sell products that people truly need and transform struggling products into market leaders. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on a topic, and I think I believe you wrote about it too, so how small businesses can outperform larger competitors by deeply understanding customer needs. You know, for marketers like you and I, that kind of sounds like table stakes, but we know, in reality, we’ve seen so many examples out there of what happens when you don’t do this. All right. So I’m gonna kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat, okay, so the first question is, where do you see many small businesses and their marketing teams, if they have any where do you see them struggle? And the second question is, why do you believe that focusing on features and benefits alone won’t drive sales?

Laurier Mandin  01:52

And this often applies to large teams too, but small teams especially struggle with trying to do everything within really tight constraints. So teams, budgets, limited skill sets on the team, time commitments, all that pressure to perform, pressure to ship, and you’ve never, ever got enough of what you need to do it as well as you’d like to. So those constraints, the smaller the team you have, the more hats people are wearing. Often the more unrealistic the commitments are that people are making, and the expectations are and so those pressures are all a lot higher. 

Laurier Mandin  02:26

And the second part of the question is, why I believe focusing on features and benefits alone doesn’t drive sales? It’s because features and benefits are never on buyers’ minds. Buyers have needs and goals and lots of fears, but your feature list is never on their radar. It’s never going to be, and their brain isn’t even built to do or to want to do the work to understand it and to get it there, especially with, you know, all those constraints that we were talking about, and I can go into more detail on this, and I explore it in the book, but thinking is hard and highly energy intensive to do, and your buyers have other things to invest that energy into. Teams don’t have enough of anything. They’re under-resourced in every way, and they’re under constant pressure to move fast. So when they come to your website, when they’re looking at what your product does or your service does they don’t have the capacity and their resources, the time or the interest to go through connecting those dots for themselves? You really, really have to do it for them. 

Christian Klepp  03:31

Yeah, you really brought up some interesting points there. And I want to go back to the first bit about small marketing teams and their constraints. And you’ve seen this happen a lot, but short of stating the obvious, there’s a lot of chaos in an ecosystem with a lot of moving parts. But let’s look at this from a more constructive perspective. I’m going to say, and I’m going to quote, I think his name is Jean-Marie Dru who used to be the CEO of TBWA, and he wrote this book, “How Disruption Brought Order”, and he talked about creating order amidst the chaos. So back to you, how do these small marketing teams that are, as you said, wearing many hats, they’re trying to create order in this chaos, and they just can’t seem to do it. So how would you advise them to go about creating that order?

Laurier Mandin  04:21

The only way to create order and chaos is always to step back and create basically structure, and to turn that structure into a plan and move forward in an organized, non-chaotic way. So having a really solid sound go-to-market roadmap that your team can action on and be on the same page. That holds everybody accountable is one really important way to do it, and so that everybody on the team knows exactly what they need to be doing, and they know what they’ve got to answer for. That’s one of the things I help a lot of teams work on, is  designing and flushing out action plans like that. A go-to-market roadmap, so that they know everybody is singing from the same song sheet. And at least the chaos will continue to happen, and every day still brings surprises, but then you at least have a framework and guidelines to put things back into rows and columns and make things more orderly so you have a chance at managing it and prioritizing it again. So again, in chaos, everybody’s trying to put out fires and take care of urgencies and very often, what’s truly important and the mission can get ignored. So really, really important to build in that structure and to and to understand what it is that we’re all working to achieve.

Christian Klepp  05:42

Absolutely, absolutely. And you can use whatever analogy you like, right, like whether it’s manning a ship and having the right captain of first mate, or having the orchestra with the right conductor, something to that effect, right?

Laurier Mandin  05:55

Yes, yeah, for sure. I use, you know, singing from the same song sheet a lot, just because it’s very often you see where that’s not happening, and everybody is just kind of doing what they think needs to happen. And you don’t end up with a concert, you end up with a lot of noise. 

Christian Klepp  06:08

Absolutely. Well, it sounds like what you know, what the orchestra sounds like when they’re tuning up right before the concert?

