B2B Digital Marketer - The Intersection of Engineering and Marketing in the Digital Age
Mike joined the B2B Digital Marketer for a conversation into data and creativity in marketing. Mike discuses the importance of quantitative and qualitative data in understanding customer behaviour and driving decision-making and the need for marketers to embrace data-driven strategies rather than relying solely on creative instincts.
Listen here: https://b2bdm.com/the-intersection-of-engineering-and-marketing-in-digital-age/
A Napier Podcast Interview with Joe Zappa - Sharp Pen Media
Joe Zappa, CEO and Founder of Sharp Pen Media, is an expert in the marketing technology space and joined Mike to discuss how marketers can maximise the impact of their marketing efforts.
Joe shares his insights into why constancy is important for long-term success, why marketers should dig deeper when developing personas and why he believes the AI generative phenomenon has been overblown.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Sharp Pen Media
Sharp Pen Media specialises in content and PR for the B2B companies in the AdTech and MarTech space, including enterprises, startups, and marketing agencies.
About Joe Zappa:
As an experienced B2B Ad MarTech Journalist, Joe has spent several years creating content for B2B companies. He is now the CEO and Founder of Sharp Pen Media, an agency supporting businesses in AdTech and MarTech.
Time Stamps
[01:11.09] – Joe discusses his current role at Sharp Pen Media and his career journey.
[06:06.02] – How do the marketing challenges of start-ups and established businesses differ.
[14:33.02] –Joe highlights some campaigns that have been successful in MarTech.
[17:59.04] – What impact is AI going to have? Joe shares his thoughts.
[24:49.09] – Joe offers the best marketing advice he has received.
[27:27.01] – Joe’s contact details.
Quotes
“I think the generative AI phenomenon has been overblown… I think A. I. Is ultimately at present more of a tactical tool” Joe Zappa, CEO and Founder and Sharp Pen Media.
Follow Joe:
Joe Zappa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-zappa-6229a4a8/
Sharp Pen Media website: https://www.sharppenmedia.com/
Sharp Pen Media on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sharp-pen-media/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Joe Zappa - Sharp Pen Media
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Joe Zappa
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Joe Zappa. Joe is the Founder and CEO of Sharp Pen Media. Welcome to the podcast, Joe.
Joe: Thanks so much for having me on.
Mike: It's great to have you and you're a little bit different because you're actually running an agency, but you're running an agency that works with a very specific group of clients. So he really specialises in the marketing technology, which is why you're on I'm really excited to find out and take a little bit of a look behind the scenes as to you know, how some of the guests who've been on our podcast might actually be doing marketing. So hopefully you can help us with that.
Joe: Yeah, I'll do my best.
Mike: Okay, so, first thing, you know, we want to start out and find out how you got to where you are today. You start as a journalist, and now you're helping marketing technology companies promote themselves. I mean, How'd you make that jump? That sounds like quite an exciting career journey.
Joe: Yeah, so I was an adTech martec. Journalist, I was the editor for five years of the mahr tech trade publications, street fight. And when I was doing that, I would edit the thought leadership islands and missions we would get. So basically, I was constantly interfacing with the marketers who were representing adTech and more tech companies, either fielding their pitches, reading that press releases, or editing their executive byline submissions. And when I started to transition from being a journalist to being a marketer, the way I did it was just to talk to all the people had been pitching me forever, and be like, hey, what do you do? Tell me about that. And then they would be like, you know, this space really? Well. you've edited these things, why don't you try writing them? And I did. And it went well, because I had an understanding, having edited like, 1000 columns by adTech and MarTech CEOs, what works and what doesn't, and what's actually compelling to the audience.
Mike: So it's pretty interesting, but what made you make that jump and go from being a journalist through to actually, you know, effectively starting your own agency?
Joe: Yeah, I was recommended to a company that needed a content marketing writer and realise that I really liked it. I got my start in journalism, editing the daily newspaper at my college. And there, I would do reporting and edit the reporting of others. And I would also edit the columns and work with the column writers. And I always really appreciated argumentative writing, sort of like a debate club, like I really love getting into the head of a given company or company leader, and figuring out like, Okay, I know about these trends in our space, what is this company's position within the space? How do we differentiate them and make that argument? So that was something I loved about marketing from the jump.
Mike: That sounds really cool. So I mean, you've got your first, you know, if you like, freelance gig, how do you think grow the agency? I mean, what were the next steps to go from from that one sort of freelance role into building up to be an agency that that obviously now is quite a big force in the mahr tech space? Yeah,
Joe: interestingly, I think the journey for an early stage agency or a freelancer trying to become an agency owner in marketing is not so dissimilar from that of a really early stage tech company, which is to say that I wouldn't have recognised it as this at the time, but it's basically founder led sales in the beginning, right, you're setting up your shingle, you come up with a basic positioning statement, and you are working your network and talking to everyone you know, and see, like, who will work with you? Once I had that sort of critical mass of clients, I made a pretty classic like Freelancer agency owner transition when I just couldn't do all the work myself, right. Like I went from one or two clients to six to eight. And by then it was like, Okay, well, I'm writing like, three articles a day, on top of trying to market the business and manage things like that's not gonna happen. So that's when I had to hire people and start really running an agency.
Mike: I mean, that's awesome that you managed to grow like that. So where are you today? I mean, you know, how far have you gone? And what is sharp and media? Do you feel clients today?
Joe: Yeah, so we have about a dozen clients and adTech and MarTech ranging from really early stage startups to billion dollar plus revenue companies. We do marketing strategy, content and PR for our clients. I basically view it as two different personas. One is a probably fairly early stage company. I mean, they might have been around for 20 years, but they're still small ish, and that they don't really have a marketing team or a marketing strategy. So for those clients will come in and we'll bring in a multi time adTech martech CMO, and we'll create your marketing strategy out easily with you with the CEO or the CRO, whoever's in the picture. And then the other client, which is probably more relevant to your audience is a more mid market or enterprise company that has a marketing team and a strategy already. And with them, we're usually working with the director of comms or VP of content or whatever it is. And they're I view our role more as making their life easier. So generally, they work with us because they have worked with freelancers or agencies before who didn't really get adtech martech. And they want to come in and like, not have to explain, like, what's a DSP? What's like B2B intent data add? What is the third party cookie, these kinds of things we just come in. And we know that and we try to make their lives easier.
Mike: And hopefully everyone listening knows what all those abbreviations are, because they've heard other people talk about them. So. So that's great. I'm interested, you've got those two very different personas where you know, it sounds like the startup, you're basically are the marketing department. Whereas the more established companies, you know, you're working for a marketing team, to these two very different companies or types of companies. Do they face the same challenges? Or are they facing very different problems?
Joe: I think on one level, there is a similar challenge, which is sort of my hobbyhorse, which is that, like a huge challenge, and adTech and MarTech, and more broadly, B2B tech marketing is differentiation, or transcending commoditization. Right? So even when you have these more established companies that have a certain level of awareness and product market fit, I think still, there's often a challenge of okay, you know, we help companies sort out their data, right, first party, third party data, whatever it is, and privacy is a huge issue in that space. So we want to write a byline about, or we want to write an executive byline for our CEO about the third party cookie going away. So this is very common, right. And this is what I experienced as an editor was I edited hundreds of these third party cookies going away, what do we do now columns, and I still see that even with very mature companies is that you have to work together to figure out okay, let's reset. Like, we're, we might have a marketing team of 10 or 50 people, we're pretty advanced. But do we really have a differentiated message? And do we have a way to talk about the news that relates to that differentiated message? So that I would say is the similarity? I would say the difference is that those early stage companies, they need that marketing strategy, right, they probably don't have written down anywhere like, This is who we are, this is who our competitors are. This is why we're different. This resonates with our customers. So especially for the younger companies, I think you need to do that foundational work of understanding who the customers are and what resonates with them.
Mike: Wow. So that sounds like two very different challenges. I mean, it sounds like those startup companies, you really are starting from scratch, even if they've been around for a while if they're small. They don't have that they plan the strategy, the frameworks to do it. The Enterprise comes in Why do you think that they're still, you know, writing the same articles? And I'm I agree, though, third party cookie going away? Is that storyline that keeps giving right, we then see they get rid of it? Why do they keep going back to those same storylines, rather than finding something new?
Joe: I think it's because things evolve in your industry. And there was probably a point, if you're a mature company, where you did the exact type of exercise we're talking about with the early stage companies, right? Somewhere along the line, you got together with your executive team and the leaders of the marketing department, you talked about who you are, and how you're going to be different, you interviewed a handful of customers figured out what resonates with them all that foundational work. But that goes stale, right? Like you need to do that basically, once a year, to understand how to insert yourself into the narrative of the industry and provide value to your audience. When you don't do that sort of strategic work on some sort of regular basis, you end up taking the easy way out, which is no individuals fault. It's just what happens when like everyone is busy, and you don't have the time to set aside for that strategic reflection. And so then you end up pumping out commoditize insights, right, where it's like, in adtech, and martech. We've all read, you know, 50 by lines on how to prepare for the death of third party cookie, and then we end up saying basically the same thing. So I think it's it's keeping up with the dynamism of the industry. That is the challenge. But what would you say? Because you work with a lot of companies on similar issues?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting, we see a lot of themes that are fairly consistent. So if you look at the world of industrial automation, there's a huge theme around net zero. I mean, it's a massive topic. But I think in a way, companies in our space are actually quite good at putting their own, you know, really specific view on it. Because the way you get to net zero in terms of saving as much carbon and, you know, sequestering it or doing whatever, as opposed to the carbon you're missing. There are different ways to do that. So you can do that and have a strategy around capturing that carbon you can have a strategy around, generating energy in a more environmentally friendly way. If you can have a strategy around more efficiency, I think we see those big topics, but there's lots of different ways to attack them. I think one of the challenges maybe you face is that, you know, something like a third party cookie, there's going to be one industry solution, there's going to be consistent, and people can't very easily come up with very different answers. Is that fair? Do you think?
Joe: Yeah, there are there are two or three solutions. But ultimately, if you have 100 companies talking about two or three solutions, you're still gonna end up with that commoditization challenge.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So becoming commoditized and not differentiating. I mean, that's a classic mistake that people make. I mean, do you see other mistakes being made in the marketing technology space where, where companies are maybe missing opportunities, or perhaps just simply doing things wrong?
Joe: Yeah, one is consistency. So I think that, you know, we mainly do content and PR for our clients. And something that we see a lot is that companies are stuck on the MQL hamster wheel. So they're stuck only doing marketing tactics that can be easily attributed to leads. And that's fine. Like in the beginning, you should do that, right. Like if you're an early stage company, and you need leads to survive, and you don't have a reliable acquisition channel, you should focus on marketing tactics that will clearly grow your business. But as you mature, and let's say you're a an eight figure revenue company, and you get all of your leads from SEO, that might be an acceptable tactic to management, because it's easy to understand, right? Like we spend this much we write these articles, we can easily track them, people come through, they submit a demo request. But ultimately, to grow beyond whatever stage you're at, you're going to plateau with that MQL focused SEO tactic, and you're going to need other tactics. And that's where understanding that being a part of the industry conversation, and regularly getting in front of your audience does pay dividends over the long term is important. If you can find like a version of Twitter, right? Like people will say an industry Twitter's like adTech, Twitter, or whatever it is, if every major thread that happens in that industry, you are a part of and people are looking to you as an authority. Or if you're speaking at conferences, and people recognise you as a luminary on this or that issue, like that is going to generate gains for your business over the long term. And I think where a lot of companies go wrong, is they just give up on it too soon, they don't want to do anything that can be easily measured in terms of lead output. So they have their main lead strategy, but then they like try out content, they give up on it, because after three months, they're like this isn't clearly generating leads. The other thing I would say is that companies focus too much on their own product, which is harder for their prospects to remember than they might imagine, like, my new product details are very important to the people working every day on the product, they're not as important to the customer base. And the key is to make your customer, the hero of the story, not your product. So I would say those are two things I see often.
Mike: That's amazingly similar with what we see in our industries as well, I think the product is really interesting, and I totally get it. I mean, I used to be an engineer, I used to be developing products, you know, and products were two years of your life. And he put this huge effort in and it really matters to you. And it's very hard to have a marketer go and say, customers aren't that worried about particular features or particular products, what they care about is over whether you're the right vendor with a right sort of range of capabilities to be able to work with them. That's hard when you've spent all that effort and all that time on one particular product or one particular feature.
Joe: Yeah, that's absolutely true. Ultimately, you are selling to a person. And unfortunately, that person, like let's say your product is, you know, five hours out of their week, they just don't have that same level of attachment to the intricacies of the product as you do. So the way I try to coach people out of that is to focus on the person or the persona, right? Like, who is this person who's using the product? What do they want to achieve? And how are you going to help them? I'm sure you do something similar?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, it's a, I guess it's a fairly standard approach, but it's very effective. I'm interested to move away from some of the challenges. Let's look at something a bit more positive. I mean, where do you see martec companies getting it? Right? Are there any particular campaigns you've run or seen that they you think really crush it in the world of martech?
Joe: Yeah. One example I like to go to is our marketing strategist, Paul connect and he was the Chief Marketing Officer of an adTech company called beeswax that had a nine figure exit to Comcast. And what Paul realised when he was working at beeswax was they were working with media buyers, so brands and agencies, and they were having trouble with sales cycles. Your sales cycles were really long, they couldn't really figure out Who is truly our ideal customer? And how do we use that intelligence to bring in the right people make the sales cycle shorter and then make happier customers. And what they ultimately realised was that they had this sort of intricate and granular tech that really resonated with a persona that they ended up calling control freaks, which is funny, because it almost sounds insulting, right. But that's the exact idea of it was that they didn't resonate with like the average media buyer, they resonated with companies that had built out data teams and people who really wanted to get into the weeds on their media buying technology. And by reworking their marketing and their sales pitch around this persona of the control freak. They were able to bring in the right people shorten the sales cycle and have happier customers, because they were no longer foisting this, like relatively granular tech on people who just wanted something easy, right. So I think that's a great example, because it shows what we sort of learned in marketing 101, but then tend to forget, because it's hard, which is that the most effective positioning will actually turn away the majority of the people who see it, but it will really resonate with the 20% of your potential market, you need to be super successful.
Mike: Yeah, and I love that as well. Because I think in B2B, it's so easy to, to almost think of personas in terms of checkbox characteristics, you know, size of firm, what role they are, you know, how many people in their team? And actually, I think that that control freaks is really interesting, because that's much more about that person's behaviour and how they think, and really not so much about what they actually do. And I totally agree, I think that can be really, really effective when you really get under the skin of your customer.
Joe: . Yeah, I agree. I was talking to another startup founder recently, who runs a text messaging solution that helps small businesses communicate more easily with site visitors right to turn online visitors into leads. And he was saying, like, there's a hard condition for our prospects, which is they need to have website traffic, right? Because then if not, that solution, obviously won't work. But then there's a softer, more like persona driven condition, which is they have to care about communication. And they have to want to improve and sort of have this understanding that there would be value and a solution that would help them more effectively communicate with their customers. And that's not like you could have a 10 person business where they have that desire. And you could have 100 person business where they're like, oh, no, this is never gonna work. It's not important. So you're right, it does go beyond firma graphics, is great.
Mike: I mean, I could talk about personas for ages. I love PreSonus. But I'm aware of the time I think we ought to talk about some of the other topics. I mean, one of the topics I feel I can almost never do a podcast without is mentioning AI at the moment, you know, I'm interested as another agency owner, where are you using AI? And where do you see it going?
Joe: So where we think I can be helpful is in research and inspiration. So for example, if you are writing about location data, and you have a freelance writer who's never written about it, a use case where I've found AI helpful is having that writer put into chat GPT, like write a blog post about three ways enterprises can use location data to grow internationally, right, and then that might provide them a basic education on the subject that's going to be more efficient than if they were to go out and like Google seven different things and like read a bunch of different articles. Or another way would be very commonly established use case now, like, give me 10, subject lines for an email about X, Y, or Z. But overall, to be honest, I think the generative AI phenomenon has been overblown. And the reason I think that is because AI is ultimately at present more of a tactical tool. It's not going to solve like foundational, strategic or critical thinking marketing questions. And I'm just of the opinion that those foundational questions like, Who are we? Who are we speaking to? What's going to resonate with them? I think that comes from speaking to your customers speaking to industry experts and thinking critically, I don't think it can really come from ChaCha beauty. And I think the obsession with generative AI comes from a problem in marketing, which is that we are very obsessed with like tools and tactics and efficiency. And I think often to the detriment of those strategic developments that really make marketing successful. But what about you, how are you using it? And how do you think about it?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, junk food is really interesting, because it's very attractive because writing good quality content is really hard. And most people know that. A lot of people who are not specialist writers, they really don't want to have to create that content. So that promise of generative AI to be able to create blog posts very quickly, is incredibly so octave, and I understand why people like it. I mean, we've actually tried, we ran a test using Jasper, which is still based on the same GPT model. And we did some editing to make it better. But effectively, we ran the tests, we decided we weren't prepared to post the blogs, because they weren't good enough. So we did some editing afterwards. And we put them up. And ironically, at about the same time, we obviously had some of our writers writing content. But also, we were doing a couple of articles on design, and we had a couple of designers contributing. And the designer, you know, blogs don't do as well as the ones written by professional writers. And they probably shouldn't do, you know, it'd be worrying if designers were as good at writing as people who do that as their career. So they had a much lower time on page. And interestingly, when we put the AI generated content up, it was about as good as the designers, even though we've had writers come in and try and edit it and facelift it afterwards. So, you know, kind of my view was, if you want to write blog posts that are as good as a graphic designer, AI is not bad, I think it will get better. But being an ex engineer, fundamentally, what AI is trying to do in generative AI, is it's trying to predict the next most likely word. And it's not quite that simple. It's a little bit more complex, but it tries to predict what word would be most likely used. And that to me, says average. So I think you know, generative AI will will get to the point where it's round about as good as the average person at writing. And obviously, when I've specialist knowledge that not everyone will have. So in terms of any one specialisation it will be average, I don't see it getting above average, because by its definition, it's not trying to be creative. It's not trying to be new. It's interesting how when you look at very short form content, you know, Google ads, headlines, or subject lines for emails, sometimes they're the way GPT works, you can actually get some quite creative ideas. And I think for sparking ideas, it's great, certainly, for summarising content is amazing as well, you know, if you want to summarise something down, or indeed, if you want to get to explain a technical concept in our sector, there's lots of technical concepts that are quite hard to understand. And actually, AI is better than a lot of web pages and explaining those. So all of those things are fantastically helpful, but it doesn't replace people. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not got that creativity. And I don't think it will, I think what will happen is, rather than us having a, effectively a marketing copilot, or you know, a chat GPT that we consult all the time, I think there'll be aI features accelerated into all sorts of different tools, and almost disappear. I mean, there will always disappear. And you won't think of it as AI. But it will just be suggesting ideas to it will be helping you create content. And I think that that's the future. And that is very exciting. But it's not a it's not like having a cyborg next to you. That's a marketer.
Joe: Yeah, and it's similar to how it works from a product or entrepreneurial standpoint, right. And that most of the successful companies that are using AI over the next five to 10 years, they won't be quote unquote, AI companies. They will be companies that are doing similar things for companies doing now with AI to be better at it and X, Y or Z way. Another thing I would just add is that what you're describing with chat GBT or generative AI pumping out average content returns us to the commoditization problem, right, that's it's like you're using a tool that necessarily churns out commodity content, because it's optimising for the average, and it can't capture what is specific about your company's positioning or expertise.
Mike: Yeah, and the thing is, is sometimes something agencies aren't very happy about talking about, but a lot of what we do, doesn't actually really resonate. And actually, typically, when we look at content, I'm sure you're the same, you know, a small percentage of content is responsible for the vast majority of engagement on any website, or, you know, in any publication. There's a few really hot stories or topics that people really like. And so generating average is not a good idea, because average content gets well below the average number of views is the exceptional content that really drives success. I mean, do you agree with that?
Joe: Yeah, I do. And I also think that speaks again to the consistency point of right of you show up every day, you participate in the industry conversation, and you know, one out of five pieces, or tweets or LinkedIn posts or whatever it is, are going to have an outsize impact. But if you're just pumping out the same thing every day, and optimising for average, you're far less likely to see that outsize impact from the best pieces of content.
Mike: And I love that if you're optimising for average, you're not going to see outsize impact. But that's a quote that I think we should leave with on the podcast. This has been fascinating. Jonah, I think it's been really interesting. I could talk to you for ages. We have a couple of questions. We'd like to ask everybody to try and get some idea of what are the good things in marketing and one of the things we'd like to know is what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Joe: I think really good advice that is given often but not followed is that if you really want to market a company effectively, especially as an agency where you're not immersed in that product every day, you have To talk to customers. So as I said, we do that with early stage companies for sure if we're setting the foundational marketing strategy, but I would just exhort your listeners to, of course, be sure they're communicating with customers, but also if they have agencies or freelancers to let them either talk directly to customers, or at the very least, like get transcripts or sit in on customer calls, because it's from talking to customers and hearing what they love about the product and how it makes them do their jobs better, that you're really going to understand how to reflect the best parts of the product back to the target audience.
Mike: That's great advice. I love that and understand the customer in terms of careers. I mean, you were a journalist, and then moved into marketing. What do you feel about marketing career? Would you advise young person thinking about marketing to go into the career? Or would you say there's better places they could be?
Joe: Yeah, I definitely would. I mean, I went to a sort of liberal arts college and friends of mine who went into business right out of college, they went into like consulting or finance, there was no sales or marketing classes or major. And I didn't even really know what marketing was when I was leaving college. And I wouldn't have done it differently, necessarily, but I do think it would be really helpful for kids with more of a writing aptitude with more of a qualitative brain to understand that communications and content are out there, and that there are, you know, 10s of 1000s of jobs in these industries, because you can participate in business and sort of have a more standard, secure career path. Without just like living in spreadsheets every day. Of course, there's another part of marketing that is living in spreadsheets, and like the data science people are the more quantitative brain folks, they have lots of options in business that include marketing and many other things. But I would especially just talk to college students, early career professionals who are more writing or qualitative, focused, and say like, there are a lot of really good business jobs out there for them.
Mike: That's great advice. I love it. Joe, I so appreciate your time. I'm, you know, really valuable your insights if people are interested in contacting you and finding out a bit more whether they're from a Mar tech firm that needs help, or perhaps just somebody who wants to ask you about something you sit on the podcast, what's the best way for them to contact you?
Joe: Yeah, you can find me either at podcast dot sharp pen media.com or just Google Joe Zappa, LinkedIn. And I'm sure I'll pop up. That's fantastic,
Mike: Joe, it's been a great conversation. It's great to talk to someone who runs another agency in a slightly different sector. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for being on the podcast.
Joe: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Mariam Lochoshvili - Sensata Technologies
Mariam Lochoshvili, Global Marketing Communications Manager at Sensata Technologies, joins Mike Maynard for the next episode of our leading B2B marketing professionals series.
Mariam shares how following job opportunities around Europe led her to her role at Sensata, explains the importance of localising campaigns for maximum success, and shares her thoughts on why maintaining a strong company tone of voice might offer an advantage as AI increasingly saturates content across the industry.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Sensata
Sensata is a global industrial technology company striving to create a cleaner, more efficient, electrified and connected world.
Time Stamps
[00:49.02] –Mariam discusses her career journey.
[12.39.08] – Mariam shares why authenticity and emotion is important when marketing B2B tech.
[13:49.09] – Why is localising so important? - Mariam and Mike discuss.
[18:09.0} – Mariam discusses the campaigns she is most proud of.
{23:29.01] – Mariam talks about AI and career prospects.
Quotes
"Talking about emotions is a new trend in B2B... when you connect to people on that emotional level, only then are you actually generating true interest." Mariam Lochoshvili, Global Marketing Communications Manager at Sensata Technologies
Follow Mariam:
Mariam Lochoshvili on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariam-lochoshvili/
Sensata website: https://www.sensata.com/
Sensata on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sensata-technologies/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Mariam Lochoshvili - Sensata Technologies
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mariam Lochoshvili
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Miriam Lochoshvili. Miriam is the Global Marketing Communications Manager for Sensata technologies. Welcome to the podcast. Miriam.
Mariam: Thanks for having me, Mike. My pleasure.
Mike: It's great to have you on the podcast. I'm really interested, we always like to start off by finding out how people get to where they are in their career, and you've had geographically quite an interesting career. So Jordan, tell me a little bit about your career journey and what you've done.
Mariam: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm originally from Georgia, the country, not the state. And my international journey really began with an unforgettable Erasmus year in Latvia in Riga. I did that during my Bachelor studies. And to this day, I think this experience is like really special from me. And from there, I was off to France for my masters. This is actually where my first experience in the world of B2B marketing happened as well. They no one was off to Germany for work. And now I call London my home. And, you know, it's really funny how curiosity can lead you to unexpected places, I never imagined living in London. And, you know, I often wonder where it will take me next. And yeah, it's been really interesting.
Mike: And I'm really interested, because, you know, for someone in the UK, where we don't typically see people who are particularly mobile with careers. I mean, were you picking countries you wanted to be in? Or were you picking opportunities, and not really worrying where they're located and just following the opportunities? I
Mariam: was definitely following the opportunities, not the countries. Now,
Mike: that's awesome. And other than a little bit of jealousy, because obviously now the UK can't participate in the Erasmus programme, which I know was an amazing and still is an amazing programme in the EU. But it's great to see that you've moved around. How're you finding London?
Mariam: I absolutely love it here. I do. But I never imagined myself living in London, but I actually really liked it here. So
Mike: it's great. And you're in London to work for since arta. So if people listening don't know, since after, can you give us a brief overview about what the company does?
Mariam: Yeah, absolutely. So since Allah is this huge global industrial technology company, what we are doing is that we're really striving to create a cleaner, more efficient, electrified and connected world, we've got this huge range of sensors or an electrical protection components, and also some data rich solutions as well, that really help our customers and partners solve very complex engineering challenges. And we are also not really limited into one field. We make sensors and solutions for everything really from like your everyday gadgets to high tech, complex automotive or aerospace applications.
Mike: That's interesting. And I mean by background, you're not super technical, are you? So how do you find working with such technical products?
Mariam: Yeah, I'm definitely not. I think the key is there, I honestly owe a lot to my colleagues, that really helped me navigate the technical aspects of our products. I work with engineering teams on a daily basis. And I think for marketers, sometimes that can feel quite overwhelming, because engineers are known for their very direct, precise communication, they are exceptionally smart, and it can feel overwhelming sometimes. And when it does, I like to remind myself that they are the creators of the products. They know everything about it. And I actually feel really honoured to be able to work by their sides. And I try to approach each project with a sense of humility, and also really be proactive. You know, while I may not know, or have the same technical background as they do, I'm really committed to ask the questions. And I'm also very open to doing my independent research to fill the gaps from time to time and that's how it happens. I think it's in the end all about collaboration because we bring different things to the table. I
Mike: definitely agree with that. I mean, one of the things that the intro As Mason salts has, obviously got a very broad range of products, I mean, do you approach things from a product point of view learning about the products? Or, you know, when you're trying to understand the technology, you're approaching it from the application point of view, looking at the industries that use the products and why they need them? I
Mariam: think it's a combination of both. To be honest, it really depends on the product and solution, I've done both. There are certain products that are the same across the industry. So in that case, the product approach works, but there are others where you have to start from the application and go backwards. So it really depends. We've done both. Awesome. I
Mike: think, you know, one of the interesting things about B2B is B2B is different from a lot of consumer marketing because of the the depth of product knowledge and information you need. A is that something you see is is that you know, one of the differences and is that one of the reasons you'd like B2B.
Mariam: I definitely see that. I don't think that was the reason why I ended up in B2B. I'll be very honest, I didn't have any like this grand master plan to start my career in B2B, I would say, opportunity came up. And I just went for AIX. I started actually in b2c, when I was very green in marketing. And I've got to say that I really enjoyed that experience, to be honest. But as I've always been very open to try new things. when the chance came up. And it was actually in Paris, I had a chance to do my internship to write my master thesis in a B2B tech company. I was like, Yeah, sure, why not? That's a great opportunity. And then I just went for it. And I stayed, so which means that it's still quite interesting and really challenging. So I love it. And
Mike: that was great. I mean, can you dig a bit deeper as to what particularly is exciting about Cinsault? Or what, what gets you really excited about marketing products there rather than maybe another company? Yeah,
Mariam: that's, I love that question. Actually, I think there are many things that are exciting about marketing for Cinzano. But I think the part I love the most or I find most fulfilling is knowing the impact that we are actually making on the world. And I think for me, the ethical dimension of marketing is very important. And I realised that early on in my career, I need to really believe in the product I'm promoting. And x insider, I have that assurance and that luxury, that I know, our products are genuinely making a good difference. So I think that's probably the most important for me.
Mike: That's fascinating. I mean, it sounds like you're saying authenticity is really, really important in marketing and B2B now. Is that your view? Do you have to be honest about the products? Or do you think it's much more about whether or not you enjoy the role that's really driven by you know, how much benefit the products deliver?
Mariam: I do think that honesty is really important. And I think in general, and that might be my very personal opinion. But I think in general, for a marketer, there are a lot of distractions, to be honest. And there are a lot of ways you can sometimes lose that path, you know, but I honestly think that it's really important as a marketer to really maintain the authenticity and honesty in your communications, because I think the trust that you're building with your audience is the key to successful campaigns. And it's also a value that will serve you throughout your career, not just in that particular company. So I would look at that, even from a broader perspective than from like one company's angle. That's
Mike: really interesting. I mean, you talk about trust, you've got to build trust with a lot of different audiences with sensor data. So I'm interested to know how you manage marketing communications that build that trust with, you know, a whole range of different people, both in different industries and also different roles that are involved in buying your products. Yeah,
Mariam: absolutely. So I think the important thing is instance data. We have long and short cycle businesses, right. And if you think about our business cycles, your short cycle businesses would be using very similar to like b2c marketing practices and our long cycle businesses would be those traditional B2B practices. But I think you know, what's funny, there is one common ground between all the audiences that we really serve, and it's the fact that you're talking to people and people have their emotions. And I think our job is really making sure that people that are out there looking for solutions, we can connect with them on that emotional level, while delivering the information about our products and solutions, and really let them know how we can help. And then think that's the universal truth that doesn't matter which industry you are in which products, you're marketing, you need to think about people. And your audience is always made up of real people that have very real emotions, and you need to find ways to connect with them. On that emotional level. Yeah, no, I,
Mike: I love that sort of talk about, you know, firing emotions in your audience, your prospects and customers? I mean, can you just dig a little bit deeper into that and give maybe some examples about how you try and generate an emotional response rather than a purely logical response, which I think often some people think is how engineers process data? Yeah, that's,
Mariam: that's a great question. And before I get to that, I think I also really want to mention that talking about emotions is a new trend in B2B, right, because the B2B industry is quite well known for the technical part of it. But I think what we often forget, and I think that's becoming increasingly apparent in today's world where people are and customer behaviour is changing so rapidly, engineers are people as well. And they react to emotional responses. So I think when we try to plan campaigns, our first layer of communications is really trying to connect to those people on the emotional level, and then deliver the technical parts, because only when you connect to people on that emotional level, only, then you're actually generating true interest. Because people nowadays have a very short attention span, you have this tiny window. And I think without bringing emotions in place, it's really hard to stand out from competitors. Because everyone can put tech specs out there. I think not many companies can actually try to turn this text backs into something that connects to a person on an emotional level. And that's a real challenge. And I don't think we always do that, but at least we make our best effort to try to do it. And that's already, you know, that's already great.
Mike: I think that's really interesting, Marian, because you know, you've got a global role. So do you think you need to do different things to spark emotion in people in different regions around the world? Or is this something you can run one campaign it generates the same emotion wherever you're living?
Mariam: Our 100% And we are definitely committed to localising our campaigns, where required not in all cases, but in most cases. And then when that happens, we really work very closely with the regional teams to make sure the strategy really aligns with the market needs and requirements. And I think one example, I can share with that, that just comes to my mind, because it was very recent, we've been trying to break into mexican market with one of our product lines that were previously launched in the US. And the first thought was, you know what, we'll just translate all of our US communication, entire materials, and then that will do the thing. And luckily, we went through this discovery phase and did some digging. And we found actually really valuable insights, that, fortunately, I may just completely rethink our game plan. In fact, we had to redo all of our marketing materials, significantly adjust the messaging, and completely rethink the channels. And I think my key takeaway from Greece was, you really need to build strong connections with your local experts, but also really try to get some fresh perspectives outside of your usual company bubble. You know, I would really recommend, you know, observing what other companies doing that country, connecting with thought leaders, industry leaders, looking at your competitors. But as you do that, I think it's important to remember that just because something worked for your competitor doesn't mean that it will work for you. And I think it's always important also to keep an open mind that you don't know from the start, and you need to continue to test to adapt to tweak. And that's about it. I think they building that strong connection to the market in the exploration phase is really important and keeping an open mind as well.
Mike: I think that's very true. You know, you need to really understand what's going to generate the same response from the market and I'm typically translate Seeing words from one language to another is not the way to generate the same response. It might, it might appear to be the same message, but it's not received in the same way. Absolutely.
Mariam: I can talk about difficulties of translations whole day. But yeah, translation doesn't work word by word. It doesn't, it really does.
Mike: I think that's interesting, because a lot of companies now are looking more and more to AI for translation. And obviously, AI, generally, is a very literal translation. And I think that's going to bring some problems in the future, as companies realise that the translations they've done don't actually communicate the same message and the same feelings, even if the words have literally been, you know, switch from one language to another. Yeah,
Mariam: absolutely. And even in every language, you have multiple ways of saying the same thing, right? It's like the same sentence, you can express yourself in different ways. So literal translation never helps. You all always need to look for the emotional background behind the actual sentence. And I think that can only be done, unfortunately, by humans. And that's why you need to work with your local teams, or if you don't have a local team, build a strong local team that will help you with that. Definitely.
Mike: And we've talked about an awful lot. And one of the things that's occurring to me is you've got this global role, you're covering a wide range of products, a wide range of industries. I mean, how do you in your role, prioritise and decide what you're going to focus on?
Mariam: If you look at my desktop, you probably think that it has definitely seen better days. You know, I definitely have my version of an organised chaos. And I do love my chaos. But seriously, if I have to answer the question seriously, I would say, I really rely on project plans heavily. So every time I started a project, I make sure that I create a comprehensive project plan first. And the plan really helps me navigate and adapt as well. And I think also, my personal nature comes in play as well. Just because I'm very adaptable. As a person, I think I can really quickly shift gears in the work environment as well, which allows me to prioritise and then reprioritize quickly and effectively. So I think personality definitely plays a role. But outside of personality, I think really keeping your ducks in a row by organising your projects, plants is important. And you know, whether that's an organised chaos, or very meticulously organised the project plan, that's completely up to you.
Mike: I love that, you know, pick, pick how you want to get there, but make sure you get to the right place. I'm interested now, I mean, you know, from this organised chaos, and also some great project plans, you know, you've obviously produced some really good campaigns, are there campaigns you're particularly proud of, or campaigns you think, have worked particularly well in your career?
Mariam: That's a very difficult question, because I genuinely love all the campaigns that we deliver. And I worked on delivering, because I genuinely think that while there is always room for improvement, I know from my own perspective, like at that point in time, I've done the best I could, given the resources, right. But I think if I have to choose probably, to a recent campaigns come to my mind, and I'll tell you why I like them. I think the first one was the public service initiative, we've launched actually, this summer. And what made it really special for me was that it was a collaboration between five competitors, that really got together to tackle a service related challenge for the industry. And I think it was for the first time that we had to witness this competitors, like really set aside their individual interests, you know, and really come together for a common cause. And that was really inspiring, because there is a huge potential in collaboration. And the campaign results definitely are a testament to that. But it was a really good example of how collaboration can make really the significant impact then each of us would make separately it was way more significant than that, and really, like elevate the entire industry and I think that's beautiful. I really liked that part of it. The second one, as part of our commitment to sustainability. We've actually taken some steps to adjust our internal process and like really revamp our internal flows on like how we approach trade shows, marketing, collateral consumables, anything that we print, so We made a lot of adjustments to that. And I really liked that personally, because again, it shows our dedication to the responsible marketing. And it's really close to my heart. So I'm very excited for that. Yeah.
Mike: And as an engineer, I love the thought of people focusing on process and how you do things rather than necessarily just looking at the result, because clearly, a lot of randomness happens. And some some events are great. Some events are not so good. And it's not necessarily something you can control. I love that process focus. Yeah,
Mariam: absolutely. And I think sustainability is a tricky one as well, right? Because there's so much fuss around it right now. And, yeah, sometimes you can make way bigger impact by redefining the process than actually by changing one component or material.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sustainability is really interesting. You talked earlier on about trust and authenticity. There's a lot of sustainability campaigns that maybe have questionable basis. I mean, how do you feel about the way that everyone is jumping on the sustainability bandwagon and tried to appear sustainable, whether or not they're actually changing the way their business works to be more sustainable?
Mariam: Yeah, I mean, there, that's a real problem out there, right, like greenwashing is everywhere we go. And I think as a marketer, as well, there is so much fuss around it, like you actually need to make a very educated effort to understand what's trying to jumping, and whatnot. And I think outside of the marketing aspect of it, I think everything starts within the company. And I think in today's world where information is everywhere, and you can't really control that, I think everyone should be really conscious of communicating something that is not 100% accurate. People have more information about sustainable efforts that this information is very accessible, more accessible than it was before. So my feeling is that we all really need to be conscious when talking about sustainability topics. Often it's not so much of a marketing message for external audience. But really, the first layer is actually getting every single person in your company excited about it, then redefining the their everyday work to make sure that they are thinking about sustainability. And in our case, it's very much into our DNA, because the products that we produce, are actually helping the world be greener place. So obviously, the manufacturing process itself, these being adjusted, like as well, every other company would put we do make our efforts in that direction. And I'm really proud of that. But again, we try not to make too much fuss about it externally, and keep the right balance there. I love that. I
Mike: mean, I think it's interesting that, you know, you're not overselling something, even though you've got a genuine reason to talk about sustainability, because the product inherently helps your customers be more sustainable. Absolutely. Moving on. I think we have to talk about AI at the moment. I think it's it's one of the requirements of any podcast about marketing. I'm really interested to know what's been your experience of AI and marketing at the moment? And whether you're using AI extensively?
Mariam: Yes, some Yes. Still, ner is definitely getting a lot of attention. And of course, I've been experimenting with it myself. In fact, beginning of this year, I really made this very conscious effort to play with different tools like Chai, GPT, Google barred me journey and few others really. And what really blows my mind daily is how fast AI is progressing, and how quickly it changes. And I know that there is a lot of scepticism out there in the marketing community. But I would say I definitely think AI is here to stay and definitely give it a shot. Try it. While I think all of us should be very responsible. Using Gen AI, I think it's really important that we become familiar with it, and we'll learn how to use it to our advantage. And really like how I personally look at Gen AI is it's just another tool in my creative toolbox really. And it has opened some exciting possibilities, but so did other developments, right. So I think it's definitely important to try but also remember that responsibility aspect of it as well. And to answer like the second question, I think the content creation is becoming so much easier and faster than it was ever before. Jenny I allow As opposed to like, generate content in second. But I think what's going to be really important is ensuring that the content that you're actually generating is the right one. It's not just quick, but it's also engaging, it provides the right information, and it creates value for your audience. While you can create so much more content right now, it will not guarantee that the content will always hit this box. So I think for marketers, it's going to be extremely big challenge to make sure that in this environment where content generation is so easy, we try to generate the right content, and it's gonna become a really challenging job. And I think that's why we see new jobs, like prompt engineers becoming really important that are trying to track all the ways you can prompt the AI, right. But at the end of the day, I think marketers should keep that in mind. And the other important thing that I always think, is the tone and the voice of your company, like if everyone is using AI generated content, I think those of us who will make an effort to stand out and keep the voice and the tone of the company will actually be on the winning side of the game. Because all content will solve some start sounding the same. And I think it's increasingly important to try to maintain the tone and voice of your company. And stay true to that, which can be challenging, but it's not impossible. Yeah, I
Mike: think that's a really good point people don't think about is one of the goals of marketing is obviously to differentiate. And if you sound like everybody else, it's very hard for people to see you as being different. So I love that it was great insight. So we have a couple of questions we like to ask our guests. And the first one is very simple. What's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given? Miriam?