Laurier Mandin  06:14

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think of that too. Or it’s kind of an interesting noise sometimes, but it’s not music. 

Christian Klepp  06:22

Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly. I’m going to move us on to the next question. So in your book, I need you speak at length about something you refer to as the coveted condition. So for the benefit of the audience, can you tell us more about that and how it relates to creating and marketing products that people want to buy?

Laurier Mandin  06:40

I came up with the name coved condition thinking about I wanted something memorable for what I saw as this desired future state that your buyer achieves, not immediately through using a product usually, but through owning and using it and making full utilization of everything that it can do for them. And I tell clients that they should imagine, if their product was taken away from a power user after a full year of use, what would that person miss the most in their lives? What would be the big Oh no, and not just now, I’ve got to go back and do my research and find a way to replace this. But now, what is? What is that, that gulf, that gap, what could no other product do that yours has done? And I have a kind of a little mental tool that I use to help people understand that I have, I say, fill in the blank on this sentence, on behalf of your customer. 

Laurier Mandin  07:32

So the sentence is, I need, and then the product’s name in order to become what, and maybe that what is a new job title of where you want to be promoted to. Maybe it’s become free to focus on another area of the business or life. But whatever that thing is that they say, I need the product to become, takes you beyond I need it to do. And it points out what that coveted condition is, what the real reason is that someone would go to all the pain and trouble and cost of adopting a new product that’s far beyond the you know, those features and benefits that we’ll talk more about, that companies tend to list when they’re trying to promote and sell something. 

Christian Klepp  08:16

Absolutely, absolutely. You just made me think of something. And I suppose you could say this is same, same, but different, but it’s almost like the same exercise that you go through with branding, right? Like so there’s always that question and workshops, let’s say, for example, you take away your company’s logo from the website. Well, people still know it’s you, right?

Laurier Mandin  08:36

And could, I think that is wonderful, and I think it’s another way of saying that is, if you took your positioning, the messaging on your company’s website, those headlines, and stuck it on another brand, could they wear it and Could they say us too? Because if so, then there’s no differentiation. And that’s one of the big challenges, especially in B2B, is having this kind of not differentiating, differentiation that everybody says, Oh no, ours is uniquely asked. It’s like, oh yeah. How come? Your competitor could wear it too, likewise, with the logo, right? If I could put and I think it’s just kind of interchangeable. Whichever part you’re swapping out shows that you’re missing that differentiation, not just in the client size, but really in the way that the company itself sees the product.

Christian Klepp  09:22

Absolutely, absolutely. On that note, that was a great segue into the next question about key pitfalls to avoid. So talk to us about that and what small businesses and marketers should be doing instead.

Laurier Mandin  09:35

There’s so many pitfalls in terms of what the things that kind of that tension between connecting with our audience and pleasing our bosses and peers. And we talked initially about, before we hit record, about content marketers in particular. And I was thinking before this conversation about, you know, where a good example was that content marketers are forced to write SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content and get that word count up, having keyword density, all those types of things. But really what Google is going to measure you by is engagement and time on page and those really important things. And regardless of what those other distractions are, as marketers, we really need to focus on big picture, desired outcomes in the differentiation that’s going to matter to our buyers, to our readers, being memorable and showing value that leads to sales not, you know, not churning out words that we think, especially if we’re in workshops. I have one client that I tried and tried and tried to explain to them why have calling themselves a solution right at the top of their home page was not differentiating them. And if you go to their home page now, that word solution is still there, I couldn’t succeed with that client. And you know, sometimes it’s really a losing battle, and it’s just because B2B is so conditioned, they believe that their customers want to see them positioned in a way that fits with the expectation, but that’s not again, differentiation. It’s about being memorable and showing value that’s going to lead to sales. It’s and for that reason, it helps to really understand what goes on inside of the buyer’s brain. 

Laurier Mandin  11:14

And in the book, I explain, and I need that, I explain in simple terms, how brain science works, with the limbic system being purely visual and having a central role in buying decisions, often making them in a matter of milliseconds. The what I call the dog brain, because it responds passionately and emotionally and quickly, like a dog it, it sees things and makes decisions in as little as two milliseconds. Well, the rational brain, the neocortex, rationalizes and justifies, but it’s 250 times slower than the limbic system at responding and even at reading, which takes a lot of back and forth between the different parts of the brain. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and features and benefits, things like that are mostly, if not all, text. So it’s really important that when we’re talking to our buyers minds, we’re using language that is strongly visual and helps people to process things and get an understanding of what it is we’re, how we’re going to benefit them in a really clear way that the limbic system understands. 

Laurier Mandin  12:25

So with my client, you know, an example is, instead of saying our automated IT (Information Technology) solutions, use next generation AI (Artificial Intelligence) to reduce manual interventions and provide proactive issue resolution, which isn’t far off from what that client was saying. You might say something like, you could have a self healing system. Well, competitors, IT departments, are still running around with fire extinguishers. Now we have a visual that people can imagine and convert into images, and they’re going to remember you that you’re the company that stops you from having this crazy, chaotic, you know, fire extinguisher comical scene by giving us a self healing system, you can imagine things fixing themselves behind the scenes. So even when you can’t necessarily just present images, because what you’re doing is fairly complicated, you can use visual language that brings images to mind and automatically makes that processing and understanding of why you’re different that much easier for your ideal buyer. 

Christian Klepp  13:26

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Like, I love that whole visual language piece, but you brought something up earlier in the conversation. I wanted to go back to it, because I think you’ve seen this 1000 times. How do you deal with clients like that, where there’s a lot of well, for lack of a better description, there’s a lot of analysis paralysis and decision by committee going on, and this is, this is how we think the market wants us to be represented, and this is how we should communicate to the market, like, how do you deal with that internally, to let them know that perhaps this is not really in their best interest.

Laurier Mandin  14:06

Usually, I succeed that one outlier is kind of one of these. Okay, I’m gonna let them have this one because they’re so set on it. But I think it’s really important, you know, and if I were to go back to that client now and kind of explain to them some of the things that I just said to you, as far as how the brain makes these decisions, and to really show them even what we just discussed about, you know, if, if I could take this very tagline and put it on your competitors website, then that means it’s not differentiating you, and people are not going to, you know, When you use the word solution, it’s a blah, blah, blah word, and I’ve listed out before, kind of, there’s a there’s a long list of names, and it seems to keep on getting longer. Of words that either are too commonly used in industry or they’re words that AI really, really likes. Like the word crucial is one of those words that you. It, LLM (Large Language Model) tools like ChatGPT and Claude just can’t help but spitting out every third sentence. And because of that, those words are becoming just more ignorable. 

Laurier Mandin  15:11

So I think it’s really having getting to the point with clients, with the businesses and the decision makers, that they want to come up with something that’s really uniquely them, authentically them, and not just put out words that people are going to skip over. If you’re putting words on a page, recognize that visitors are there just sometimes for a few seconds, and if one of those words is solutions, despite that, you know, as that client would argue, people are looking for solutions. They’re going to see that all over the place, and they want to know how you’re going to be the solution, not just that you think you are going to.

Christian Klepp  15:52

Yep, yep, no, absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Moving on to the next question. We all know that research is a key component, right? Like, especially in creating marketing products that people are compelled to buy, but, and I know we can go down a very deep rabbit hole here, but I’m gonna ask you to, like, be as succinct as you can how B2B marketers can validate a business product or service idea without requiring, well, a monster sized research budget?