Mariam: Good one, I think the best piece is really three things, right? learn, relearn, and unlearn. And I think in today's fast paced world, and no one can claim to be an expert in everything. And sometimes it's meeting and really embracing that. continuous learning is really key. And I also would advise people to concentrate on what you can control, really. And you can always control your attitude, your activity and the level of your efforts. So I think the combination of the two was the best marketing advice I've personally received. And I hope that will help someone else as well. That's great. I
Mike: love that. The next question is, what would you say if somebody was thinking about entering marketing as a career, somebody young? Do you think it's a career that's going to have a lot of prospects in the future? Or would you recommend they look elsewhere? Oh,
Mariam: I definitely think there are a lot of exciting prospects out there, in general, for every person that is at the very start of their career journey doesn't matter if it's marketing or anything else, I would really recommend getting as much real world experience as possible. Like any internship, you can get any hands on opportunities you can get, do that. Because that would really help you align your expectations. And we all have expectations as we enter the workforce, with the reality of the field, the reality of the job. And I say that really from the personal experience. You know, I wanted to be a stockbroker, once before, I found by way, marketing, two completely different fields so and what helped me is really going for those internships and getting the real world experience, and it made me see what I was more passionate about. So I think that's really important. I think I mentioned earlier as well. Another important piece that I would specifically give to the marketing people is, again, try to be honest and authentic in your communications. And really think about trust as you build your career. The trust you build as a marketer in your environment, but you also built through your company communications as well. I
Mike: love it. That's that's a great way to end the interview. Thank you very much. I mean, we've talked about so much if people have questions for you, Miriam, what's the best way for them to get ahold of you?
Mariam: Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. I absolutely enjoy the questions. And yeah, I would really invite everyone to connect with me on LinkedIn. I guess that's the easiest way. Feel free to reach out if you have any question So in store if you'd like to continue the conversation, I'm always welcoming feedback or an inquiry. So we'll be happy to connect. Thank you so much
Mike: for being on podcast man has been a great conversation and I hope you you know, continue making the world a better place and, you know, using some sort of products that make people more sustainable thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Matt Swalley - Omneky
Matt Swalley, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Omneky, an AI-powered ad platform, sat down with Mike to discuss the possibilities of AI in advertising and how businesses can maximise the benefits of AI-generated content in their campaigns.
He also shares why testing is integral to campaign success and why human input is essential when working with AI-generated content.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Omneky
Omneky is an AI-powered platform that uses state-of-the-art deep learning to create and personalise creative content across customer touchpoints. Machine learning algorithms analyse designs and messaging and these insights are used to generate the content most likely to drive sales.
About Matt Swalley:
Matt Swalley is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Omneky. Matt brings 13 years of strategic leadership experience and has an undergraduate degree from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and an MBA from Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.
Time Stamps
[00:46.01] – Matt discusses his career and why he moved from a corporate to a start-up role.
[06:34.08] – What is Omneky? How does it help its customers?
[13:49.09] –Matt discusses the importance of testing ads and campaigns.
[15:22.2] – Matt explains why human involvement is a must in AI-generated content.
[18:02.00] – Matt shares some use cases of Omneky.
[23:23.02] – Matt offers her marketing top tip.
Quotes
“The best part about AI is people's jobs are not necessarily being eliminated. They're being changed. People can think much quicker on concepts and stuff.” Matt Swalley, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Omneky.
Follow Matt:
Matt Swalley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-swalley-59249533/
Omneky website: https://www.omneky.com/
Omneky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/omneky/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Matt Swalley - Omneky
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Matt Swalley
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Max Swalley. Matt is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Omneky. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matt: Hi, Mike, thank you so much for having me really excited to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on. I'm really interested in about your career. And in particular, you know, you've recently jumped from a very corporate background into a startup. So tell me how you got to AT and T and then why you decided to change and co founder, I'm lucky.
Matt: Yes. Sounds great, Mike. So I spent 13 years at large corporation, at&t and I did a lot of different roles. And what's one of the best opportunities of working for you know, as a fortune 10 company for many of those years with 250,000 employees is, you get the opportunity to a lot of different things. over the 13 years, I did probably 15 different jobs and lived in eight different markets, some of the biggest markets in the US. So Dallas, Atlanta, Southern California, where I lead sales teams, and the earliest days I was carrying a bag is what they called it, where you're picking up the phone and calling you know, 50 customers a day setting up primarily new lead generation through calls and emails. And that kind of will go into my discussion later about how digital needs to be the base today. But I learned a lot about meeting with 1000s of customers learning how to ask questions, selling is all asking questions. And then I took that on and expanded it into leading teams in Southern California across like the biggest territory. And then I took on some leadership roles in mobility applications. So selling software for at&t, like GPS tracking about a bunch of their software services. And I made this decision, I want to get to headquarters because all decisions are made in headquarters. So that was one of my biggest transitions was moving to the headquarters in Dallas, Texas, and get into be around the leaders I led a sales organisation in Dallas initially and then became a chief of staff for the global business officer who ran all the multinational relationships for 18 T communications. And it was a really, really great big picture moment where I was getting to see big, big p&l hiring in every region of the world. We had customers in London in the UK, Japan, every single region. So learning a tonne about multinational companies and how you know how to sell. And then I got my MBA during that. And this was like my second career defining moment there was I made a decision, I want to get into corporate strategy. So I got into corporate strategy day PNP spent two years doing financial analysis, go to market strategy Board of Directors materials, and learning how to work with big datasets and tell stories for senior executives and the board of directors. And during that time, I got really excited about technology and growth stage companies, especially in artificial intelligence. And that's where I met Hikari singe the CEO of Omneky who is the best visionary I've ever seen. He was years ahead, knowing general AI was going to get to where it is today and joined him on that journey. At a early early stage startup at the time, had raised a little bit of seed money, right when I joined, but we primarily bootstrapped and almost profitable in the early days, where Hikari was running most of the different operations from sales to engineering, and I joined as the business leader about two years ago from today.
Mike: Awesome, congratulations. I'm really trying to dig a bit deeper way to this this jump I mean, you're AT and T you at the headquarters, you say presumably in a well paid secure job. I mean, I think a lot of listeners will be interested now. How do you find that courage to jump to something that appears so incredibly risky?
Matt: Yeah, so I always had kind of entrepreneurship in my heart. So like the earlier my job before 18 T, I spent at a small business where I ran an entire territory for a small uniform company in Chicago. But I always had this like business development opportunity where I love going out and making things happen myself, the hardest thing about working for a large corporation, you learn how to execute very well. And you get to sell established products most of the time and you have greenspace customers where you already have the relationships. But a lot of times you're not able to go figure out how to go to market, how to go sell a product, how to grow a business. And then the second biggest thing is is when you look at revenue and future projections, I really want to join a growth stage company where we can make a huge impact and we're a seed stage company with a goal to be, you know, an initial public offering in the next couple years. Some of the other industries are declining industry He's in, when you're in that situation, every decision is made an operational efficiencies instead of figuring out how to, you know, grow that next business unit 200 million or a billion dollars in revenue. And that's where I like, I love startups, because every day you're prioritising on what's most important that will make an impact to help grow this business and, you know, develop our team and find customers that fit our value prop.
Mike: I love that. I think it's, you know, it's absolutely true. Most people find growing, that sales number is far more exciting and far more interesting than shrinking that cost number.
Matt: This role a lot of things I learned in the past, how to organise teams, how to I learned a lot of marketing, channel marketing, for example, how to sell with or sell through customers, we're doing that a lot at arm to keep, they all are mission critical at a startup because a lot of leaders that startups are the most driven individuals, incredibly intelligent, know how to do so many things, but they haven't worked at large corporations and figured out how to, you know, build that operational cadence and structure into the day. And that's where you can immediately bring that knowledge from dealing with eight different levels and figuring out how to navigate the political environment and everything and you can, you can really simplify that all and then start building that into startup.
Mike: That's awesome. I love your enthusiasm around nominee keys. So do you want to talk about what I'm Nikki does, I mean, I got from the website, you're the omni channel creative orchestration platform, which is a bit of a mouthful, I think it probably needs some explaining.
Matt: Let's just say AI powered sales. And when I say that is digital advertising has to be the base for all sales. Primarily listeners here are in the B2B field. So in the past, you used to figure out ways to develop business from meeting in person making phone calls and emails, well, what we do is we tell businesses stories in different ways. So you have all these four different major criteria I keep going back to, you have different audiences for your product, and B2B, it could be a different vertical, like retail, you have different products and services. You also have different geographies with like localization, you could be based in the UK or based in, you know, Dallas, Texas. And then finally, you have different platforms. So this could be websites, or social apps, or a number of different things, people's attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter. So you can go follow your customers to wherever they are on different websites or apps and tell your business's story. That's what Omneky does. We tell your story in a lot of different ways, formatted for each platform. And then you can target and retarget those audiences. And lead generation is a major, major one of our focuses, especially for us, because we use digital ads for our own growth.
Mike: That's interesting. So what you're doing is you're kind of taking that story from the customer. And then you're being able to tell that in emotional, different formats on different platforms, different sizes. Is that really what you're doing? You're kind of doing this? It seems almost like repurposing on this massive industrial scale.
Matt: Right? Yeah. So it's called multivariate testing out there and marketing. And you can learn a lot from the data. So one step back on on McKee is we collect data from a lot of different places. One is third party data from advertising platform. So if you're advertising and have a couple of weeks or months worth of data, we can analyse like how many people are clicking for each of the different things, clicking or buying or generating a lead, or we care about qualified leads the most, so you can go farther down the funnel. But then you can use this tool called Computer Vision, which has been around for a long time, but it's getting better and better as well. It can identify different elements of the copy the image, the video, and then across all the people looking at an ad, you can start to like quantify, like what's resonating? What's the key headline for the audience, what's the key video length, what's and then you you can iterate off of what's working well. And then with testing also, like, you want to spend about 30% of your advertising on brand new concepts and about 70% on iterating off what's working, because the platform algorithms for like the major platforms, meta Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, for B2B are, the algorithms are constantly changing. And so you have to feel it with creative and then also targeting is becoming more restricted with GDPR, California Data Protection Act. So now creative is the major lever for distribution. So a lot of these platforms have really smart algorithms that recognise what people like and it will deliver an ad based on what you've been looking at in the past. And so the better creative you have that hits their needs, the more effective
Mike: so it's interesting. So you're creating these ads, images, text, etc. And you're looking at two things you're looking at how really to get preferred in the algorithm, but also what works in terms of what drives drives leads. Is that Is that really what you're trying to combine?
Matt: That's right. So it's a data based approach. And then also testing of new concepts. And one of the beautiful things with AI is like, is advertising still overall is too general, everyone talks about personalization, but there was broadcast before one ad reaching millions, then it was narrowcast, a little bit more narrow. And today you are entering a place where technology allows you to be so agile, it can be more and more personalised, it's not gonna be exactly personalised yet. But it could fit the audience, the vertical, the, like I mentioned, the platform, the product, they will piece those all together, and then deliver to the right set of small narrow customers that you're trying to get to. And you have to tell it across images and videos, and you go test what's working, and then raise budgets on what's performing well, and continue to iterate off of it.
Mike: So let's talk a little bit about what it feels like to be a user of Omneky then, I mean, how does someone use the platform? How do they they create content? And then how do they control where it goes? Because it sounds like it can be going in a huge number of different channels.
Matt: Yeah, Mike. So this is some of the exciting things of technology is bringing as well. So when you onboard, we have a platform. So you register on Omneky, and we have within our platform, you upload your brand assets. So the first guardrails, our enterprise has very specific brand guidelines, we stay within those. So you give us your fonts, your logos, your brand guidelines, in any raw assets that you have, you could have 1000s of assets, a lot of these big brands have so many assets. And what's beautiful to with technology right now is on Nikki's built a brand large language model that will like categorise and scan all the different assets in the library, and then make it really easy to go pull from them for different ads. So that's step one. The second is we connect to the advertising platforms for data. And then we have an immediate six month history of what's been performing well. So we look at that look at the criteria across all your platforms that you're advertising, Maddow Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, we look at it as a single pane of glass view, figure out what's been working. And then within four days, we're delivering a first set of ads. And that's getting shorter and shorter timeframe, it's a really quick turnaround, from onboarding to like four days out. And then it's a constant feedback loop of within our platform, we deliver ad creatives, once the customer approves them, they're launched into the platforms, we're collecting data and then iterating, in real time off the data.
Mike: I say interesting. So you're building these models? I mean, obviously, an important part of that is defining the audience. How do you do that? Because I think a lot of marketers find it quite hard to go from having an audience definition to seeing what that means really, in Google ads or on Facebook or on LinkedIn?
Matt: Sure, so you want to test two different things. So one is your testing actually defined audiences. So let's just give an example. You could pick different criteria of what you believe it's a good fit on the platform, you launch ads that are uniquely created exactly for that audience. The second one is you also want to use the algorithms that like performance Max and Google, for example, that just optimise on their own. So two different strategies there, you figure out what's working better there. And you know, a lot of times those algorithms that you're utilising with the platform that aren't just making a narrow targeting outperform the ones that are, you know, defined audiences. But really, you understand the customers belief for ideal customer profiles, and then you can go test each one of them. And then you might uncover some new ones based on the data, which is what we you know, we do as a company as well.
Mike: Fascinating. I think you keep coming back to talking about testing as well. And and you came up with this stat earlier, that is 70% of your ad budget should be placed on the on the sort of existing ads and and 30% on testing, I think you said, can you just unpack that and explain why you think that's important?
Matt: Yes, because still, like what we noticed across the market is there's lots of different platforms you can test on. So one of the beautiful things with Omneky is we have integrations with all the major channels. So when I say testing new concepts, it might just be expanding to a new platform even right, so you might want to go test Reddit, or Pinterest or you know, programmatic, like the trade desk, but you only understand the history from what you've tried from data. So there might be new avenues like testing, you know, like I mentioned performance Max with a brand new set of creative that you were before just doing, you know, narrow targeting that are going to outperform and you want to have creative for each one of these. So what I'm gonna keep does is we put like a strategy in place across all the different types of potential going to market and then we have creative that aligns with each one of those and you want to test both video and images for each one of those videos is still like 60% of ad test. And then for companies that are doing it in house, a lot of times they might only have expertise in one place and what are the key does we bring in the ability to go launch and all these different places very Be very quickly with whatever assets you have.
Mike: Awesome. And I mean, you've talked about AI. You know, I think people are imagining that there's, there's some AI just firing out all these different versions. But actually, you also have real humans behind this as well. So tell us, you know, I guess what are the humans do? And then why do you feel you still need human input?
Matt: Sure. So the best part about AI also is, people's jobs are not necessarily being eliminated, they're being changed. People can think much quicker on concepts and stuff. So AI, and we plug it in, in a lot of different areas of the workflow. And, for example, for ideation, for humour, different things like that. So creators could potentially use it to figure out brand new ideas on concepts, we have images, pretty much automated, right? So you can pull in, you can use assets from like four different places. One is from brand assets, you give us all your raw assets, we can use those for ads. The second is AI generated assets. So the technologies keep getting better, we also have an AI team that's refining all these processes and building your own algorithms. And then humans still have to review all the creative because AI is not perfect in any situation. So there's always a finishing touch where human craters can can look it over and also use or scanning for bias, like generation one of these models had a lot more bias than generation two, right. And so it requires a human on the loop on our side. And then also on the customer side, you want to have two different checkpoints. before things go live, we have this approval dashboard, the customer could have, you know, five different approvers in there, including legal and compliance. You don't want anyone anything going live until you know it's got a stamp of approval that it looks ready to go. And then video, there are video tools that are amazing. And we're working with some really, really cool technology we're building. But video cannot be completely done through automation today. It's not it's not there yet. It can though. Plugin inputs help you piece together the story, what assets to use, but it's still going to have to have a human that helps piece it all together. For the most part.
Mike: It sounds fascinating. It sounds like you're, you're using AI as an accelerant to really speed up what individuals can do to be able to scale at the kind of scale you're talking about.
Matt: That's exactly right. So like a lot of enterprise businesses are either like duplicating assets times, you know, 50 within a whatever programme they're using, and then they're changing stuff, or, you know, manually and what we're doing is we're making that whole workflow so efficient that AI can help power the different areas, the content and the images, and then click a button and you have all the different sizes you need and ready to go.
Mike: Cool. So maybe we can dig into some of the uses, particularly in B2B. I mean, does Omneky go as far as being able to do sort of, you know, Account Based Marketing campaigns where you're, you're focusing down on single big accounts or two people tend to use it for, you know, broader campaigns.
Matt: It's typically more broader campaigns today with our success, like we use it for ourselves. So we have a number of different focuses. One is enterprise B2B. One is resellers agencies that are using our product. So each one of those has a specific advertising goal and a specific value prop and messaging, each one of them has different things. That's where we plug in, we tell the stories for each of those specific audiences in different ways. You could, with enterprise, you could take it deeper into Account Based Marketing, where you're focusing on one single account doing the ads, it's just, you're not going to have as much reach and as much data coming back because you're targeting like one very small audience.
Mike: That's interesting. So you need to you need that volume of data to be able to analyse what's working, presumably.
Matt: That's exactly right, the more data the better. So like, we recommend that the minimum like our minimum spend for testing is typically like $10,000 a month in ad spend. That's where you're getting enough eyeballs. And then when B2B that the other thing I wanted to mention is sales has changed a lot like people don't pick up their phone, you're getting 1000s of emails a day might and better say like, you know, schedule a demo, will advertising polls customers to you. And then you can figure out how you're how you can start to refine your demo in your questioning and moving the process through the funnel in a different way. And so, historically, sales organisations had lots of people doing outbound and meeting with customers. Today, you can have a smaller team, that's figuring out how like to deal with the incoming leads, route them in the right way, you know, don't take meetings that don't fit with who you can sell to, and then refining your value prop and pitch and questioning until you start to improve the ratio of sales close. That's really the way we look at it. It's like big deals coming to us. We figure out how to refine the process and prove efficiencies there. tell our story and better ways to drive more and then continually qualify and more Wow, that sounds
Mike: cool. I mean, maybe you can, you know, just paint a bit of a clearer picture. Do you have a couple of campaigns you can talk about that, you know, have really worked on on Nikki and delivered some great results.
Matt: Sure. So one specifically, we have a couple in. One is omni channel, the one you said earlier, Omni platform will call Omni platform distribution, this campaigns worked really, really well for us, because B2B marketers, and anyone in marketing has, as I mentioned, a big big challenge figuring out how to produce content for all these different channels. They might have expertise and just meta or LinkedIn, excuse me, but they don't across all. So we've gotten tonnes of interest from all different sizes of corporations, including lots in the Fortune 1000 range from those add greatest. The second one is if you have any great live, like videos of explaining your product. So another one for us was TechCrunch. We were a finalist at TechCrunch. disrupt the CEO did a demo of that on stage. And you can repurpose all this as ads. So that was focused on really the the mid market enterprise space. And that performed extremely well, any of that content, you can have and repurpose, like right away. When we start having content like that a lot of times we're repurposing his ads, and if they perform extremely well,
Mike: that's great. I mean, I think great content always works well, doesn't it? And any kind of AI magic is going to struggle unless you have that inherent good content start with.
Matt: That's right. Cool.
Mike: I mean, you mentioned people need to check. You know, everyone's gonna be wondering, we've all heard about AI getting things wrong. I mean, what are the main problems you find? When people are rejecting ads that have been generated by the system? I mean, what's the AI doing to get things wrong?
Matt: So some of the things that we see is one is, and this is what we see is one of the major challenges with AI, a lot of times it will repeat the same things over and over again. So you have to figure out how to ask it the prompts and different ways to generate different emotional responses or different ways to, you know, tell your story. So that's one thing we're building there. The second is a lot of the image generations in the early stages are not perfect. So you can train AI on what a product looks like, you could have a, you know, a specific product that has your brand logo on it and everything, when you're just trying to regenerate that in completely new situations, a lot of times, the text on it doesn't show up, right, there's a lot of challenges. So now, you know, what you're doing is you're figuring out how to make that exact product or service appear with whatever the production is you want without production, manipulating the backgrounds in different areas or putting into videos with overlays. But a lot of times the biggest challenge was not getting things perfect. And then you have to figure out other ways of doing it that will make that area of it perfect.
Mike: That makes sense. So so it's it's not necessarily going for some really crazy disastrous failures, it's much more it's not quite perfect. And, you know, clearly brands want it to be perfect.
Matt: The brands want to be perfect. And that's still why you need a human touch point in there for a lot, especially for the enterprise space.
Mike: That makes sense. This, this has been fascinating, man. I mean, one of the things I'm intrigued with is, you know, you're obviously not actually drilling from a marketing background. We're talking a lot about marketing and marketing technology. I mean, what's the best marketing advice you've ever received?
Matt: Yeah, I was actually a marketing major, believe it or not back in the day, and then went into the sales path, and then corporate strategy, and then transition to marketing. But some of the best advice I've heard is just start testing. Like, even with whatever, you know, I mentioned, you have to have a pretty good budget. But you can learn so much from getting 1000s or millions of eyeballs on something that could take a team, you know, months or years to realise your product might not sell the way you believe it's going to so you can just start testing. The second one is with AI the way it is today, try out as many of these tools as you can, that are available out in the market. Like, I'm sure you do this to Mike. But every morning, I review a newsletter I love about AI, I look at the 10 newest products on there. And I go test one or two of them. Because eventually you start to figure out how to piece all these together and figure out what helps us for what we're building but to it helps you understand the big picture of how all these pieces can fit together. Because we're at this stage right now, where AI is the first initial wave of it here after chat GPT got launched in you know, the open initial open API's. It was a cool factor. It was like this is cool. This has never been done. But it wasn't completely solving a business problem. Now we're entering the stage where businesses are getting to the point where they're solving business problems and beginning to learn how to scale those problems. test as many of the tools as possible.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I mean, there's so many AI tools that you look at and you see the script, you think Oh, that's amazing. And then you start playing with it and you go Yeah, I'm not sure how it's gonna help me. And then the cost of
Matt: compute star I'd say add up to with anything with scale, like you can try it with a small scale. But then once you start to like, do it a larger scale cost a lot more money.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean figures? Well, you know, I mean, you obviously started in marketing, you moved out of marketing, you've kind of come back a little bit into marketing. I mean, you're more business than the marketing still. I mean, do you recommend young people look at marketing as a career? Or what would you do? If you were starting again? Would you take that marketing major?
Matt: Yes. So I would, growth is one of the biggest roles if you want to join a startup, it's going to be a role that comes in more like its series, a stage head of growth, but head of growth has to understand marketing direct partnerships channel, they're kind of that overall marketing person that's in your company. And, and I have learned so much in the last two years from talking with eight customers a day sometimes or prospective customers a day might I hear I hear feedback from all these agencies, enterprise companies of what the business problem is. And I look at the world completely differently on how to go to market now. You have to figure out how to synergistically combine all your different direct outreach with retargeting with ads. Otherwise, none of it works. If you're not your PR is not firing away with news, your ads aren't going and your direct is not going. So yes, I believe it's a great base, but you also want to go try out different areas of the business because it gives you a much wider view of strategy.
Mike: Definitely, I think it's good advice. I mean, I'm very mindful of time. I'm in tricks, though, you know, the platform I'm Nikki seems to have so many different capabilities. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about or highlight from the platform that you think we haven't covered yet, Matt?
Matt: Sure. So one of the really exciting things we're working on right now is, is of course video and figure in, there's some really great AI tools that help tell different languages, transcribe what's on it. And then really exciting to is these virtual avatars. So one of the things we're we are working on right now is you can write a script and everything will follow our company's specific product. And then you can immediately create a virtual avatar that tells your story that can go on ads. So I really am excited about this technology, as we're, as we're developing it as another, you know, another area from testing for for ads.
Mike: Oh, that's cool. I mean, we we've been playing with some of that technology as well. And I think it's certainly at the moment, it's very compelling whether people will, in the longer term get to be able to spot you know, who's a real person who's not? I don't know, that's an interesting question.
Matt: Right? I know, it's gonna be interesting, because it went from like, user generated content to you know, there's a lot of different people that can go tell tale product stories to now. Virtual.
Mike: Exactly. I mean, Matt, it's just been amazing. We've we've covered so much, it feels like we've only scratched the surface of Omneky and your experience, but it's been fascinating. If anyone's listening or they'd like to get ahold of you, what's the best way for them to contact you?
Matt: Sure you if you want to get a demo, and on occasion, go to www.omneky.com and schedule a demo and put in the code you heard about in the marketing B2B technology podcast. That would help and then or you can reach out to me at Matt ma TT at Omneky.com. Or find me on LinkedIn.
Mike: That's awesome. Matt, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and the information about Omneky, I really appreciate it.
Matt: Thank you so much might been a pleasure.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
The Future of AI in Marketing Automation
How is AI going to shape the future of our marketing automation campaigns? From the latest announcements from leading platforms in the industry, to how AI could revolutionise lead scoring, Mike Maynard and Hannah Wehrly explore the latest news and developments in marketing automation. They also look at predictions on how marketing automation is expected to grow in the coming years and the role automation plays in customer retention and growth.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Ten - The Future of AI in Marketing Automation
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. This week we talk about the growth in spending market automation, the new Einstein co pilot from Salesforce, act on AI, predictive lead scoring. And we talk about how marketing automation can be used to keep in touch with customers after they make a purchase. Welcome back to another episode of modern automation moment. Mike, it's great to be back.
Mike: It's great to be back with you, Hannah. It's been a little while and I think we've got a lot to catch up on.
Hannah: Yes, we have a lot of exciting updates to catch on actually, because it's been a really interesting last month in the market automation landscape. So I'm gonna dive right in. And we've talked about some figures before, but I've actually come across some reports from a marketer and allied market research. And they had some really big figures in there about the future of the mahr tech spending industry. So they believe that there will be a growth from 15 point 31 million USD in 2020, to 27 point 11 billion in 2024. For the martec spent, I mean, a lot of this is going to be through the driver, the growth and the craze of AI tools. But I think this is spectacular that the way the industry is pointing is that the spending is going to increase. And so the advantages to marketers is just going to be amazing.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one of the interesting things they're saying is that actually, you know, around 2023 is going to be a low point in marketing spend growth, and people are going to actually see their budgets increased by a greater percentage over the next couple of years. So it's quite exciting. I think a lot of that, obviously, is people trying to buy AI tools and see how they work. We're still to some extent in a experimental phase. But clearly, there's a lot of people getting benefits from AI, and that's going to drive more investment.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, the next thing we're about to talk about Mike is really going to reinforce this, and this is Dreamforce. So this was Salesforce, his yearly conference, which actually took place last month in September. And not surprisingly, AI was a really big key topic. And the most exciting thing that they've released is a new generation of Einstein. So the Einstein one platform. Now I have to say, I'm a big fan of the cartoon character, it really sells me on the platform. But actually, the capabilities as well is really quite amazing. So they've actually introduced the Einstein copilot, which is basically an AI and system, which is built into the user experience of every Salesforce application. So it can help draft customer code, it can provide a sales recommended steps to close deals faster, propose copy for emails, I mean, the possibilities are limitless. What do you think about it?
Mike: Well, I think you know, me, I have to make a snarky comment. And it'd be great if the people who were responsible for the user experience of Salesforce were, you know, as talented as some of the cartoonists because, you know, we all know Salesforce is a real challenge to us. And I guess this is what they're trying to address. Einstein is actually going to be there to help Salesforce users do the things they want to do, and hopefully overcome some of the challenges you've got around the user interface user experience.
Hannah: I think as well, you know, Mike, you've mentioned this before, but eventually in the future AI is going to disappear and disappear into the sense not that it won't be around anymore. But that will become such a seamless integration, people won't know what's AI and what's not. It really feels like this Einstein platform is the first step to really making that a reality.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it's still, you know, it's being promoted as something separate. And it's still this, this shiny kind of thing. But certainly my view is more and more AI will be embedded into products. And, you know, to some extent, we won't actually know we're using AI, the product will just work better, it'll work more efficiently. I mean, if you look at, you know, the the claim for Einstein, they cite several customers that are using it. And this is their quotes to improve productivity, drive revenue and create personalised experiences. That sounds like you Salesforce. So you know, there's everything that Salesforce should be doing anyway. And I think having this Einstein layer outside is a first step. As we move forward, I think what we'll see is more and more the AI will just be embedded within the product. And we won't be talking about it so much. It won't be this, this new shiny thing, it will be the entry ticket, everyone will have to have aI within their system.
Hannah: That's a really good point, Mike, and you know me I'm very enthusiastic. I like to look ahead, but I think that it's such a valid point, because at the moment and I mean, when we were looking around for the news The things and updates to talk about in this podcast, everything because AI focused everything's about AI is this really shiny new thing. But eventually, you know, that platform won't be separate. And as you said, it'll just be something that set up from the start from the get go based on these market automation platforms.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think we still have this this concern that as more and more AI is deployed, the opportunity to generate higher and higher volumes of communications, particularly emails are going to increase. I mean, I don't know whether we're going to see a situation where, you know, all these personalised AI messages begin to swamp our inboxes. I mean, my email inbox is busy enough as it is. And clearly, it's gonna be very hard for spam filters, or, you know, the prioritisation filters to actually select our AI generated content versus personal emails. So it's gonna be interesting to see what happens that and I'm really hoping that what we don't see is we don't see the value of marketing automation, and email marketing decrease, because everybody's overusing it. And that clearly is one of the concerns. And one of the potential downsides of AI. I mean, AI has got downsides as well as upsides.
Hannah: That's a really good point, Mike. And it is the upsides versus the downsides. Because one of the key things they're setting Einstein platform in is this generative AI, but as you said, actually, is that not as positive as it could be? It's really going to be interesting to watch and see kind of how it unfolds.
Mike: For sure, and I mean, I'm sure everyone has had experiences like I've had, where we've received emails that are AI generated. And she kind of No, because what they're doing is they're taking a line of description from the website, it doesn't feel real. And I think generative AI is still got a little way to go to write those absolutely compelling emails, if you just want to tick a box and get a marketing email out, then fine. I mean, generative AI does a decent job. But the reality is, is that those stunning emails that really grab attention, there still tend to be human written. And it's gonna be interesting to see how AI manages to close that gap with creativity, and doing things different than actually grab attention.
Hannah: Absolutely. So I want to move on just a little bit. So still AI focused? Of course it is. But Salesforce also announced a Slack AI. So this is an AI programme that's going to enhance the slack platform. So it's all about making the more admin and the more manual tasks more automated. So it's going to enable users to search for answers, it's going to enable them to have fresh summaries. I mean, it seems like a really simple thing, but I think it's actually going to be quite effective. As a company, we don't use Slack. But we know a lot of companies that do so what do you think, do you think just this simple kind of integration is actually going to be really beneficial?
Mike: Do you know I mean, a lot of the hype at the moment is all about generative AI and creating stuff with AI. I think one of the, you know, incredible powers of AI is summaries. And I know I mean companies that are very into Slack, it's impossible to keep up with that flow of information that's going through. And so people, you know, if they've been away on holiday, they really have been left out. And rather than having to go back and read, you know, 1000s of slack messages, to have aI summarise, what's happened, I think is incredibly powerful. We're gonna see it all over the place. I mean, I know that, for example, Mikekrosoft, in a different area talked about when you record a team's meeting, they're gonna bring in AI to be able to summarise that meeting and potentially give you action items. I think as marketers, we're going to start seeing this AI, do sort of that summary, and action point work for us very, very soon. And across all sorts of platforms, that's going to work. So it's not just Salesforce driving that. But I think, you know, if we look at Mikekrosoft and Google, they'll also be providing similar platforms. And hopefully, that's going to save a little bit of pain when it comes to writing meeting minutes. I'd certainly be up for that.
Hannah: Me too. Me too. I think the key point there, Mike is, you know, as marketers, we do get really sidetracked by the shiny items by the really exciting things with the in depth analysis and how they can support the data. But actually, that more admin side is going to help me faster and quicker than that marketing and and that generative AI within the platforms at the moment.
Mike: Definitely. So let's move on. What's the next shiny item you found in the news?
Hannah: Well, the next shiny item is a bit of a controversial one, Mike, because, you know, we've spoken about this before, but I'm a big fan of lead scoring. It's not that you don't like lead scoring, but you're not as into the benefits of it, I would say and act on has actually released an AI predictive lead score, which is basically a feature that's going to work within their act on platform to help marketers narrow the marketing funnel and really hone in on the strongest leads. What do you think about this? Do you think it's beneficial, or is it going to offer more problems than what it's worth?
Mike: It's really interesting. So, I mean, I'm not completely against lead scoring, I think one of the challenges that people have with lead scoring is that you need a fairly high volume of prospects and customers to make it work. So if you're looking at clients that we work with that have, you know, very small number of customers, for example, you know, we've got clients that sell, you know, high value capital equipment, they don't sell, you know, 1000s, or hundreds. So, you know, some of them even have one major customer. Yeah, doing predictive lead scoring on that is almost impossible, because the data is so limited. And certainly AI learning based upon a small number of very high value customers, it's going to take a long time to learn and that AI is then going to lag, the customer behaviour. So AI has got issues when you've got low volume, when you look at moving into some of our clients that have high numbers of customers, then they're I think that's where AI lead scoring is going to be really good. I mean, one of the things that interests me is, I see people generate lead scoring algorithms, and that their rating, you know, what drives people to be a customer. And honestly, they're probably writing the things they think are important, and perhaps even the things they spent a long time generating, you know. So if you spend a lot of time creating white papers, you probably score those very highly, the great thing about AI is it's going to take away some of that bias. And it's actually going to score based upon what really drives people to become customers. Now, of course, you've got to get that data on what actually happened, and how that links to someone becoming a customer. And again, in b2b, that can be very difficult because the purchaser can be different from the person who's actually the decision maker. And we all know that attribution is one of these hugely challenging problems. But I do think it makes sense to introduce AI. And I do think it can have some significant benefits, as I say, particularly around really getting to the bottom of what does correlate with someone becoming a customer, rather than what we think is important as marketers,
Hannah: I absolutely love that. Mike, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it takes away the bias. I mean, as a marketer myself, you know, I spend forever on blogs. And I'm like, Well, if someone reads a blog, it's got to be important, right. But that's not necessarily the journey they're actually taking. That's important. So I think that's such a valuable point, because it will really help with identifying and digging down and especially in the tech industry as well, is what's actually important, and what's actually driving the people to make the decisions.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. And to some extent, you actually don't need AI because you can measure it and use maths, the AI is going to try and pattern match a bit more quickly. So that can potentially generate results sooner. I mean, the other thing I noticed was, you know, whilst act on made a big thing about the lead scoring, they to also announce at the same time that they've got generative AI to create emails. So, you know, again, that's going to be interesting, because what you potentially be doing is running your run AI looking at what was driving leads in the past, but then having a completely different email strategy, because it's easier to generate personalised emails, because you've got aI within the platform. So I think if you look at what's you know, what's happening, it's gonna be hard to get really good results on lead scoring all the time, because you're always dealing with historic data. And most people develop, expand and improve their marketing campaigns. But for sure, particularly if you have a large number of customers, AI is going to be a key part of actually scoring and prioritising leads.
Hannah: Yeah, absolutely agree. That's a really insightful thoughts. Thanks, Mike. So I'm weary of time. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And we've spent a lot of time previously talking about how we can use market automation for lead nurturing, and for gaining new leads for the customer journeys. But what I'm really interested in talking about today is about keeping in touch with existing customers. And I think sometimes market is gonna get in the trap of like, okay, great, we've got the customer, we don't need to do anything to them anymore. We don't need to nurture them. But in my opinion, I actually think nurturing existing customers is so valuable to accompany. And so I'd like to get your thoughts on how beneficial is it to use your marketing automation platform to really nurture those existing customers? And how do you draw the line between staying in touch and annoying them?
Mike: Yeah, this is really interesting. I mean, I was introduced to this when I was learning about drip marketing at university. And I remember our drip marketing lecture. He said, If you're selling a car to consumers, only one question you have to ask. And, you know, we tried to guess the question. He eventually said, look, it's how long do you want to keep the car for? And apparently, that's a very accurate thing. When you ask a consumer, how long they expect to keep a car for. They normally give an accurate prediction, of course, what you need to do as a marketer, once you've sold the car is to be talking to them when they're picking their next car, whether that's in three years or five. previous time or whenever. And so I think we forget how important it is when we make that sale, to think about the next sale. And so with marketing, in b2b, it's absolutely the same, you know, quite often we're working with customers who, you know, perhaps have multiple projects running, certainly, we'll have a new project at some point in the future. And what we need to do is we need to engage them to help them in the period where we're waiting for that next project. And that can be all sorts of things that can be providing information to help them use the products that they've actually chosen, you know, great example would be in some of our seMikekonductor companies, people purchase evaluation boards, these complex boards to let engineers understand how to use a seMikekonductor product. Why are marketers not emailing those engineers, to help them get up to speed more quickly, and improve that experience of using one of your products. And equally as they move through the design, we also know there'll be choosing other products. So you know, it's the same thing, if you look at, you know, someone doing a factory automation project, quite clearly, there's a big deployment of products into the factory to upgrade, but then it's all sorts of things around maintenance, that gives you opportunities to go and sell in more services, or indeed, sometimes more products. And I think as marketers, we need to, you know, forget about we market sell, and we're done. And actually think about a much longer relationship with a customer, I think about the customer over their whole lifetime, rather than over one purchase journey.
Hannah: I really like that Mikek. And I think what I would add to that as well is that within the market automation platforms themselves is this sort of communication doesn't need to be hard. It can be really easy. It's it's automations, you can set up a year in advance, you know, oh, we are customer has been this engineers. When we've asked for six months, let's do a check in. It's not something that you necessarily have to think about every day. But having those automations set up for success from the start is really important and being successful.
Mike: definitely agree. I mean, you do an amazing thing, for example, on anniversaries of clients working with us sending them birthday cakes and things like that. So, you know, very simple things can actually make a really big difference.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for your time again today, Mike, it's been a really interesting conversation.
Mike: Thanks, Hannah. And hopefully we'll talk to our listeners again on the next episode of The Marketing Automation moment.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the marketing automation moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Jodi Cerretani - RollWorks
Jodi Cerretani, VP of Marketing at RollWorks, an Account Based Marketing platform, sat down with Mike to discuss how marketers can use ABM to maximise their marketing efforts and how RollWorks can support this process. Jodi shares why it is more important than ever to focus on intent and how this can set you up for success. She also offers the best advice she has been given and provides her own advice for new marketers starting their careers.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About RollWorks
RollWorks is an account-based marketing platform for B2B marketing and sales. Through proprietary data and machine learning, RollWorks helps teams identify their target accounts and key buyers, reach those accounts across multiple channels, and measure program effectiveness.
Time Stamps
[00:27.00] – Jodi shared a little about her career journey and what lead her to RollWorks.
[04:20.00] – What is Rollworks? How does it help its customers – Jodi shares her insights.
[08:41.00] –Mike and Jodi discuss integrations and target audiences in ABM marketing
[12:49.00] – What marketing strategies and tactics does RollWorks use itself?
[17:02.00] – Jodi talks about measurement and pricing transparency
[21:47.00] – Jodi offers her marketing advice and industry insights
Quotes
“I think you have to be comfortable with a certain amount of ambiguity and instinct. Yes, this matters. Yes, this is going to drive action. Yes, this is worth my time. And it, it pushes the initiatives of a business forward, even though I can't see it in my…revenue.” Jodi Cerretani, VP of Marketing at RollWorks.
Follow Jodi:
Jodi Cerretani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodicerretani/
RollWorks website: https://www.rollworks.com/
RollWorks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rollworks/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Jodi Cerretani - RollWorks
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jodi Cerretani
Mike: Welcome to marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Jodi Cerretani. Jodi is the VP of Marketing at RollWoks. So welcome to the podcast. Jodi.
Jodi: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here.
Mike: So Jodi, tell me a bit about your career journey seems really interesting. He started off, like studying psychology and then went into marketing. So how you ended up in marketing, and then ultimately got some role works?
Jodi: Yeah, so I think back on that on those college years, I remember very little honestly, Mike about the individual classes that I took in my psychology jority. But I do think that college taught me very much about how to learn and definitely expose me to a tonne of people, I did a number of different things outside of college, I managed women's resource and Action Centre, I did some independent research, I was a TA etc. And over the years, I've been told that my velocity of learning is one of my biggest strengths. And that sort of skill isn't really decoupled from my people skills. So I think I tend to have a flexible approach when it comes to different people a different approach for different people. And I tend to get people very quickly, my husband actually says, I have a knack for difficult people. And I think that's just meaning that I tend to connect with and find ways to understand and motivate different people. And I think that core that velocity of learning coupled with people instinct, allows me to nail a foundation in b2b marketing that's necessary. And that is to really understand what is going to motivate people to take action. So I think that that, that journey, starting in psychology and the little nuances to that, that early part of my education, definitely did help set me up for success, but maybe slightly less literally than one might imagine from someone with my background. So I think I ended up in in Legion or demand generation, I've run all of marketing now.
But I definitely can't unring the demand gen Bell, I definitely have that orientation. And probably we'll always be looking to create, you know, revenue for our company. So I spent a number of years in the latter part of of college doing independent research. And I quickly learned through that experience that I am way too impatient for that line of work. And I really needed to be in a career where the effort that I was making, even on a daily basis was connected to impact, important impact right away. So in research, as I'm sure you're aware, you could do many years of conducting the research, and then it takes many years to publish and create impact. And that just wasn't going to work for me. So it was very obvious to me, I needed to shift into a career where that could be possible. And that's very much the nature of demand gen and b2b marketing these days. So as far as how I ended up at RollWoks, I'm lucky and blessed to have worked with a number of very talented people over the years. And one of those individuals, a fella by the name of Mike stocker was that role works. And he reached out and shared just the details of the company and really inspired me with how incredible the culture was incredible the leadership was and really the potential of this space. So that was kind of the initial hook. But beyond that, I have learned about myself that I have a particular passion for helping other marketers, you know, peers, people in my role or aspiring to be in my role really earn the seat at the table. And I think one of the direct ways to do that is to allow those individuals to make an impact on the business and to prove that impact. And so, ABM and roadworks and sort of our charter very much connects into that personal ambition that I have. So it was a bit of a combination, I suppose, of getting that endorsement from Mike and some of those key elements of the the business model Leadership, Culture, etc. But then, also being a company where I could continue to pursue that personal passion of mine.
Mike: That sounds awesome. And I love the way that you talked a lot about the company culture as a reason to join. But you also seem very enthusiastic about what the company actually does say, can you just tell listeners who don't know what RollWoks does? I mean, what, what do you offer customers?
Jodi: Yeah, so we offer our customers what we call a no nonsense Account Based Marketing platform that drives efficient revenue growth at b2b companies. It's a bit of a mouthful, but that's kind of a fancy way of saying that we make b2b revenue generation through marketing, tangible, scalable and less expensive than ever before. So so that's kind of the gist
Mike: of it. How are you doing that? Are you serving ads to particular company? So what's the approach when you say Account Based Marketing, so there's a lot of martech companies doing different things in the ABM space?
Jodi: For sure. So there are a lot of point solutions that are focused done kind of an account based approach or a fit, focused approach, role works, you know, as that platform we sort of are that end to end solution, helping folks realise the promise of ABM and the promise of ABM is is efficient by nature, because we're focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the accounts that are most likely to purchase in the near term and be most valuable to your business in terms of the average deal size, and their fit as a customer, and therefore their longevity as a customer. And additionally, the promises of ABM are really connected with sales and the rest of the go to market team. It is multi channel and highly what I like to call Hyper relevant messaging across your different channels. And it allows you to measure all these different initiatives in a single platform. So I think simply put, we help folks identify their best fit accounts to go after reach those accounts through ads, and then a variety of other marketing and sales channels, and then measure all that impact to top and bottom line metrics in kind of a single destination.
Mike: That's perfect. That's a great overview. I'd like to unpack it a bit, you said something which I think a lot of marketers were picked up, that you find accounts that are most likely to actually spend money, and also like to spend the most. So that seems like two different things that you're looking at intently, you're looking at FIT. Can you talk about how RollWoks does that?
Jodi: Yeah, so intent data, what it means to roll work, sometimes people use intent, the word intent to describe first party activities that they're able to track at the account level, some analysts use that term for role works, we separate intent as a third party pool of data, and then engagement as that first party pool of data. So it's true that we have incredible capability to connect into all the sources of activity data on the person and the account level and make sense of it. So a lot of times, marketers, we have different systems of record across marketing and sales, we've got our website that there's certain activities, we've got our marketing automation platform, perhaps we have a sales outreach tool, et cetera. And then additionally, our buyers are engaging with the rest of the web, right, which oftentimes is invisible to us. And so RollWoks has this incredible ability to be able to pull all of that data across the web, as well as all of your first party activity sources, and pull it up to the account level, whether they're, it's an anonymous individual that's acting, or whether it's a known individual, we can tie that up to the account record, and therefore have a complete understanding of all the activities that you might value as a business. So that's extremely powerful for our customers. Because as you said, it's not just about the fit, that's a great starting point, but it's also about their readiness. So looking across first and third party data to really understand their interests, their readiness, their willingness to buy, whether the timing is right. And their affinity as a company can allow you to do a whole slew of things that are really exciting in terms of prioritising the right accounts, and then acting on those accounts in a really relevant way.
Mike: That's great. I'm just interested, you mentioned, you know, obviously, that robot sits in an environment with a lot of other tools and is pulling in first party data maker from the market information platform and pulling in third party data. I mean, integrations must be huge part of what you do, how do you make sure you integrate with the products that your customers need? Because it seems like every day, there's a whole wave of new marketing technology products that you probably need to integrate with?
Jodi: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, we've made the deliberate choice as a vendor as a solution to really support a composable tech stack versus trying to build one tool to rule them all. And that's kind of unique in our space, our competitors are, are really trying to disrupt and in many cases, replace a lot of the other the mahr tech and sales tax solutions. But we found that when we talked to our customers, they are really intolerant of kind of the switching costs or the cost of ripping and replacing what they already are using. And to be honest, they believe that their needs are unique. And so they want to select you know, the the individual tools and technologies that fit their unique needs, as opposed to purchasing a behemoth tool that maybe have subpar or just slightly misfit capabilities when it comes to say email marketing or other things. So yes, integrations are very important to us. They're very important to our solution. And you're right, I think I'm not sure what it is now is it 9000 Martex. So allusions, and that's just on the marketing side of it. It's pretty wild. So it's not rocket science. Honestly, Mike, we're just constantly conducting customer interviews and really trying to understand who are the core technologies that our customers are using in order to support their account based motion or they're kind of demand gen to Dotto revenue, marketing, whatever you want to call it. So certain things are definitely going to be core like a marketing automation platform. We've got rich integrations with sort of a largest marketing automation platforms, gifting tools, intent sources, etc. And we make decisions about who to integrate with, I think we have 27 integration partners at this point, which is, is pretty beefy, and definitely checks all those core boxes that our customers need to and want to see. And those integrations continue to be our partnerships continue to be formed and and whilst sort of always be on that journey.
Mike: Yeah, I'm sure you keep a few developers busy with all these integrations. Absolutely. So what I'm really interested in finding out is who typically works with RollWoks, do you have a typical customer? Or is it a range of people that use the product?
Jodi: Yeah, it's a bit of a range, but neatly in two camps. So we like to say that we have two solutions and two audiences that are the right fit for those two solutions. On the one end, sort of on the upper end of the mid market and into the enterprise, we offer what most people see as the most sophisticated, targeted ad platform on the market. And that typically suits the needs of a b2b company that's in technology, manufacturing, business or financial services. And they're really looking for sort of the the Ferrari of of ads, most of the time, it's within an ABM practice, but they believe that advertisements is the most cost effective way to sort of reach and engage, convert, accelerate, etcetera, their business. And so they're really focused on that sort of channel and the offer that we have within that channel. And then on the other end, sort of on the other side of the market, we offer, what I have said we'd like to say is that no nonsense ABM solution for growth oriented small to medium sized businesses. And they're looking for full platform capability. So everything from identification of target accounts to engaging those target accounts across their channels and tools of choice, and then measuring all those capabilities with one tool. So I guess, strategically, the ABM market is pretty saturated. There's a lot of point solutions and different folks that if they didn't originally set out to solve an ABM kind of challenge or be in that market, they have aligned to that, that kind of growth in the market. And that that interest in ABM, it's very, it's very popular, it still is very popular as a category. And because of that, we're really looking for green space and aligning our solution and our go to market strategy to the to areas of the market we feel like are simply underserved by the capabilities that the other partners might have today. And so that's where you get this bifurcated approach and two very distinct markets looking for two distinct solutions.
Mike: And presumably, that impacts how you as RollWoks, do your marketing, you have to treat those two audiences very differently.
Jodi: It absolutely I mean, we've learned that it's best if we're very, very thoughtful about how we go to market because there are different as you can imagine, different buyers, different level of complexity, different members of the buying committee, different needs different messages, different ABM, maturity, et cetera. And so it really is very specific. And so we've built our internal teams and our approaches to be as relevant and also thoughtful I guess it in our approach and make sure that all the the mechanics of go to market are there and we're doing all the right things in terms of paying ourselves back and supporting growth in those two areas.
Mike: And I guess, I assume you're gonna say something about ABM when I start asking you about tactics and how you approach actually getting the message to those two audiences.
Jodi: Yeah, we definitely eat our own cooking as my head of sales like to say and it may or may not surprise you that for role works, we don't have a separate demand gen team that is distinct from our ABM team. In fact, we sort of see ABM and demand gen is one of the same in many ways, ABM is just our mindset or our North Star and how we approach going to market in a highly aligned and highly efficient way. That's definitely very much true. Were a last touch attribution house formally and so us and everyone else on the planet will see if their last touch attribution house that their most successful tactics are going to be eat anything that offers something that is as close to give me a meeting with sales as as possible. Those are those hand raising calls to action are obviously going to show up as the last thing that someone did before they booked a meeting and then ultimately down the road about your product. Specifically for us, I'll give drifta shout out here because drift is a chat solution. But they also have this capability that allows folks to kind of skip the form and choose a time of day that works for them to meet with a salesperson. So it eliminates that friction. And then on the on the back end, of course, it eliminates the drop off that you typically see between somebody submitting a form request you to speak to sales and when you can actually get them scheduled and to show up. And so drift actually is our number one source of demand, in part because we're a last touch attribution house. And that's just how the everything shakes out. But in part because it's a it's a really friction free process. But beyond sort of last touch, we obviously know that there's other important motions, other important touches, I should say, in the demand creation motion, you have to source buyers, we have to accelerate them along the process. And and that role works. The marketing team is also responsible for Retention and Expansion as well. So really, there's a lot that goes into it. So we do very carefully look at what what brings folks in what sort of moves them along what converts them, what encourages them to stay with us and buy additional things. And, and so we're very prescriptive in how we approach how are we going to resource these different types of motions. And depending on where we're seeing gaps in our funnel, that's where we shift our attention, and then invest in the right tactics at every sort of stage, depending on what impact we're focused on.
Mike: And I'm interesting, you've obviously said that you invest in different tactics, even though you really focus attribution on the last touch, and could hear me on a podcast, which is classic top of the funnel stuff. I mean, how do you justify investment when you're not actually measuring ROI directly for that activity?
Jodi: Yeah, I guess there's two answers to the question. One is, is I think regardless of what the tactic is, or what purpose it has, that you should always, as best you can, try to tie that investment, whether it's a investment in time, or investment, financial investment, to the most meaningful business outcome that you can, I think, as an orientation. And because of the capabilities of different tools and technologies and measurement capabilities that is standard today, we we are obligated as marketers to always try to connect our actions to business outcomes. Having said that, there is going to be a certain piece where it's very intangible. I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago, and I had a customer, actually the decision maker for a really important customer who we've been trying to get connected with, in terms of an executive sponsor relationship. And she had been sort of not very responsive. And she happened to hear me on a podcast and reached out to our contact and was like, I would like to speak to your VP of Marketing, because I really liked some of the things that she was saying. I mean, what are the odds? Right, so, you know, in that case, that was the, quote, measurement. But obviously, it's anecdotal. And it's difficult to scale. So I think the second part of the answer, Mike, is that I am one of the most data driven business folks out there, but I even I know that there is going to be a part of marketing that is just intuitively right. And that is where there's a period at the end of that sentence, I think we have to be comfortable with a certain amount of ambiguity. And that your instinct on Yes, this matters, yes, this is going to drive action. Yes, this is worth my time. And it it pushes the initiatives of a business forward. Even though I can't see it in my quote unquote, sources of revenue, we have to be somewhat comfortable for that level of ambiguity. Yeah, I guess I'm talking about both sides of my mouth, but it is a complicated field. So you know, stay attached to business outcomes as best you can, but then leave room for the fact that you just aren't going to be able to measure every single thing.
Mike: That's first face it. I mean, things are not black and white, I guess. And I'm interested because RollWoks has somewhat changed its strategy on pricing a couple of years ago, RollWoks are very aggressive, very open about his pricing. And now you've chosen to take that off the website and you have to actually ask for the pricing. I'm interested in what drove the decision to change the strategy there.
Jodi: You just caught us in a moment of transition honestly, Mike, we definitely believe in transparency in the buying process, including being upfront about our price points and and particularly our starting price because it is resetting the standard in the market. For what ABM platforms full ABM platforms with for ABM platform capabilities ought to cost which you know, is you know, less than $1,000 ollars per month as a starting point, it's just that we're actually changing our pricing and packaging model a bit on the background. So to not confuse existing customers that are going through the sales process now, before we've been able to publish it, so stay tuned in just a short while we'll have pricey backup on the website. But regardless of the details, we definitely remain committed to being the right priced ABM solution and make sure that all businesses regardless of their size, or ABM sophistication, have a package that works for them both in terms of the impact they're looking to drive and the price point that is accessible for their particular budget.
Mike: What a great answer. I mean, I love the fact that you are committed to transparency and price. I think a lot of people get frustrated by the, you know, kind of a peak pricing that some people produce. And I suspect because we record these podcasts in advance, probably by the time this podcast is released, actually, you'll be back in you may well have the pricing on the site, people will be asking why are such a crazy question. But it was fascinating to get your answer.
Jodi: Yeah, no worries. But I think I agree with you. I think transparency is key, especially as we know that buyers are doing almost all of their research ahead of time, a lot of times the folks that are doing that research and making a recommendation or they're putting together a business case, they may be a more junior level person. So they really want as much detail as possible before they present, at least their top a few vendors to selected. We're just realists are in that and just want to support folks finding the right tool for them.
Mike: So, JD, you've been a great guest. It's been really interesting. We normally ask a couple of sort of quickfire questions. So I'm gonna dive into it. Now as we come to the end of the interview. The first question is, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Jodi: Oh, I know that I don't know if I ever recall a particular piece of marketing advice. But I definitely remember one of my early early sales counterparts, he had this phrase that he would say about sales, which I actually think applies very much to marketing, b2b marketing. And that is you eat what you kill. And I think that idea that you benefit from the revenue that you drive is very important for marketers to ingest and live by, it's both important for from a career security and career advancement perspective, but also from the perspective of accessing resources internally, right, commanding the attention of folks that you need to command attention, getting alignment, and getting support. In many ways. I agree with my CFO, that revenue solves all problems, right. And so it needs to be the number one focus of your marketing organisation. It's not simply a demand gen function, it is the responsibility of everyone in marketing period. So I guess that's what I would say is just keep that in mind. That's what someone told me about sales. And, boy, it's not just sales, it's marketing to
Mike: I love that, that's great. Another thing I'm interested in, a lot of things are happening at the moment in marketing, click with AI coming in and disrupting. What if somebody asked you, you know, that at the start of the career, whether they should go into market or not, what would be your advice?
Jodi: I'm not sure it's related to AI. But I absolutely think marketing is oftentimes the unsung hero there. It's the good news. Bad news is that we have the ability to impact so much in a business culture, internal marketing, and sort of the perspective the alliance that your employees have with the company, etc. It's it's incredibly powerful. But I think that what I often tell folks on my team, it's a personal mission of mine to get everyone aligned to this. And also, if when I have the opportunity to mentor young younger folks, is that it is it is absolutely critical to invest in your own business acumen. I think it's becoming now a more standard than not that businesses expect that the leaders in marketing will be business people first marketer second. And I think that is a transition that has been happening over the last few years. And now what's absolutely key in order to going back to what I said, earn your seat at the table or earn that seat at the strategic table that the table of the executives and the board etc, is to really understand how every single ounce of your effort is driving business impact and being able to actually speak in terms that those folks that are in those rooms understand which is ultimately about financial statements and in dollars, dollars and costs. I think that is you know, not necessarily something that you get in college to it typically, but definitely through mentorship, definitely through the LinkedIn learning and other sorts of ways to educate yourself exposure etc. I think that's something that is absolutely critical. And no matter what role you take in marketing, that that is where you want to be where you're not simply a cost centre With the way that we were 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, whatever it was, but you're really a strategic partner at the strategic table, and the only way to earn that seat and the only way to really belong there is to make sure that you're speaking the language of business, which is ultimately in terms of business outcomes and dollars and cents.
Mike: That's, I think, really insightful advice. I've so enjoyed this conversation, you've been very generous and kind with all the information you've shared. Is there anything else you feel we should have covered or anything else you wanted to talk about?
Jodi: I guess the only thing that comes to mind, Mike is I'm lucky enough to talk to a lot of prospects and customers and because we sell to marketers, I'm, I'm lucky enough to talk to a lot of other marketing leaders, marketing and sales leaders. And typically what comes up these days is what's working now there's been so many changes a lot of businesses are experiencing, you know, not to sound morbid, but depression in in things that are core like site traffic leads generated business, a lot of folks are experiencing churn problems, and they've never really had that before, or marketing hasn't really focused on retention or expansion motions. And so one thing that often comes up is, you know, what's working today, what's changed? How are you succeeding in spite of the environment. And what I hear over and over again, if I could just, you know, share this one tidbit, it's fresh off the press, not even really research, but more insights from the field is that people are really laser focused on really understanding in market signals at the person and the account level. The idea here is that there are fewer buyers in market, but fewer doesn't mean zero. So as long as you can be laser focused on identifying those buyers that are the right fit for your organisation and acting upon them in a relevant way. You're gonna set yourself up for success, you're gonna set yourself up for success today, but also in the future when maybe there's more abundance and fewer buyers becomes once again, many buyers. So there's a lot of ways to do that data, of course, is your friend RollWoks does offer five distinct buying signals. And so a lot of times when I talk to our customers or, you know, transparently, they're talking to me about of those different signals. But regardless of whether your role works customer or not, I still think it's a relevant piece of advice is, is, you know, there's a lot of different ways that you could spend your energy but with fewer resources, getting laser focused on those accounts, and people that are the right fit for your organisation are showing that they're actually looking to make a purchase decision sometime in the near future is going to absolutely pay you back in spades.
Mike: That's fantastic advice. I think, you know, focus is always so important. But I think that that insight about focusing on people in market, something a lot of people are talking about. I really love that idea. Yeah. So JD, it's been a great conversation. I really appreciate your time. If people have questions or just want to learn more about RollWoks where's the best place to get ahold of you?
Jodi: I mean, you can always find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me just through email. My email address is is J. Sarah Tani at roll works.com. So you can you can find me there as well. If you'd like to email me directly. I'm happy to have a chat. I always find that there's a lot of quote unquote thought leaders out there, I definitely do not consider myself a thought leader. I'm more of a practitioner and I love to talk to other practitioners and get the real stories about what's happening and share, you know, a few tips and tricks that I've been learning as as as someone facing the same challenge as everyone else. So feel free to reach out.
Mike: That's, that's very kind of give me your email address out. I really appreciate it. God has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Jodi: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
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Listen to the interview here: https://thechrisvossshow.com/the-chris-voss-show-podcast-mike-maynard-managing-director-of-napier-the-awareness-to-opportunity-agency-delivering-results-for-b2b-technology-clients/
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Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier, recently sat down with Social Media Examiner for a conversation about how strategic acquisitions can help agencies grow.
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A Napier Podcast Interview with Mario Blandini - iXsystems
In the latest interview of our leading B2B marketing professionals’ series, Mario Blandini, VP of Marketing at iXsystems, an open-source software storage company, sat down with Mike to discuss his career, how he came to work in the data storage industry and his top marketing tips.
Mario discusses how open-source companies work and the benefits this can result in for both the customers and the business. He shares the campaigns he is most proud of and some advice on how companies can attract young marketing talent.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About iXsystems
iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS®, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in over 200 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies.
Time Stamps
[00:45.06] – Mario explains how he ended up as VP of Marketing at iXsystems.
[08:34.0] – The right time to move from propriety storage to open source.
[11:43.0] – What is open source?
[18:07.0] – How do you promote something that will drive no immediate revenue?
[22:42.0] – Mario shares the campaign eh is most proud of.
[28:09.0] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?
[31:53.0] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.
Follow Mario:
Mario Blandini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mblandini/
iXsystems website: https://www.ixsystems.com/
iXsystems on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ixsystems/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Mario Blandini - iXsystems
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mario Blandini
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I've got Mario Blandini, who's the VP of Marketing at storage company iXsystems. Welcome to the podcast, Mario.
Mario: Hey, thanks for having me, sir.
Mike: So Mario, I mean, you're actually a bit like me, you started your career, technically, as an engineer. John, tell me a little bit about you know, why you chose to be an engineer, and then maybe move on to why you moved from being an IT engineer to being a marketer.
Mario: All right, I have a pretty interesting story, working class background, my father was in the Vietnam War in the Navy. And he told me that I was such a slob, idiot and loser that I would make it not even one day in the Navy. So instead, I joined the Marine Corps serve six years, and I had a special job fixing Honeywell DPS six mini computers from the late 60s. So I got to touch all of the oldest technology. And it's really helped me because I have a view of technology, how we stored things from core memory storage, all the way up to today's cloud storage, where it's a ethereal, where is it? Nobody knows. But it doesn't matter because you have access to it. So I'd say I became an engineer, and I realised I just couldn't code faster or automate faster than my, my colleagues. And so believing my voice probably being my superpower, I just naturally gravitated toward explaining how technology works. Rather than building the technology.
Mike: I'd love to talk to me a little bit about, you know, some of the highlights of your career. So where you worked, perhaps as an engineer, and then then how you moved into marketing and, you know, some of the companies you've enjoyed working with, because you've got a great history.
Mario: Okay, cool. i One might argue that it has too many stops along the way. But some of them were long. Okay, so I'll let me try to do a rapid fire thing, I went from being a Marine to a tech support person at Toshiba, troubleshooting upper memory block issues. And this is getting all geeky it so think, early 90s, IT support and then I went from that to working for a payroll company as a systems engineer, because I wanted to be on the customer facing side, I got a job working in automation, and testing for Adaptec, which, at one time was the number one semiconductor maker for all storage applications. So I got to start at a huge company was able to show me what a big company operates like, because if you've only seen a small company, big ones, and small ones are different. And it's not that you can't be successful in both. But just understanding how they work. It was really, if you say my past was varied, I think that was one of the blessings, I got a chance to work for enough big companies to understand how that works. Fast forward. From there, I became a sc again, for a storage service provider, the first wave of the.com Bust where the thought was build an Amazon s3 Like service, and everybody will use it. Well, much like web van, which if you ever saw there, they I live in the San Francisco Bay area, a food delivery company two decades before its time. Now it's quite normal, that that's just what everybody has. So kind of a cool thing that didn't work. I've spent the last 10 years being a head of marketing, taking all that experience and doing it with either, you know, under 100 million dollar companies or startups.
Mike: That's great. You also had a passion projects in your history, your resolve networks. Tell me a bit about that.
Mario: All right, well, those of us of a certain age, they call it middle age, crisis, maybe it was that I, we had recently done some big moving my wife and I with our daughter going to college moved states, we wanted to just figure out, hey, if that first half was all about driving value for your employer, maybe the second half would be how do you do that and achieve some of your passions at the same time? So the thought process, believe it or not, was that there, I made a video game where you do good deeds in real life. And those earn coins that become cash that goes to a nonprofit. So for example, you volunteer for a nonprofit and you spend four hours, not only do they get your four hours of volunteering, they earn $15 per hour for the hours you did. And companies are ready to sponsor this right. I think my idea was, let's just say ahead of its time. I'm standing by to write a book actually, to give this idea away along what I've learned here at my most recent stop here at iEX. My second open source company, maybe my maybe my opportunity just to give it away and be a podcast guest going forward to sharing what I've learned. But I think it's a cool project because the same things we do in targeted marketing, as B2B enterprise marketers, if nonprofit had that same ability to do it. Think of the impact they can make? Because we all know like in marketing, heck, if you're batting 300 sales seven times, but when three times, you're still going to the All Star game, right? Nonprofits are batting 5% 3%. And if they just operated like a modern marketing organisation and philosophy, imagine how measured outcomes would be understood, tested, and you'd work toward achieving it versus right now, a lot of that industry is just stuck in the 20th century.
Mike: That's great. That's so inspiring. And actually, I love the idea of you talking about giving away the idea because, of course, you work for a company based on open source software. So very crudely, you've got a product that you then proceed to give away. I mean, talk to me about how that works.
Mario: All right, cool. So there is a great video by Dan Pink on motivation. Look it up. It's very famous. He talks through several examples of purpose in a company. In fact, that's how to be more relevant to this discussion of being an open source company, because you're have that unfair superpower of having a genuinely higher purpose. Because your first motive isn't profit. So that's, that's a very, very cool thing. But in the video, he talks about how 20 years ago, if he would have went to his professor and said, I got this great idea, we're gonna get a bunch of smart people, and I'm paraphrasing, they're going to take their very limited discretionary time doing work that's more complicated than the work they do for a living. And we're gonna give it away for free. Economists would have just said that was the most idiotic thing. In modern times. Data is it's conclusive that an open source model eventually, along gardeners parlance is where marketplaces go, when the plateau of productivity no longer can sustain the margins, where the big guys find that it's a worthwhile business. And it's not to say that the stuffs not valuable, but storage is such a commodity now, do you care? As long as it works? Awesome, and cost the right price? Does anybody really care? I think that's where it's gonna, where I'm specifically going to do it. But it applies to all companies in terms of your purpose, hey, capitalism is cool. I've been in all capitalistic companies too. And you can still have the same ideology, even though you may not have that business model, because you can use as an analogy, customer success as the higher purpose, right. And so I have already given tidbits of knowledge when I'd give away to other people for free. That's one of those things we as technology buyers, or technology, marketers don't leverage enough because everybody's trying to say the same things and everybody's greenwash and all that actually, you're probably different least one or two ways, lean on those and, and make that part of your customer success.
Mike: I love that. So, I mean, talk to me a bit about this, this idea from Gartner that everything ultimately ends up No, I
Mario: said that. So I Gartner doesn't say that because it's just if the game being what it is, we love Gartner and where we are Gartner subscribers, that there's this concept of the hype cycle. And so I won't go through the details. But the plateau of productivity is the final stage. What happens when a technology is on a plateau of productivity and 20 years elapse? Does it stay on the plateau of productivity? Or is there this other phase that's not tracked by Gartner called the I no longer pay 70% margin for this, I pay a lower margin because it's a commodity and the commodity works. Awesome.
Mike: That's fascinating. So I mean, I've certainly worked as you know, as an engineer in the past and understand that storage was incredibly complicated now. And actually, as you say, storage become that commodity today that that people pretty much forget about. So you feel that today's you know, the right sort of time for people to move from expensive proprietary systems, which maybe make them feel a bit better, because they spend more money into open source systems that are going to be lower cost.
Mario: It's even easier than that. All I want them to do is just try it for free, spend an hour, try it for free for no other reason than continuing professional education as a means of just understanding what it can do. Because when you understand it can do all the same things, the one that cost more does, maybe you think about using the free one, the next time it comes up, or if free doesn't work, and you need the supported one with 24 by seven, expert support, then you buy our product. And that's how we fund our passion project. We sell these hardened appliances the same way they buy proprietary storage, except they're less expensive and have all the same features and characteristics. So it's one of those things where we get an opportunity to say yeah, we have to pay for one but we don't want to talk to you about that. First. Try it because if you don't like that you're not going to like to pay for one and how many people can allow you to try the full featured product for free anytime you want. And then use it forever for free, never asking for a penny. It's a different position by which I'm marketing. I'm not trying to get them to decide to do something, I'm simply asking them to understand that there is a choice, and that it's worth investing the time to understand what that choice can mean, on their ways of doing it. And face it, we humans are creatures of habit. And we say these technologies swerve. I mean, you probably us old guys will remember this, they said mainframes would be dead. In the past, more, more profit. And revenue has been made on mainframe computers today than in the history of the world just turns out, it's a small segment of the overall one. It's not the mainframes fault, the market drew around it with all these new things. And so to kind of bring that full circle, a lot of technologies, at least for the right, why it's the right time now, the right time, is that I think people understand how this pays you go pay only for what you want to use, they're able to do that with lots of other things. And they'd say, You know what, I wish everything worked that way, right. And while it can't yet work that way, in storage until the next generation, let's just say, you can start making choices like open source ones, which are already compatible with the new way. And that's what we're trying to say is it just hey, if we can't give you a reason to try it, then then we're not doing the right job. But I'm, I don't have to sell anything, I just have to get people interested enough to try it. And for all you guys if you know an IT person out in your personal life, ask them if they've ever tried true NAS T ru e n a s, and if they haven't, they're gonna thank you that you pointed them to it. Because it is the world's most use Storage operating system just is more of an on the planet than anything else. It's just because we don't make money off of it. We're not as big as the competition.
Mike: I love that little advert in there. That's fantastic. I just want to go back to this. Try it for free, because I'm sure some people listening. That may not be technical. They're marketers. They've heard of open source? I mean, can you just explain exactly what this is? Does this mean that the software that you're selling in your systems, people can go and download for free from the internet?
Mario: Yes. So imagine, we're like a software that you could touch a button and put on your phone, right, so that software works there, we also can sell you a phone that's perfect for running that app, this software can run as a container as a virtual machine, as you name it, right? You can instal it just about anywhere, with about the same ease as just clicking out as a couple more clicks, but just click download, you've got it. And then you can start using it. Naturally, the horsepower of your phone would be much different than if you were running that app on a supercomputer. So the idea is, while that's good for lots of things, if you needed a more demanding use case, well, you need to need to put it on higher powered hardware, which you're free to do we have lots of universities that pay us nothing yet store petabytes of information and be able to put the money that they used to spend on storage back into research, which then allows them to buy more storage to do more research to buy more storage and do more research, you see how that it goes on there. It's really where open source has taken off in academia, as you might imagine, it's always been there, we really want commercial companies to see the same thing. Now, if you're not an open source company, I think you can still run this same play because I've done it in a proprietary company, as well as in a quasi open source VC funded company. In both cases, the solution was complicated enough that no one would ever buy it without seeing it work. It's just one of those things. It's like you would never buy a car sight unseen without taking a test drive, people are starting to do that. But generally speaking, get off your butt and drive five minutes away, you can do a test drive, right, and make sure you like it, we make that test drive process infinitely easier and assessable. So you could anything you can do in my past I've made I would I couldn't do a free software download, I held a daily office hours with our customer guru, right kind of like a nerd bar or whatever they call that a geek squad or whatever, you're one of those. And that served as the people who come ask things for free, it was just about helping people be successful, a venue for other customers to ask other customers, we're gonna be able to create a bunch of content off of that and drive people to that as a means of engagement, warming them up toward when would be the right time to talk to somebody in sales. And that that works for any technical product, right? If you're seeing it as providing value with no expectation of anything in return other than you're just trying to help them be successful. This is now Customer Success one on one thing, so think of the things I'm doing as maybe even a more primitive version of what customer success is, regardless of industry. And if you have a software product that people can evaluate, even if they can't evaluate it 100% Create a demo that shows people it's basically a guided tour, have one of your technical people just do a guided tour video, you can drive people to that, as that experience that warms them up to get them qualified to be a lead.
Mike: That feels almost like you're taking the concept of content marketing giving away useful information. They should, and implementing it in the real world. I mean is is that basically what you're doing?
Mario: Well, they say that legislation, computers, everything we know today, we knew back in the mainframe world, we just have better kit, the same thing could be true, I think for marketing, content marketing having its heyday and still being obviously super big. I think now with the fact that we have a Twitter or x or whatever we should be calling it these days attention span, that there's this idea, you have to put the entire payload of all value proposition into 140 characters. And the reality is, you just want to give people a reason, the same way the the Internet giants are the most profitable and prosperous companies in the history of humanity. They're just giving people something they think they might want to look at at their height time, we as marketers should be doing the same thing. And not in the sense that we're just trying to sell sell their data, but for us to understand based on their behaviour, if and when the right time is to lead them to the next step. Because attention span is everything, I'll give you a stat in our company, we have a lot of things going for us because our community is so big, but with respect to doing direct email engagement to what we'd otherwise consider qualified personas with some lead score, we're able to put them on ultra long lead drips that don't work the first quarter don't work the second quarter. And the reason they don't is there's no project in the first quarter. And there's no project in the second quarter. People say, Oh, gosh, what have you done for me now. And my thought is unless you start really irrigating those long, lead drips, you're not capturing the ability to take the people closest to your gravitational pull and sucking a man right. And content is marketing is what it's all about. I am a content marketer, a product marketer by background before I was a marketing generalist. So content marketing, is it but I think it just like the like anybody, you're just, you're competing for eyeballs? And dang it isn't your competition, doing everything that you're doing, if not three times as loud and more annoying. Right? So how is it you just find them at the right time? And I'd say that yeah, there's, there's things you can do with content marketing, back to lead scoring? Because they were on they were on the verge at one point? How do you push them over the edge?
Mike: I think that's fascinating. It really reminds me of what LinkedIn is talking about, with their B2B Marketing Institute, where they were saying, you know, 5% of your customers are probably in market ready to buy, and 95% are not ready. So your marketing should think about that. 95%. And I think as marketers, often we're all too focused on the No, no, everyone should buy now just buy now, even if people are not ready.
Mario: Well, I mean, that's a lot just Don't hate the player hate the game, right? I think our incentive structures are usually in those organisations done that way. My my KPIs here, have a lot to do with how many new people we get to download the software, how many people we get to store more than a certain amount of data? So it's kind of fun that way.
Mike: I think it's interesting. I mean, actually, maybe one thing I want to ask you about is, you know, you're getting people to try the software that's inherently a low bar, because it's free. But how do you market to that? Because obviously, free is not immediate revenue. You talk about these long drips and multi quarter drips? I mean, how do you decide about your marketing budget to go out and promote something that you know is going to have zero immediate revenue?
Mario: Well, here's the cool thing is that, and we talked about this in the green room, when you work for an open source company that our company does more than $100 million of revenue, and we spend less than a million dollars in marketing. All in. Like all in employees, headcount services, everything is ultra lean, because simply by having what we call the machine, or what a marketer might call the mousetrap, our mousetrap is just to get people to try it. And then just over over time, they raised their hand, right. And what's cool is, for us, once they download the software, that software, their agreement, opps them into doing a lot of things where we touch them on a regular basis without seeing a lot of unsubscribes. And not seeing a lot of complaints, right, because people don't mind receiving something on the weekly if it's how to get more out of something that's free in providing value now, right? It's just ideas and other stories. So I think we have an unfair benefit there. We can probably do more frequency than anybody else. And that applies also to those less interested folks who are enterprise folks who timing is it very few people are doing research on what they're going to be implementing next year, right? It's like, what are we barely surviving this quarter and what's going to be assigned to us next quarter? And I think that's one of the reasons why the whole go to market has changed. What used to be face to face sales calls as a part of the 17 touch process has shown that you can get It deals done in 12 touches and no face to face, same deal, same everything B2B, all the complexity, the pandemic brought that on, but to us, it's like leaning in the favour of an open source company, because it's leaning in the way where the the most productive activities, the ones that don't cost money that would be outside the reach of us, because we just don't have budget to buy leads or pay for, you know, qualifying services, etc. Let me give you another idea, because I know we're probably running short on time on, I feel compelled to do this, because it's been a big win for me recently, this idea that if you are a global company, there's an opportunity in every department in a company to leverage qualified and high performance talent in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, other areas too. But generally, it's this virtual assistant, the pandemic created the virtual assistant industry, where there are college educated, usually mothers who work the same work hours through the middle of the night as their client, and take care of their kids send him to school and sleep during the day. These people love working at iEX. And it's because they're doing things that cost us a lot less money, but they can do very valuable and offload the people who are already strained, who you're not getting to enough stuff, the only way you can add is really to figure out how to spend less on what you're currently doing. So you can add more stuff, right. And I'm I just found that this is something that worked. And I think it could work for anybody. Because there are virtual assistants waiting to just do whatever work you want them to do in marketing. There's plenty of busy work, like clean this list and append to this and fix you know that so it's it's been a cool boon for us. They're still employees, but they work in the Philippines, then we have an intern programme, then we have our regular marketing. So another way reason we can compete is that we can be headcount heavy while driving costs a little bit lower with a structure like that. But pay for profit companies can do the same, but they're trying to recapture spend spend on programmes.
Mike: Yeah, I think increasingly, we're seeing that with for profit companies, offshoring stuff, to places where you have very smart people who don't need as much salary as maybe they do in the States or in Europe,
Mario: and they've already worked for an American company and or some international global brand, and have already proven that they can be successful, you know, as a part of the team. And I think that's, there's a good supply of those right now. Demand for them is probably going up. But that's another tip for all marketers. And I think you guys provided Napier provide a lot of value as far as how to put those strategies together, though. Title, the I'm not a client.
Mike: You're right, we're running a little short time. So let's go to a bit of a more quick fire round of questions. So I'm interested to know, you know, whether it's iEX or somewhere else, is there a campaign you're particularly proud of that worked really well?
Mario: Sure. And it's that to incentivize or not to incentivize question, specific to appointment setting. I think in most B2B funnels, the marketing KPI is how many qualified meetings did the sales guys actually have, followed by how many of those continued on to the next stage in the funnel, that that is what we really focus on. And so a campaign that incentivizes to get there, the biggest issue you throw incentive on, you get a bunch of unqualified people, you can make keep it really targeted, but you may not be able to get much in the in the way of results. We found a recipe at a company I was a private yet $500 million company I was working for in the past, where I think we perfected this, which was a lot of people would do the Hey, well coffee's on me or lunch is on me, if you take a meeting. We did it where take this survey, and it was, you know, kind of your average survey thing just to get an idea of whether you could benefit from this. People do that? Guess what the answer was almost always, yes, you can benefit from that. And the idea was in that context, then go click because now the sales guy has a least a valid starting point for the meeting, because the customer can least articulate why they were interested. And they don't mind taking those meetings because they can become either Hey, contact me next quarter, or yeah, let's talk now. So the incentive was 25 bucks, and it was well worth it. Because ads for full conversion, we have to pay $1,500 per opportunity. And we were delivering opportunities at 100 bucks because the incentives was what 25 and the rest of it made for a very low cost appointment setting campaign that didn't involve people. It just got us a lot more people wanting to have qualified meetings.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's brilliant, because probably the people who are taking the survey are almost self qualifying themselves before they take the survey. You know, generally speaking, they've got an idea that probably it's worth meeting and so they'll take the survey. I love that. That's fantastic. Yeah,
Mario: well, you take the survey. And if they choose to move through with it, then at the end of that they get the 25 bucks. Which, which, which is this thing that we're not trying to fool you, we're just saying we can talk about this. And if you think it's valuable to you, then book it. And so that was that that was probably the one I'm most proud of. And I say that because the fruits of it, started to bear it, the trees blew up a year after I left the company. And today, I I'm very good friends with the same agency that's continuing to work with that company. And he's reported that it is they'd let it run like a chicken with its head cut off, it's still performing today, it's still the top lead source.
Mike: And I'm sure a lot of people listening, taking down notes on that and thinking, how can I do something similar? But I also know people want to know what goes wrong. So is there a is there a campaign you've run that, you know, you thought it was going to be great, but actually in reality didn't work? Why do you think that was?
Mario: Alright? It was a brand campaign, I was working for a company where it was quasi consumer high end consumer prosumer. And business business was profitable, the prosumer stuff less so unless you could do it at scale. So the thought was, you need to be reviewed by the number one product reviewer of Apple products, a editor for The New York Times, who then went on to Google, etc, we got into the New York Times, we invested more than 50% of the net effort for three quarters to make that happen. And in the end, it didn't make a sound. Really, it came out no perceptible difference in our demand gen metrics, except a bunch of people complaining on the internet about critical things he said. And then the competition, taking things and blowing out of proportion, and all that sort of stuff. So what you thought was your, you know, your use of video game analogy was the thing you grabbed, and you have now in your head about protection, it's the opposite, you grab it, and it kills you. So the moral of the story is, never put more than 10% of eggs into any one basket, or at least into the first phase of what someone wants you to put it into. Because your board, the community, your investors, everybody could ask you, Hey, you know, I want you to go do this. We're not going to be there until we have a Superbowl commercial, or until we are on the front page of The New York Times in a product review. Well, sometimes be careful what you ask for. Because, hey, who knows what works, what works? Now, it's not something that takes six months, it's what's something you can ideate prototype, test, launch, and iterate on inside of a week. Right? So put your energy there, you're gonna get a lot more engagement than what would be more like just that kind of checkbox. Okay, hey, we had this product review or review, it was a positive review to just didn't, just didn't didn't make a sound.