Laurier Mandin  16:24

And you can spend a lot of money doing research for sure. The other side of that is, you know, whenever I do research projects with clients, I’ve never had them say to me, well, that that just told us what we already knew. That’s what you often think when you’re being dismissive of doing the research because you don’t want to be to see that you’re on the wrong track. And that’s the big fear, is you don’t want to be told that you know by maybe the wrong people, that what you’re working on is the wrong idea. But it’s more the insights really you want insights when you’re doing research. So the key thing when you’re doing research on a limited budget, and I have quite a lot of the book dedicated to doing this validation, because it’s such a critical area, it’s so important to do this right. But the most important thing is talking to strangers, and if you think it’s going to be hard, finding strangers that match your ideal client profile, now wait until you’re selling their product, because then it gets harder and not easy. You’re trying to do it at scale, but you need to talk to strangers, not not family, and especially not friends, because friends are your friends for a reason. You chose your friends because they say things that make you feel good about yourself, and they want to stay friends, and they want to see you make something cool. So they’re going to tell you that what you’re doing is cool, and everybody’s going to buy it, and it’s going to be amazing, and let’s make it, it’s going to be awesome. I’ll buy it, but they won’t. And so you’ve got to ask these strangers specific questions. 

Laurier Mandin  17:55

I’ve got three key questions that are really, really important. So first of all, have they actively searched for a better solution? Have they gone online and used ChatGPT or Google to try and find a better way of doing what it is they’re doing that your product does? If not, there’s a concern, because that means your solution isn’t being sought. And to market something people are looking for is much, much easier than marketing something that people don’t know exists, or don’t know that they’ve got a problem. 

Laurier Mandin  18:23

And the next question, number two is, what do they like most about their current approach? What do they like about what they’re doing that they would be hesitant to abandon, because, again, we have all these biases, and a really big one is status, cool bias. So if they really, really love their current approach, for some reason, you need to know why that is because you need to fight that status quo bias, and you need to address why your way is better.

Laurier Mandin  18:46

And then number three is probably the most important. One of all is because you need to know this going in into market, and you need the results of it is, what would they pay to solve this problem properly? And with that question, high to low ranges are great. And next important thing after they give you that high to low range is to offer it to pre-sell the product to them at their suggested low price. And that separates the genuine need from the polite interest. They’re saying everybody’s going to buy it if they’re going to write you a check or give you money, cash money to have that pre order down, then you know you’re onto something, and you’re able to take that forward and tell investors that you have people who are putting money down for this product, and it’s just the kind of the biggest acid test for validation is yes, people are willing to actually pay me money. Strangers are willing to actually pay me money to use this product, and you don’t need to do massive market research to do this. I tell people, you can do this entire validation process with just five good conversations with strangers. Might not tell you as much as comprehensive market research, but you. Have some pretty good indicators, and you’ll definitely have insights that you didn’t have before you went into those conversations.

Christian Klepp  20:06

Yeah, no, no, no, those are really good insights, and just one follow up based on what you said, was definitely conducting research and identifying those customers and the types of motivations that they have. I call them demand triggers, right? What would trigger them to find the solution online? What importance or priority would you give to competitive ecosystem analysis, like checking because, you know, a lot of people are saying, Oh, we’re the only ones in in the market that are providing this type of solution. I usually say, Well, I kind of doubt that’s true. There’s an alternative to what you provide that in itself, directly or indirectly, can also be considered a competitor. But what are your thoughts on that?

Laurier Mandin  20:49

Yeah, I’m always surprised at when I meet a new client for the first time, and they tell me something like that, or they tell me there’s just this limited set of competitors. And then when I go out and do fairly simple research, even I’m uncovering all these businesses and these options that I think they look very much like competitors to me, and usually they prove to be real competitors. 

Laurier Mandin  21:09

So I think that’s one of the things about just being, you know, have being inside of a product, being too close to the solution, that you don’t recognize what the other competitive options are. And for that reason, you know, having somebody like you or me, having someone external, take a look at what the other options are, and build those into the if we’re doing a roadmap for them, or coming up with their go to market strategy, really recognizing that there are more competitors maybe, than the inside people think. And that can be, there’s good things about competitors, too. If you if you have a number of competitors that aren’t doing the best job of solving the problem, you know, they they don’t have the best UX (User Experience), they don’t have the best solution, and the solution that the client is working on is much better, then that tells you the you’re in a market that exists. There are customers out there. There’s people trying to solve this problem and paying for it already. Now you’ve just got to show them that you’ve got the best solution. 