Mike: Yeah, that's fascinating, because I think I know you're talking about and every supplier has something to do with Apple wanted him to review it.
Mario: Why not? Who doesn't want free publicity? Right? I'm just saying that free publicity that which was so desired, was not desirable by our target audience.
Mike: Amazing. So, in terms of market advice, you've given a load of advices, loads of great information, but I'm interested, what's the best bit of market advice you've ever received?
Mario: It's really simple. When's the best time to plant a tree? Yesterday in the past, right? The best time and this is something I have with my team. And I think it works especially well in marketing is that you ask for help. On the earliest signs that there's a probability you may ask for help in the future. I don't know if I said that the right way, which is this idea is that if I only would have just waited, I F around for five hours on this one, I literally could have done this and it would have been done. choose that path, right? Ask for help and or give it to somebody else rather than pouring your energy into it. Because right now, time is our currency as marketers, we are one of the only organisations where there is an infinite number of things to do, because everybody has an opinion on what needs to be done in marketing, because we're all consumers, therefore we all have an opinion, you'll never do everything that's in the queue. Right? The only thing you can hope to do is prioritise. And so for me, that's a part of the prioritisation exercise is by at least having names for things and knowing what it is you're gonna invest the time on. If you just find you're investing your time too much on one thing, that's your signal to say, Can I hand it to an intern? Can I hand it to someone in the Philippines? Can I hire somebody who is the integrated marketing manager and makes the whole team better by you know, just having the things run smoothly through the machine? Right? I think it's really more my advice is be on the lookout diligently on the lookout for signs that you probably wish you would have asked a question sooner.
Mike: I think that's brilliant. We see that I the way you've expressed it, you know, I can see that particularly in more junior people coming into the company, and they want to try and prove themselves And they want to do something and they just spend day grinding on something that they could have asked the question and got it solved in minutes. And I love that advice. Think it's brilliant.
Mario: Yeah. But we need to do it for ourselves. Can we catch ourselves doing that? Right? I think that's one of the things it takes a village. And we believe that obviously, it's an open source company. But in days where marketing teams are being really cut down, and we're going toward models where it's in multiple different agencies and stitching them together, it's ever more important to really then understand how you assign workload and divide labour and do all of those sorts of things. And I think that that's where I wear an agile company. I don't know if I mentioned that last bit of advice, who would have thought that the company would do a backflip when marketing suggested, hey, we're already using JIRA for Project product management in or for managing projects in engineering, why don't we just use the same thing in marketing, guess what, now there are no extra apps, we don't have an HR app or this app or that app. So marketing, actually, through our advanced knowledge of tools can help make impressions across the rest of the organisation to bring them more agile. So that's another bit of advice is that young people do not want to work in an organisation that is not yet agile, because everybody's asking for those skills. And so if you already have JIRA, in the, in your environment, get off of monday.com, or Basecamp, or whatever you're using there, because we free to you. And you'll actually do things with a higher level of quality, because you'll follow more, a more scientific repeatable process of making sure things are QA, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks for inviting me today. As you can see, I'm a fountain of information. And I do enjoy sharing with others. Just make sure you ask questions, right. I think being humbled to ask questions is really the biggest takeaway, that to answer your question, because preventing guilt or regret in the future, means being more aware in the present.
Mike: I love that I'm in the spirit of asking questions, I guess, you know, one of the things I'm thinking is people are listening to this, they probably got a whole bunch of questions for you. What's the best way to get ahold of you?
Mario: All right, I would suggest that if you wanted to go to Toon as.com, just go into the live chat and say, Hey, Mario, like, believe it or not, the VP of marketing does actually look at the live chat. Right? Cool. I probably see you there. If not, somebody on the team is gonna say, hey, Mario is not here. And then we can get that way. Or you can email me at M Blandini. At IX, systems.com, or gmail.com. Turns out there's not very many M bland genies in the world. And otherwise, yeah, if you're like any of the ideas that I've talked about, what I'd say is one of the easiest ways to to get it get into a cohort group of people who are like minded like you meetups in the back in the day, were the great thing. And then it kind of went virtual, we forgot about that. Just having a couple of people in different industries to commiserate with is really, really cool. So even if I can't answer the question, I'm not saying anything wildly inventive. You could probably go and network with your local group of meetup folks, and and build some relationships that way. Because the reality is companies I found this at my company to being 20 years old. You don't know what's going on on the outside, because you've only been in this side for so long. So as marketers we kind of get to specialised, I know that there's some people who have a market where it's literally every customer is known I had this in the telecom industry. Well, it still doesn't mean that you can't go and build for them a company reason to do it. Right. So that's my other bit of advice. Heck, ask your boss whether or not you can brag a little bit more about what your company does, because odds are you do it in a less humble, less authentic way, when you probably could just state something that's absolutely true about your company and find some power in that. Anyway, hit me up on the live chatter and Blandini@gmail.com and Blandini at IXsystems.com.
Mike: So scenario, it's been such a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, my pleasure.
Mario: Hey, y'all, and best of luck.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Jim Kraus - Buyer Persona Institute
Personas based on buying data and research can have a huge impact on both marketing and sales, allowing informed decisions to be made based on the needs of customers.
Jim Kraus, President of the Buyer Persona Institute, shares why building personas based on buying decisions and understanding the needs of prospective buyers is so important. He discusses some of the things to consider when building personas and some tips on how to get started.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Buyer Persona Institute
Buyer Persona Institute offers B2B companies’ insight into what their prospective customers need to know and experience before they buy products or services. The institute delivers buying decision insights and persona activation workshops to more than 100 customers across the globe.
About Jim
With over three decades of experience managing market research teams, Jim has become a highly sought-after expert on the intersection of marketing, sales, and product strategy. As the President of Buyer Persona, Jim is passionate about understanding buyer behaviours and implementing marketing efforts that understand the "voice of the buyer."
Time Stamps
[00:49.06] – Jim provides an overview of Buyer Persona and how he got involved.
[05:00.9] – How do you build a buyer persona? – Jim offers his advice.
[10:45.0] – How should you leverage buyer personas?
[15:20.3] – Mistakes to avoid when developing buyer personas.
[22:01.7] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?
[23:13.4] – Would you recommend a career in marketing?
[26:21.9] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.
Quotes
“You’re not guessing, it’s not anecdotal. That is really the foundation of your marketing sales strategy, your messaging, your positioning, campaigns that you do. It’s pretty powerful when you have those insights.” Jim Kraus, President at Buyer Persona
Follow Farzad:
Jim Kraus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimkraus/
Buyer Persona Institute website: https://buyerpersona.com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Jim Kraus - Buyer Persona Institute
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jim Kraus
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Jim Kraus. Jim is the president of the Buyer Persona Institute. Welcome to the podcast, Jim.
Jim: Thanks, Mike. Great to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on. And so I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be familiar with the buyer persona Institute. But you know, what we always like to do is find out how people got to where they are today. So can you tell us a little bit about your career journey? And what brought you to being the president of the Institute?
Jim: Sure. So I've been doing market research for well over two decades and market research has always just been a passion of mine just really trying to understand customers and buyers and markets to help organisations make smarter, smarter business and marketing decisions. So my career has spanned both doing market research on the client side for different organisations, mid very large enterprise companies, as well as on you know, now the supplier side, you know, helping clients with their market research needs. So this Buyer Persona Institute my focus there has really a kind of a natural culmination in my career up until this point.
Mike: And how did you get involved with a buyer persona Institute.
Jim: So Barbara stone Institute was founded about it was about 15 years ago, Adele Rivella founded buyer persona Institute, and some of your listeners, I'm sure have heard and maybe even know Adele, and her and I have known each other for years, just crossing similar circles as far as where our focus has been. And back in was end of 2021, she was really interested in retiring at that point. And her and her I got the talking. And it just made a lot of sense for the firm, the research firm I had been working for, to partner with Buyer Persona Institute and kind of carry on what she had started. So that's how we've been involved within it. And I've been leading Buyer Persona Institute for over a year now. So it's, it's been fantastic.
Mike: That's great. I think, you know, what will be interesting is obviously, some of our listeners will know what you do at the institute. Other people won't know what Buyer Persona Institute is. So do you want to just, you know, unpack what you do?
Jim: Yeah, so you know, traditionally, a lot of folks think about buyer personas, and typically they'll think of it being a profile of an individual or a role in the buying decision, which is fine. And we can get into a little bit more of that later. But Buyer Persona Institute is really focused on understanding buying decisions, more specifically, understanding everything that prospective buyers want to know and experience to have full confidence in making a particular investment and making that investment with you. So it's about developing buying insights around a specific buying decision, rather than just understanding profiling characteristics of a role and decision process. And that's a really key distinction and a pretty important one, in terms of getting value out of buyer personas.
Mike: So that's really interesting. You're talking about personas being specific for a particular situation. So can you just explain a little bit more, you know why you can't create generic personas for individuals in business and then use them across a wide range of different suppliers?
Jim: Yeah, so if your buyer personas are focused on just profiling your particular role, so let's say let's just take a technology product randomly. Let's just take CRM, for example. And if your organisation sells CRM, if you identify the CIO or an IT, buyer is one of the key influencers in that buying decision, certainly not the only one. But let's say and you have a profile of that, of that it buyer and you know, their average age, their education, maybe even their overall challenges and priorities and information sources they use. Certainly that's helpful from a marketing and sales standpoint, to know that information. But it really doesn't tell you anything about what are the things that are really driving the need for that CRM solution. It doesn't tell you what are the fears and concerns they have about that purchase? It doesn't tell you how customers are defining success. It doesn't tell you what are the key decision criteria they're using. It doesn't tell you anything about their buyers journey. So it only gives you really limited information. And what ends up happening is you you really have to guess or make educated guesses about what is it that buyers really need that for that particular buying decision. So that that's why we take this buying decision focus.
Mike: So I mean, who the industry is actually a little bit more than just the persona. It's really understanding that that process of buying a particular product, or helping people understand how their customers buy their product.
Jim: Correct, yeah. So the approach that that we that we advocate, and you'll see a lot of information that we put out on social channels and on our website is just to try to educate folks about, you know, the different components of a buyer persona. So mate, let me explain that, because I think that'll probably crystallise the thought a little bit more. So, for a buyer persona, the way we recommend doing them is to actually go out and talk to recent buyers of the particular product or service that you offer. In other words, you know, go out and find people that have made the exact same buying decision that you're trying to influence. And these aren't necessarily your own customers, these are folks you want to talk to that you ideally would want in your sales pipeline, right, that have actually made that decision, have gone through this process, and go out and interview them. The interviews that we typically do are 30 to 40 minutes. They're like a journalist, really, really a journalistic approach, right? We're not asking them, we're not giving them ratings and rankings and ask them to pontificate. We're actually having discussions with them, where they literally tell us everything that happened from the moment they had a need for a particular product or service, all the way until the point where they make a final decision. And we take a approach where we literally identify how they first come up with an initial consideration list, how do they winnow down their choices?
So we do these interviews. And what we do is we look across the interviews that we do we find patterns in the data. And the buyer persona that that you develop from these is there's five key areas, we call them the five rings of buying insight. The first one is priority initiatives and priority initiatives are literally what are buyers telling you? Is the trigger to happen so that they are looking for your particular product service at this moment in time. So they may have had a particular challenge for a while what is it that's getting them going out? The second key characteristic or element of your buyer persona, should be what we call success factors. And these are literally the outcomes or the benefits that buyers need to realise to feel justified in the investment that they're actually make. The third one is a really important one that can be overlooked. Sometimes we call perceived barriers. And these are the fears and concerns that buyers have. Right. So when you're talking about a higher consideration buying decision. Typically a lot of B2B buying decisions are there's going to be some fears and trepidations that buyers are going to have no question about it right? This could be a significant investment for them. There's going to be impacts on the organisation positive or negative, depending if you make that quote unquote, right choice. They may even be career implications depending on how big of a buying decision it is. You certainly want to know what all those trepidations are ahead of time because it's going to inform a lot in terms of your marketing and sale. The fourth element is decision criteria and decision criteria is all the questions that buyers are going to be asking of you as they evaluate their alternatives. And again, we're calling all these insights from actually doing interviews with recent buyers. And they will tell us, you know, here are the all the things that we use to evaluate different providers and solutions and winnowing down our choices and coming up with our final selection. And then the fifth and final one that should be part of your persona is buyers journey. And the key here is understanding what are the steps in the buying process for this specific buying decision? Who are the key influencers? And who's making the final decisions? What information sources are they using? And we all know buying decision is is that is the exact same we know that.
But by doing a number of these interviews, you can really identify some key moments in the buying and who's involved in what types of information sources that they use and trust. Now, if you step back for a minute, and you think about those five key areas, imagine if you're in a marketing and sales role, and you have fact based insights in each one of those areas, you're not making it up, you're not guessing it's not anecdotal. That is really the foundation of your marketing and sales strategy, your messaging your positioning campaigns that you do, it's pretty powerful when you have that those kinds of insights.
Mike: That's fascinating. Sounds like you've got this really robust process you've developed that allows you to get in depth information about the people buying products. I mean, is this something that you need to do and provide as a service or is it something people can learn?
Jim: Either way, so we we do studies for different organisations all the time, but it's also something you can do do yourself as well. So we actually do offer a masterclass that will teach you kind of the ins and outs and how to do this on your own both identifying who to interview, how to interview them how to do the analysis and put putting together your personas. The biggest challenge is finding recent buyers right so we're not looking for customer lists. These are typically blind studies like so when we do the studies for organisations we don't Don't tell the people that we interview who the sponsor the research is, and vice versa. But it's really important that you define the buying decision very specifically, you define who your target is very specifically, you know, if it's a certain industry or enterprise size, or geo or some other criteria, and then working with different recruiters to identify who those recent buyers are. So that's, that might be the hardest part of the process, just finding them. But it is certainly something that you can, you can do on your own as well.
Mike: So I mean, that gives people flexibility. I mean, I guess, you know, we've touched on it earlier about, it's an involved so it's quite often a B2B sale, but who should use personas on how can they best use them?
Jim: Yeah, so really, buyer personas as we just defined them, can be used for any moderate to high consideration buying decision, whether it's consumer, or its business. So as an example, this approach works wonderfully for if you're trying to do a buyer persona for people that are trying to figure out where do I want to go on vacation, certainly, that's a high consideration, type of buying decision, right, you may be looking at different places to go, you may be looking at different places you can stay where you go, you may be looking for certain activities, or things that you want to be doing, where you go on vacation. Again, it's anything that is not just spur of the moment, type buying decision, whether it's business or consumer, can work really well, in terms of how to use them, right. So once you have your buyer persona, you know, the things that we most often see our clients how they use them is, it's amazing how, how creative they are really, because it really is the foundation of the house, as far as all decisions are going to be making from a marketing and sales perspective. But the ones that typically get the most use out of them are, they either start with new messaging or refresh the current messaging that they have. This includes, you know, top of the funnel type stuff, where you're just trying to figure out how to initially attract and, you know, become relevant to buyers. Also, it's refreshing messaging, middle and bottom of funnel when they're really starting to get into their buying journey. And they're really looking at their different options. And the beauty of the buyer, the buyer personas is they will help you in both in both areas. The other place that we see buyer personas used quite often is for different sales plays, like one of the things that you can do with your buyer personas is identify top four or five, six value proposition themes, right things that you know, buyers are going to want need during their buying journey. And by using those and really developing proof points about how you can deliver on some of these things that they want. It's gold for the salespeople, who a lot of times their biggest challenge when they're meeting with a new prospective buyer is, you know, what should I talk to them about right? And obviously, you want to talk about their needs, right? But having an idea about what their needs are like the art had a story to tell, works wonderfully in sales loves it, because you're giving them a real starting point with and really meat meat on the bone to go in and have those conversations.
Mike: Yeah, I love that example of sales. I think sometimes people sort of look at buyer personas and feel that it's adding complexity to the planning process. But But it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, when you understand the needs, it can massively simplify the decisions you need to make to create a good either marketing or sales campaign.
Jim: Yeah, no, it's a great point, one of the most common people that we work with, right, so we have people come to us with in different situations. One of the common situations is somebody will come to us in our organisation with their hands in the air because they have 510 15, we've had organisations come to us with 50 personas, because they have a broad portfolio, and they've got a persona for every person to decision process. And they just don't know what to do, it becomes such a matrix and so complex, they also don't have the resources to market to each one of those individually, oftentimes. And the beauty of those conversations we usually have a smile on our face is because what we're proposing here simplifies everything because now you're not trying to be so tailored to every single person in that buying decision. You are now tailoring what you're doing to the actual buying decision itself. So that the buying committee and as likely a buying committee involved in these decisions, you know, you're coming with an understanding of what collectively they all really need. And again, remember, like if you think about if you're a CIO, you may have a whole list of priorities and challenges. But don't kid yourself when it comes to a specific buying decision using a CRM example below. There's some very specific things that that CIO and that buying committee are going to need that they're going to be worried about, that they're going to be using to evaluate their different options. So it simplifies it simplifies everything and it and it really improves the focus that you can have which is particularly in today's environment with You know, with scarce resources, a lot of times focus and prioritisation is is gold, right?
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, it sounds like you're saying one of the big mistakes people make with developing personas as they develop too many. Are there other mistakes you see people making when I tried to do persona work? I wouldn't say so
Jim: much mistakes, I would say more of just a lot of it's just kind of knowing about other options that may be available. So that's one of them. Right? That, you know, we talk a lot about the buying decision versus role based persona. So that's one one miss out was a mistake. But that's one thing you can definitely it's a game changer. You know, I will say that. The other thing I would say is not being afraid to talk to recent buyers. You know, marketing a lot of times is you know, they're charged with trying to educate and influence buyers around a particular buying decision. But they're trying to do it with one hand tied behind their back, because a lot of times they don't have the luxury of talking to recent buyers, right sales folks talk to prospective buyers all the time. Just think about all the knowledge, they're learning that innate knowledge they're learning that really influences how they communicate, and speak with prospective buyers. A lot of times marketers don't have that. So by going out and talking to recent buyers, you know, now you've got the answer sheet, right? Like some of our clients call the buyer, buyer personas, cheat sheets, because it's literally everything that you need to know to be able to use your marketing talents in the best possible way. So that's the other thing I would really recommend is don't be shy about talking to recent buyers. I mean, they have they have all the answers for all the things that you're gonna be doing.
Mike: I mean, I think sometimes talking to recent buyers can be hard, particularly when companies quite often go through a persona, right? So because they're not being as successful. So you mentioned about recruiting recent buyers, is there any advice or information you can give people to help them, you know, be able to go and find those recent buyers and approach them properly?
Jim: Yeah, so a couple of things. One is if you have an interest in doing it yourself, we'd encourage you to look at the master class, or the book buyer personas that Adele had published a number of years ago, which gets into some of the methodology type stuff. So those are a couple of sources you can definitely go to outside of that. One of the things is, we typically kick off a buyer persona study with a, we call it a study design. It's an outward meeting, and we get all the key stakeholders in the room from marketing sales product. And we spend a lot of time just defining what the buying decision is that that you're really trying to understand. So as an example, just going back to that CRM example, to be consistent, it may not just be a CRM for your particular organisation, it may be CRM, but just because of your product and services or your focus, it may be CRM, but it has to include certain components of CRM, because you feel like your ideal customer profile, your ICP, there's certain things about their needs around CRM, or their requirements, that you really want to make sure those the buyers you go talk to. So you wanted to find that really specifically, any other specifications, like we talked about earlier, like, you know, II size, geo industry, other things. And then you want to develop a screening questionnaire that you qualify people in or out. And then you want to use some, some recruiters to help you. So there are different recruiters that the only thing they do is help find people based on certain specifications. So you can partner with those organisations as well to help you find those people.
Mike: I mean, it certainly sounds like one of the things people need to do as well is to take the time and really spend the time developing a very good and detailed buyer persona. I mean, do you think there's value in in generating more superficial personas? Or is it you know, really the case that the return on the investment on doing the work is so great, you should be doing all the work.
Jim: It's really a decision. I mean, if you do, if you do a more of a profile of an individual or role in the buying decision, you know, that's something that you can probably do for less resource, you're just not going to get nearly as much value out of it, it's going to leave, you know, leaving fundamental questions to the marketing and sales team. So, you know, what we have found is using this buying decision based approach, it leads to an increase in not just leads qualified leads, because you've got folks that are more likely to find you, because the stuff that you're putting out there is tailored to the people that you're really looking to attract. The other thing that we see is conversion rates go up. But the main reason for that is because now you have such a deep understanding about their fears, concerns and decision criteria in particular, that what you're putting out there and what you're communicating is really going to influence the buying decision when they're further along in the process. Right. So, again, it's a choice. You know, the buying decision, one takes a little bit more resource to do, but the payoff is is you know, we would argue that it's worth it when we have organised Asians that anytime they have a new product or service, or there's a significant change in the marketplace, they'll go refresh their buyer persona to make sure that they're fully aligned to their prospective buyers.
Mike: Yeah, and certainly, I'm sure a lot of your clients, they're actually talking about very high price tag sales. So you don't need to do much on the conversion rate to make a huge difference in terms of return on investment. Yeah, 100%. I mean, this has been great. I've loved the overview about the process and how to create really good personas. It just likes to go back in and talk about the ESG for a second, and it's a question I feel I've got to ask is maybe not fair. But the buyer persona process is part of the marketing process, basically, do you think there's really is a need for a separate Institute or a separate organisation? And if there is, why do you think it's, you know, it adds so much to be separate and be very focused on what you do?
Jim: Yeah, we do. And the reason for that is because it's fundamentally it's about understanding prospective buyers and a buying decision. Right. So one of the things we're trying to do is not muddy the waters, right? There's all different types of research that you could do, right? There's positioning studies, segmentation studies, customer sat studies, Product Development Studies, and on and on and on, one of the things we wanted to make sure of is to be very focused on buyer personas, because it's a very specific types of in buying insights, that you're trying to get to overlay very specific types of marketing and sales decisions and motions that you're putting. So we have it separate for that reason. So there's no ambiguity about it as far as what the value is. And that's the main reason that we've done that.
Mike: Sounds like a great reason. I mean, obviously, you've obviously got a lot of experience, we'd like to ask some more general questions. And one of the questions we really like to ask people is about marketing advice. I'd love to know, what's the best bit of market advice you've ever had? Jim?
Jim: Certainly, I would say the one that is on my mind every single day is how to, I would say twofold. One is understand your buyers and your customers as much as you possibly can. And never, never let that end like continue to refresh your understanding, walk in their shoes, recognise that it's not about your product or service. It's about their needs. Right. And the second thing related to that, which is the advice is always be asking yourself, How can you be helpful to the folks that you are marketing and selling to, right, because, quite frankly, they're not interested, they don't really care if they're working with you, and they don't really care about your potential product or service, what they care about is their own needs, their own problems, their own opportunities and things that they're trying to achieve. So be helpful to them as that is the main thing and everything else will work out itself, right? Because they're going to see that you actually care about their results, they're going to feel confident that when you start giving them advice, or suggestions that it's credible, because it's coming from the right place. So that's something that I literally say to myself every single day still, and that would be the probably the best advice I've ever gotten from a marketing standpoint.
Mike: That's great. And really clear. I mean, you know, if you help your customers by the more later by I mean, that's, that's a great approach. The other thing we like to ask people is about advice, career advice for young people maybe thinking of coming into marketing. I mean, would you recommend marketing as a career for young people, but I mean, particularly considering the marketing as a whole has kind of been thrown up in the air with AI, and we're not quite sure where it's gonna land?
Jim: I would I mean, you know, I think it's such a fascinating place to be because at the end of the day, you know, business is all about people and individuals. And one of the things I love about buyer personas is, you know, you talk about B2B, large enterprise technology, for example. And it seems like this big, you know, impersonal type of thing, but the reality is, it's people that are making these decisions and people that have real, you know, real trepidations, real ambitions, and I'm saying that in a good way, both for themselves in their organisation. So, from a marketing perspective, I just think it's fascinating because you're always learning things, markets are always changing. And at the end of the day, there's always going to be a need for organisations to bond and align themselves with their prospective buyers and develop relationships that's never going to end. Regardless of what tools are out there. It's fun to learn about them. I've been doing this for a while, and I still, you know, the the AI I think is fascinating. We're already thinking about how we may potentially be able to use that enhance what we're doing. So I think it's it's a, it's a field that's constantly changing, but the fundamentals about what you're trying to do and connect with buyers doesn't change. And that kind of mixture is something that I think is pretty attractive and keep keeps things pretty interesting as you go.
Mike: I love that sort of optimistic view of the future of the industry that that's That's a great note to end on, I think. I mean, it feels like we've we've kind of only really scratched the surface. But is there anything major you think I've missed? Or you think I should have covered?
Jim: I don't think so. I mean, I think the two big takeaways for me is I always try to leave people with with, you know, two thoughts, and we've covered them, but one is, go talk to buyers there, they'll be happy to talk to you, they this is something that they're not pontificating about, it's something that they went through, that meant a lot to them, and they've got some really insightful things to share. So you'll actually enjoy those conversations. So don't be afraid of them, actually, you know, look forward to them. And then two is, if you're, if you've been frustrated with buyer personas before, or you don't know much about them, think about the approaches that we talked about today they are there really are can be a game changers. And the nice thing about them, we have found is using this approach is is very pragmatic and logical. So buying in the organisation tends to once people get it, they're like, Oh, that makes a lot of that makes a lot of sense. You know, why haven't we been doing this? So that's the other thing I would encourage folks to do.
Mike: Perfect. No, I mean, a great thing to leave people with. I mean, I'm sure there's some listeners who want to find out more either about the Institute has a hold on, maybe ask you questions to follow up. I mean, what's the best way to learn about the Institute and maybe get hold of you, if somebody's got a specific question,
Jim: feel free to visit our website, buyer persona.com. There's a number of resources there, that'll just expand on some of the things that we talked about today. Please leverage them to the fullest. And then also feel free to find me on LinkedIn, Jim Kraus. I'd love to connect with you there. And you can contact me there or through our website, there's a contact field there as well, if you'd like if you'd like to connect with us.
Mike: Fantastic. I mean, Jim, this has been fascinating, you know, I feel really motivated to for our next project really go deeper in terms of understanding what buyers care about during the buying process. So I really appreciate that. It's been very motivating for me. Great. Thanks, Mike. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for being on the podcast, Jim. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Can AI Really Support Content Generation?
Everywhere you look, everything is about AI. But how can AI actually support content generation? In this special episode of the podcast, Napier’s Mike Maynard and Hannah Kelly discuss the capabilities of AI in marketing automation platforms. They also chat about how email signatures can be leveraged by marketers, what to consider when writing subject lines and how companies can grow their subscriber database.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Podbean
Time Stamps
[01:03.0] – Will AI make our lives easier?
[04:44.0] – Can we use AI and generative AI to optimise campaigns?
[10:33.0] – Email signatures – how can marketers maximise their impact.
[12:51.0] – The challenges of growing subscriber databases whilst complying with GDPR.
[17:39.0] – How to write a good subject line.
Quotes
“Do you just want to be average in your marketing automation? Or do you want to create something that is above average? People who are above average will do better than AI.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
“AI can be a great start but if you think it’s going to replace you, unfortunately the good news is you’re job safe, the bad news is you’ve still got to do some work.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
Follow Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in marketing automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://marketingb2btech.napierb2b.com/
Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketinging automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast.
Mike: Today we talk about AI. And that's probably enough to get most of you listening. But I promise if you do listen to the podcast, there'll be lots more as well, including things like how to write a great subject line.
Hannah: So welcome back. Mike, you just got back from another trip in the US. How was it?
Mike: It was great. Actually, I'm feeling a little bit jet lagged. But really keen to have another chat about marketinging automation. Well,
Hannah: I appreciate you making the time. I've got a lot to talk UVU about. So I'm really excited to just dive straight in. I mean, the first thing that I've seen is actually having a scroll through Actos website earlier this week. And it's no surprise that a lot of content is about AI. Everywhere you look, everything's about AI. But I think one thing that's really interesting, which I'd like to dive into is, how can AI actually support content generation within marketinging automation platforms? So how effective is it for emails, landing pages? Will it make people's lives easier? Or are they going down a path that perhaps isn't right to get that high quality content they need?
Mike: I love that question. Hana. I mean, I think it's really interesting. The truth is, you know, speaking as an engineer, it's actually really easy to integrate something like chat GPT into a product today. And so because chat GPT is the hottest thing on the planet, apparently, I think most of the marketing automation companies are looking at going this is an easy one, we've just got to do it. So they're all integrating generative AI. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think, you know, firstly, we've got to look at this, you know, people are saying, well, we want generative AI to create personal emails for everybody in my database. Actually, they're not even using basic marketinging, automation, personalization tools. So, you know, for people to suddenly think that personalization is the greatest thing, because they've been really lazy. And now it feels a bit easier. That's probably not the right way to go. Personalization is important. But maybe AI is not the right thing to use. So I think it's gonna be interesting. But I think the thing you've got to remember is that AI and I'm sure I've said this to you before, a number of times, it tries to predict the most likely next word, I mean, that's fundamentally how generative AI works. And so what it's trying to do is be average. So the question is, do you just want to be average in your marketinging automation? Or do you want to generate something's above average, so if you're really good, generative AI might be great for ideas and giving you a start, but actually, it's not going to remove the work of really polishing that email, or really getting that landing page, right? Because people are above average, will actually do better than AI.
Hannah: I love that so much above average. And I think when it comes to B2B as well, having this technical content that we have to write is even more important that yes, you can use this API to draft the first kind of landing page or the first email, but you still need those experts to put that input and put their insight to make it this high quality piece of content.
Mike: You're so right. I mean, it's another great point, you know, generative AI is, is what really geeky people like me call a stochastic process is based on probability. And it's been trained on history. So if you're writing a landing page about something that's a completely new, innovative product, why should AI which is trying to predict words based upon what was said, in the past, generate a great landing page, if you've got a product that's very similar to lots of other products, maybe AI is going to generate a pretty decent landing page. But I think, where we're looking at promoting new technologies and new products, that's where AI is really going to start to struggle. So again, it does come back to the fact that, you know, I don't think it's a bad thing to use it. But I think it's a bad thing to trust it. 100% I think, really, you know, what people need to be doing is using AI. I mean, the classic thing is, you know, if you've got writer's block, you're sat there thinking, I have no idea what to write, then AI can be a great start. But if you think it's going to replace you, unfortunately, you know, the good news is your job safe. The bad news is you still got to do some work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I guess just extend on that a little bit. Mike Lee, looking at this AI and this generative AI, how can we use it to optimise campaigns, is it something that we should be using more for optimising campaigns or when we're actually trying to break out 20 marketings a new client is a new product, where would you think it fits best?
Mike: So now I feel a bit geeky, because generative AI is the AI that creates content, whereas other AI technologies and machine learning will actually learn from what you've done. And then try and optimise. So you know, what's generative AI might produce, in theory, a good set of copy, what you need is different sorts of AI that are going to measure how well your campaign has been received. And look at how changes can impact the performance. Now the problem is, is what's going to happen is the people going to run AI across previous campaigns, and then try and use those previous campaigns to dictate how to optimise the new campaign. If you're running lots of similar campaigns, happy days, that's going to work. But if you're running something very new, or targeting a new audience, there may be what worked before isn't necessarily optimum for today. So again, I think AI is fascinating. It's something that that's definitely going to help in optimization. And let's be honest, you know, most of us are doing things like running, you know, Google Pay per click campaigns, whether it's search with display, we're already using AI to optimise it, we're quite happily buying into the Google AI world. So we're gonna use it. But I think sometimes the marketinging automation need to take a step back and say, Actually, I'm doing something new. And maybe I need to take a new approach a different approach, rather than replicate exactly what I've done when I was talking to a different audience about a different product.
Hannah: I love that mindset. Mike, I think it's definitely something to consider. And I think it's something that industry will learn, because you'll soon see if the results aren't the same for a similar campaign as they are for new campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you're right, you know, if you just let AI run, it'll optimise some campaigns brilliantly, other campaigns, not so much. And I think, again, AI is going to be a tool AI is not the solution. And I think if you look at what happens with technology, technology very rarely replaces complete functions, what technology does, it replaces processes, and little aspects. And my view is, is that where we see this magic marketinging AI that comes in and does all your marketinging for you, you just go run marketinging campaign, I'll see you on Friday. And it all runs, I don't think that's going to be the way I actually you know, has an impact, what I personally think is AI is going to be everywhere, some of the time, you're not even really going to see it. And it will be all over the place in all of the different martech tools, doing little optimizations or creating content suggestions, or, you know, even maybe generating some of the content. And I think it's just going to be embedded everywhere. And that's where it's gonna get really exciting, because you're just gonna get that AI to do a little bit here a little bit here a little bit here, suddenly, you've saved yourself, maybe 50% 75% of the time to run a campaign. But you're still in there, you're still doing that direction, and where it's appropriate, you're still providing that kind of subjective judgement.
Hannah: Absolutely, I think it leads back into a nice point of the next thing I want to talk about. And that is around events. And we know as marketingers that perhaps the companies that we work with, and our prospects, and our clients aren't always the best utilising marketing automation when it comes to events. But as you said, AI is going to be embedded into systems now is going to be there when you don't even notice it. And I think this is going to be one of the key areas that we actually see time saved, where it can be the most efficient is building these event follow ups these fantastic to beat you. webinar follow up webinar registration emails, I think they're I see the real value from the marketinging perspective, or where AI to make a real difference very quickly, within the marketinging teams.
Mike: Yeah, and obviously, you know, you know about this, because you do all the follow up for napery webinars. So, you know, you have this problem of creating these follow up emails, and typically, they follow us fairly standard kind of format. And I think, you know, that's where AI is really going to come into its own, you know, the thank you for attending, here's a replay, we don't need to type that email, again, you know, an average email is going to be good enough for that. So I completely agree with you, Hannah. I think AI is going to have an impact in this event follow up. And hopefully, it's going to mean that people have, you know, more personalised and more thoughtful follow up, because they're not spending all the time on kind of the mechanical basics that you have to do after an event.
Hannah: I think the key thing there, Mike is thoughtful, because marketingers can sometimes be let down where they're rushing, they're just doing these bland kind of mass emails. But we know that personalization makes a difference. And if you can utilise tools to make that difference, and especially I think events have come back. I mean, I was on a meeting on Monday, and we were talking about how we couldn't believe the attendance at the events, you know, B2B or UK across the globe. And I think as the world kind of still goes down that events route, it's just going to be amazing to see the kind of follow up that comes from being able to utilise these tools, and then also them channelling investment from these events because they've been able to do this real personalised outreach was not a lot of effort.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean, if we look at what's happening, there's real evidence people want human to human contact, they want to see people's personality. It's something that's talked a lot about in B2B. And you get that trade shows, you get to meet people, you get to fill their personalities. And I think that's, you know, another reason whilst AI can come in, and it can make a massive difference for our job day to day, it's probably not gonna replace us at least hopefully, it's not replaced. So fingers crossed. So I mean, I know we can speak about AI for a good another 20 minutes, Mike, but I do want to steer us into a slightly different direction. And that is email signatures. And this is something that we've not yet discussed on the podcast. And it's something that I really believe is overlooked. I mean, at Napier, I spent a lot of time working with our IT engineer to build personalised signatures based on the accounts, people work on our case studies, our awards, and HubSpot actually released a blog recently that said that 77.8% of users check their email inbox more than five times a day. And so actually, email signatures can be such a fantastic way to improve brand awareness. What's your opinion on them?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I love the way HubSpot went in and said people check email, therefore, signatures are important. I mean, that kind of was a bit of a jump there. But having said that, you're absolutely right, when you do use email signatures, then absolutely, you can get some really good value. And I've seen clients use automated email signatures for all sorts of things. That Classic is, when you're nominated for award to get people to vote, and the clients that do that get great response. So it's really clear these people checking emails five times a day, actually read to the bottom of the email, and they actually do look at signatures. And the great thing about a signature is if you're interacting with someone on a frequent basis, maybe they don't notice the signature the first time they get an email from you. But when they're getting emails, you know, maybe once a day, twice a day, whatever. Suddenly that signature starts having impacts, it keeps getting repeated. So I'm a massive believer. And as you know, we've got technology and API's that will put in dynamic signatures based upon who's sending the email and, as you say, you know, for example, the accounts they're working on. So it makes a huge difference. And I think it's sometimes a bit unsexy, in a bit underrated in terms of a marketinging tactic. And a lot more B2B companies could actually think about what they put in the signatures, and they could think about changing the signatures, for example, depending upon who they're sending to, or who's sending the email that then lets those signatures feel, you know, really customised and personal.
Hannah: I love this mic. I think it's the first time we've wholeheartedly agreed on something.
Mike: Well, it's nice for there to be a first time I'm sure we've got another story so we can return to normal.
Hannah: So thanks for that insight, like I mean, slightly moving on back into more than marketing automation platforms. And I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts around ways that companies can not only maintain, but also grow a subscriber list of in their databases. And I think there are challenges here with GDPR compliance if you require opt in. So what kinds of things can companies do to overcome this?
Mike: Etc. Interesting, I think the first thing to say is that GDPR is important to understand what the rules say. And in B2B, obviously, with some exceptions, you actually don't need explicit opt in. But a lot of companies choose to go that way. And that is not a bad thing. So they're actually choosing to focus on quality rather than quantity. And clearly, for growing a list, as you said, opting in or requiring someone to opt in, is actually going to make it harder to grow the list. But on the other side, that quality is going to be better. So you know, it's something you need to decide. And we have clients who take both they take the legitimate interest approach, and they take the opt in approach. And I think once you've decided that, that then defines a lot about what you do in terms of growing that list. And you.
Hannah: Absolutely, and I think there are ways that if you do this opt in way that you can still do incentives to encourage people to opt in. So we could do things like popups, you could do things such as all make sure you do tick this box and have a chance to get a discount on one of the products. I think there's more creative out of the box ways that you don't have to be limited to get those people to opt in.
Mike: I totally agree. I mean, one of our best tactics for a client is when people choose not to opt in, we just pop up in Marketingo on the landing page, a little box that just says Are you really sure you don't opt in? And I think, you know, one of the dangers is is that now it's almost a default to say, I don't want to opt in. But actually when people think about it, they go, Oh, actually, I quite like the supplier. They could give me some useful information. Maybe I do want to opt in. So I think that there's lots of things you can do to think about getting people to fill that form in getting them to opt in if you've got an opt in process. And then also, we're thinking about retaining those people on the database and making sure you send them good quality content, so they don't opt out.
Hannah: That's such a good point, the growing is as important as it is maintaining, and you have to engage your contacts in your database. And you have to provide that high quality content, prove that they've made the right decision.
Mike: Exactly. And I think, you know, again, this is this is something that's really interesting, because, you know, some clients will gather more data than others. And the more data you can gather about the people that you're mailing, the more personalised that content can be. And so you know, even me in my my day to day marketinging life, I get emails, you know, telling me about events all around the world, it's like, I'm not based in America, you know, a trip to San Francisco is quite a big deal for someone from Europe. And I really don't care about this event, because I know you're running an equivalent one in London. And that's much closer to me. But clearly, the person who's captured my name hasn't captured the country I'm based in so they're sending me information on everything. So that gathering and that enhancing of the information. That's a really important thing that relates to retention, because the more you can understand your database, the better you can personalise, and therefore the more likely people are to feel that the emails I get are relevant, useful, and not emails they want to opt out from.
Hannah: Absolutely, and it's quite easy to do, because performance within all moto automation platforms have the capability to do progressive profiling. So it's really easy to gather that information, it doesn't have to be a difficult task.
Mike: You're so right when I mean progressive profiling is marked information superpower. But, you know, I think most people use to some extent, but often is underrated. And clearly, what you want to do is you want to try and keep gathering more and more information, not because you know, you're some kind of, you know, freaky obsessive collector of data, or wanting to go in and spam people, but because you want to actually send more relevant content. And the other thing to remember is, you don't actually just need to use forms to do that, you can actually use behaviour. So look at what people are clicking on, if you've got a recipient that only clicks on content that relates to events in the UK, at some point, you're going to hope that sensible marketingers are going to say, I'm gonna make a guess this person lives in the UK, and I'm just gonna send them content around events in the UK. And then you'll reap benefits because you'll get much more engagement, your emails will be much more effective. And also people are much less likely to opt out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I love that it's the marketing automation superpower. That's the only way I'm going to describe it moving forward. So I'm just conscious of time, Mike. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And this week, I really wanted to talk about subject lines. Now subject lines are so important within emails, and within ebooks, within ADS, everything like that. But if we focus in on emails, how do you think different subject lines make a difference in engagement rate? And what are some of the best subject lines that have made you open an email?