Laurier Mandin  22:05

So being able to do that and recognizing that you do have a reasonable number of competitors, but it’s not a market that’s saturated with solutions, and the solution you’re working towards really has those significant differentiators, then finding, you know, having a great understanding of what those competitors are, are essential to get in the point where you can put up positioning that anybody else, looking at those other options, can clearly see why this product is the standout.

Christian Klepp  22:39

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. As you were talking, I just came up with another follow up question. And I’m pretty sure you’ve got your thoughts on this. You brought this up, and especially if you’re dealing with small businesses, right, they’re forever going to be constrained by everything from funding, budget to resources, bandwidth, etc, etc. And there are certainly, I know this, but there are certainly benefits to having an external I’m going to call them strategic partner, conduct this research, right, versus them doing it in house. What are your thoughts on that? Because I know that you probably run into this all the time where people are like, well, can’t we do this ourselves?

Laurier Mandin  23:21

Yeah. And why? Here’s the interesting thing is, it’s not just the small the smaller companies, just the startups that have that problem. And I find that even for some of my larger clients, when my Graphos team, and I go in and we and we show them all the things that are possible, and we bring them the extra value that a good partner can, that it usually expands our scope of work. And pretty soon, we’re not, you know, we’re not arm wrestling their internal people for the tasks that we can do better. They’re handing us stuff and bringing us things from other departments and saying, Can you help us with this too? Can you this other department needs some similar help to what you did for this department. 

Laurier Mandin  24:03

So I find that if you know, as long as you’re staying within your wheelhouse, and you’re able to bring that extra expertise to the to the client, to the business, you tend to discover more and more ways, and they become often, I think, just better at identifying and freer to see the ways that they’re weak or that their point of view is limited by being by only seeing things from the inside, I find the best clients tend to kind of recognize that organically, like they already realize that they’ve got these shortcomings. They recognize that they’re that they’re too small, that they’re strained, and that’s an easier position to come at it from as an outside partner, but I feel that in my experience is that if we do our work really, really well, that the client tends to get better at seeing themselves and seeing their limitations as what they are. Because. So having a great partner come in also helps them focus on why they’re there in the first place. And all these people do have their superpowers, but if they’re wearing 17 hats, they’re not able to go out and do the things that they came in to do that they do really well. So it’s, you know, offering a really good outside team sometimes really flushes out the skills that people have internally and makes everybody better at doing what they were hired to do. 

Christian Klepp  25:27

Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And then, you know, short of sounding corny, it’s, it’s viewing, viewing you as the extension of their team, and that that additional team that’s coming into to support you or provide those to use the military terms, those reinforcements, right? That you that you absolutely.

Laurier Mandin  25:45

Yeah. And again, it’s so different from one business to another. When you’re working with clients, is some of them just, you know, kind of see that naturally and and that that flow just happens, and they’re just eager to bring in a good partner. And other times, you kind of have to really prove yourself, and you have to fight through it. You have, you know, the odd you have, maybe one difficult person that is being really resistant, and when you win that person over, now, all of a sudden, the magic starts to happen. And you know, they’re happy to all of a sudden take credit for your work, because that’s one thing that I had a mentor teach me years ago, like over 20 years ago, was, he said to me, you know, what I learned in my career is that we’re not here to do stuff for clients as much as we’re here to make them look good. If they take credit for what you’re doing, if they’re happy to say, Look what we did, that means you did something good. It means you did good on them. Because now they’re not saying, look what this partner did. And you know, seeing what their bosses say you’re seeing what the others say. They’re saying, Look what we did, and that says, now we’re now, we’re working together. 

Christian Klepp  26:46

Absolutely, absolutely. And I guess that’s just that comes with the territory, right? If you’re working in this ecosystem, you have to allow the client to take credit for your work, right? It’s just part of the game.

Laurier Mandin  27:00

Yeah and it’s the highest compliment. It really, really is, because if they’re still saying, you know, look what Laurier did, look what Graphos did, then I feel that they’re not truly invested in what they brought us in to do. And you kind of do see that change when all of a sudden the credit taking happens and and I always when I start working with the client, is even if I’m really fresh and new with the brand, I really talk about it as we I really talk about us, because it’s so important that when you get in there and you’re working together with a new team, is that they recognize as early as possible, from your language to that this is a we thing. We’re everything that we’re doing. We’re going to succeed or fail together. We’re going to experiment together, and we are going to find a way.

Christian Klepp  27:42

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I found in my own experience that that hesitation on the client side, you know, when dealing with an external partner usually comes when it’s the first time they’ve done it, like it’s the first time they’re outsourcing this kind of work. So there’s that fear, I guess part of it is the whole letting go, like letting go that I’m not going to be working on this, it’ll be somebody else, and then it’s still, you’re still in that stage where I call it like the first date, right? You’re still trying to build that trust and see if the other person can, can deliver on this or not, right?

Laurier Mandin  28:14

Exactly, yeah, on that first date, your night’s not so much of a we thing. It’s, you know, it’s her and me, and we’re going to figure out if this works or not, and the we kind of happens as as you start to have a partnership.

Christian Klepp  28:26

Absolutely, absolutely okay. So we come to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but so if somebody were listening to this conversation, who is probably in one of these companies, right where they’re dealing with these kinds of situations. 

Laurier Mandin  28:43

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  28:44

And what are some simple frameworks that any business can use to evaluate product market fit? 

Laurier Mandin  28:51

And product market fits is one of those things that’s tricky, and I think you have to have frameworks, you have to have objectivity somehow to be able to know if it’s going to happen. So I’ve got what I call the three Rs of product fit, and it’s the first R is for reviews. If customers, what are customers saying and saying consistently? If you’re organically getting five star reviews written by people in a specific market, then you’re on to something within that segment, within that market, there’s a good chance that you that you’re achieving, or beginning to achieve, product market fit, because people are are buying their liking, and they’re going forward and saying that they’re liking. 

Laurier Mandin  29:28

The second R is returns or retention in physical products. If you have a return rate that’s below 5% that signals strong fit. If there’s 5% or less, if you’re up in that 10 plus range, then your product market fit is weaker. And if you’re 15 to 20, then you’re probably doing something wrong in the positioning. Maybe the product is junky, and that’s a whole different problem. But with product market fit, people buy the product, like the product, and they don’t want to return it. They want to retain it. They want to continue subscribing and in B2B size. Where you watch your turn rate, if, if customers are renewing and expanding their use rather than dropping off, then you know you’ve got strong fit. They’re they’re telling you that.

Laurier Mandin  30:08

The third R is referrals. If customers are actively recommending you, not just saying they would, or promising they will, refer you to other people in similar industries, then you know that they’re actually, they’re putting their reputation on the line. They’re putting their contacts on the line, because that’s the strongest signal of all, that they really believe you’re doing something well and that you’re worth recommending to other people. If you’re scoring well on all three of those Rs, then I say that you’ve almost certainly found your fit, and really, by the time you’re scoring well on all those Rs, you’re kind of off to the races in other ways too, because you’ve got that retention, you’ve got those referrals, you’re getting great reviews, and those are great things to utilize in your marketing, to leverage in your case studies, to bring forward in everything that you’re doing, but if not, there’s, you know, those three Rs also tell you where to focus if there’s one of those that you’re doing especially poorly at if you’re not able to get good reviews, if nobody seems to recommend you to their colleagues or peers, then you’ve got to improve the product experience, reduce buyer friction, or find better ways to delight your customers.

Christian Klepp  31:27

Yeah, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. So just to recap, for the benefit of the audience, those three Rs, right? So we’ve got reviews, we’ve got retention, and we’ve got referrals. So I have a feeling I might know the answer to this question. I’m gonna ask it anyway, just from your experience, Laurier. How long does it usually take a business to get a balanced score for all three Rs?