Mike: I love this question. Because there's, there's so much focus on the minor things. And so little focus on the things that really matter. So you'll read endless studies that have analysed you know, the optimum number of characters in the subject line, or, you know, people talking about you should use title case rather than sentence case. So you have a few more capitals to make people open. And the truth is these, these make a difference. But the difference is really tiny. What really matters is something people care about. And I think the interesting thing is, subject lines are important, but from addresses are very, very important too. And I mean, I've had emails where I know I open it, because it's the from address, it's got nothing to do with the subject line. I mean, do you see the same thing?
Hannah: Yes. What a brilliant point. Yeah, the from email is so important. Because if it's just from a standard marketinging app named your B2B dot com, you know, it's not personalised, you know, no one's made any effort for you. But if you have that real person behind the email, it makes such a difference.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you know, I give a shout. I just remember one email recently, that really, I think gets a lot of white people open emails. And it was for an organisation called Zen pilots in pilot are a company that helps agencies optimise their processes. So for me, it's really relevant. And in fact, it's so relevant, that I actually downloaded one of their tools. And the tool was amazing. It was really good. So, you know, immediately I was engaged. Everything was sent by a guy called Jeff Cypher. I believe that's his real name, but it's a very memorable name. So he's a lucky guy there. And then the next time the email comes in, I'm already thinking about the tool I've used on process definition. And I'm thinking this guy's got great fun Hmm, last time I opened an email, it was brilliant. I want to open the next email. And then I can't remember he sent me through a worksheet or something that again, was, was really thoughtful. It's a really good tool. And then he sent me through a couple of personalised kind of offers to try and move me down that funnel. And I think lots of things were at play there, the subject lines, they weren't that great. I mean, they kind of refer to what what he said before, but you know, they weren't particularly innovative or creative or, and as I remember, they weren't even titled case of a sentence case. So you know, they weren't going to optimise like mad on the subject line. But because of that history, and that interaction I had, I open the email. And so I think, yes, we can look at subject lines, and we can optimise them, and you can read the MailChimp or whoever's report on, you know, this is a way to structure structure subject lines. But actually, what you've got to do is build trust. If you build trust and engagement, people will open your email. And you can pretty much get away with any subject line. If you've got that trust and engagement.
Hannah: That's some brilliant insight. Like I absolutely love that. It's about trust. It's about the content. Yes, you can do all these optimizations. But if your core content piece isn't delivering the value, then it's not going to make a difference. Anyway.
Mike: That's beautifully summarised. You've summarised about half an hour of my waffling in two sentences.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic conversation.
Mike: Thanks so much, Hannah. And hopefully we'll have everybody else listening to the next episode of The Marketinging Automation Moment.
Thanks for listening to the Marketinging Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
Crossover Episode - Can AI Really Support Content Generation?
Everywhere you look, everything is about AI. But how can AI actually support content generation? In this special episode of the podcast, Napier’s Mike Maynard and Hannah Kelly discuss the capabilities of AI in marketing automation platforms. They also chat about how email signatures can be leveraged by marketers, what to consider when writing subject lines and how companies can grow their subscriber database.
Check out this crossover episode with Napier’s sister podcast, The Marketing Automation Moment, sharing the latest news, views and tips from the world of marketing automation.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Time Stamps
[01:03.0] – Will AI make our lives easier?
[04:44.0] – Can we use AI and generative AI to optimise campaigns?
[10:33.0] – Email signatures – how can marketers maximise their impact.
[12:51.0] – The challenges of growing subscriber databases whilst complying with GDPR.
[17:39.0] – How to write a good subject line.
Quotes
“Do you just want to be average in your marketing automation? Or do you want to create something that is above average? People who are above average will do better than AI.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
“AI can be a great start but if you think it’s going to replace you, unfortunately the good news is you’re job safe, the bad news is you’ve still got to do some work.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
Follow Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Mike: Welcome to marketinging B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Because it's summer and I'm away on my holidays. This week we've got a special episode from our sister podcast, the Marketinging Automation Moment. So if you as a marketinger use marketinging automation tools of any sort, take a listen to this podcast. Maybe it's something you want to subscribe to in the future.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketinging automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast.
Mike: Today we talk about AI. And that's probably enough to get most of you listening. But I promise if you do listen to the podcast, there'll be lots more as well, including things like how to write a great subject line.
Hannah: So welcome back. Mike, you just got back from another trip in the US. How was it?
Mike: It was great. Actually, I'm feeling a little bit jet lagged. But really keen to have another chat about marketinging automation. Well,
Hannah: I appreciate you making the time. I've got a lot to talk UVU about. So I'm really excited to just dive straight in. I mean, the first thing that I've seen is actually having a scroll through Actos website earlier this week. And it's no surprise that a lot of content is about AI. Everywhere you look, everything's about AI. But I think one thing that's really interesting, which I'd like to dive into is, how can AI actually support content generation within marketinging automation platforms? So how effective is it for emails, landing pages? Will it make people's lives easier? Or are they going down a path that perhaps isn't right to get that high quality content they need?
Mike: I love that question. Hana. I mean, I think it's really interesting. The truth is, you know, speaking as an engineer, it's actually really easy to integrate something like chat GPT into a product today. And so because chat GPT is the hottest thing on the planet, apparently, I think most of the marketing automation companies are looking at going this is an easy one, we've just got to do it. So they're all integrating generative AI. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think, you know, firstly, we've got to look at this, you know, people are saying, well, we want generative AI to create personal emails for everybody in my database. Actually, they're not even using basic marketinging, automation, personalization tools. So, you know, for people to suddenly think that personalization is the greatest thing, because they've been really lazy. And now it feels a bit easier. That's probably not the right way to go. Personalization is important. But maybe AI is not the right thing to use. So I think it's gonna be interesting. But I think the thing you've got to remember is that AI and I'm sure I've said this to you before, a number of times, it tries to predict the most likely next word, I mean, that's fundamentally how generative AI works. And so what it's trying to do is be average. So the question is, do you just want to be average in your marketinging automation? Or do you want to generate something's above average, so if you're really good, generative AI might be great for ideas and giving you a start, but actually, it's not going to remove the work of really polishing that email, or really getting that landing page, right? Because people are above average, will actually do better than AI.
Hannah: I love that so much above average. And I think when it comes to B2B as well, having this technical content that we have to write is even more important that yes, you can use this API to draft the first kind of landing page or the first email, but you still need those experts to put that input and put their insight to make it this high quality piece of content.
Mike: You're so right. I mean, it's another great point, you know, generative AI is, is what really geeky people like me call a stochastic process is based on probability. And it's been trained on history. So if you're writing a landing page about something that's a completely new, innovative product, why should AI which is trying to predict words based upon what was said, in the past, generate a great landing page, if you've got a product that's very similar to lots of other products, maybe AI is going to generate a pretty decent landing page. But I think, where we're looking at promoting new technologies and new products, that's where AI is really going to start to struggle. So again, it does come back to the fact that, you know, I don't think it's a bad thing to use it. But I think it's a bad thing to trust it. 100% I think, really, you know, what people need to be doing is using AI. I mean, the classic thing is, you know, if you've got writer's block, you're sat there thinking, I have no idea what to write, then AI can be a great start. But if you think it's going to replace you, unfortunately, you know, the good news is your job safe. The bad news is you still got to do some work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I guess just extend on that a little bit. Mike Lee, looking at this AI and this generative AI, how can we use it to optimise campaigns, is it something that we should be using more for optimising campaigns or when we're actually trying to break out 20 marketings a new client is a new product, where would you think it fits best?
Mike: So now I feel a bit geeky, because generative AI is the AI that creates content, whereas other AI technologies and machine learning will actually learn from what you've done. And then try and optimise. So you know, what's generative AI might produce, in theory, a good set of copy, what you need is different sorts of AI that are going to measure how well your campaign has been received. And look at how changes can impact the performance. Now the problem is, is what's going to happen is the people going to run AI across previous campaigns, and then try and use those previous campaigns to dictate how to optimise the new campaign. If you're running lots of similar campaigns, happy days, that's going to work. But if you're running something very new, or targeting a new audience, there may be what worked before isn't necessarily optimum for today. So again, I think AI is fascinating. It's something that that's definitely going to help in optimization. And let's be honest, you know, most of us are doing things like running, you know, Google Pay per click campaigns, whether it's search with display, we're already using AI to optimise it, we're quite happily buying into the Google AI world. So we're gonna use it. But I think sometimes the marketinging automation need to take a step back and say, Actually, I'm doing something new. And maybe I need to take a new approach a different approach, rather than replicate exactly what I've done when I was talking to a different audience about a different product.
Hannah: I love that mindset. Mike, I think it's definitely something to consider. And I think it's something that industry will learn, because you'll soon see if the results aren't the same for a similar campaign as they are for new campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you're right, you know, if you just let AI run, it'll optimise some campaigns brilliantly, other campaigns, not so much. And I think, again, AI is going to be a tool AI is not the solution. And I think if you look at what happens with technology, technology very rarely replaces complete functions, what technology does, it replaces processes, and little aspects. And my view is, is that where we see this magic marketinging AI that comes in and does all your marketinging for you, you just go run marketinging campaign, I'll see you on Friday. And it all runs, I don't think that's going to be the way I actually you know, has an impact, what I personally think is AI is going to be everywhere, some of the time, you're not even really going to see it. And it will be all over the place in all of the different martech tools, doing little optimizations or creating content suggestions, or, you know, even maybe generating some of the content. And I think it's just going to be embedded everywhere. And that's where it's gonna get really exciting, because you're just gonna get that AI to do a little bit here a little bit here a little bit here, suddenly, you've saved yourself, maybe 50% 75% of the time to run a campaign. But you're still in there, you're still doing that direction, and where it's appropriate, you're still providing that kind of subjective judgement.
Hannah: Absolutely, I think it leads back into a nice point of the next thing I want to talk about. And that is around events. And we know as marketingers that perhaps the companies that we work with, and our prospects, and our clients aren't always the best utilising marketing automation when it comes to events. But as you said, AI is going to be embedded into systems now is going to be there when you don't even notice it. And I think this is going to be one of the key areas that we actually see time saved, where it can be the most efficient is building these event follow ups these fantastic to beat you. webinar follow up webinar registration emails, I think they're I see the real value from the marketinging perspective, or where AI to make a real difference very quickly, within the marketinging teams.
Mike: Yeah, and obviously, you know, you know about this, because you do all the follow up for napery webinars. So, you know, you have this problem of creating these follow up emails, and typically, they follow us fairly standard kind of format. And I think, you know, that's where AI is really going to come into its own, you know, the thank you for attending, here's a replay, we don't need to type that email, again, you know, an average email is going to be good enough for that. So I completely agree with you, Hannah. I think AI is going to have an impact in this event follow up. And hopefully, it's going to mean that people have, you know, more personalised and more thoughtful follow up, because they're not spending all the time on kind of the mechanical basics that you have to do after an event.
Hannah: I think the key thing there, Mike is thoughtful, because marketingers can sometimes be let down where they're rushing, they're just doing these bland kind of mass emails. But we know that personalization makes a difference. And if you can utilise tools to make that difference, and especially I think events have come back. I mean, I was on a meeting on Monday, and we were talking about how we couldn't believe the attendance at the events, you know, B2B or UK across the globe. And I think as the world kind of still goes down that events route, it's just going to be amazing to see the kind of follow up that comes from being able to utilise these tools, and then also them channelling investment from these events because they've been able to do this real personalised outreach was not a lot of effort.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean, if we look at what's happening, there's real evidence people want human to human contact, they want to see people's personality. It's something that's talked a lot about in B2B. And you get that trade shows, you get to meet people, you get to fill their personalities. And I think that's, you know, another reason whilst AI can come in, and it can make a massive difference for our job day to day, it's probably not gonna replace us at least hopefully, it's not replaced. So fingers crossed. So I mean, I know we can speak about AI for a good another 20 minutes, Mike, but I do want to steer us into a slightly different direction. And that is email signatures. And this is something that we've not yet discussed on the podcast. And it's something that I really believe is overlooked. I mean, at Napier, I spent a lot of time working with our IT engineer to build personalised signatures based on the accounts, people work on our case studies, our awards, and HubSpot actually released a blog recently that said that 77.8% of users check their email inbox more than five times a day. And so actually, email signatures can be such a fantastic way to improve brand awareness. What's your opinion on them?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I love the way HubSpot went in and said people check email, therefore, signatures are important. I mean, that kind of was a bit of a jump there. But having said that, you're absolutely right, when you do use email signatures, then absolutely, you can get some really good value. And I've seen clients use automated email signatures for all sorts of things. That Classic is, when you're nominated for award to get people to vote, and the clients that do that get great response. So it's really clear these people checking emails five times a day, actually read to the bottom of the email, and they actually do look at signatures. And the great thing about a signature is if you're interacting with someone on a frequent basis, maybe they don't notice the signature the first time they get an email from you. But when they're getting emails, you know, maybe once a day, twice a day, whatever. Suddenly that signature starts having impacts, it keeps getting repeated. So I'm a massive believer. And as you know, we've got technology and API's that will put in dynamic signatures based upon who's sending the email and, as you say, you know, for example, the accounts they're working on. So it makes a huge difference. And I think it's sometimes a bit unsexy, in a bit underrated in terms of a marketinging tactic. And a lot more B2B companies could actually think about what they put in the signatures, and they could think about changing the signatures, for example, depending upon who they're sending to, or who's sending the email that then lets those signatures feel, you know, really customised and personal.
Hannah: I love this mic. I think it's the first time we've wholeheartedly agreed on something.
Mike: Well, it's nice for there to be a first time I'm sure we've got another story so we can return to normal.
Hannah: So thanks for that insight, like I mean, slightly moving on back into more than marketing automation platforms. And I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts around ways that companies can not only maintain, but also grow a subscriber list of in their databases. And I think there are challenges here with GDPR compliance if you require opt in. So what kinds of things can companies do to overcome this?
Mike: Etc. Interesting, I think the first thing to say is that GDPR is important to understand what the rules say. And in B2B, obviously, with some exceptions, you actually don't need explicit opt in. But a lot of companies choose to go that way. And that is not a bad thing. So they're actually choosing to focus on quality rather than quantity. And clearly, for growing a list, as you said, opting in or requiring someone to opt in, is actually going to make it harder to grow the list. But on the other side, that quality is going to be better. So you know, it's something you need to decide. And we have clients who take both they take the legitimate interest approach, and they take the opt in approach. And I think once you've decided that, that then defines a lot about what you do in terms of growing that list. And you.
Hannah: Absolutely, and I think there are ways that if you do this opt in way that you can still do incentives to encourage people to opt in. So we could do things like popups, you could do things such as all make sure you do tick this box and have a chance to get a discount on one of the products. I think there's more creative out of the box ways that you don't have to be limited to get those people to opt in.
Mike: I totally agree. I mean, one of our best tactics for a client is when people choose not to opt in, we just pop up in Marketingo on the landing page, a little box that just says Are you really sure you don't opt in? And I think, you know, one of the dangers is is that now it's almost a default to say, I don't want to opt in. But actually when people think about it, they go, Oh, actually, I quite like the supplier. They could give me some useful information. Maybe I do want to opt in. So I think that there's lots of things you can do to think about getting people to fill that form in getting them to opt in if you've got an opt in process. And then also, we're thinking about retaining those people on the database and making sure you send them good quality content, so they don't opt out.
Hannah: That's such a good point, the growing is as important as it is maintaining, and you have to engage your contacts in your database. And you have to provide that high quality content, prove that they've made the right decision.
Mike: Exactly. And I think, you know, again, this is this is something that's really interesting, because, you know, some clients will gather more data than others. And the more data you can gather about the people that you're mailing, the more personalised that content can be. And so you know, even me in my my day to day marketinging life, I get emails, you know, telling me about events all around the world, it's like, I'm not based in America, you know, a trip to San Francisco is quite a big deal for someone from Europe. And I really don't care about this event, because I know you're running an equivalent one in London. And that's much closer to me. But clearly, the person who's captured my name hasn't captured the country I'm based in so they're sending me information on everything. So that gathering and that enhancing of the information. That's a really important thing that relates to retention, because the more you can understand your database, the better you can personalise, and therefore the more likely people are to feel that the emails I get are relevant, useful, and not emails they want to opt out from.
Hannah: Absolutely, and it's quite easy to do, because performance within all moto automation platforms have the capability to do progressive profiling. So it's really easy to gather that information, it doesn't have to be a difficult task.
Mike: You're so right when I mean progressive profiling is marked information superpower. But, you know, I think most people use to some extent, but often is underrated. And clearly, what you want to do is you want to try and keep gathering more and more information, not because you know, you're some kind of, you know, freaky obsessive collector of data, or wanting to go in and spam people, but because you want to actually send more relevant content. And the other thing to remember is, you don't actually just need to use forms to do that, you can actually use behaviour. So look at what people are clicking on, if you've got a recipient that only clicks on content that relates to events in the UK, at some point, you're going to hope that sensible marketingers are going to say, I'm gonna make a guess this person lives in the UK, and I'm just gonna send them content around events in the UK. And then you'll reap benefits because you'll get much more engagement, your emails will be much more effective. And also people are much less likely to opt out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I love that it's the marketing automation superpower. That's the only way I'm going to describe it moving forward. So I'm just conscious of time, Mike. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And this week, I really wanted to talk about subject lines. Now subject lines are so important within emails, and within ebooks, within ADS, everything like that. But if we focus in on emails, how do you think different subject lines make a difference in engagement rate? And what are some of the best subject lines that have made you open an email?
Mike: I love this question. Because there's, there's so much focus on the minor things. And so little focus on the things that really matter. So you'll read endless studies that have analysed you know, the optimum number of characters in the subject line, or, you know, people talking about you should use title case rather than sentence case. So you have a few more capitals to make people open. And the truth is these, these make a difference. But the difference is really tiny. What really matters is something people care about. And I think the interesting thing is, subject lines are important, but from addresses are very, very important too. And I mean, I've had emails where I know I open it, because it's the from address, it's got nothing to do with the subject line. I mean, do you see the same thing?
Hannah: Yes. What a brilliant point. Yeah, the from email is so important. Because if it's just from a standard marketinging app named your B2B dot com, you know, it's not personalised, you know, no one's made any effort for you. But if you have that real person behind the email, it makes such a difference.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you know, I give a shout. I just remember one email recently, that really, I think gets a lot of white people open emails. And it was for an organisation called Zen pilots in pilot are a company that helps agencies optimise their processes. So for me, it's really relevant. And in fact, it's so relevant, that I actually downloaded one of their tools. And the tool was amazing. It was really good. So, you know, immediately I was engaged. Everything was sent by a guy called Jeff Cypher. I believe that's his real name, but it's a very memorable name. So he's a lucky guy there. And then the next time the email comes in, I'm already thinking about the tool I've used on process definition. And I'm thinking this guy's got great fun Hmm, last time I opened an email, it was brilliant. I want to open the next email. And then I can't remember he sent me through a worksheet or something that again, was, was really thoughtful. It's a really good tool. And then he sent me through a couple of personalised kind of offers to try and move me down that funnel. And I think lots of things were at play there, the subject lines, they weren't that great. I mean, they kind of refer to what what he said before, but you know, they weren't particularly innovative or creative or, and as I remember, they weren't even titled case of a sentence case. So you know, they weren't going to optimise like mad on the subject line. But because of that history, and that interaction I had, I open the email. And so I think, yes, we can look at subject lines, and we can optimise them, and you can read the MailChimp or whoever's report on, you know, this is a way to structure structure subject lines. But actually, what you've got to do is build trust. If you build trust and engagement, people will open your email. And you can pretty much get away with any subject line. If you've got that trust and engagement.
Hannah: That's some brilliant insight. Like I absolutely love that. It's about trust. It's about the content. Yes, you can do all these optimizations. But if your core content piece isn't delivering the value, then it's not going to make a difference. Anyway.
Mike: That's beautifully summarised. You've summarised about half an hour of my waffling in two sentences.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic conversation.
Mike: Thanks so much, Hannah. And hopefully we'll have everybody else listening to the next episode of The Marketinging Automation Moment.
Thanks for listening to the Marketinging Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Bugra Gunduz - HockeyStack
Accurate attribution is difficult, particularly in B2B tech, but it can be crucial in understanding the customer journey and what marketing activities drive revenue.
Buğra Gündüz, CEO of HockeyStack, an analytics and attribution platform for B2B businesses, breaks down how marketers can leverage their platforms to understand marketing data and the benefits of using specialist platforms.
He also shares his experience in growing his start-up business and the marketing activities helping to drive early-stage growth.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About HockeyStack
HockeyStack is a San Francisco-based analytics and attribution tool for B2B companies. Connecting ads, websites, and CRM platforms, HockeyStack collects data in one place, and turns that data into visual customer journeys you can analyse.
About Buğra
Buğra Gündüz is a CEO and co-founder of HockeyStack.
Time Stamps
[00:39.2] – Overview of HockeyStack, its uses and how it was founded.
[03:46.1] – Buğra discusses how marketers can understand what marketing activities drive people to become customers.
[14:28.3] – Who is HockeyStack aimed at?
[15:15.5] – How does HockeyStack approach marketing itself?
[18:18.1] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?
[24:23.5] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.
Quotes
“Large enterprises don't understand how their marketing funnel works, which sources work, and which sources don't. Are they getting value out of what they're spending on a channel?” - Buğra Gündüz, CEO at HockeyStack
“I hear this all the time from clients - attribution is one of the hardest things. People are spending money, and to a large extent, it's very hard to know what drove prospects to become customers.” – Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier
Follow Farzad:
Buğra Gündüz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgrgndzz/
HockeyStack website: https://hockeystack.com/
Follow HockeyStack: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hockeystack/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Bugra Gunduz - HockeyStack
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Bugra Gunduz
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Buğra Gündüz. Buğra is the CEO of analytics company HockeyStack. Welcome to the podcast.
Buğra: Yeah, great to be on here.
Mike: Thank you. Well, it's great to have you on as well. So what we'd like to do is start by asking people, you know, how they got to where they are today. So tell me a bit about your career journey, and why you decided to found HockeyStack.
Buğra: So I've never really had a true full time job ever in my life. So I can't really talk about a career. I started coding when I was really young. I think I was like nine. Ever since then. I've been building digital products. That was my obsession throughout my whole life. So naturally, it led me to try out a couple different products, try selling them and build a company. I failed a couple times before. But right now lucky sec. is the one that stuck out.
Mike: You didn't find it on your own? I mean, how did you find co founders to actually start the company,
Buğra: both of my co founders, we met while building other stuff. That was a benefit of its I saw how they worked. I saw their work ethic, I saw what they liked doing what they didn't like doing. And when we found a good idea, a naturally had two people that would be really passionate about it, and stick it out with me.
Mike: That's awesome. You've actually like worked with them previously? And got that experience? I think that's great. So can you explain briefly what HockeyStack does?
Buğra: On the website, hockey sack, it says and is an analytics and attribution company for B2B businesses. Basically, what we do is we collect all data about the B2B customer journey from the start to the end, from marketing, to sales, touch points, to customer success, touch points, everything is collected and merged. And then you can analyse that data to understand what really drives revenue for your company. I guess when people think of attribution software, they think of a very narrow set of software, like traditional attribution software shows you a simple table of sources, and how many customers that those sources both, but what we do is we're building a data discovery platform. So you can dig into basically any data that is collected from the customer journey. And that allows you to access really, really accurate attribution, rather than just using attribution models, and showing that simple table.
Mike: So I mean, that's interesting. I've got loads of questions about how the product works. But I mean, but I have to ask this question. You know, attribution is famously a difficult problem to solve, particularly in B2B. So why did you pick that area? Was it just because of the challenge?
Buğra: Well, we talked to like 200 to 300 people, before even starting out building a product. And every one of those people said their biggest analytics challenge was actually attribution. People don't understand still, to this day, even large enterprises don't understand how their marketing funnel works, which sources work, which sources don't? Are they getting the value out of what they're spending on a channel? So I guess that's why we want to work on it.
Mike: No, I mean, I hear this all the time from our clients, actually, that attribution is one of the hardest things, you know, people are spending money and they, to a large extent, it's very hard to know what drove prospects become customers. So I totally agree, it's, it's definitely a problem worth solving. So maybe you could talk me through, you know, if somebody's using HockeyStack as a product. I mean, at a high level, you just walk through what they do, to try and understand what marketing activities are driving people to become customers.
Buğra: So there are a couple of ways people approach it. First, let me talk about how it's set up. Because our setup is one of our biggest differentiators. When you think about a Data Platform usually think about three months, six months at upcycles. Our setup is completed in five minutes. You connect to all your different data sources by Clevedon connect on our UI. You put a simple script on your website. If you have any other software you use that we don't have an integration for the built the integration for you free of charge. And then once all of that data is collected and merged, you're presented with templated dashboards that show you a breakdown of each channel and some reports that you find valuable that you see. So just cohorted Comparison Reports for your advertising activity for your event activity for your organic channels. And then you're presented with also a really flexible Report Builder. So you can go in and think of any report you want to create, and you can build it yourself. People like to build the conversion rate reports by source. And the good thing about collecting all data from all sources together is that you can view conversion rates across the entire funnel. So it can be of conversion rates from an email you sent, which is stored on whatever you send emails to a deal activity. Or if you use your website as a big channel, you can see conversion rates between your emails to your website, so sky's the limit, you can see conversion rates between anything, you can see the lift of any activity on any conversion rate on your sales cycle. You can see how it affects your sales cycle length, which is a big thing that our customers B2B customers, like to optimise for. Yeah, that's, that's pretty much how people like to do attribution nowadays.
Mike: So I'm just gonna ask you a question about something you said at the start of that answer. I'm sure you say you build an interface into whatever product you're using free of charge. Is that right?
Buğra: Yep. And that's because, one, we're getting pretty fast at building integration. So it doesn't have much of a cost associated with it. Obviously, if it's like a really, really custom thing, like we have some people who have their own in house CRM software that they want to want us to integrate with, which obviously is not free of charge. But if we see that there's a real deficiency in our product, then we do it free of charge.
Mike: Wow. So I mean, you know, a standard CRM or advertising platform or whatever, that had a decent API, and a reasonable user base, you'd actually just integrate, you know, whether or not you've already had that. That's amazing.
Buğra: Yeah, definitely. I'm not ashamed of admitting that, like, we're an early stage company, we just got started. The product was launched in February 2002. into, which is pretty pretty early for a software company. So obviously, we won't cover all of the integrations that companies use, but we're willing to make the effort to cover our bases.
Mike: I think it's amazing. I mean, that's, that's really refreshing. You hear a lot of people talking about how important integrations are on this podcast. And yet, they still aren't as flexible as you to build them. So I think that's amazing. I move back to HockeyStack now and ask you some questions. So I think a lot of people, you know, have maybe done a little bit of work with attribution, they use two different attribution models. So you know, last touch, first touch time decay, whatever it sounds like, you're actually taking a slightly different approach where you can go and almost interrogate the data to find out the impact of one particular activity on conversion, is that what you're doing, you're doing something slightly different, are you trying to, you know, simply allocate value for a conversion across different activities?
Buğra: Well, we also provide attribution models, they're the not industry standard, so you have to provide them. But our websites is to say 100%, accurate attribution is a pipe dream. And that is because attribution is not about assigning credit to touch points, like those models you use, you use the linear model, for example, the linear model breaks down the entire credit into all touchpoints equally, but in reality, that is not really true, like the person visited, they maybe saw a certain campaign that affected them a lot. And then they had a couple of different touch points that didn't really affect them. So you can't really know for sure that that credit is true. One you have to compare across different attribution models, that is very hard, like flexible Report Builder comes into play, because you can compare different attribution models, right on the same report, which nobody else really does to, you have to, like you said, really dig into the data to understand the lift of those activities. That table that attribution table shows you a certain channel as x much credit, but you have to dig into all of those credit deals or companies and see if they actually did those. So we give people a super detailed timeline view of all activity across all stakeholders that a company did, from like any source so that they can really add a glance understand what the company was influenced by And then where this is going in the future is, we're gonna get smarter, you're going to be able to understand just like how variable to do qualitatively, we're going to be able to understand quantitatively, which channel had the most meaningful impact on a customer's journey. I think there's a mathematical way of understanding that. But that's what we'll be working on in the future, to make it even more accurate, but I really don't think that attribution models will last like first touch last touch. Those obviously are inaccurate, even multi touch attribution models, I think, are highly inaccurate.
Mike: And that's interesting. I mean, I think a lot of people have seen a similar thing. You know, if you run, say Google ads campaign, you know that it's not just the Google Ads that's that's driving that, but Google will apply attribution, and and, frankly, quite often do it to make their ads product look good, I think.
Buğra: Well, I meant about that. Google just would most of their attribution models, except for their, I think their last ditch and also data driven. And I'm pretty sure that their data driven model, highly biassed? Is there their Google Glass product?
Mike: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, data driven is kind of a bit of a black box model, isn't it? You don't really know what's going on. It's just just kind of trust us. It's gonna work model.
Buğra: Yeah. I think there's a way of like making it work making AI based models work. And we'll also be working on that. But it's just that when Google does it, you obviously know that they're trying to feed their ads product?
Mike: Yeah, of course. I'm also interested about offline activities. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of tracking of attribution online. I mean, is there a way for you to incorporate offline activities into HockeyStack?
Buğra: Yeah, so we were the first ever company to be able to do not only source based attribution, but action based attribution, that might be really vague to some listeners. But basically, all of their attribution companies show you reports broken down by which channel they came from, or which type of source they came from. With that, you're not able to really track a lot of other touch points. So what we invented is, we can attribute one action that happened across the customer journey to another action that happened before it. And that action you attribute to, if you change it to be the events, activities, event subscriptions, that you collect on your CRM, then you'll be able to attribute revenue or any other metric to your event activity. If you change that to be, for example, content consumption, if you're really heavy on your blog, maybe you can attribute revenue to your blog, and you can be break it down by exactly which blog post they read, and really understand what's happening in your content marketing. And you can apply that to any offline or online activity.
Mike: And presumably, a lot of what you're trying to do is make it really easy for the user to actually pick those items. Because I guess one of the challenges is if you look at, you know, a midsize or large size B2B organisation, they're doing an awful lot. So being able to pull out what's important is probably one of the big challenges of usability for you.
Buğra: Yeah, definitely. And I believe that their CRM does a lot of the heavy lifting. Even though a CRM as the interface looks really, really complicated. The data we pull from a CRM is super, super valuable. So whatever you input onto there, we can display it for you.
Mike: That's fantastic. I'm interested in now, I mean, is there a particular sort of type of business that you've aimed HockeyStack out? Is there a particular problem you're trying to solve?
Buğra: Well, we set out to solve analytics for B2B companies with large sales cycles. That's the type of company that has the most trouble tracking their activities, because there's so many stakeholders, so many different touchpoints marketing has an effect. Even after the sales conversation starts, marketing still has an effect. So we're trying to really make it easy for B2B companies to track their marketing activity.
Mike: And when you talk about B2B covers, is this a kind of product that only large enterprises can afford? Or is it a more affordable product for midsize companies?
Buğra: Well, we have customers from both segments. The minimum pricing starts from 12k here, which is pretty affordable for midsize company, I would say. And then for larger companies, I don't think it's that expensive of a product compared to a lot of my uptick in sales tech providers MC that are building like crazy amounts delivering no value
Mike: Absolutely. And I think also compared to the amount of money you can save by investing in what actually really drives conversions, rather than the marketing, that's ineffectual. I mean, the potential return on investment is huge.
Buğra: Yeah, that's definitely true.
Mike: I mean, just just changing track a bit. I'm interested in how you go about marketing HockeyStack. I mean, you talked a little bit before we started the interview, that you know that that was something we're quite excited about. So tell me what you do in terms of your marketing.
Buğra: Yeah, I think in the beginning of this company, I for one didn't understand marketing at all. And we had to go through a lot of challenges, trying to get it up and running. And while doing so, I think we got to really, really learn how marketing should be done in 2023. And our philosophy right now is to make our brand appear everywhere. And that sounds super big. But when you think about it, you can appear everywhere for a small set of people at a time. And once you reach a threshold, once people hear you all around them, they have no choice but to come in, in bulk to asking to do business with you. And a lot of sales conversations, we do start with people saying, Oh, it was long overdue, have we been seeing you around all the time, we've been DMing with experts in your team. Like, we already have a relationship with most of the people that we have sales conversation with. And even if you don't have relationship, we have a one sided relationship where they're consuming your content. And how we go about doing it is we have a list of customers that we want to target list of about 20 25,000 companies, we select a small set of people from there, we tried to show them our content, one, we produce content that is relevant to them to figure out where they hang out. Currently, they all hang out on LinkedIn. So we push a lot of Lincoln content. Three, we target them with digital advertising. And for whatever podcasts, they listen to, whatever community they're part of, we are there. And once that happens for that set of people, we can probably observe the effect of that within three, four weeks, and they start coming inbound or inbound volume shoots up, we can attribute it effectively to altruistic those activities we're doing since we are an education company. And then we move to the other segment of people.
Mike: I mean, that's really interesting. That sounds, I mean, like you're so focused, you're almost, you know, really doing Account Based Marketing, rather than than try and broad brush, you're trying to really focus down but you're, you're not just doing it through classic Account Based Marketing techniques. You're also looking at trying to understand, you know, as you said, you know, the podcasts that people might be listening to, that's a really interesting approach to focusing your time and your effort.
Buğra: Yeah, I think it's either ABM at scale, or it's brand marketing at a smaller scale.
Mike: And it's interesting. I mean, clearly, you also believe in frequency. And, you know, as a follow on question, I'm interested in what the best bit of advice you've ever been given in marketing and how you've implemented that, in campaigns you've run.
Buğra: I've never been given a good piece of advice and marketing. I'll be honest with you. I had a lot of advisors, when trying to get everything up and running when we had $0 in revenue. I think everyone's journey is different. Every single company is different. What works for a company doesn't work for another company, even though it is the same exact company, even if it was the same exact company wouldn't work simply because you're doing it a different cohort of people and a different time. If you give it enough time, every single strategy will work. We just needed to find one that we could scale up fast and stick to it.
Mike: And that's interesting, because it sounds like what you're saying is you've You've almost got to experiment and find out what works for you. Because you're almost saying maybe you haven't been given great advice, but perhaps there isn't that magic piece of advice that you can get.
Buğra: Yeah, basically, let me tell you the story of how this all came up. We weren't growing at all he had revenue. But this is like early last year, we had launched a product but couldn't get it up and running. And then we were following the trivet traditional marketing playbook, like running ads, doing blog posts, ebooks, etc. And at some point, I thought we're not growing. We need something that is truly different than what we're doing right now. because it's obvious that this is gonna take a long time. And it's not because the strategy was bad is because like, we just couldn't make it Soviet something different that we could scale up fast. So one day, me and my co founder sat down, we kept all of our growth related documentation on notion. We sat down on notion we deleted everything. And then we wrote down, what do you want to test what we think as prospect of forgetting what the saw that worked in the past, and basically, our strategies for testing that within a single month. And then we got to doing it. Within two months, from all those things we tested, we rolled out like 70% of them, the 30% We kept was the goldmine, because he got really good at executing those. And we got really fast at getting results from those. Two months later, we saw our first contract signed from a prospect that came from those activities, and then it scaled up from there. And right now we have really, really good volume, I think we're one of the fastest growing B2B companies in the space. So I guess that works.
Mike: That's amazing. I love the way that you started by throwing everything away and starting from scratch from first principles. I think that's, that's very impressive, and probably very brave as well.
Buğra: Yeah, I mean, it was really obvious that it didn't work. And I think there are a lot of big companies, that should do it right now as well. Like, I'm talking to a lot of marketing people every day. And I'm seeing that 90% of those companies don't really have a good marketing strategy. They're just getting customers because they're big.
Mike: I'm interested, I mean, we've talked about this and some of the difficulty around finding the right tactics. And we've also, at the moment, seeing a lot of new tools coming in. And you know, everyone's freaking out at the moment about AI replacing marketing jobs. One thing we'd like to ask, you know, all I guess is, if you knew a young person who was thinking of going into marketing, what would be your advice,
Buğra: my advice would be to go work at a small early stage startup, really observe everything that they're getting from the market, every signal that they're getting from the market, and be able to deliver that company, a, an asymmetric amount of value, by reacting to those signals, it's really easy to do marketing, I think, you just need to go and try it out yourself. And you need the products to work on that product to be your child. So you can prove yourself. And once you make that company work, you can basically do anything.
Mike: That's That's great advice. I mean, it is, it is certainly challenging, I think for people, you know, new to the marketing industry to to go into that startup environment. But I love that thought and the feeling that people would have such an accelerated learning curve in the environment.
Buğra: Yeah, well, the easy way to get into a startup is to provide them value upfront, a startup will always need you to give them more value than they're giving you. So they're gonna give you a low salary, they're gonna give you equity, that doesn't really equate to anything that has a 99% chance of going to zero. And they're gonna give you long hours, they're gonna give you no work life balance. You have to endure that, like in the various stages of your career, you can't really seek out work life balance or a higher salary. You just need to endure that prove yourself out. And then you will do whatever you want.
Mike: That's amazing. Invest in yourself by that, you know, tough first few years. And then the world's your oyster, I guess. Definitely. This has been amazing. It's been very interesting. We've covered, you know, all sorts of things from career advice all the way through to, you know, I think just scratching the surface on on analytics and attribution. Is there anything you feel we should have covered that we haven't talked about?
Buğra: No, I think this was really helpful. I'm gonna repurpose some kind of out of this as well. So
Mike: well, I mean, thank you, Buğra, for being on the podcast. I know that people listening will be interested in maybe asking you questions, and certainly, you know, taking a look at HockeyStack to see if it can help them understand what are their marketing activities are actually generating revenue. So how can people contact you if they want more information?
Buğra: Yeah, I'm really active on LinkedIn. So if you DM me there, I'll definitely see it I read on and that's just my thought and
Mike: that's great. And what about the product? Where should people go to find out more about HockeyStack?
Buğra: To find out more about HockeyStack, we have a great website, good copy, hockey sec.com. We have a live demo. You can go and play with the product yourself. That is the entire product that we put on there like we put the exact product you see onto the website and you can play with it for free without giving out anything
Mike: That's fantastic. That was probably, I think, you know, a great marketing tool as well. It gives people a really good understanding of the capabilities that probably goes way beyond any number of web pages trying to explain it.
Buğra: You know, I think that's one of the best things we ever did. And it was by accident.
Mike: That's great. And I think maybe that's a story for another podcast. I mean, Buğra, thank you so much for being such a great guest on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Sharekh Shaikh - CleverX
Market research is a massive industry, but despite this global interest, the sector lacks innovation and struggles to manage fraudulent data.
Sharekh Shaikh, founder of CleverX, discusses how his platform aims to provide market research teams with complete control of the quality and reliability of their research with access to top-level business professionals.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About CleverX
CleverX is an audience discovery platform for market and product research teams, connecting researchers with >20K senior professionals ranging from the world’s leading companies like Apple, McKinsey, NASA to founders of exciting startups.
About Sharekh
Sharekh Shaikh is a 2X founder in the human capital and the future of work space. He has successfully created businesses that have generated $ multi-million in sales. He has also raised >$1M on his new startup CleverX.
Time Stamps
[01:49.0] – Overview of CleverX and its uses.
[07:52.2] – Quantitative vs qualitive research – Sharekh discusses the two major methods of research
[11:53.2] – How is AI impacting the product? – The opportunities and pitfalls of AI in the research space
[20:40.7] – Would you recommend market research as a career to a young person?
[22:53.2] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?
[24:24.5] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.
Quotes
“Traditional ways of doing online surveys in the B2B space are very broken, it is almost 40% fraud data.” Sharekh Shaikh, Founder at CleverX.
“Companies which create narrative around a product, which probably isn't even the best product, still win.” Sharekh Shaikh, Founder at CleverX.
Follow Sharekh:
Sharekh Shaikh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharekh-shaikh-4591874/
CleverX website: https://cleverx.com/
Follow CleverX: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cleverxhq/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Sharekh Shaikh - CleverX
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sharekh Shaikh
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Sharekh Shaikh, Sharekh is the founder of a company called CleverX. Welcome to the show Sharekh.
Sharekh: Hey, happy to be here. Mike, thank you so much for having me.
Mike: It's great to have you on the show. So we always like to start off with a question about your career journey. Do you want to tell us how your career's gone and why you ended up founding CleverX.