Laurier Mandin  31:54

Well, in consumer products, it can be quicker than with B2B products. In B2B, it can take, you know, I hate to say it, but it can take years, and it shouldn’t. If you’re able to do things right, if you’re iterating quickly, and you’re reaching out and try and recognizing those because I think when you have those three Rs as KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), you get there faster. You know, I would say it, it’s nice to ideal to be able to get those three Rs happening within a year of launch. To me, that’s, you know, if you, if you aren’t moving towards them, then there’s a chance that you’re doing things that is, you know, potentially quite wrong, that your positioning might be off significantly, that you, either you the product needs improvement. But there’s something that’s wrong if you’re not making measurable strides towards getting that product market fit inside of that first year.

Christian Klepp  32:49

And that probably goes back to something you mentioned earlier in the conversation, right? There’s got to be either that one person or that team that’s like the gatekeeper for all these three Rs, right? That does these regular checkups to make sure that, you know, everybody’s held accountable and that everybody is moving or rowing in the right direction. 

Laurier Mandin  33:09

Yeah, with any KPI right, you have to have someone who is the champion of it, because if you and is able to push that through to the other team members who are accountable for making it happen, to be able to say that, you know, our retention is low. We’re slipping. You know what is there’s something that we’re doing wrong because we’re getting way more turn than we should be, and we’re getting more than we had last quarter. And to have people aggressively go in and work together to solve those problems. So, yeah, you need that, not just to be able to say that’s what our three measurables are here, we need to have identify what the standards are for them. You know, if it’s that 5% that’s your goal, to recognize that, you know, or it’s or sub 15% whatever that goal is from where you are right now, to make it measurable. And then you can continue to adjust and tweak it as you strike those goals and you start to do well at them.

Christian Klepp  34:02

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, my friend, please get up on your soapbox here a status quo that you passionately disagree with and why.

Laurier Mandin  34:17

I’ve got a few of them, but I think the one that you know is most consistent with what I’ve been saying, and it really is one that bothers me. It’s the main reason I wrote the book is that people believe, still out there, even if they you know whether they say it or not, they believe that product validation kills innovation again. They might say it, they may not, but that’s kind of the key reason to not to do the in depth and serious validation, to do the work that it takes to validate the product. And you know, it’s a pervasive myth that’s often backed up by repeating that Steve Jobs quote that customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. And that’s okay when you have a huge idea and huge money sometimes, but you. Got to remember this, Steve Jobs also got kicked out of Apple and wasted millions and millions of dollars on failed products that we don’t talk about because he had that, you know, that belief, and that’s really expensive experimentation. Validation is, you know, even the expensive validation is so cheap compared to the cost of launching something and not knowing what customers are going to think until they see it. 

Laurier Mandin  35:24

And likewise, you know the brain science that I talk about in the book, and I talk about a lot as a result of that, it tells us that it’s the validation is important too. We use tools like fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). We can literally watch buying decisions being made in milliseconds in the emotional center of the brain, and when you validate properly. You’re not asking people what features and benefits they want, you’re discovering what’s going to trigger that dog brain to say, I need that. I spent 30 years watching really smart innovators put their life savings and their investors money into products that could have succeeded but failed because they confused validation with feature requests from their peers and focus groups that weren’t properly set up, and just making mistakes like that. That you know doing, it’s not hard to do it right? It really is, you know, it’s, it’s quite simple stuff. It’s just basically understanding, not leading people, not framing for them, what you, you know, giving them the these ideas of saying, Would you pay this much? And of course, they’re going to say yes, because you led them and you framed it. But just really having, having the customer guide you, and to not just be dismissive of the inputs they give you, because it’s not what you want to hear. I think that’s the other side of that. You know, as soon as you start getting answers you don’t want to hear, you go back to that. Well, yeah, but they’re not going to know how great it is until we show it to them anyway.

Christian Klepp  36:57

So true. So true. Okay, here comes the bonus question. And I thought long and hard about this one, but let’s just say that there’s somebody out there, and I’m not going to name any names, but somebody like cuts you a check or calls you up and says, Laurier, I’m going to give you this much funding, and I want you to go out there and create this product that’s going to change the world. If you were given that opportunity, what product would you build? And why?