Sharekh: You know, this is my fourth country, I live in the US now, in California in Palo Alto. This is 1/4 country, I've lived in different countries before, mostly spend time in technology. So I'm a software engineer by trade, did my you know this is MBA in Singapore, and then worked in Dubai for many years, and now in the US, but the amount of time that I spent between the place where technology and market research comes together was a reason for me to start clever acts. But what I learned in that process is that this industry is struggling with a lot of fraudulent data. It's a massive industry, which is around like $70 billion global spent. And it's not as innovative as it should be, in my view for the spend that it has all around the world. So we tried to build this innovative platform that solves a lot of problems for market researchers, product research teams. And I think that was the reason for me to start. Clever Axia.
Mike: So let's talk about clever acts. I mean, CleverX is obviously something to help people do market research, can you just explain what the product does.
Sharekh: So if you look at the, you know, traditional market research industry, there are two major ways of conducting research, qualitative and quantitative research methods. Quantitative mostly is related to online surveys, which is a major chunk of money that's spent by the most of the world in terms of market research. And there's a very small 10 11% of money that's spent on like one to one sort of engagement for research purposes. What we're trying to focus here is give, you know, market research teams, the control on the quality, and the reliability on the research by giving them access to the world's top level business professionals, and the tools that they already use come together seamlessly. So think of it this way, if I'm conducting an online survey, I'm hosting that online survey on Qualtrics. What level X allows you to do is bring that survey from Qualtrics into our platform, and connect it to a verifiable, senior, you know, audience to that survey that doesn't exist today. The reason being traditional ways of doing like online surveys in the B2B space are very broken, it is almost 40% fraud data, because a lot of people wouldn't know this. Even if you spend a million dollars, you wouldn't know who your research participants are when it comes to online surveys. So let's say a big company goes ahead and does like an online survey, they have no idea. Even if they spend $100, on a successful survey response, they have no idea who took that survey. So that's the problem cloud X is trying to solve, I think for just solving that particular problem. We've seen like a growth of 5x in the last one year, in terms of our revenues, and you know, team as well.
Mike: So it's interesting. So I mean, just to make sure I've understood this, what you're doing is you're providing effectively a pre selected audience and audience that CleverX has created on the platform that experts or senior leaders in the field that will then answer your survey. So you're getting very, very high quality answers to survey questions. Is that right?
Sharekh: You're getting identified users. So it almost looks like a professional network. So if you sign up on the platform, you can connect with 1000s of people on the platform today. You can ask questions to them. So if I'm conducting research with let's say, Mike, I can actually chat with you and see like, Hey, Mike, you answer this question number 10 on the survey in a different way. And I want to do a call with you now. So you can extend your research by interacting with every single respondent who's been a part of your research project, which, which is, I think, a big, you know, change for this industry that has never happened before. Yeah.
Mike: Well, so that that's something actually quite different. So not only do you get the survey result back, but you're actually doing people dive deeper and go in and ask follow up questions or ask the why behind the house. Is that Is that what you're doing?
Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. You can you can ask them the why behind the particular question, but you can also go ahead and extend your research by saying, hey, let's do a call and I'll pay you like $500 for the next one hour of your time. So for research, it brings a lot of reliability and control into your research process. In today's world You don't know who your respondent is. So it's very difficult for me to say I got a survey response from 100 people. But I don't know who these people are, is it really a reliable outcome that I should base my multimillion dollar decision on? And that's a scary thing for a researcher to answer to the board or to the CEO of a company.
Mike: So, you know, I'm interested, you mentioned this group of experts that you have, I mean, how, how many industries do you cover? I mean, how broad is the actual range of these professionals?
Sharekh: Yeah, I think most of our professionals on the platform are in the US, most of them are manager or above position, you wouldn't need CleverX to connect with someone who's at a junior position, you can do that on LinkedIn right away, what we're trying to do is get you the access to hard to reach business audiences, someone you cannot connect with on LinkedIn. And if you do, they're most likely not going to respond to you, because of trust are spam issues that happen on LinkedIn. So we did a study, which is very interesting, or 1000s, of, you know, outreach, or LinkedIn, the standard is one acknowledgement for every 20 emails, that's how frustrating it is for a market researcher to connect with one respondent. So with clever is that that problem is solved where you can go and directly connect with these people. Because since the money and the trust is guaranteed on the platform, it becomes very easy for two strangers to interact with each other to transact that value for research and money.
Mike: And I've actually had a play with looking at different industries. So this is probably a bit unfair to ask you. But I mean, what sort of industries do you cover? Is it around a specific industry? Or how broad? Yeah,
Sharekh: yeah, I think we are quite, you know, you want to be quite broad. But being a marketplace, you have to be more verticalized in the beginning, then being horizontal. So we don't want to be the platform for everyone right now, we will be hopefully in the future. But right now, we are covering marketing, which is being used heavily on the platform, technology would be the other one, and healthcare and HR. These are the four verticals that people are using the platform mostly on. But there are close to 133, niche verticals in the world for expertise. And we want to have all those people, millions of users using the platform and become this sort of like, probably a bad analogy ever something like think of it like an Amazon or a Shopify, for market research in B2B.
Mike: I mean, it's really interesting because I actually looked at something fairly niche in terms of people who were engineers designing with semiconductors, and actually found some some experts on the platform. So there's certainly a few I mean, where you have perhaps something that's much more niche, presumably, people can go straight into a video call or a discussion, and get qualitative feedback, where you don't have the volume to get quantitative. Is that the way you'd approach it? If you've worked in, you know, one of the smaller niches?
Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. I see. You've got to understand the context behind qualitative and quantitative, I've always, you know, learn this from our customers, you do quantitative, which is online surveys to get collective intelligence. What do you want know is like 100 people have a same job role in a particular industry think about a particular topic, right? That's what you're trying to understand. Like, what's the sentiment there? How are they thinking and feeling about? Once? Once you have that answer, the next step would be qualitative, which is like going deeper into that particular thing with five or 10 people to know the small details, you know, of why that's happening? Or, you know, what are the things that they should care about? That's the context between qualitative and quantitative, but mostly, our platform is being used for quantitative. There are expert networks all around the world, we can solve the same problem around qualitative, like the GLG is the gardeners of the world. And I'm an ex gardener. So I understand this industry really well. But I think most of the problems that we're solving are around this collective intelligence, which is this quantitative online service part in the research.
Mike: That's interesting. That's kind of a process that, as you described, is built in where you do the research and then dig in. I love the way that that's kind of almost built in as a process. So it kind of makes it easy for people to take the right approach.
Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: So I'm interested to know, you know, how do people use this service? So what sort of things companies typically wanting to find out? And how do they go about doing it? Yeah,
Sharekh: very interesting project. So suddenly, we've been seeing like a lot of projects happening on the platform around Chatterjee beginning AI. That's like the most trending topic in the technology world. So people are building these incredible products, in large enterprises or at startups. And they're approaching a lot of people who have built AI solutions before on the platform. So we are seeing big market research teams coming and bringing their online surveys and trying to conduct surveys with machine learning developers on the platform. So let's say they want to conduct 200 online surveys with machines Learning developers. On the other hand, we seem like startups which are trying to find a product market fit in AI application. And they're trying to talk to these people who are CIOs where they want to sell this product, and ask them questions around pricing, or, hey, does this make sense? Or will Google come and build this in the future or charge GPD might come up with a new plugin that can, you know, completely change the dynamic of that particular industry. So those are the questions people are asking on the qualitative side, and quantitative side. So it's very interesting to see how trends shape my goal as a founder is when when CleverX becomes like a massive big company, to understand the pulse of the world, because we will have a very good understanding of what the world is looking for. Because the amount of data that we generate on just these projects that happen every day on the platform is incredible. We get to understand what people are really thinking, you know, and where things are moving in the future.
Mike: So you could almost act as a resource for industry knowledge, once you've got the data from the surveys, is that where you see yourselves going?
Sharekh: Yeah, I think data is a big mod for our platform. I mean, it is still very small, but 1000s of surveys and hundreds of calls happening on the platform every month. And we see what people are actually talking to each other about kind of projects that they post within the platform, or the opportunities that are getting created around market research. That gives us a pretty good sense of a particular industry, what people are thinking in that direction. It's also a very fun thing that I've noticed, the senior people on the other side of the platform, we're participating in research, also tell researchers like hey, I'm going to participate, you're going to pay me this $100 or $200, whatever for this research. But I want to know what the outcome of your research is going to be once the study is finalised. So people in general are very curious to know. Because what's going on in the industry as well. So that's very exciting to me. And we see that happen quite often. Yeah,
Mike: I can imagine certainly, you know, talked about AI, there's got to be a lot of people who are on the platform, who wants to know what the future of AI is. So we're gonna want to know this research that that makes a lot of sense to me.
Sharekh: Yeah. Last year, that was metalworks. You know, we've seen a lot of companies trying to talk to people in that space without naming the names of companies, but understanding like, where's the future? What's happening, even just for curiosity, even if you're not going to spend money, but just to understand, is there an opportunity there for our company to build something or create a service around that particular topic? Yeah.
Mike: So I think we want to explore you know, whether there's any alternatives to using something like CleverX, I mean, you know, we've talked about AI, do you ever see AI being able to evaluate new products?
Sharekh: I think we got to see AI becoming a part of different workflow, CPUs, AI, have you been using AI for the last many years, you know, but big companies like the apples and the Google, you know, the products that we use, but I think now it's kind of democratised with new, you know, alums, and companies that charge up to opening up their platforms to everyone to use. And that's opened up like startups, which can create vertical niche solutions to solve a specific problem in a specific industry. In market research, we will see that happen when it comes to you can tell your AI like, hey, go ahead and create a survey for transportation C level execs because these are the XYZ questions that I want to get answered from them. Can you go ahead and create a survey for me there is a possibility that's going to happen very soon. The other possibility could be, hey, can you tell me what the sentiment of 100 people has been on the survey? Right, so that sentiment analysis can happen. It's happening in certain cases already. But what AI cannot do is talk about an experience that Sharik has had on Mike has had in their life working for a particular company, doing a certain project that AI cannot do, it can give you what's out there in the in the public domain, the data that's already there, summarise it and give you a pretty good answer to learn something from, but it cannot go deeper to a human level and that post political experience a human being has had in doing something and that's, that's where I think, you know, we are different than machines are. And that's, that's pretty amazing, actually, to think about it.
Mike: And that's pretty cool. It, you know, gives us optimism that AI is not going to replace us all and actually that person experience is going to be important. Yeah, I mean, talking about personal experiences and relationships. You know, I know a lot of B2B companies, their market research is somewhat around going to the sales team and saying, check with a few customers see what they think. I mean, what's the benefit of doing a more formalised process through CleverX rather than working with the sales team?
Sharekh: Yeah, I think sales team getting feedback from a sales team is a given you have to do it. But when you run a formalised process, you're putting a really deep thought into every single question that you're asking them. You're trying to understand nuance answers of things which a lot of companies miss out on. And I think the answers lie in the details, you know, most of the major decisions or any company that's found an edge in, you know, competing better in a particular industry, or becoming the best in that industry has always been a detail oriented company, it doesn't happen by luck and float, where you can say, like, oh, we talked to 10 customers, and this is what they want. And this is how it's going to look like the companies which has gone deeper with every single customer try to figure out, you know, what their problems or challenges are, I think those are the winners, you can create an average company, of course, doing that, but but I think the goal of companies, which are using research as as a method to learn more about the customers have an edge over companies, which do not because you're putting in really thought and time into it and figuring things out.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think it's, it's clearly something that's a little bit deeper, a little more rigorous than than talking to the sales team. I mean, that makes sense to me. Yeah. I mean, I guess on the other hand, people might say, Well, you've got a group of people on the CleverX platform, how do I know they're representative of my audience? I mean, what are you doing to make sure that the people on the platform are representative of a particular industry or particular area?
Sharekh: Yeah, so the platform has his discovery function, which is pretty exciting. Where you can find people by, you know, their location, you can find people by in their, in their industry, their skill set, profiles of people on collaborates, or as exhaustive as your LinkedIn profile would be, right. But the biggest validation for me as a person who's trying to conduct research is directly talking to my respondent or chats, asking them questions before even starting my research project, to know like, are these the right group of people that I want to conduct research with, or there are other sets of people or persons that I can go after and connect with, so you can even filter people by their job roles. So let's say I'm trying to conduct a project, understanding how the macro environment is changing SMB, as a sector, I can actually go ahead and find people by their designations, buy the company type, the revenues of the company, and things of that sort. So you can do a lot of filtering, and finding those specific people that you want to talk about, or even test idea that are these the right person or that I should be talking to before I even start conducting research. So talking to people on club X platform is free, you can go and chat with as many people as you want to, just like you would do it on LinkedIn or any other, you know, social network.
Mike: So it's interesting. So you can actually go and almost test the audience for free before you actually commit.
Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. Our goal is to make sure that product researchers market researchers are empowered, they have all the control, and they are directly interacting with the respondent. So today, the way research works is there are multiple companies, parties involved between the researcher and the respondent. So a lot of people in the value chain, and we even want it ourselves to be out of that equation. So we've given this platform we democratises access to each other for a researcher as well as a respondent. And that solves a lot of problems when you directly talk to the person you're researching solves enormous amount of like issues that are currently existing in this industry.
Mike: So thanks, Shrek, one of the questions that people are probably thinking is this platform sounds amazing in terms of accessing, you know, this, this huge resource of people who can advise you on products or technologies? I mean, is it something that's painfully expensive, or can midsize companies access this sort of technology.
Sharekh: So we have customers from the Microsoft's of the world, to the largest research companies in the world using our platform. We also have like really tiny startups, which are, which don't even have a product today, using the platform. So it's, you know, skills based on the need that a customer would have, we see that by giving a sense of his platform, you can reduce the cost of research. So for example, the amount of money that you would spend to recruit one exec for one video call would somewhere go in the range of $800 to even $1,500, depending on the kind of service that you're using. With CleverX, you can just sell service, use the platform and spend probably less than 50% of that, because you're doing the heavy lifting and connecting with these people and talking to them, rather than a new service provider, which is going to do this on your behalf. So it depends. If a customer wants to have a concert service, where they want someone to give them everything. Probably CleverX is not the platform for them to use. But there are customers who who want to take control of the research process and they want to do everything by themselves. For them CleverX makes a lot of sense.
Mike: I'm presuming those customers get a lot of value because of this ability to ask those follow up questions and really take it from just being a survey to be a conversation. Yeah,
Sharekh: you can extend your research and that's the beauty of of the platform is and there are Adding new research methods as well. So we are even incorporating in the new version of the product where you can even do product research. So you can give the product to a customer, let's say you're building an app, and you want this customer to interact with your app, you can just give the app to them to our platform, just sit there and watch them interact with that product. And you record all those details. So what Lex is doing is all these amazing tools that are out there to solve these problems. We are integrating them into our platform and giving you access of those tools and audiences in one single place. And that's not been done before, for I don't know, decades. And I think that's the problem you're trying to solve for different type of research methods.
Mike: That's great. I, you know, I'm interested, we've talked a lot about market research. I mean, one of the things we'd like to ask guests is, you know, if you had a young person thinking of a career in the your case or career market research, I mean, do you think this is going to be exciting place to be in the next few years?
Sharekh: You know, it's interesting, I was just talking to someone couple of days back, she's 21 years old, and she's asking me a question, I want to get into, you know, a tech company, what kind of role should I look for? I mentioned, or you should go into product research product management role in the future. I think that's where the fun is, I think human beings are designed to create, and product research, product marketing, product management, or roles where you get the ability to create something or be a part of creation. Same thing goes with market research, as well, with even larger and smaller industries is like, you're coming up with these insights and these golden nuggets to find two small things that probably are uncovered and people are not aware of, and that could help you build something or build a building amazing service or a product out of it. I think that's a very fun process has become very frustrating with the way the traditional industry has done it in the past. But that's what we want to change. We want to make it a fun, exciting process, because actually is, is an amazing, you know, thing to do research and figured out something that a lot of people don't know, probably around the world. Yeah.
Mike: And that's great to hear that technology is making a particular career more exciting and more fun. I mean, I think a lot of people think technology is about taking jobs, but but you're doing almost exactly the opposite.
Sharekh: Yeah, I think researchers like I have a lot of people have been on the on the other side where I've done research as well working for Gartner. And it's not easy, it's a really frustrating job, you require a lot of hard work. There's a lot of dependency on multiple things that are happening in a particular research project. Yeah, but if you can make it like fun, entertaining and faster, I think you can make the job and life easier. If you can save, like let's say a few hours every week for research, I think we've accomplished enough as a startup to solve their, you know, give them extra time for themselves and their families. Yeah,
Mike: that's great. I mean, another thing we like to ask, I guess, is about marketing. And I mean, interested to know, what's the best marketing advice you've ever received?
Sharekh: I've been in B2B sales for a long period of time. I personally found one advice or statement by Bill Gates, a lot of people might find this very contrarian as an as an advice. If someone asked him a question saying, like, if you're given $1, what are you going to spend on when it comes to marketing, and he said, PR, and I realised that you know, when br happens is you can just create this amazing narrative and education about a company, because my learning has been the best products always do not win. companies, which have created this narrative around a product, which probably is not the best product in the world, still wins. And that's, that's very interesting to me, you know, we always think like, Hey, I'm gonna create the best product and it has to win. Of course, your goal is to create the best product, don't get me wrong, but I think this narrative, this education that you create around a particular trend, or a product that makes winners, that has been my personal learning, I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on this. But I think that's a pretty amazing advice. Very contrarian.
Mike: Well, I think, given the fact that as an agency, we do a lot of PR, we'll be very happy with that advice. That's not a problem. So Chirag I really appreciate your time. I think it's been great. There's been some really fantastic insights into doing market research and and how that's changing for B2B. If people would like more information, or they'd like to try the CleverX product. I mean, how would they go about doing that?
Sharekh: It's pretty straightforward. You just go on the platform, clever. x.com, see levrx.com. And you can sign up for free, you can import all your LinkedIn data onto the platform, it takes you 30 seconds to sign up. And then you can start receiving amazing work opportunities around research or you can hire people for your own research work. So it's a very straightforward, amazing platform to intuitive and simple platform to use. If you want to reach out to me, I think LinkedIn would be the best way you can put my name Shahrukh. under Search most likely I will be the first head. Lucky for me the name is kind of unique. So it should work out. But yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn happy to answer any questions around research or just any help that I could be offered to anyone.
Mike: That's very generous, Sherif. I know people appreciate that. I mean, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been a really interesting chat. I really appreciate that.
Sharekh: I really appreciate that. Mike, thank you so much for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Bonnie Crater - Full Circle Insights
Bonnie Crater, President and CEO of Full Circle Insights, explains why companies struggle to identify what marketing activities impact pipeline opportunities and clarifies what attribution means and what to consider when selecting an attribution model.
She also shares the best piece of advice that she has received as a marketer and the insights she would give to someone starting their career.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Bonnie Crater - Full Circle Insights
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Bonnie Crater
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Bonnie Crater, Bonnie is the president and CEO of full circle insights. Welcome to the podcast, Bonnie.
Bonnie: Thank you so much, Mike. It's great to be here.
Mike: Great to have you on. I mean, the first thing we always like to understand is how our guests got to the position they're currently in. So can you talk to me a little bit about your career journey, and why you feel full circles the place you want to be now?
Bonnie: Yeah, so I live in California. So I grew up in Silicon Valley. And I always wanted to go into marketing. I found my way at some bigger companies in the beginning Oracle and so on, and then drifted to to startups. But every time I did a marketing job, I was VP of Marketing five times, actually. And every time I had one of those jobs, I always wanted to do a better job at explaining the impact of the marketing activities on pipeline, and revenue. Basically, just really worked better with sales. And so I didn't really have a very good way of doing this with the technology that was available to me at the time. And that's really why we built and started full circle is to help people like me, who were really interested in understanding, you know, alright, is any of this stuff actually working? And how well is it working, and which stuff is not working? And that way I can really realign my budget so that I can optimise the activities that we were working on.
Mike: I think it's interesting, a lot of the best startups are people are effectively building something to solve a problem they've had, which, which clearly is something you've done here.
Bonnie: Yeah, it was a big problem for us, I, you know, go to a meeting with a bunch of executives. And in the meeting, everybody would be bringing all of their data to the meeting. And I literally have not very much information about how well our marketing was working. And so I became very interested in trying to solve this problem for myself, but also other people that were very interested in solving the problem, too.
Mike: So you're trying to measure how well marketing is doing? So can you just explain a little more detail what full circle as a product actually does?
Bonnie: Yeah, so we are a software company. So we make software for B2B companies. So this is the business companies. And the software does marketing analytics. It's a package of software that has a lot of pre configuration to it. So it just makes it easy for marketers to deploy, they can leverage all of the pre built reports and dashboards and get to work right away.
Mike: I mean, I guess effectively, what you're trying to do is work out which marketing activities generate revenues? Is that what you're doing? You're trying to link sales to marketing?
Bonnie: Yeah. And that's known as attribution typically, is how, what is the impact of all of the different activities on pipeline, and revenue. So salespeople are very interested in pipeline. So the total value of your opportunities, then revenue would be all the close one deals. So sometimes you can do a lot of activities that don't generate any pipeline. Or maybe you have a particular set of activities or group of activities that you're doing that generates tonnes of pipeline. But maybe some of that pipeline actually doesn't close one. So really understanding of the dynamics of all that is what full circle is all about.
Mike: And what IT companies find this this so hard to work out what marketing is actually impacting the pipeline, and what and what marketing is doing nothing.
Bonnie: Well, first of all, there's a little bit of confusion about this word attribution is want to talk about that a little bit. Because the way we view the world is that there's really two types of key metrics. One is about a funnel. So this is a an age old concept of a sales funnel. So you have leads that come at the top and deals that come out of the bottom. And then there's a newer concept that was introduced, I don't know, whatever, 10 years ago about the concept of attribution, which is really about impact on pipeline and revenue. And these two sets of metrics are really different. The funnel is all about process, right? What's the volume velocity conversion rate from stage to stage in the funnel, you can see in the data, you can see when things break, for example, you know, leads don't get passed to sales in a very efficient way. For example, attribution, on the other hand, is all about optimising budgets. So you can see impact on pipeline and revenue. And then you can stack ranks, all of the campaigns that you're running based on their impact on pipeline and revenue. You might even want to try to look at campaigns in combination, because some campaigns work better when you're doing other campaigns together. So all of this is a technology that's all available now. And if I just had this, you know, when I was a VP of Marketing, I'd be such a much better marketer than I, then I was.
Mike: I'm presumably, I mean, when you talk about attribution, you're applying some sort of algorithm, because marketing can touch people, you know, right at the start at the awareness phase, or it can be an impact to move people through the funnel further down. So, I mean, do you create those algorithms do? Do your customers build them? How does that work?
Bonnie: Yeah. So moving away from funnel metrics, and just focusing on this attribution. And back to your question of why is the fuel find the so hard? The reason is that the the way that you calculate attribution can be different for different companies or different purposes. So attribution, folks that are experts at attribution, they refer to the models, attribution models that are associated with the calculation. And those models take a form. And many people have heard, oh, it's a, for example, the phrase first touch model. And what that means is, you're looking at the first time anyone had an interaction with your, your company. And you're going to give all of the pipeline dollar amount, or all of the close $1 amount to the campaign that is in that first touch. Another model potentially, would be an even spread model, where most, most folks when they're interacting and purchasing something, it's complex, they have lots of interactions with a with a company. And so in an even spread model, you'd take the total amount of pipeline or total amount of, of closed one revenue, and you'd split it evenly across all of those touches. So you can see how in a first touch model versus an even spread model, when you would get different results, because the models are just different. Now, why do people find this hard to do? Well, the math is not that hard. But what's challenging for folks is to try to understand like, well, when should I apply a first touch model? Or when should I apply an even spread model? Well, I think that's a great thing to talk about. I mean, I think, you know, even when you run Google ads, you see these different attribution models. And Google just says, so use this one is what we recommend. And I think most people possibly just click on the Google recommendation. But what is the thought process behind how you decide on attribution model? It's really based on your marketing strategy. So say, you're trying to really put a lot of stuff into top of the funnel, right? That first touch model makes a lot of sense, because basically, what you're trying to do is you're trying to run campaigns that put a lot in the top of the funnel, and even spread gives you a better understanding of how the marketing applies to all aspects of the sales cycle. And you might have a last touch model, or something that accelerates the the the credit as it goes to a close one deal if you have a whole bunch of folks in your pipe or ready, and you're trying to get them close one. So with marketing, it answered the question, what marketing is helping you close one? So it's all about your marketing strategy? What are you trying to accomplish for the company, and then select models that will reflect that strategy.
Mike: And that sounds like good advice for companies that want to improve their their use of attribution is think about the strategy and match your measurement to what you're trying to achieve.
Bonnie: 100% Yeah. And so folks, oftentimes will struggle with trying to figure out what what they want to do. And the other aspect of this is don't run one model, you've had to run multiple models at the same time, because you're because you want to see, not just one, one point of view on your data, you want multiple points of view, so you get a broader understanding of how your marketing is actually working.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things I hear a lot about attribution is attribution isn't incrementality. And so you might touch someone with marketing, but it may not actually have an impact, even if they buy because they're gonna buy anyway. I mean, can you talk a little bit about differentiating between attribution, and then deciding what actually increases revenue?
Bonnie: Well, all of our customers use Salesforce. And so in Salesforce, you have deals, which are called opportunities. And those opportunities can be classified in in various, various ways. So, for example, new business or upsell, or cross sell, or perhaps a renewal repeat, kind of kind of opportunity. And so by cutting the data, based on the kind of sale it is, it's a new business. Yeah, it's always going to be incremental, because it's new business.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And so you're taking this short, you're measuring the impact of marking but you're also measuring the performance of sales funnels you alluded to earlier. So do you want to talk about what What you're doing with a sales funnel and how you're helping that become more efficient, and how that can inform marketers about what they should be doing.
Bonnie: Yeah, so many folks in an enterprise world are very familiar with a group called Forrester or serious decisions. And those folks define methodologies for various funnels. So the one that that folks are very familiar because it's actually probably a 20 year old idea is the is a person based sales and marketing funnel. And so there was a methodology that was produced was actually patented by this company siriusdecisions, which was purchased by Forrester. And it basically divided the funnel into four or five stages. So inquiry, marketing, qualified lead, sales, accepted leads, sales, qualified lead and closed one, which is a very simplified version of you know, what happens in in complex sales processes. But that became a standard so that that standard is a person based funnel, so you're following people who work at companies. And what they responded to about 10 years after that the notion of Account Based Marketing became very popular. And so that notion was picked up by a series decisions, and then also now Forrester in their new Forrester B2B revenue waterfall. And so that methodology is what most people are working from, from which characterises an account based marketing funnel. And so that's not based on people as the construct, it's based on accounts. Now, what's cool about doing Account Based Marketing is that sales teams, and sales people that you might work with, which are, are also focused on accounts. So Account Based Marketing is a great way to actually tie the activities of marketing and sales together. And the campaigns marketing funnel has a different set of stages based on, you know, setting a set of target accounts, and so on until it's a closed one deal.
Mike: I will see you actually Forrester recently been talking about opportunities funnels now where they're actually splitting the opportunities within companies. So presumably, there's this view of the perfect funnel, it's gonna keep changing as we move forward.
Bonnie: Yeah, I think there's always going to be new invention, and a new optimization about how to actually do B2B marketing in the best way possible. So yeah, for sure, there's going to be innovation and changes. The reason that this is my interpretation, but the reason that Forrester talks about opportunity based Funnels is that the focus is on getting marketers to think not just about people, and getting people to do things, but get hold counts, and to drive, drive a sales interaction, or an opportunity. So it's just a slightly modified theme, but person based funnel or, or account based funnel, they both work. And most larger companies actually do a bit of both, you know, they focus on the people, because you have because you people do things. And they focus on accounts, because they're trying to get more cats.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. So, you know, when you've got, you know, particularly customers, they're focusing on trying to improve their marketing and their sales to ultimately I guess, sell more products, you know, what do they do, that actually works that helps them improve that sales process?
Bonnie: Well, the the first thing is, is to really understand and measure how much time it takes to go through each stage. And this is reflected in either a person based on campus funnel. So for example, you if you have the time it takes to go from one stage to another takes a really long time, you can see it in the data that is taking a really long time. So this is an opportunity for discussion, you can have meeting with the folks that are supposed to be following up or we're responsible for taking it to that next stage and discuss, okay, what activities can we do better, so that we can shorten the sales cycle. If you shorten the sales cycle by half, you close twice as much business and in the same amount of time. So velocity is a very key metric that a lot of people don't really pay that much attention to. But for folks that are really thinking through all this, yeah, focusing on velocity and seeing those the impact of changes that you're making, in your process, to have things go faster. It can have huge, enormous impact on the company.
Mike: I love that about velocity. And I mean, it's one of the things we talk about Napier and I think, you know, perhaps sales has been thinking about funnel velocity for a while, but but certainly marketing, I think it's kind of a new concept, isn't it that actually the faster you can move prospects through, the better it's going to be?
Bonnie: Yeah, I can't comment about how new that new that idea is. But certainly remembering that that's an important concept and an important way to help help your company. Yeah, that's a philosophy Sir, a key metric.
Mike: Sounds good. I mean that there's one other part of the product you've got that I'm interested about, you've got a product called matchmaker. What's that? What's that all about?
Bonnie: Yeah, so that's designed to solve a problem that lives in salesforce.com offerings, that helps our customers that are interested in Account Based Marketing. And basically, it allows leads that are in Salesforce to be tied to accounts in the box, Salesforce leads are separated from accounts. And so this, this particular product allows you to tie people or representatives leads to accounts. So you can do measurement prior to the opportunity creation.
Mike: No, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I know that Salesforce is very contact, or lead driven. And it's not really thinking about opportunity in terms of an account based funnel. So it makes a lot of sense that what you want to do is be able to think in that way. at that early stage, when you're first gathering contexts.
Bonnie: Yeah, and a full circle, what we do is we build a set set of software that basically creates a data model that allows you to do funnel metrics, whether it be person based, or account based, or all sorts of flexible attribution right inside that Salesforce platform.
Mike: I mean, that's awesome. I think one of the questions some people ask now, obviously, you know, full circle is targeting enterprise primarily, I mean, is there a solution for SMEs or an approach you'd recommend for smaller businesses that they could take and use?
Bonnie: This is an area that that I'm really interested in right now. Question is, how does a small business do what a big company does, and many, many small businesses use tools like, say MailChimp to send emails, and there's pretty good reporting inside there. But tying that to tying that to a pipeline and revenue and doing more sophisticated things, that requires other products. So I'm very actually very interested in building one of these, I think it'd be great actually build, build a new tool, a new small business marketing analytics tool that actually does the very sophisticated things that an enterprise class product would do. So anybody who wants to, to share their ideas with me, I'm eager to build one, you can just send me an email Bonnie at full circle insights.com.
Mike: That's awesome. I know, I know, there's a lot of small businesses going. Yeah, I'd love to know which bit of marketing budget I'm spending is actually working in which bit isn't. So that sounds great. Moving on. I mean, I feel I have to ask about AI at the moment. It's obviously the technology everyone's talking about. You mentioned earlier, and it's quite unusual. You said, you know, it's maths attribution is maths. Whereas I think, you know, lots of people like, why should be AI? You know, do you see AI coming in and changing what you do significantly? Or do you think it is more mass that is known and understood?
Bonnie: So AI is a topic that's been evolving for many, many years, the concept of, of making a computer really understand, and draw inferences and things like that, like people do. And there's certain cool advances that have been made over the last, say, 10 years. And it really boils down to your data, right? How good is the data? If you have poor information to draw inferences from? If you're human, or you're, or you're an AI machine, you're gonna draw the wrong inferences. So first of all, start with the data, making sure that that's as best as you can make it, no one's data is perfect, but give it a go. And then if you have enough data, so that's another bit of this is you have to have enough information to draw the draw the inferences that you want. A lot of AI in marketing is about, you know, next best action. So what should a marketing person or salesperson do when a potential prospect has taken certain actions? What should that be? And if you have enough data, you can identify patterns that are fairly specific, and you can do things like that. So that's very much where where we are right now. But it's for many B2B companies don't have enough data to really draw the kinds of inferences that you would want, B2C companies have lots and lots of data. So Well, we'll see how these how the algorithms play out. And whether we can be very successful at applying them to be to be
Mike: interesting. I mean, that's kind of a watch this space. And, you know, that leads on to one of the questions we'd like to ask all I guess, which is, you know, if you have a young person who comes to you and says they're interested in marketing, with all the potential change going on, would you say to them, you know, marketing is the place to be or would you say, Yeah, you know, it could be a tough industry, what would be your view? Oh, my,
Bonnie: my view is marketing is great. It's particularly good for folks that really want to use both sides of your brain, so your left side and your right side. And you also, if you also have a real need to have a lot of diversity, a lot of different kinds of things that you're doing every day. Marketing is a great job because The world is changing, the markets are changing, your products are changing, everything is always changing. And so there's a lot of new and fun things to work on. And if you need new and fun things, marketing is a great job.
Mike: So awesome. And then following on from that, you know, you've obviously had a really long successful career in marketing. But I'm interested in what's the best bit of advice you've ever been given about marketing?
Bonnie: You know, I think it really came a long, long time ago, and just kind of remembering the purpose of marketing. What is the purpose of marketing, if you're a B2B market, the purpose of marketing is to make your offering really easy to buy. And also make it easy to sell. So if you ever forget about what you're trying to do in your marketing job, that's a really good thing to remember. Just to go back to that very simple thing. Yes. Is this is what I'm doing making my offering easier to buy? And or is it also making it easier to sell?
Mike: I love that very simple, very good way to you know, focus on what you're trying to do. That's brilliant. Bonnie, I really appreciate your time. Is there anything you feel we should have covered that we haven't that you want to talk about?
Bonnie: Yeah, thanks for thanks for asking that question. So the the new hot thing is to do Account Based Marketing. And Account Based Marketing is awesome, because it helps you bring together companies, both sales and marketing, you know, talking from the same page. I think it's also important as as you're doing, if you're taking on this marketing analytics project, with your sales team, it's really important to make sure that your data is in one spot so that everybody has access to the same information. Oftentimes, disagreements arise, because sales team might be working from one set of data. And marketing has working from a separate set of data. But if you put all the data in one spot, and make sure that everyone has access, and you're transparent about the information, it facilitates Much, much tighter sales and marketing relationships and can make create great success for your company.
Mike: That's amazing advice. And I've actually I've certainly seen that where you've got two views of, of what's going on. So I love that. I really appreciate your time on the podcast, Bonnie, it's been great. I know you mentioned your email address before. But you know, if people want to contact you and find out more, either about full circle, or they want to partner with you to build a new product for SMEs, can you just remind people that the best way to contact you would be
Bonnie: Yeah, you can go to www.fullcircleinsights.com. Or if you have any great small business marketing analytics ideas, just send me an email Bonnie at full circle insights.com.
Mike: Bonnie, thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
The Business That Story Built Podcast: Guest Mike Maynard
Christie Bilbrey, host of The Business That Story Built podcast recently sat down with Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier, for a conversation about how to ensure you target the right prospects and some of the ways to successfully do so.
Listen to the interview here: https://www.christiebilbrey.com/podcast/kscubuefnh6tqe82sm961lmzjqm25d
A Napier Podcast Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona
Farzad Rashidi, lead innovator at Respona, a link-building tool, discusses the origin of the business as an internal tool within the content creation platform Visme. He shares top tips for getting good quality backlinks and creating backlink campaigns that benefit both the requesting business and the providing business.
He also shares how to capitalise on current trends and discusses a successful campaign involving Game of Thrones that dramatically increased Respona's page rankings.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Farzad Rashidi
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Farzad Rashidi. Farzad founded and is now the lead innovator at Respona. Welcome to the podcast. Farzad,
Farzad: Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
Mike: So far said we'd like to start off by asking our guests how they got to where they are today. So can you tell us a little bit about your career journey?
Farzad: Sure. Thanks. So I started my career in marketing at a company called Visby. Have you heard of vids? Me, Mike before?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Their presentation tools company.
Farzad: That's right. Yeah. So it's an all in one visual content creation platform. For businesses. We came around the same time as Canva kind of went down the b2c market and they've now become a household name, we took a different approach focus a little bit more on the business side of things. So cater predominantly to SMB, and enterprise. And so I joined as a first marketing hire Bazmee. And we basically grew, the company completely bootstrapped to over 20 million active users. And the way we acquired all these customers and users has been predominantly through our content and SEO. So right now visit means website is getting close to about 4 million monthly organic traffic. And so lots of lots of trial and error to get there. However, what what was really key to kind of help skyrocket our traffic at this meeting was our Off Page promotion tactics, which basically helped us build relationships with relevant authoritative publications in our space. And those tactics were sort of done all over the place by manual work and spreadsheets and whatnot. So we put it together under one roof. And it was sort of an internal software for us for for a little while, and it just worked ridiculously well. And we decided to release it as a standalone product. So that's kind of the backstory of how we ended up with Respona.
Mike: And did respond to spin out as a separate company, or you will the same company,
Farzad: separate entities. However, we are self funded, in a way. So we are funded by Visby. They're technically our investor. But yes, we were kind of incubated out of there.
Mike: So it's pretty cool. So you did so well, with the first company, you were able to fund the second that sounds awesome. Thank you. So you talked about your off page SEO activities, and that was how you grew versus me. So Respona is basically that internal product you built that's now available to the public. So can you give me a you know, just a brief overview of what Respona does and what people would get if they subscribe to it? Sure,
Farzad: I mean, I don't mean this to be a plug for Respona. Most of us responded as really, you can do manually yourself. And that's actually what I recommend everyone to start, if you're not doing any sort of off page, promotion is better to always start manually and kind of get a proof of concept and see if this is something that works well in your niche. And if so then great. And our respondents kind of a gasoline, a floor on that fire and help scaling things without losing that personalised touch. And in that human touch. So kind of what our platform does is very simple. So from a technical perspective, you can find any website and it finds you the right people on those websites and helps you contact them with a personalised pitch, both through email and LinkedIn. So there's a bunch of different components to it. So today, you would normally have to purchase multiple different tools and conducted them together that respondent sort of brings together under one roof and automates a lot of dirty work and a lot of that, that tedious manual tasks that you can focus more on personalising the pitches and actually building relationships versus, you know, dealing with overhead. Now, as far as the use cases for the platform goes, just to kind of give you some examples, there's there's myriad of different ways in how we use this internally. And also different ways that customers find use cases for right. But predominantly, unless you produce a piece of linkable assets and, and you'd like to potentially get other publications to talk about and mention it, and then those backlinks and those mentions from those relevant publications, help your domain authority to go up and, and help that content piece kind of pass on that link equity to other pages in your websites. And now you start coming up in the search results for your own target keywords. So that process though, basically, just to kind of give you some examples, that there's one strategy, for example, what we call the podcast outreach strategy, and this is what I'm doing right now. Right?
So the way we found a you Mike and team got in touch with your team and found you and reached out was all through response. So responding, for example, helps you find people in your space that I've been on auto podcasts and And, and helps you weed out the podcasts and nobody listens to you and, and find you the right person in charge of that podcast gets you the contacts, all of that stuff is fully automated so that you can actually spend the time to do research on a podcast and say, Listen to feel the episode, see if this is the type of podcasts that we can come and add value to, and then reach out to the right person. And basically ask them if they'd be open to hosting a guest because now at that point, we have a pretty clear understanding of what the podcast is audiences and what they're interested in. And then we come on to the show to help the podcast hosts create an episode, but at the same time, we get indirect awareness for our brand. And also at the same time you kind of chopped this episode into no other blog posts or the types of content or repurpose them. So that also gives us a mention or a backlink from your own website. And that, you know, it's a vote of popularity and other search engines. So that's one out of a myriad of other different tactics and strategies that respond to help sweat.
Mike: So that's such a really interesting answer. I mean, we were out guesting on podcasts as well. And it was really interesting, because we found that our SEO was improving. When we started guessing on podcasts, we had no idea why it was improving. And eventually we dug in, we found out what all the new backlinks were. And most of them were driven by podcasts. So I think that's really interesting. A lot of people are excited about podcasts. But there's more benefits than just appearing on the podcast.
Farzad: Exactly. And you know, obviously, it's not to say we're only here, Mike just cannot get a backlink from your website, that that's just a simplistic answer. Obviously, there's myriads of benefits. Number one, for me, at least, the reason why I spend an hour of my time is because I want to meet smart people in our industry, like yourself, building these relationships. And also at the same time, you know, that's advertising to a niche audience helping you create that content piece. So it's a mutually beneficial collaboration that happens. And that's the type of approach that we take when it comes to any sort of outreach tactic, right? They know that, for example, we applied that also to digital PR, which is I know, it's one of your expertise as well as your agency. So like, the way we go about kind of average is a little different than most people were that basically just span the world and kind of hope for the best. It's like very highly mutually collaborative type of approach that we take when it comes to average.
Mike: So I think, you know, a lot of people here, even if they're not SEO professionals, they understand that the more backlinks you get the high quality backlinks, the better your ranking, and Google is one of one of the factors, not obviously the only one. But it seems to be that Link building is is a real problem. And it's kind of got tarred with this reputation of being a bit sleazy sometimes, so I'm really interested to know, you know, why is it such a problem for SEO to build those links.
Farzad: So it's just because it's new. So if you think about like, in the early 2000s, when sales outreach became a thing, like outbound, I know. And then people discovered email, as a broached when it comes to prospecting. Everyone just started blasting emails to everyone, and it was quite spamming. And now fast forward two decades later, now, it's a much more sophisticated type approach, where now the account executives that reach out to you know your dog's name, and, you know, they actually are reaching out with, with a clear value prop, and it's working for some of the companies, not something we're good at at all. But you know, it's working for some companies in some certain industries, when it comes to Link building is just because I feel like that's my personal opinion. It's just, it's simply new. It's become a thing recently in the past few years. And marketers don't really know what they're doing yet. They're still discovering it. So what what happens when you don't know what you're doing is that you kind of resort to simplistic tactics like, Hey, let me just send an email to 1000 people and ask them for a backlink. See what happens. And 99.9% of cases is that answer dot question is nothing, nothing is going to happen. So wasted time, you just wasted your time. So I think over time marketers kind of kind of learn sort of what, what strategies work. And a lot of it has to do with adding value, right? So you don't want to ask people to do something for you. You add value and create value together. And the sort of mutual benefit of collaboration is sort of what we're advocating for. And that's something that respond facilitates.
Mike: That's really interesting. See, you mentioned, you know, that there's a few ways to build those, those mutually beneficial partnerships. So, I mean, it sounds like you believe Link building is not just something that should sit in, in the SEO professionals role, but actually, other people, you know, for example, PR, should be thinking about the impact on SEO, of what they're doing. I mean, you want to talk a little bit about that,
Farzad: Of course, and, you know, I can I can talk some examples. I feel like it's a lot more helpful than just talking in hypotheticals. So when it comes to link building, the way we define it again, I I hate that term, even though that's kind of what our industry is just because so much negative connotations involved with it. And the UK, you folks call it digital PR, and that I like the sound of that more. But as far as the strategy goes, still comes down to the very basics. So one of the biggest mistakes a lot of folks make when it comes to average, that they try to build links to sales pages and like pages that they want to come up in the search results, right. That's the number one thing people think about when it comes to link building. And like, Okay, I built this landing page of my services page, and I want it to come up in the search results. So let's go see if I can build links to it. And that's just the wrong approach because nobody wants to mention and genuinely talk about a sales page. Right? So let me let me give you an example. One of the very successful campaigns are ran at visit me was right before the last season of Game of Thrones came out. Have you watched Game of Thrones, Mike,
Mike: Do you know what falls out? I've not watched Game of Thrones. I think I'm the only person on the planet. Oh, come on,
Farzad: Mike. All right, you got some catching up to do. But anyhow. So before the last season, the cable firms came out. Everyone's talking about Oh, who's gonna win the game of thrones. Yeah, yada, yada. And so this means the data is tool that's one of the unique features that they know helps to create really cool data visualisations. So what we did was just take the data from a betting website of what characters people were betting on winning the game of thrones. And, and put it together in this blog post that we talked about, okay, here's like when we predict or who the public predicts, to be that to be the winner. And what we did then, was that we fired up response. And then we looked up all the latest news articles that were published on the Game of Thrones. And it's something they don't normally traditionally do with a PR database, right? Because it's not a traditional industry, you don't reach out to anybody who's interested in movies, right? So we want it to be very targeted towards people who had just covered like, earlier today, published an article on like a character and give us a response to helps you find those contacts with the author. And that gets through the contact information. And then we reach reached out and say, Hey, Mike, and I just found your article on Forbes about Game of Thrones. And we just put together a really cool DataViz, on whom the public is picking to be the winner. And that brought in by 60 or so press mentions that just one campaign to that content piece. Now, you must say doesn't have any business value? No, absolutely not. Because, yes, those press mentions are not necessarily something that we're directly selling, right? We're not in the movie business. However, those mentions to our website, are a voucher of popular vote to popularity, nice photo searching. And so what we call link equity, which is means basically how much popularity you have gets passed on to other pages on our website. So now our data visualisation software landing page is ranking number one, because of the amount of credibility we built for our website in those topics. So this is not to say this is the one sites you know, everybody should go create DataViz on. The reason why we did that is because we are in the data was business, right? So there's a myriad of different ways on how you can go about this. But I just wanted to kind of paint a picture of an example of a type of campaign that we ran, specifically when it comes to digital PR.
Mike: So that's really interesting, because I know, when it comes to the links that come in, the more relevant the site the links to that, that's also good. So what you were looking to do was, was pitch this story ostensibly about Game of Thrones, but pitch it into articles that talked about data visualisation. And so you've got that credibility for being a database product through the content of the story. Is that Is that what you're trying to do?
Farzad: Yes. And it's not to say this is all we do, right? So we actually do those and batches anytime it would make sense. On a more granular basis, anytime we put out a linkable asset, or any sort of pieces of content that add some value in terms of education. We have other strategies that we follow, for example, we can understand, okay, what are some of the older pages on that topic that have been published? Dad, obviously, we've created a far superior piece of content so we can see, okay, where else they have been mentioned. And so that normally gives you a lot more relevant, you know, websites that are not necessarily news publications, but other websites that we could potentially reach out to, and again, start a collaboration with them to either give us an addition or replacement. And again, I'm just going through different types of strategies. Each one has a different specific purpose. And that's been one of the main challenges. That response has been customer education, right to kind of teach people how to do these things the right way. And so we kind of had to incorporate a lot of these education into the product as well. So now when the users go in there, we don't just put them into this blank canvas and we're like, okay, you should To start your campaign, we'll give you like specific strategies you can click into and kind of walk the user through that different strategies to kind of help kind of do some hand holding to get put them on the right track.
Mike: So that sounds like you're aiming this product, you know, almost open up access to this, this part of off page SEO, to people who actually aren't SEO experts. Is that is that one of your goals?
Farzad: Absolutely, yes. And we don't actually require folks to be an SEO expert to do any sort of promotion. Because when it comes to getting other folks to talk about users, there's several benefits to it. Other than just the backlink you get to your website, for example, one of the first strategies we ever ran for respond to, and actually nothing to do with our SEO, what we did using our own platform was to reach out to other blog post I had listed, for example, what are some of the best tools for link building or some of the best outreach tools? What are some of the best PR tools and secured mentioned in those listicles that basically would potentially drive referral traffic? So the goal of that campaign was actually tirely? Independent of right SEO? Does it help with our domain rating? Absolutely. Because, you know, there's a website talking about us. But that's kind of an indirect benefit that happens after the primary goal. So, you know, these sort of tactics, I think any business has to do, like, even if you, for example, you're in commerce, like we have lots of online stores, they use responded like, for example, one of them. And that was quite interesting, it's quite eccentric was was a CBD gummy company that basically sell like CBD gummies, that just became legal in the US. So they can't do any sort of advertising, Facebook or Instagram. So what they do is basically reach out to other news publications, blog posts that have elicited similar products or whatnot, and trying to send them a free product to get themselves mentioned on there. So again, every day, I find, you know, different use cases, different type of ways and how folks try to make it work. But yes, that's kind of the gist of it. So it's far beyond the scope of SEO.
Mike: I mean, that's an interesting range of customers you've gotten and so you know, markets, I mean, presumably, off page SEO, SEO link building, I mean, that's something that applies to almost any company can benefit from that.
Farzad: Yes, but when it comes to developing a marketing strategy, you can't say we developed this platform for all businesses of all kinds, right? It's just a big mistake. So we had to kind of narrow down our focus on some of the more tech savvy customers that were, they were aware of what Link building is and what they were doing normally themselves manually. So we get to target market we picked to start with the market to again, the product could be used in different ways. But that from a marketing standpoint, where we developed, our messaging was mainly targeted towards marketing agencies, because first of all, you guys are doing this on a daily so and you normally do it at a larger scale, because you're managing dozens of clients. So normally, these are higher value customers for us, because you're gonna stick around for a long run and also, ideally purchase the higher tier plan. And also other software companies, SAS companies that in already had a content team that already have an SEO person, they already know what they're doing. So it's very easy for them to get the value of the platform, not ecommerce bloggers, publications, we have a small percentage of our customers that are from those areas, and they get a lot of value from it. But obviously, you know, we have to kind of pick our battles when it comes to messaging. So those were the two target markets we pay.
Mike: That's interesting. So looking at the people who, you know, obviously everyone could benefit, but you're really focusing down on who's going to get the maximum benefit from that platform is a great bit of marketing in terms of identifying the target market by value and love that. Thank you. I just need to move on. I mean, it's a question. I think at the moment, everybody's got to ask, and that's that's the AI question. There's obviously a lot of hype around AI and particularly, where people are using Respona to reach out to people, you know, I think there's obviously opportunity for generative AI for for emails. I mean, what are you doing around AI? And what do you think the future is for AI in marketing?
Farzad: You know, it's interesting, bring this out, Mike, because we're actually in the development process. Now. I think it may sound like it's tech ro. saying these things, but I think AI is definitely going to revolutionise the way businesses do business. And it's something that's applicable to all sorts of industries, not just software, but law like lawyers, I don't know, real estate agents, all sorts of businesses are going to be impacted sooner, sooner or later. And any company that doesn't keep themselves updated is at a risk of becoming obsolete. So, as far as response goes, there are several stages of phases that we've planned phase one is going to be kind of creating that messaging. So, you know, generative AI has become pretty good at creating very engaging emails and pitches based on campaign objectives, obviously got to train it, modify it. And we have a mass amount of data available to us in terms of what are some of the best practices, what are some of the best type messaging to work best. And so helping other customers kind of getting to that level without having to hire you know, or contact manager or whatnot. And also from second phase perspective is in terms of personalization. So, we actually already utilised a good amount of artificial intelligence in the background of respondents. Like, for example, we have an article summarizer feature where it would actually read the article and summarises the piece, so that you can take that information and personalise your messaging, that process of personalising your message is right now manual. So next phase of our products kind of go live this quarter is automating data as well. So not only it will go and reads the article, and also knows the author and Li reads their LinkedIn URL. So now we have information about the person, we have a lot of information about the content that you have written, and we already have a pit. So it's quite easy to combine this together and create a highly personalised pitch without having human involvement. And so that's something that's coming next and that we're very excited about. So what's going to happen after is predominantly going to be in terms of putting together these campaigns in the first place, right? So right now respond has a lot of automation that helps you kind of go through these campaigns pretty quickly. But coming up with those campaign ideas, and having those done in the first place, is something that a human has to do. And I don't think that's required. So the next phase of that will probably be actually helping you automate a lot of that. So you kind of plug and play your website and help respond to kind of take care of the rest. So that's kind of the direction we're heading to, obviously. And are we going to have to play it step by step?
Mike: And do you think this is going to be a positive thing? Because, you know, I think one of the things a lot of people are concerned about is once AI is being widely used to generate emails, that the volume of marketing emails can be almost unmanageable to deal with the inbound emails you get.
Farzad: Right? Absolutely. And I think there's going to be solutions to help you manage your inbox after they're already sent out there. So yes, you have to kind of go back to the beginning of the interview where I mentioned, when we conduct average, we're creating value. We're not just asking people to do something for us. So what well, we facilitate with respondents is these mutually beneficial collaborations, for example of kind of going back to that podcast, interview, podcast hosts are on the hunt for good guests. And they welcome good guests to come on to the podcast. So if respondent helps you find those podcasts that are a perfect fit and reaches out to them, and actually does the research to know that there's a fit and sends you a personalised pitch. This is something from a podcast host perspective, you get three or four different pitches, good pitches from suitable guests, that's something that you would welcome because then now you have a pool of candidates of interviewees that you can pick from, right. So it's not to say that this is going to necessarily spam your inbox, but also just putting better guests in front of you from that perspective. So, you know, the way I would look at it is as long as it's done for good, it's never a bad idea to do more good. If that makes sense.
Mike: Now, it makes a lot of sense that he's certainly work with us. I mean, we turn down the vast majority of pitches we get for guests on our podcast. So whatever you you did through a spoon, it definitely worked for us. So that's great. I'm interested. No, I mean, I'm aware of your time. And when there's a couple of questions, we'd like to ask people. So I'm really interested to know, if you're talking to a young person today, would you say marketing's a career to go into? Or would you advise them to maybe look elsewhere?
Farzad: That is a very great question. I think it comes down to what you're good at, right? Because marketing could be a great field to be in if you're, if that's something that you're passionate about, and you really like as cheesy as it sounds. And it could be a horrible for a person that may not necessarily like the nuances that goes into it. So if a young person is listening to this, I would say do look at what you're doing your free time and see what you do for free that you it's not for work, it's not for money, you do it out of your own entertainment. And it could be sports, it could be, you know, it could be whatever that you do and see if that's the type of area he tend to look at as a career. So that's what I would leave with that.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I love that. And we also like to steal a few good ideas from our guests as well. So I'm interested to know what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Farzad: That there's no one size fits all strategy. You know, when I started my career, I was looking at other companies and how they were doing their marketing. And I would try to copy a lot of his ideas and they'll most of them didn't turn out to bear any fruit even though it worked for another business. So instead of kind of focusing on what other companies are doing, what really worked for us has been kind of talking to our customers understanding how they come across a solution like ours. And having that face to face interaction really directs a lot of our marketing strategy. So I guess that that would be something I would say is that I wish I knew this sooner that instead of looking at Laura's kind of look, and works when it comes to marketing,
Mike: I love that. And that's also a great way to get more creativity into marketing, which I think is a real positive thing. Absolutely. So far, so thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm sure. There's a lot of people that would like to, you know, maybe ask questions or just learn more about Respona. So, what's the best place for them to go to either contact you or find out about Respona?
Farzad: Well, my name is Farzad Rashidi aren't a whole lot of us out there. So I stick out like a sore thumb on LinkedIn. The best, best way to get a hold of me is just to look up my name on LinkedIn.
Mike: That's awesome Farzad. Thanks so much for being a guest and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it.
Farzad: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Generating Value with Simple Automations
Surveys can provide great insight into marketing impact, but as Mike and Hannah reflect on recent survey findings, correlation does not always mean causation. They also discuss the importance of ensuring the basics of automation are in place and the simple automations' that can generate significant value.
Marketing automation platforms are often the key to marketing strategies, so keeping them organised is vital; Hannah shares some top tips during the insightful tip of the week.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Eight - Generating Value with Simple Automations
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment the podcast from Napier.
Mike: In this episode, we talk about two reports on surveys that have been conducted recently,
Hannah: six underused market automation emails.
Mike: And then Hannah tries to organise everybody's marketing automation platform.
Hannah: Well, welcome back to another episode. Mike. It's great to be here.
Mike: It's great to talk to you this morning Hannah.
Hannah: Yeah, I think we've got some really interesting topics to cover today.
So I'm just going to jump straight in. I think one of the most interesting things we've come across in the last month or so actually, was that Salesforce has released a state of marketing report for 2023. Now, it had some good insights. I mean, we even wrote about it on our blog. So we know that there's been some good insights in there. But I know when we were discussing internally, Mike, you had a few views that Salesforce was perhaps tricking people into view and a certain perception of these results. So for example, often the difference is relatively small between the top and poor performers. So it's not necessarily the case that if you do something that top performers are doing, that's going to be successful for your marketing. I mean, you actually picked out an example referring to the analysed marketing performance in real time results. Did you want to share some further insights on this?
Mike: Well, I think it's really interesting. I mean, these reports are useful. So I don't want to suggest that I don't agree that the reports are worthwhile, or that they're not beneficial. But there's some things to bear in mind. I mean, you work with me, Hannah, you may have heard me say correlation is not causation before. And of course, none of these reports really establish whether any links that you see, between people being able to do something, and getting better results is actually caused by that, or whether people who get better results are actually just better at doing everything anyway. So it doesn't necessarily mean that if you do something, it will generate better results. It does mean, on average, people get better results generally do that thing. So there's a good chance, but it's not always the case. I mean, the famous example that when I was learning statistics years and years ago, was that you saw that the number of electric power stations electric power capacity in the UK, was growing almost exactly at the same rate as car usage was in the UK, which kind of suggested that cars were running on electricity, which clearly back when I was younger, was not the case. Now that might be changing. But I think there's a lot of these things where two things correlate, but they're not necessarily a cause. So being able to analyse marketing performance in real time, I mean, Salesforce push that it's obviously one of the things that Salesforce helped people to do. But the reality is, is that actually 61% of poor performers can analyse marketing performance in real time. So the fact you're analysing marketing performance in real time doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a good performer. And I think people need to read into these reports a little more in depth, I'm pretty sure if you're a good performer, real time results are going to help. But it doesn't necessarily mean that if you do this one thing, analyse in real time, you'll magically get great performance for your campaigns. And I think that's what we've got to try and get away from. And clearly, you know, what, what companies like Salesforce are doing is they're creating these surveys to generate interest and demand for their product. So they're actually going to potentially push these results that sometimes might not be completely accurate.
Hannah: It's definitely an interesting perspective by them, I agree. I think, you know, one of the key points from this report is that marketers are shifting to maximise value from their existing tools. So basically, Salesforce is trying to create a more demand for them automation systems and everything they can do.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think some of the things that are in the report are quite clearly data that you can rely on. I mean, they had a good sized sample. And it's very clear that, you know, one of the key priorities marketers have at the moment is to get more value from existing tools, rather than to necessarily go out and buy more tools. Now, obviously, we've had a few years of martech craziness where everyone's been spending like mad. So probably, is the time to look at are we making best use of our tools, and maybe even to rationalise the tools that people use? So I think that's, you know, that's a really useful finding.
Hannah: And I personally think it's a great area to be in because, you know, we work with clients and prospects we speak to when we often feel frustrated when they're not using their tools to their full potential. So if this is the focus, then I'm completely on board of it.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, we've all seen the client who's running email campaigns on Marketo. They're spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year on Marketo and, frankly, getting little more value than they would get if maybe they ran a campaign on MailChimp. So I think actually making use of tools is really important. And people when they buy these tools, they look at all these capabilities. The reality is, is most companies double down on a few capabilities that really make the difference to their campaigns. And I think, you know, really understanding what makes a difference. And then using those capabilities is the most important thing rather than trying to tick all the boxes.
Hannah: Definitely. So we are a bit survey tastic. Today, Mike, but there was another survey that I wanted to talk about with you. And this was actually by Insightly who surveyed nearly 200, B2B marketing leaders. And actually, they found that five out of 10 say that optimization of the overall automation strategy is the most important thing to them, and that they want to improve their customer journey and increase revenue. So similar results to Salesforce is state of marketing report. But it was interesting to see the focus to improve the customer journey, because I feel that a lot of the work for the customer journey actually has to be completed offline, in the more strategy areas before it can be implemented and marked automation platforms, rather than something you can just build from scratch and you can implement straight away. What do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Hannah. I mean, to me, this, this comes back to, you know, the finding we talked about from Salesforce, people want to get more value from the tools. And actually, if you're using a market automation tool, to build clear customer journeys, and to focus on measurable results, and in particular revenue, are both going to help you get more value out of your tools. So I think it ties in very closely. But I totally agree, it shouldn't just be something you think about. From a marketing automation point of view, you should actually be thinking holistically across all your activities.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I think there's some great opportunities to increase the revenue with your opportunities within Marketo Meishan platforms like lead nurturing, is such a simple yet effective tactic to really increase the speed through the funnel.
Mike: Oh, yeah, I mean, I think looking at where people are falling off on a customer journey, so you build your customer journey model, you see how people progress through. And you'll very often see points where people just disappear, they don't continue the journey. We've talked about this in previous episodes. And doing that analysis is really important, because identifying where people leave the journey gives you the opportunity to fix that problem. The people that leave and don't continue the customer journey, they're never going to buy anything, they're not going to get to the end of the journey. So really looking at that and optimising the journey is going to make a huge difference. It's one of the most basic and straightforward things you need to be doing with marketing automation.
Hannah: Definitely. And I think that relates really nicely to Article I saw a martec Recently, and they were talking about the top six automation workflows that need to be used within market automation systems. It was quite consumer ecommerce focused. But I think they made a good point that it's obvious that people are still forgetting the basics, and that there are some workflows that need to be implemented to be successful. What do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, when you say that people miss the basics, quite often, there's some very simple automations you can do, that are gonna, you know, really generate a lot of value. So you know, some of the things that the article talked about. And this is, as you say, it's more consumer in E commerce is, you know, sending post purchase emails, or sending account creation and welcome emails, sending abandoned cart emails, I mean, everybody knows that these are the basic things you should be doing. But not everybody is doing them. And they're not very sexy. I mean, they're not very exciting. I think a lot of this does relate to B2B. So even where B2B companies are not doing e commerce and not selling off their website, there are still opportunities to do these kinds of simple, straightforward emails, you know, you've probably got a newsletter, and you probably should send a welcome email when people sign up for the newsletter. And in fact, I think probably if we look at Napier, we're maybe not actually the best at doing that as well. So perhaps that's something we should do too.
Hannah: Absolutely. I think there's always areas to improve. And that's how you always get better.
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, you know that there are other things as well, you know, the the article talks about when people are browsing and abandoned before you get to a goal in terms of a journey through the website. And that can be really important. I mean, interestingly, though, I think the one thing you shouldn't do is to really try and compensate for poor customer journey or poor customer experience, by then sending emails. I mean, I recently tried to buy something online. And I received four follow up emails that were asking me about, you know, how can we help you complete your purchase because I abandoned the cart. The reason I abandoned the cart was the whole user experience was terrible. The amount of data they needed was awful. And I went elsewhere because it was just easy. And so I think again, as marketers, we shouldn't look at one solution, and think that one solution is the only way to fix problems. So you shouldn't just look at marketing automation as a magic solution to fix issues when people drop off the customer journey, you should also look at the reasons why they're dropping off. And whether that's caused by, you know, bad user experience lack of information.
Hannah: Definitely and could you give an example, maybe Mike about how your journey could have been improved in that example, that'd be really interesting to hear for our listeners.
Mike: I mean, this one was really simple, you know, what I was trying to check out, you know, if you're trying to buy something online, as a consumer, you probably just want to give your address, your email and your name. And that's it. And there was this massive, long form, they wanted to know, loads of information. And it was just too painful. To be quite honest. There was also a lot of upsell there as well, in terms of, you know, would you like to buy this? Like, he's like, No, I just want to buy this. And it's difficult enough as it is. So I think, nobody, it almost felt like nobody at that company, had been through the process of like buying on the website for the first time. And they hadn't realised what a pain it was, it may be a fantastic experience once you're signed up. But unfortunately, as a consumer, I'll never know, because I actually went to one of their competitors.
Hannah: I think the key thing you just said there, Mike is a customer buying the first time. And I think that's such a crucial thing to think about, because there are customers who be in different stages. And so their journey does need to reflect that.
Mike: Absolutely. And we see it in B2B as well, it's, you know, how are you giving, looking at the experience for someone who's new to a website, or is not very familiar with your brand, versus someone who's, you know, really experienced, and there's different things you can do, you can on one hand, not really promotes registration, or newsletters and gathering data. And that's not great, because it's not really very effective. But on the other hand, if you over promote to people who already registered, that's going to become annoying. And so you need to really think about the journeys. And you think about the journeys in the context of the individual personas that you've got.
Hannah: Absolutely. Now, I'm just going to take us off to our insightful Tip of the Week, Mike. And this week, I really wanted to talk about what is the one thing you wish you had known when setting up a market automation platform. So for me, my thing is that organisation is key. So you will thank yourself later, if you spend the time setting up the formats and the processes or folders that are easy to read emails that are easy to find. What are your views?
Mike: I'm shocked that someone like you is keen on organisation, you are the most organised person I know. But you're absolutely right. We quite often see clients who have put campaigns into marketing automation system, they've had no naming convention, there's all sorts of names, then you try and find a particular campaign. And it's not too difficult when you've got maybe five campaigns. But when you've been running for a while you've got 50, it becomes almost impossible. And so quite often we see clients having to go back and implement a folder structure or implement naming conventions. And I totally agree that actually thinking about how you're going to structure things, how you're going to name things, that is probably one of the most important things to make your system easy to use in the future.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, I have become a bit of a terror, if you like poor Natasha and Holly who I work with, but our SharpSpring platform is set to all our folders, it's all organised as key. And I think that what clients need to remember is, sometimes they don't account for growth. So they start off with four email campaigns. And that could be like that way for six months. But eventually they are going to grow them out automation platform, the business is going to grow. And so they've got to account for that time in the future, and make sure that they're set up properly to be efficient.
Mike: Yeah, and I think understanding you know, what determines a folder structure versus what determines the name. So quite often you might have in a large organisation, you might have folders structured around different divisions that's very common, or indeed different geographies and then different divisions. Whereas the naming convention might do things like identify the date of the campaign, and allow you to sort an order of date. So I think it's important to think about that. And I mean, anyone who's, who's interested in that I'm sure, they can send you an email after listening to the show, and you're helping them out with your opinions.
Hannah: Absolutely. I'm always happy to share an opinion. Well, it's been another great conversation. Mike, thanks so much for joining me today.
Mike: Well, thanks so much, Hannah. It's been really interesting, and I look forward to talking to you again.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Evan Kramer - MotionPoint
Evan Kramer, CEO of MotionPoint, a tech-driven translation and localisation company, discusses the differences between translation and transcreation and the benefits that going beyond simple translation can have.
He also explains the impact translation can have on conversions and why you should measure their impact to determine the level of translation required.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Evan Kramer - MotionPoint
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Evan Kramer
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Evan Kramer, who's the CEO of MotionPoint. Welcome to the podcast, Evan.
Evan: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Mike: So, Evan, I mean, you've done quite a lot of things, you know, in your career, tell me about your journey and how you've ended up running a MotionPoint.
Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think for your audience that has a marketing focus, you know, my career is quite interesting, and how I ended up, you know, getting into marketing, and then ultimately a CEO. I, originally, when I graduated college, back in the mid 90s, I was in finance and accounting. And in the late 90s, when I went back to graduate school, the Internet was taking off and got bit by that, that digital marketing bug with with internet companies, and so launched my career, really getting into startups, working for venture capital groups, and working for venture capital backed startup companies, all really interested in digital marketing, so focused on SEO, paid search, and in all those emerging areas, you know, back in 2000, in the early 2000s, and so I had the, the opportunity and privilege to launch a few companies to work for some incubated businesses or even venture backed businesses. I helped launch, you know, autotrader.com, back in the late 90s, for Cox enterprises, and then was able to go off and launch another online automotive business. And so really, for the first, you know, the early 2000s, really focused within direct to consumer based internet businesses, where I was leading marketing and really doing a lot of cool stuff. Because, you know, you were able to figure out things like SEO before Google really put the clamps down on the grey areas of that sort of profession, or how do you optimise paid search. Whereas today, you know, there's so much automated tools that that human trickery doesn't really exist anymore. And so I've kind of worked my way through different companies, to the point where I became a CMO Chief Marketing Officer for about a decade across several, again, high growth businesses that were PE or venture backed. One being a home security company in Philadelphia that we ultimately sold to direct TV, where, you know, we were able to really become a pioneer in customer acquisition costs for home security, that was a CMO for a software company, again, out of Philadelphia, that was targeting consumers that wanted to inventory or organised receipts expense reports through software, and then became, you know, CMO at a global IT company, really learning about and first time getting indoctrinated into global marketing, and global digital marketing. And then became a CEO, one for an education technology company that we ultimately had a really great growth story and sold the business very successfully. And then another marketing services company.
And then now finally, at MotionPoint, this is my third time as a CEO, all for a private equity backed company. So you can see how my journey, you know, really took the marketing track and my dream my career and then, you know, then rolled that into a leadership at a CEO level.
Mike: And it's interesting, I mean, I know your company, MotionPoint is headquartered in Florida, but you're based in Detroit, and we don't have many people from Detroit doing marketing technology. So as Eminem kind of skewed my view of Detroit I’m sure it’s much more exciting and, you know, more high tech perhaps I think,
Evan: well, I mean, if I'm sure with Eminem, you hear an eight mile I'm near 14 mile, so we're six miles away from all that. But I went to school at the University of Michigan. So my heart I'm not from Detroit originally, but my my wife and her family is from Detroit, and we recently moved back. And so I think there's a lot of innovation coming out of Ann Arbour, and a lot of the universities that emigrates into Detroit, we have a philanthropist that started a large company out of Detroit called Rocket Mortgage. So you've heard that Dan Gilbert, who's invested a tonne of time and money into the city, and right up to COVID. I think there was a real almost a mini Silicon Valley sort of harvesting in in downtown Detroit. We have now have Detroit Venture Partners and a whole wing of venture. So what's interesting about Detroit that a lot of people don't know is the size of it, right? So from a geographical standpoint, You could fit San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan all into Detroit. So, you know, just the enormous landmass that's here, the development, the real estate development, the emigration, I think, is starting to really grow tremendously. So it's kind of a cool story.
Mike: That's, that's pretty posted. It's nice to hear. Let's move on and have a look at what you're doing, though. And what MotionPoint does. So do you want to explain very briefly, you know, what MotionPoint is and what they do for your, for your customers?
Evan: Yeah, so MotionPoint, is a pioneer in what I like to call managed outsource translation. So what we do is we take over any website or web translation needs for companies all over the world, right. So if you need to translate your, your website, or your digital assets into another language, for multiple reasons, we have a technology platform that we pioneered called proxy that enables us to completely manage that solution, while your marketing department internally at our customers can focus on marketing. And then everything they do from a marketing perspective just gets automatically translated, and marketed into a translation experience for that particular entity. So so that's really what we do, there's really two types of main customers that we focus on. Given that we're in the US, obviously, we focus more on US based companies. One one use case is where companies want to market globally, right. And so there, we do have fortune 500 brands that are in as many as 30 different countries, you know, operating in 40 different languages. And so we operate and manage their entire experience. There's other the other persona or the other big use case, that we manage our domestic companies that for compliance reasons, or, you know, for the Hispanic community need translation, either into French, Canadian, or into Spanish, right. So you think about financial services, you know, banks or credit unions, hospitals, health care, government and utilities, you know, these are companies that need translation to service, the entire customer base, as well as, you know, regulatory compliance reasons. So we do that on an on behalf of them. And so those are sort of the two different the mix of types of customers that we have.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, you mentioned you focus more on the American customers, is that because it's your local market is easier for you? Or is that because there's a difference between, you know, American companies and European companies when it comes to translation?
Evan: Yeah, that there's quite a difference, right, the EU and you know, even east of that the translation market is much more mature, right, the US as as a melting pot, really, probably only for the last 20 years has really been thinking about needing translation. And so, you know, there's a lot more companies and a lot more competition across the pond, right, that have required different levels of service. And a lot of the companies, you know, in the EU, for example, you know, want to work with more local vendors. So I think the opportunities are a lot different, the maturity of the lifecycle that the companies are in, are different, where we seem to rarely Excel is earlier in the translation lifecycle of the company, right. So if you are, you know, just entering global marketing, right, and you're a US based company, you're going to come to a MotionPoint, because you don't know a lot about translation, you don't have the resources, and you want to outsource it first. And so we're sort of that first line of defence. You know, once you're in 20, markets, there's a lot more optionality about how you think about your total cost of ownership of translation, right? You can hire a lot of localization managers, do more in house have a mix of outsource versus INSOURCE. And some were thinking about domestic US based companies, they're most of them are earlier within that maturity of that translation lifecycle. So there is a big difference between the two.
Mike: That's interesting, I guess that there's a really clear explanation of where you sit in that translation market. I'm interested because you mentioned you know, things like financial services, and obviously, a lot of people who listen to this podcast are companies that are doing technical products, you know, where you have a technical requirement, whether it's to better explain something in an engineering language, or whether it's to meet, you know, the legislation when it comes to financial services. I mean, that's hard with translation. How do you make sure you get that translation? Right?
Evan: You know, there, there's a lot of there's a spectrum of quality of translation, right. And at one end of the spectrum, you have what I'll call generic machine translation, right? And that's the Google translate to the world and it I'll even call it the chat GPT is of the world we'd come back to that and talk a little more in detail about about chat GPT and open AI. But on the other end of the spectrum, it moves more towards human quality and linguists, right. And so that that spectrum is around more literal translation, right? If I give you a document with 1000 words, I need you to translate those words. The next level of quality is what we call trans creation. And so if you have those 1000 words that you want to translate, let's say from English to French, Canadian, fully translated human with editing, is what you do, but transcription is taking it to the next level where you localise the French Canadian words from English, meaning that it has a localised slang and glossary involved in how it is said not just what is said, right. And so there's a large spectrum. And so when you talk about our clients, what we like to do is we work with them over a long period of time we try to get samples, we use the same linguists, we measure quality by having what's called a two step review process where there's a second linguist that oversees the first. And so we try to hold to a pretty high standard. Now, where technology doesn't really exist today that is really coming really fast is how do you measure that quality more quantitatively, right? And say, Okay, well, that's a 10 out of 10, or an eight out of 10. And so that's really where there is a lot of innovation happening. Up till now, it's been a lot of sort of client acceptance of the quality and a lot of QA review. But to automate that and score, the content, I think, is where there's some innovation happening.
Mike: It's interesting, I love the way you're making a distinction between translation and transcreation. I mean, we talk to clients and say exactly the same thing, you know, translating the words may actually not carry the same meaning and different languages have the same emphasis. So I think that's really important. What you talked about review, and that still being a part of the process? I mean, how do you handle this, this process of the customer reviewing your translations?
Evan: Yeah, I mean, what we do is we we give them access to all the translations in real time. And so they're able to review it, but I think where we're MotionPoint stands a little bit apart is we actually have a QA team. So where the client is obligated to review where they want to, we also do another QA on our side, when we when we provide the content. So it's another benefit of using MotionPoint versus going direct to a linguist or doing it in house. So that's that extra layer.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I'm sure that that that definitely helps remove some of the problems makes it easier for the clients to check. So that sounds like a really good approach. When you get customers and they start using MotionPoint. What impact do you see in terms of the growth of use of their website? I mean, you know, are you seeing people becoming more engaged and more likely to convert? Or do you see a much bigger impact with translation?
Evan: Yeah, I think I think it's a bit varied. And I say that for the reason of attribution, let's call it right. So if you're, if you're talking about needing it for for marketing and growth, right, obviously, you can measure traffic, right? And you can say, Okay, well, we're getting more traffic, if you're a commerce experience, you can measure sales. And so we do see lifts in that, but where there's a little bit of a blur is around attribution, right? So you know that, and from a marketing perspective, it we're in a multi touch world, and that happens with translation as well. And so how do you know that if someone came in through the origin site, and then went through the German experience, but then came back through, you know, the origin site to buy, you know, so there's still not we're still early in that, in that and with respect to measuring that? So I do think that that, again, this is a really interesting category with a lot of, you know, technology needs and innovation that we're addressing, and and some of it is, you know, how do you measure success when it comes to these translated sites? The other part of the answer is around quality versus growth, right. So the, in the past, you really only had access to human quality, which is very expensive, right? So if I want to translate one word in Spanish, it could be anywhere from, you know, 10 to 20 cents. But if you want to translate one word in Spanish, using generic machine translation, it might be a fraction of a penny. And so if you launch in 20 markets and find that two of those markets are not getting a lot of traction, you also can reduce your investment in those markets by reducing the cost Quality and how much you invest in the translation without having to give up the translation experience completely.
Mike: And that's interesting. And so presumably there, what you're ultimately looking to do is score the quality of the translation and look at, you know, whether the better quality, produces better results is that ultimately what you're trying to do, and then work out whether the cost justifies the the revenue you get.
Evan: Exactly. And it also depends on sort of the client, right? If you are a luxury brand, right, the risk of you leveraging anything better than great human quality, could really impact your experience and your brand experience, you know, if you are, you know, an informational site, that's not, you know, generating, it's not a lead generation site, there might be more appetite to reduce the quality. And then the third is sort of a hybrid, where maybe you are, let's say, you're a fashion site that requires high quality, but you have a lot of areas of your site that maybe have deep links, or at very low traffic, you can reduce the quality in those areas of the site to kind of be more cost effective.
Mike: Especially if it sounds like you know, one of the big pitfalls is, is not matching the quality to what, what's needed. I mean, are there any other mistakes you see people making when they're, you know, first embarking on translating their, their website or other content?
Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think that the misconception is that translation is about cost and how much the supply of the translation words itself, cost. But there's a lot more on the technical side of translation, right? So when you talk about a website, you're dealing with front end frameworks, and I remember back in the early 2000s, you know, everything was, you know, HTML is pretty straightforward. But we've really evolved over the last 20 years and the complexity of websites and and how much is embedded in JavaScript and JSON and the different types of front end frameworks. And in fact, you know, Wordpress, for example, which is the largest market share of any CMS, in the world, you know, has multiple versions and updates ongoing. And so the ability to just extract, import and export content and translate it is, is really complex, right? And so being able to identify all of the changes, change content that needs to be translated, the ability to get it back into the site without breaking functionality, right, is very complex. And so also understanding how to leverage different translation types is complex. Right. So I think that the biggest misconception is just how hard it is for everything outside of the translation itself. And that's why a lot of you know, customers come to us for MotionPoint is because we take care of all that as sort of a concierge outsourced solution. But really, I think the, the behind the scenes, the beyond words component of translation is what's is what's most complex.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, we've touched on AI already, and you've talked about AI translation, and you know, the the issue around quality. I mean, where do you see AI going in the translation market? Do you see it replacing human translators ever?
Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, although everyone in the world thinks that Chachi PT is going to, you know, eliminate everyone's jobs, and ultimately, you know, take over the human race, I don't think that's actually going to be the case here. Right. Just like everywhere else, I think it's going to facilitate speed of innovation in translation, but it's not going to replace what we do. It's going to enable us to have more capabilities. So just to kind of level set where we are with with AI, and chat GPT with respect to translation itself. Google Translate is a neural machine based translation. And so as part of a deep learning, open AI and chat GPT is another form of how it's translating, and they are at similar quality levels. At this point, there's been a lot of comparisons or a lot of research done to see does chat GPT outperform Google Translator devel. And, you know, there's been some where it's, it's a little bit better or a little bit worse, but I call that generic machine. If you think about a quality score, right? There's one quality score called a blue score, a blue score out of 100 would mean 100 is perfectly human translated. Zero is it's not translated at all. You know, we were seeing average blue scores for chat CPT and Google Translate probably around let's say, a 20. You're still pretty far off, human quality translation. But the next level of translation is what's called domain neuro machine translation. And what that is, is taking actual data or content from a specific brand, and training it on the machine so that it can understand the lingo and how in the context of how a specific brand markets itself, and you can train and get a much closer to you can get from 20 to 60, or 70. Right. So I think that the open AI and chat JpT will accelerate the training and move the continuum of quality more towards human. But we're still several years away from getting closer to human quality. Where I do think Chachi Beatty will be more effective is what we talked about earlier with transcreation. Right and saying, Okay, well, I'm going to use linguists to translate, but I might use AI to say, how can I say this better? In Italian? Right? So I think there's going to be areas that will actually help us improve the quality of translation.
Mike: That's a fascinating answer, I think it's going to be interesting to see what the impact of AI is on translation, as well as many other markets. So I've got a couple of quick questions for you. Before we, we finish. I mean, you obviously, as you said, you were a CMO before a CEO. So from your point of view, what do you think makes a really good marketing campaign?
Evan: Yeah, so I come up through the, you know, my mentors and marketing, we're very direct response driven, right. So I'm very data oriented and test driven. And so to me, a marketing campaign is about identifying your objectives, and then utilising the right, creative and call to actions and messaging to drive the response rate that you need. And so high response rates is what I target for the types of campaigns that I look for. And so it's always about trying to think through, what's the message that solving the pain point of your target audience. And so I know I'm not answering by a specific campaign, but it's more of the construct of developing a campaign really needs to be thought through of Who are your personas that you're trying to market to making sure that the audience's that you're buying and your media, you know, match those personas, and that the messaging solves the pain points for that persona group relative to what you're selling. So that's what all it means to line up, right? And then you're measuring based upon that, you know, what has the highest response rate. So what makes a great marketing campaign is, is aligning with that formula and measuring it successfully. So that's really what I see the other part of what makes it a successful campaign is threading that campaign, once you identify what's successful across the, the omni channel, way too many times do I see companies that have disjointed campaigns where they might be running, you know, messaging in social that's different than email, or, you know, it's not consistently messaged, or the there's not enough time to let the campaign mature, and you're moving and switching to a different campaign too quickly. So I think that that's kind of, you know, what, how I look at marketing campaigns?