Laurier Mandin  37:25

That’s a great question. And you know, I’ve thought about this a number of times before, too, because to me, if it’s something that’s going to change the world, it would have to be something around solving some major problems, like flooding or like fires. So I think what I would come up with would be something that would help people to protect their home in a situation where I think of areas not that far from where I live, where very frequently there’s, you know, there’s low lying areas that river has come up and overflow. And if people could create kind of an instant dam system around their house that would protect house after house from flooding. It would save insurance companies huge amounts in claims, and they could subsidize these things. So I think solutions around helping people to better protect themselves, instead of just having to run when things go wrong and come back to the disasters and try and fix disasters after the fact, and you know, that’s becoming unsustainable. That’s where I would put my efforts. If I were all of a sudden to have Elon Musk come to me and say, Hey, here’s a billion dollars. Go and build something cool. My R&D (Research and Development) would go into. I’d probably first of all find out where we could make the biggest impact and then quickly focus on developing something that would be scalable and would be really effective in helping people to protect what they value.

Christian Klepp  38:51

No, absolutely. I think that’s an amazing idea. I’ve always been thinking about finding a cheaper form of desalination, because, as you might know, it’s a very expensive process, right?

Laurier Mandin  39:03

Yes, and even for fighting forest fires right in in LA, I was surprised. I asked that question. A lot of people thought, why can’t they just grab water from the ocean, on the ocean, but they can’t because, and they do in some cases, but it’s really not good because of what happens when you put salt water into these helicopters and into all this equipment, it just wrecks everything, and the salt doesn’t work as well for fighting fires, so not just for human needs, because we’ve got all this salt water and so precious little fresh water in so much of the world. I think that’s a great one, too. I’ll go in with you on that when we get the billion dollars.

Christian Klepp  39:36

But again, making coming up with an affordable desalination solution. Because everything that I know right now about desalination, it’s just expensive. It’s just, you know, unless you’re a wealthy country, there’s no way that you can afford that, right? 

Laurier Mandin  39:51

It is and that, you know, here’s the strange thing. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways, like through reverse osmosis and other processes, to do it, and then it goes and happens on itself in nature. Here is that, you know, there’s, that’s how clouds happen. It’s desalination. You just have evaporation, but to make it happen at scale, in a way that you can capture and put where you want, that’s, you know, that is the really tough question is, how do you do that? I believe we’ll get there, because it’s such an important.

Christian Klepp  40:15

I think so too. I think so too. Laurier, I’d love to talk to you for another couple of hours about like decent elation and all these other product solutions that can help change the world. But you know, I just want to thank you again for your time. Thank you for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please, quick Introduce yourself. How folks can get in touch with you and tell us a little bit about your book.

Laurier Mandin  40:36

Sure. Yeah, well, I’ve been running my company. I founded Graphos Product in 1993 so for over 30 years now, we’ve been helping clients to take products to market, to de-risk their new product ideas to create go to market roadmaps. And that’s what I do on the day to day, and that’s what I’ve done in my career all my life, and starting just before COVID, I started writing a book, as I said, it was motivated by seeing businesses fail again and again, because there were simple things they could have been doing differently that would have saved them so much grief, and could have got them to having a product that is built around a need that’s felt by many people. So that’s what the book I Need That is all about. 

Laurier Mandin  41:22

It’s about creating and marketing products people are compelled to buy and how to get there. So, and the book, if you want to get a copy of the book, you can find it on Amazon. It’s called I Need That by Laurier Mandin, and another good way to get it is go to lmandin.com, and there you can get it in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook, or you can sign up to my daily emails. And I think that’s the thing that I spend some time on every single day. Is coming up with ways to move people forward, to move product makers, regardless of if they’re consumer products or B2B products, every single day to move them forward. So I create these short daily emails, and you can sign up to these at lmandin.com you can find out where to write to where to get the book, or how to connect with me with that website, lmandin.com and graphosproduct.com. There’s ways that you can get in touch with me and find out more about what I do. And maybe we’re a fit, and if so, I’d love to work with you.

Christian Klepp  42:25

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

Laurier Mandin  42:31

Thank you, Christian. It’s been a delight. 

Christian Klepp  42:32

Bye, for now.