Mike: I mean, it's great, it's very clear focus on the results, which I love. Along the same lines. You know, one thing we like to ask our guests is about marketing advice. I mean, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Evan: Yeah, that's a bit of marketing advice that I've ever been given is throw away your opinion, and follow the data. Right? So it's really easy to because marketing is a very visual, reacted sort of medium, it's very easy to have opinions about marketing. And so it's really about the data. And the effectiveness of that, you know, I sit, you know, with my kids and watching commercials and thinking about cash wire, why are they still using, you know, Flo from progressive because it's, She's so annoying, right. But I can't imagine that progressive isn't seeing great results, you know, using that creative? So I think it's really about, you know, try to ignore opinion. And that's even with the hierarchy of a CMO. Right. So having been a CMO, it's really easy to have some sort of hierarchy of associate level, director level, VP level CMO, and, you know, the highest the highest opinion accounts, but it should be that the data is what counts. So that's really the the advice I have been given.
Mike: I love that. If people have any questions, or would like to know more about MotionPoint, what's the best way to contact you or try the product?
Evan: Yeah, so I'm available on LinkedIn. You can find me, Evan Kramer on Twitter. I'm Kramer cool. And then obviously, triple W dot motion. point.com. I've got contacts there that you can grab me but I'm pretty active on on LinkedIn and in social media, so you can direct message me as well.
Mike: Well, thanks so much. This has been a, you know, a really interesting discussion. I know that, particularly our American clients, a lot of them are thinking about translation and trying to understand it. So I'm sure it's been incredibly helpful. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Evan: All right. Thank you so much.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Morgan McLintic - Firebrand
Morgan McLintic, CEO and Founder of Firebrand Communications, breaks down what start-up companies need to consider when building their martech stack and why choosing the wrong products can result in losing visibility of what is and isn't working.
He also shares his optimistic views on how AI may change the marketing landscape and why this makes technology exciting again.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Morgan McLintic - Firebrand
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Morgan McLintic
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I've got Morgan McLintic. Morgan is the CEO and founder of Firebrand. Welcome to the show. Morgan.
Morgan: Great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Mike: So, tell me a little bit about your career journey. How did you get to the point where you decided you want to start Firebrand?
Morgan: Well, I was lucky enough to join a small PR agency in the UK. And when they only had 10 people, and then it gave me the chance to come over to the US where I'm based now in San Francisco. And I founded the US part of the business and we grew it up to be about 600 people when I when I left, so it was a fun ride. And then, having grown, that agency decided to set up firebrand and we work with tech startups exclusively.
Mike: So that's interesting. I mean, obviously, the startup market is pretty hot in San Francisco. Is it because of location you decided to go for startups? Or were you particularly interested in working with startups for other reasons?
Morgan: Well, I think that working with startups, you know, it's that's an entrepreneurial sort of person, you get to start the beginning of that sort of company's journey, you get to shape their messaging and win their early customers. And I think they also can be more flexible in what they do. And you can try new tactics. Plus, just from a practical perspective, when you're starting out a new firm, you maybe don't have the resources that a large enterprise might require. And I just, you know, love the innovation that comes with tech. And it's sort of part of the culture here in the Valley.
Mike: So yeah, and presumably, I mean, you know, the reason you decided to move from being sort of more pure PR into more general marketing is working with startups as well. They need a wider range of services from their agency.
Morgan: Yes, yes. I mean, I think, you know, you can solve problems in a number of ways. And most startups, they have two problems, one awareness, like nobody knows who they are, and they need investment, and they need customers, and they need partners, employees, and the other is that they need to drive demand. And classically, startups will look for a PR agency when they get funding. But when you're relatively small, maybe you don't have a lot of news, a lot of new products, a lot a big drumbeat that is traditionally this sort of backbone of a PR programme. But there are other ways to raise that awareness. So it was a natural extension. And plus, they don't have large marketing departments. And so as a partner, the more elements that you can fulfil, just the better the partnership becomes.
Mike: Obviously, being in San Francisco, you're really into technology. And the thing I really wanted to talk to you about was the MAR tech stack. So I mean, maybe you can start by explaining, you know what martech stack means to you?
Morgan: Sure, I mean, fundamentally, it's all that software tools that you need to implement the core parts of a marketing programme for corporate product and, and growth. And for a startup, that typically means someone coming to a website to do something. And so you will need a CMS, most of the startups that we work with will use like WordPress, or web flow. So that you have you can host your site. And you'll need them to go into some kind of marketing automation system. Most of the startups that we work with, use HubSpot. And and that's a fairly integrative sort of platform in terms of providing email marketing, and a number of the other things that they'll need. They'll need some measurement, and a lot of startups will use the Google, you know, from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, all those good things. And then plug in all their social channels and ad networks, etc, to get people to come to the site. So typically, it's the CMS marketing automation system, the ad platforms that they'll sort of traditionally used and, and whatever analytics, they want to for attribution.
Mike: And attribution is really interesting. I mean, presumably one of the reasons people want to think of a stack rather than discrete tools, is so you can actually measure the impact of the different things you do within your marketing campaigns.
Morgan: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, where the finite resources you have to know what's working so that you can do more. And so literally one of the first things that we'll do when we work with a Client is to help configure their martech stack so they can see what works and so that we can prove the value of what we're doing. And then they can adjust their channels and their budgets accordingly.
Mike: And is that the real, you know, issue with choosing the wrong products in your martech? Stack? Is losing that visibility of what's working and what's not? Or are there other issues as well?
Morgan: Well, I think often, at the beginning, literally, the founder will be the person to sort of implement HubSpot out or build the website. And often there'll be different tools in there. They may not because quite naturally have configured those correctly. So we'll come in and help them sort of dial that stuff in. And I think as they scale, they need something that's going to be sustainable for different stages. And as their budget and their team gets larger, that's going to be important. So yeah, those are the main benefits.
Mike: So it's interesting, you talked about scaling up, and obviously, you know, some of the Silicon Valley startups grow very quickly. I mean, if you're starting a new company, or working at a relatively small company, I mean, how much attention should you pay to the needs of today versus what might potentially be the needs, you know, in two or three years time as the company grows?
Morgan: Well, startups tend to work on a quarterly cycle, you've got to get from one funding stage to the next and hit your your metrics. So necessarily, their time horizon is going to be shorter than it would be for an enterprise a business. I do think that they need to think well look, 24 months out, we could have different level of funding different sides of our team, that team will evolve. And maybe they'll bring in a demand gen person, or maybe they'll bring an SEO expert whole build out the whole growth marketing team, that whole product marketing. So this, the stack is going to expand over time, but they need to get to those different benchmarks. And I think also, the staff will change. And so we tend to sort of think about, look, don't go down one particular path, we're only a few people know that try and stick to a stack that's going to be familiar for new people coming in so they can get up to speed quickly.
Mike: And that's really interesting. You talk about getting up to speed. And obviously, having something that's popular and widely used is one way to do it when you hire but in early times, you mentioned that quite often it's the CEO setting this stuff up. I mean, how much of a problem is, is learning the tools, particularly for on this quarter by quarter time horizon?
Morgan: Well, I think marketers love trying new tools, right, we like testing new things out, most of the tools are relatively easy to use, relatively easy to use at the startup stage, when you get up to be I don't know, in marketing automation, if you implement a Marketo system that's going to need a dedicated Marketo person and team or agency to manage, right, or you're unlikely to have someone or you may only have one person in house can do that. But we tend to think that the sort of the biggest risk of bringing in too many different tools is not necessarily the speed of getting up to learning how to use them. And it's more that they will have different ways of measuring something. So even something as simple as website traffic, when a visitor to up to a page, when is that visitor fired? Is it is it when the first assets are downloaded? Is it when the whole full page is downloaded? What if it gets interrupted? So you tend to get even at something as basic as website traffic, different measurement from different systems. And the problem with that is then integrating all those things. You spend more time on trying to say, Well, why is this one saying I've got 1000 visitors? And this one's only saying I've got 800? Which is it? And why you end up wasting cycles on sort of integrating and trying to get one clear picture of what's what's going on. And so that can be the bigger risk, I think of bringing in too many different tools, rather than just sort of how long does it take me to get up to speed with one individual one?
Mike: And that makes sense. I mean, you mentioned you do a lot of work with HubSpot, which is, you know, well known as being quite an integrated product with lots of features. I mean, do you believe that's, that's one of the key things is pick something that's integrated to avoid these discrepancies between different tools?
Morgan: You know, I think so I think keep it simple because it just enables you to implement your marketing programmes more effective. Roughly there may be specific tools that provide a distinct sort of technical advantage. But over the sort of medium term, those features are going to become democratised across other platforms. And so we tend to find having something that's integrated, that enables you to actually implement the rest of your marketing your create, you know, and spend the time on the creativity and implementation or the strategy is probably better than trying to find a tool with a specific feature.
Mike: I mean, that certainly makes sense. But I wonder, you know, maybe if you look at some startups, you know, SAS companies, for example, quite often drive a lot of their traffic, and a lot of their customers from search ads. Do you think where you've got a particularly important channel, it's worth going for best in class? Or is integration still gonna give you more advantages?
Morgan: I mean, taking that particular channel search, search ads, Google search is obviously going to be the primary channel there and integrates very nicely into the Google search. And then you know, you can you could put that through HubSpot. And then we also use lots Google Data Studio, I think it's called look at data studio now, right to sort of analyse that. And so keeping it within one framework, I think, is just keeps it easier, cleaner data, better decisions.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm interested, you know, you obviously, sometimes going to clients, and they've already got systems installed, you may have to fix some configuration. I mean, presumably, other times they ask for advice. I mean, how would a startup, you know, narrow down the choice of tools, there's so many marketing technology providers, what sort of approach they take to narrow down and decide what they need,
Morgan: They normally have a fairly good idea of what they've you know, these are experienced marketers, they've seen things, try things before. So they have a sort of an idea of the stack that they that they like, that they're familiar with. But clearly budget for a startup is, is a big, a big factor. The the skills, can I tap people to do this. So I mean, if they're using WordPress, there are lots of WordPress developers, rather than building your website on a headless CMS that only a few people will know, there may be very good reasons that you want that because you want a super fast and super flexible e commerce oriented website. But for many, they'll say, Okay, I'm gonna use WordPress, or they'll think, okay, look, when I want something hosted and modular. And Webflow has sort of come up. HubSpot, we talked about has its own CMS, we tend to find for this very reason that many, many companies, even though that tool is relatively new, and probably quite integrated, they'll think, you know, there's not a big community of developers, plugins, templates for that, yet, that might change in future. So they, they tend to look at it through that, through that lens.
Mike: It's interesting. I mean, you're coming from basically the centre of the world's technology, and you're actually saying, the technology is secondary, to being able to get the people to run it. I mean, is that kind of your philosophy?
Morgan: I haven't thought about it in that way. But, you know, I do think that, you know, that is a, that is definitely a fact. Because there we've had clients who come in, and who changed the CMS, who changed the marketing automation system, rebrand the company, let's change to a Account Based Marketing go, you know, motion, implement ad roll or something like that. And that takes two years, they come in, and then the CMO will leave, having made all these changes. And I think that leaves the business, you know, it's such a big amount of change. And that leaves the business, sort of struggling to cope with all of that, you know, a different go to market motion, different web platform, different brand, you see that fairly often. So I tend to think, make incremental change to try and keep something that is going to scale over time, so that other people who come in will know, okay, I've got a clean stack of data, I know what's happening, and I can focus on implementing my programmes, rather than debugging the tech stack.
Mike: Sounds like I mean, really good advice. I love that idea of incrementally improving it. I mean, I guess as a follow up to that, do you see categories of tools where you think, you know, particularly the startup world, it's actually not worth investing in them, they're probably not going to give you a good return.
Morgan: Well, let's take intense Data intent data is great. We like that right? Finding surging intent through specific keywords with your target buyers, that is a grey area, it is not cheap, you have to have a level of sophistication to be able to then capitalise on that that data, customise your website to the people who are coming and sort of get that full flow, do an account based advertising to that account list. Now, you know, that is a great model, and really, really works as you become a late stage company as you move into IPO and at enterprise company. For a startup. It's just probably for an early stage startup, it could be a distraction. And so spending, I don't know, a certain amount of money $5,000 A month, let's say on intent based data, when you haven't got the rest of these other things you could you could be using that budget elsewhere on other programmes might be might be a better use of the money.
Mike: I think it was great advice. I was interesting. Obviously, some of these intent based products are AI based. And we've got to talk about artificial intelligence, I think Oh, yes. I mean, the first thing to say is I see you, you've launched within firebrand labs group to look at generative AI. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about why you chose to do that and why having, you know, a slightly separate group is going to be better for your clients.
Morgan: Yes. So I think tech is exciting again, right? Suddenly, we have the generative AI, I mean, AI has been around for a long time. But generative AI is now at a standard where we are all amazed about what it can do. And people are coming up with new ways of working all the time. We've just seen the launch of GPT, four, right, but you can now go and sign up for the for the waitlist for that it's an exciting time. And so I think, just as when the internet first came out, or when mobile phones became or smartphones became more use, we're at another sort of inflection point like that. And you can either hide from that and hope it goes away, or you can sort of jump in. And I think our labs group is there to explore it and learn how can we use this? Where does it accelerate the process says of ideation, or copywriting, or image production, or audio clean up or whatever it might be. And where there is it sort of just not there yet. And that is changing. So quickly, chat GPT only came out in mid November. And here we are, a few months later. And you know, the next version is coming out. We should as marketers, or be keeping a strong eye on that, because it could radically change the way we work. And that is exciting. And so that's what our labs group is, is trying to do to advise our clients and also just for our team, because their careers are going to be heavily influenced by by these kinds of technologies, and we want to help set them up for success there.
Mike: I mean, that sounds like a very positive view about AI. It's it sounds like you see it as being more opportunity than threat. Is that right?
Morgan: Well, well, I certainly think that, you know, you look at the something like I drew the analogy with the internet and where the internet touches a process. It sort of drives the price of that down. But it has also opened up multibillion dollar opportunities for other organisations. So will this dramatically change the process of marketing, copywriting, SEO, all advertising? All of that? Absolutely. Does that terrify me? Yes, it does. And it should, even the Sam Altman, the CEO of open AI, said it does get even him. And we should all be reassured by that. And I don't know how reassured I am but but you know, it definitely, it definitely is going to change us. But I, I feel like there's going to be opportunities there. And as somebody who likes technology and who feels like it can improve people's lives, that's we we like to work with companies that are going to make tomorrow better than today. This is definitely going to have that potential, but it also has the potential to you know, remove the lower end of the market, for sure.
Mike: I mean, I'm really pleased that you've got sort of a positive view on this. And it sounds like you know, what you're saying is that companies need to actually get involved now they shouldn't sit back and wait, but whether it's working with firebrands, labs So doing, you know, testing in house, you know, now's the time to try and learn about the technology.
Morgan: Absolutely. I mean, just look at how many companies are now getting funded with generative AI, or all I mean, open AI is also a back end company, how many are plugging it, you know, it's plugging its technology into every, you know, lots of different organised technology stacks that we use. descript, for example, is, you know, is now you're going to be using it. I do think this is new for everyone that, you know, they're learning how to write prompts for a chat based interface, so you can get what you want out of it, where its limitations are, where its opportunities. I think we're all learning that and there's a can sort of consensus and a joint excitement about that. And I think, I think it's fun to be part of that there are not many times in your career, that you're going to get that opportunity. And so look, if you haven't looked at it yet, totally fine. You've missed three months. This is going to be here for years. And so don't feel like, you know, Have I already missed that. But, but I think if in a year's time, we're still not, you know, we're still hoping it'll go away, and we're still sort of haven't quite got round to it, then others will have leapfrogged ahead.
Mike: That's great advice. I mean, I think the question that would really test your, your optimism here is if a young person asked you for career advice, they're thinking about marketing, given the fact that AI is potentially going to turn our industry upside down, would you recommend they go for marketing? Or they choose another career?
Morgan: Oh, well, listen, I could argue that if the technology like open AI, etc, reduces the cost of production of a website of coding, then differentiating it with marketing, maybe the most important thing to and the go to mug might be the most important thing. But here's something if you're early in your career, you have the chance to be the expert in your company, at choose a tool, write any of these AI tools, you could be the best, because all the years of experience that everybody else has had is irrelevant to that. So if you're the best at writing prompts, or you can use the script better than anybody else, or you've just tried all the tools that gives you a seat at the table. And we saw this with the birth of social media, where people who were new to the companies could be the experts, and that has launched 1000s of careers. And I think we're at the same point. So to your question, Should you go into marketing? I love marketing, so I'm biassed, but absolutely. It could be the critical function. And should you you know, is this exciting moment to be that, of course, because you could be the expert, and you can be it very quickly.
Mike: That's very inspiring, I think for for anyone thinking about marketing as a career. One of the questions I always like to ask people is about marketing advice. What's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Morgan: Well, you know, I think always make your customer, the hero of the story, right? It's about your customer. They want to be the hero. And so whether that's Nikes, famous strapline of just do it, making them the hero or applies to our little agency, we help startups crush their marketing goals. That's what we do. They're doing it. They're the hero. We're guiding them through it. I think if you think about the customer first, and make them the hero of the story, you're not going to be too far wrong.
Mike: That's awesome. I love that advice. I mean, I'm sure people have really enjoyed this conversation. And there's gonna be listeners who want to get in touch with you or find out more about fire Brandon and your labs. What's the best way for people to get ahold of you?
Morgan: Great. Well, the agency my agency is called Firebrand. We're a startup marketing agency. So you can come to that at firebrand.marketing, or reach out to me. LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach me, Morgan McLintic, I'm on LinkedIn. And I'd love to hear from any of your listeners.
Mike: Morgan, it's been a great chat. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for being a guest on the show.
Morgan: Thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Domenica Di Lieto - Emerging Comms
As one of the world's largest markets, China presents an excellent opportunity for many businesses. But how should you approach marketing to the region?
Domenica Di Lieto, CEO of leading Chinese marketing consultancy Emerging Comms, shares her experience and advice on growing businesses in China.
From choosing the correct channels to the importance of localisation, Domenica provides an overview of the differences marketers should consider when working with the Chinese market.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Domenica Di Lieto - Emerging Comms
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Domenica Di Lieto
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Dominica Di Lietto. Dominica is CEO of specialists Chinese agency Emerging Communications. Welcome to the show Dominica.
Domenica: Lovely to be here, Mike. And thank you very much for having me on here.
Mike: Well, it's great to talk to you. But I mean, to start off with, I'd really like to understand how you came to be, you know, an expert on marketing in China. So what was your career path to get where you've got to now?
Domenica: Way too many years on the clock for one. So I started life in publishing. So for many years, I was in women's glossy magazines, newspapers, the Daily Mail group. And then late 1990s, obviously saw this thing coming called the Internet called, that makes me sound old. And I went and work for a couple of clients and agencies that specialised in digital. And I was working across the apple, New York and London. And I ended up getting quite fed up with that and launched my first agency, which I sold in 2011. And that was a front end development ecommerce agency, we were a supplier to the company that bought us. And then when I was looking for something to do, I randomly ended up being a commercial director for a Chinese agency for a year. So an interim job, really enjoyed the market, but felt that possibly it could be done better, putting clients at the heart of what we do, and very much focusing on what do their customers want. So that should align what their marketing should be. And emerging communications was born about a year later, it's sort of like 2015.
Mike: So you were doing international marketing? Was there a reason you decided to jump into China? Or was it just the job opportunity?
Domenica: Well, I think for me, I get quite bored. I've been in the UK digital market and the American market for quite a long time. And China just doesn't stop you just about understand that and you understand the legislation, and all the channels, and then the following day will change. And I like that speed of change. wrongly or rightly, I love the fact that I never quite know what I'm going to find in the morning, literally. So the whole changing landscape of the way consumers behave in China, the legislation, the government narrative just keeps me on my toes. And I think I've just gotten the most incredible team of talented individuals. So I'm kind of with China. I think for the rest of my career, I would think it's fair to say, may not just do emerging comps, I might do other things. But China is fascinating. And people look to Silicon Valley, for learning about digital and tech, and they should be looking at China, because they're good five, seven years ahead of everyone in the world. And that really fascinates me.
Mike: That sounds really exciting. And also interest about something else you said you said you wanted to put clients at the heart of the agency. So tell us a little bit about who you work with who are your clients?
Domenica: Absolutely. So we do work with some b2c, but predominantly, we are working in the B2B space, even if a client also operates in the b2c space. So we work with people like Penguin Random House, where we have worked to basically give them a voice amongst their consumers, because all of the marketing they do is with distributors. So that's B2B. We work in the pharma space, biotech space with a lot of consultancy firms. We work with a lot of chemistry clients, clients that target librarians, universities that target the research space. So I would say that in terms of the B2B space, most categories, but they all tend to have one thing in common, which is that they're all established in China, with a distributor or an agent or a salesperson or a sales team. And they've they've come across some kind of issues, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. So it's more the fact that they are operating B2B in China. So they are very much reliant on a human being to close the sale. We're not tending to deal with clients that are selling the end result online in the B2B categories that we deal with it as a human being, there's actually closing that sale.
Mike: And that's interesting. Is that something you've build expertise about? Or is that a deliberate choice not to go into E commerce brands in China?
Domenica: We do do ecommerce brands in China in terms of marketing, but they tend to be b2c. So in the B2B space, it's more about how business is done in China. It's no different to here and as much the same Making units quite complicated. But in China that disjoint between what's going on in market versus what HQ wants, and that could be in the States, Europe or the UK, is where most of the problems lie. So a total reliance, for example, on your distributor in China to do your marketing to do your brand to do your sales and your marketing is one common problem. Or it might be you've got one or two salespeople who are alienated and lonely and misaligned with what's going on back at HQ. So I think that integration of often online and that integration with both Western and Chinese team is our forte, yes. But ultimately, everything we're doing is to make sure and ensure that the brands we work with are the brand of choice or the company of choice, so that their sales increase, and their conversion increases through their sales efforts. So in other words, we get the marketing, right, according to how customers want to engage with it, and what they want to see. And that sounds pretty obvious. And that's how marketing should work. But you'd be amazed at how many people try and shoehorn their American marketing with a bit of Chinese on it into China and hope it's going to work? And of course, it doesn't.
Mike: So that leads me on to the obvious question. I mean, how different is it in China? I mean, obviously, some of the channels are different, you know, for example, social media, in in America or in Europe will be different to China. But I mean, how different is the approach? Is it completely different from a strategic point of view? Or is it more tactical differences, both.
Domenica: So strategically, I would say that Guan chi, and reliance on your network of people that you trust is very, very high in China, more so than here. And so no matter how much marketing you do often online, if you don't take into account and nurture your top customers, and make them your platinum customers and make them what we call Kayo C's or keeping customers, you're going to miss a trick. I think that it's been a very interesting time with COVID and COVID restrictions, because of course, B2B has always historically been run a very key exhibitions, events, press launches in China. And all of that moved online to webinars, podcasts effectively, but using Chinese software and platforms. Now, there's a bit of a hybrid, there's still a heavy reliance on that. So strategically, I would say it's more complicated, because you've got to align your brand in China and your messaging and what you stand for, and why you much more so with your headquarters, but make sure it's still relevant to your B2B customers. But from a tactical standpoint, there are a lot of differences. So not just the fact that social media channels are wildly different, there's a lot more of them across the board. So using online PR, for example, social media and search, you're using a completely different channel mix, and some will work and some won't. And there tends to be a sense of oh, I'll just go straight and do some paid search to Monica. And I'll do a little bit of online PR and what we do instead to brands and customers is, firstly, we need to know who your customers are and where they hang out. Because the chances are, they may not be searching on Baidu, it may well be another channel, they may not leverage or engage with certain online channels that you're looking to use, they're going to use others. So understanding who they are and where they hang out and how your competitors behave in your space is more complex. But once you know that, then everything kind of fits into place in terms of driving sales, the right sales and your conversion rates, which is what marketing is supposed to do, right. But there are I'm struggling to think of a single channel we use here in the West that you've got in China. Now even LinkedIn is no longer accessible in China. So there is really nothing, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google. So basically, everything is just government owned, but a lot more sophisticated and a lot more one on one engagement. So that's a totally expected thing in China, much like one to one email used to be back in the 90s is expected that that prospect you will talk to them as if it's just then. And that's where we chat CRM and targeting through certain channels. And that's what really comes into its own but But you can't just broadcast your messaging in China won't work.
Mike: So just expand a bit on what you mean by that one to one marketing, you're talking about brands having to engage individually with people who respond is that what's expected?
Domenica: Yes. So I'd say one of the first things to understand is I talked to so many huge global brands I've been in China for quite some time and they're they're having problems with their with their marketing their sales, and we'll find that they will do their normal e CRM marketing from something like Salesforce or HubSpot in China, and your B2B, Chinese customers are not going to engage with you on email. That's just not a medium that's used. Everybody uses WeChat for every CRM. So when I say one on one, that's exactly what I mean, I mean, really understanding, because we're talking large customers here, in complex B2B, high ticket value, you know, sales, more often than not, because even if the individual sells tiny, they're buying in volume. And so that relationship tends to be done by human being. And so that sort of integration between the sales team and China or sales person, quite often it starts with one person, and what the actual marketing effort is, and making that aligned with what's going on globally is absolutely critical. Because all too often what I see is poor disparate, one or two salespeople in China, being asked to do the marketing plan, marketing, strategy, marketing, delivery, and drive their own leads, and their salespeople, they should be good at converting sales. And so we made that very clear with the client, their salespeople, and it's our job to drive them the right leads. And we talk to sales teams all the time we engage them in our regular monthly catch ups. They're the ones talking to the client, and they're the ones that are going to get the objections. And they're the ones that can tell us what's working, what isn't, what's converting what isn't. And so it's just that integration piece is really, really key. And then the same when it comes to now of course, we've got events and exhibitions and conferences now back in China, after three years with hardly any. And just basic stuff like collecting WeChat data, not business cards, making sure everything's translated, including ourselves schemes, making sure that you've got Mandarin speakers on the stand. Now, the sound already obvious, but you would be amazed, and you only had to look at the news at the weekend to get BMW to see how badly you can get it wrong. So the whole the whole cultural nuances and understanding that so it's not, I wouldn't say it's complicated, I'd say all comes down to one thing, understand your Chinese customers, all of them in the stakeholder chain, and understand how they behave and where they hang out how they want to engage with you. And then you map your marketing coordinator, you don't do it the other way around.
Mike: So it's interesting. I mean, you've kind of alluded to this issue of control. And obviously trying to basically transplant an American or European campaigns, China isn't gonna work. But equally, trusting salespeople to drive marketing themselves when they're not marketing professionals is probably not a good idea, either. So, I mean, how much control do you think brands should take when they're trying to grow their business in China?
Domenica: Oh, that's a really good question. I'm doing a webinar on this in a couple of weeks, because it's probably the single biggest question I get asked. we've coined a phrase called glocalization. And the reason that we coined that phrase is that you need to localise your approach so that your Chinese B2B Customers will engage with it, it's answering the pain points that they have, and using the channels where they're hanging out. But you also need to be on brand. Because if you're not, you're not recognisable, and you don't have the credibility, and you can't build the credibility, China is a humongous country with over 3 billion consumers and lots of geographies. So it's a balance. It's like a seesaw. And what I say to brands is, if that seesaw is, is straight, and you've got the balance about 5050, that's about right. If you localise too much, then it becomes absolutely no alignment whatsoever with the global brand. And then you get what I call leaks in the bucket, or holes in the bucket rather than leaks. So you get things like your distributor or salespeople running your WeChat marketing, and it doesn't even make sense. And it's too local. It's not on us. It doesn't look right. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound like you. It's not saying the right thing, or the literature is nonsensical, and the list goes on. But if headquarters are controlling the brand, then all it will look like and it's fine. If you are a footsie 100 company, everybody's heard of you. But most companies don't have sort of like bottomless pockets. So you do need it to be consistent, but for it to be localised, and we always localise at the very beginning of our campaigns.
And when we work with the client, we localise not just the typography, because of course, it's Chinese characters, but the brand of the way it looks and feels and also the narrative. So we have a very clear approved comms strategy. And another thing to think about with a brand alignment is crisis management plan. So if BMW had had one, I can guarantee their response would have been quicker and better. And so you can't stop salespeople or your representatives and say, exhibitions, events or PR stunts or what have you. You can't control everybody. But what you can do is if things, obviously, they get cultural training, but if things go wrong, you need to have a plan that can be actioned within minutes. Because things can go horribly wrong very quickly in China, just because everybody takes to social media and there's a lot of people and so what might be 1000 comments here is millions enjoy. So yeah, so you've got to have the balance, right. So I say in an ideal world brand control and marketing control should reside with the client and their specialist agency. But it should be a localised approach. And we've done work, for example, with IKEA, where I had to be the intermediary between the Russian global team and the Shanghai AES agency, so that they could understand each other in terms of why did the creative look like that? And why why was it localised in such a way? So it was actually really just so that the global team could understand the approach by the Shanghai US agency, which was actually perfect. It was on brand yet localised, localised? So it's, it's a balancing act. But if you get the balancing act, right, it's absolutely spot on. And the best way to find out is ask your customers, right. So that's my point, if you know what your customers want is pretty easy. Yeah.
Mike: That sounds like great advice. I'm interested. I mean, a lot of people listening might be from the States. And certainly if you look at geopolitics, the relationship between the West and China is not at its best at the moment. I mean, how Western brands have Dickie American brands seen by Chinese customers, particularly in B2B, is it still as big an opportunity is there still as much enthusiasm?
Domenica: There's no doubt about it. There's a couple of major obstacles to us right now, not just not just political ones. But also the time difference is potential depending on whether you're east or west coast, we tend to be the intermediaries for a lot of American companies, because we can just about talk to China because our teams start late in China and start early in UK. And we've got a bit more than four hour overlap on an average eight hour time difference. So time differences a problem. I think if you look at if you know anything about Hofstede, or any kind of cultural philosophy, there is an even bigger difference between American culture and China culture than European culture. So that's also a bit of a challenge. I spoke to not that long ago and American brand global American brands has been really successful in Indonesia and Vietnam and other APAC regions, they were going into China. And it's a franchise model. I'm not gonna say who they are, and they were absolutely dead set that this franchise model would work in China. And I was like, it will not. You're not offering anything that isn't offered by local competitors in China. Nobody recognises your motif, I nearly gave it away then. And the animal that is the representative in your logo. In fact, it has negative connotations, culturally, you'd have to localise. But that isn't their model. So they've decided to go to other APAC region.
So I think for America, yes, there is the political tensions, but there is still plenty of opportunity in China. And depending on what categories they operate in, obviously, you deal with a lot of B2B Tech, engineering, tech, pharma, bar science, biomedical science, chemistry, these areas are huge in China, and has have actually not been impacted by COVID. And some of our clients have grown substantially throughout COVID. Because actually, there was more demand for what they do. So I'd say that as long as you get the cultural side, right, you understand your customers, you work with a specialist agency, there's no reason why American brands can't be successful. I'm not suggesting for one second, that the strap lines and the creative and copy that we come up with focuses on where they're actually from, that might not be a terribly good idea. But if they have a better product or service than their competitors, you're still going to be successful in China. There's enough demand basically.
Mike: So that sounds really positive. I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is if a brand is looking to enter China, you talked about having kind of a sequence so people initially put sales teams in or a couple of salespeople before they they bring in marketing. I mean, what is the most effective way to enter and grow in China?
Domenica:
Oh, that's a million dollar question, which depends on the category that you're in your budget and your attitude to risk. But I'm a real believer in you see, you're trying to journey a bit like a staircase. And if you're getting to the top of the staircase, you don't try and fly from the bottom step to the top step you have to learn as you go, learn, invest, learn, invest, and mitigate your risk. You certainly depending on what category you're in, need somebody in market, we do have brands who don't have anybody and we are their customer service team and we support on the ground in events. Some of our largest clients only got one person in market, but has eight people in the APAC region that also support at large events and we support them a lot on the ground as well as strategy and marketing. But the reason I say you've got to have some foothold is you're selling something correct. So if it's consultancy, or if it's a product and you are on E commerce platforms like Taobao For example, JD, you still gotta have one person on the ground for customer service or one person on the ground that's going to talk to your key platinum customers. And how a lot of brands start is they will choose a distributor dependent on if that's their model, or they will have a salesperson and they'll use some kind of launch pad like the China Business British Council who are fantastic. And they'll work from their launch pad with that one person, they'll pay them from the CBBC. They'll go to exhibitions, events, and they kind of grow from there. But we do have a lot of clients whose HQ in APAC is in Hong Kong, or Singapore, and actually latterly Bangkok, a lot of expats left Shanghai during COVID, and went to Bangkok. And it also works if you have got somebody in the APAC region, it's not quite as good, because they have to fly in and out of events and exhibitions, but you do kind of need somebody, even though we can support that one person, but you've got to make sure your products and services can actually get to the right people. So most people start with a distributor, to be honest.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I guess that's not dissimilar to other countries. With a distributor, yeah.
Domenica: Yeah, very similar.
Mike: So if you're gonna give advice to people who are looking to grow their business in China, I mean, what do you think would be the one bit of advice people should really listen to to avoid making those big mistakes?
Domenica: I think there's a lot of assumption with global brands, that your brand or your product is going to be the right thing for the China market. So firstly, don't assume anything. You need objective advice. So I would say you need to be looking at who your competitors are in the China market. There'll be some global, some local, and can you compete in that space? What do you offer that they don't? What is your differentiator, your competitive advantage, that's the single biggest thing. And make sure that that's in the eyes of the consumer, the customer, and there will be many different types of customer in the B2B decision making unit. So don't assume that you're what I call your USP is what your customers that your USP is. So make sure that you've, you've done your competitive research and your customer research. If you've done that, and you know, what your competitive advantages and you know, you can compete and you've got a better product, and that there is a market there. And none of this needs to cost a fortune. We do this with brands quite enough inexpensively, but enough to know how we're going to market that brand. And obviously, the other thing you need to think about is how you're distributing your product or your service, which is your operations bit, which is why most people use a distributor, then it's just a question of about mapping out what marketing is going to engage, entice and sell to your customers that you've selected, according to where they hang out. So for example, Chinese search engine largest search engine is Baidu, there are a few others, but it still got the lion's share of the market. If there's no demand on Baidu index for your brand, or for your type of product, I'm not going to start there, I'm going to start with something else, I might start with online PR, I might start with some B2B influencers, in vertical sectors or on certain channels. So it's about really understanding your market, the opportunity there and your customers.
Once you've done that, and we won't touch a brand, that we haven't done that because otherwise what we're doing is noise. And China is huge. And we get fantastic results. And we get those results, because we know that what we are saying and where we are saying it is going to engage with their customers and they're going to buy otherwise, it's pointless is just basically throwing money at the problem. And I don't believe in doing that. I believe that it should get a return everything you do. And on that note, just real quickly about tracking is don't listen to anybody who says you can't track things in China. They've heard a lot of horror stories about clickbait, you know, and there are so many agencies that just fabricate results. And we can look at it and within two minutes tell a client that is not real people engaging that is that is that AI technologies, it's very easy to sport. So you can track everything and you should track everything. And we do track everything. So don't be for one second muscled into thinking that's not true. So you can track it properly, far better, actually, than any other market I've ever worked him.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I love that that real thought through process as well in terms of going into the market and focusing on money where it's going to generate return. I think that's fantastic.
Domenica: Yeah, absolutely. And but we've got an eight C's model that we follow in exact order of what you do first, and customers are right at the top before we even look at competitors is that literally your customers, your competitors you know, your competitive advantage your comps and just do it in the right order. And it's a bit like a tick box exercise as much as market research is would hate that and everyone's quote unquote, involved. But there is a process. And once you do it like that, then you'll get return. But if you go straight to the channels and activate channels, you don't know what channels you're activating, you don't know what you're saying, because you don't know what your customers want to hear. So it's the wrong way around. Yeah.
Mike: That's great advice. I've really enjoyed talking about China, there's a couple of questions we'd like to ask. So the more general questions of our guests. And you know, I'm interested, you're obviously really excited about marketing, thinking about marketing in China. What would your advice be, if you met someone, a young person who was thinking of starting a career in marketing?
Domenica: I would my biggest advice to anybody who wants to get into marketing is to study business first. So too often, the marketers I meet fresh out of university have done a marketing degree in marketing, postgrad, no practical experience, they focus so much on delivery of marketing tactics, that they don't focus on what the business problem is, you need to at least at the very least understand how business is structured, how p&l is structured, and how the board is structured. I think that's really important. And there are also so many jobs in marketing, you know, are your creative personality, an analytical person? Are you really good at writing, that people just lump it together as marketing. And they're very, very different roles. And they're going to be very different roles again, in 510 years time, you know, AI technology and drone technology. And so I think that, be sure that marketing is the right thing is number one, and which side of marketing but really do understand the business context, because it will make you a very good marketer.
Mike: I love that. So that's really thoughtful. The other question we always ask is, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Domenica: I would say, and it's not just for marketing, it's just across the board is mistakes are good. We really celebrate them emerging coms every Monday in our speech, because every time we make a mistake, and we're very open with clients as well, it might be that we've leveraged a channel that hasn't quite gone according to plan, or maybe one of their sales team says something they shouldn't. If everything is a learning thing, you don't do it twice, then it's going to benefit, the brand is going to benefit the relationship and it's going to benefit the results. To not make mistakes, in my opinion means you're not moving forward, especially in China. So I would say making mistakes need to be celebrated within Ries. I think somebody told me that a couple of years ago, and I always used to feel awful if things went wrong. But now I'm very much do you know what? What do we learned from that? How can we make sure we don't do it again? And I think yeah, I think China's got a different context. And I would say the best advice I can give to anybody doing business in China is work with an expert, don't work with somebody who did Chinese a level work with Chinese nationals. And basically, you've got to understand the cultural context at all times when you're doing business in China, whether that is negotiation, supplier relationships, or talking to your customers. So work with people that understand that.
Mike: That's fantastic advice. Thank you so much for your time on the podcast, it's been really fascinating. I'm sure people would want to learn more about China and about how you can help them in China. What's the best way for listeners to get in contact with a
Domenica: I'm very active on LinkedIn, so Domenica Diletto, or feel free to email me Domenica at emerging comms.com. If you Googled America, Diletto you'll also find me through many different channels. I would say I wouldn't ring my mobile, I tend to have 60 calls a day, so I tend to switch it off. If you email me, it will get picked up or you send a message through LinkedIn, I go through my messages every day, I will get back to you straightaway. But if you call you might be waiting some time. I work out if it's a cold call or not because I get rather a lot of them.
Mike: Well, that's fantastic and very kind for you to give your email address out. Thank you so much for all your insight Dominica. I really appreciate it.
Domenica: Pleasure, Mike really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Sticky Note Marketing Podcast: Guest Mike Maynard
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier recently sat down with Sticky Note Marketing to share the marketing secrets of the biggest business-to-business companies and how they can be implemented into your business.
Listen to the full interview on Spotify, YouTube or Facebook or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
Leadtail Podcast: How a PR-Led B2B Marketing Agency is Generating Leads For Their Clients
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier featured on the Leadtail Podcast, to discuss how his approach to strategy generates leads for clients and how repurposed content can lead to massive results.
Listen to the full interview on the Leadtail website, or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Haralds Gabrans Zukovs - Credolab
Haralds Gabrans Zukovs, Head of Marketing at Credolab, explains how through understanding how individuals use their smart devices, marketing teams can create campaigns optimised towards personality traits. He also describes how the additional insight can enhance marketing personas.
Haralds and Mike also discuss machine learning and AI, their impacts, benefits, and limitations.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Haralds Gabrans Zukovs - Credolab
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Haralds Gabrans Zukovs
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Haralds Gabrans Zukovs. Harold's is the Head of Marketing at Credolab. Welcome to the podcast. Harold's.
Haralds: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on the podcast. So we'd like to start off by asking our guests about their career journey. So can you tell me about your career and why you decided to join Credolab?
Haralds: Yeah, well, my career started like some time ago, I, when I was in high school, I actually started a project with my classmate. And it was about the tourist citing places. And I started as a copywriter. And then I slowly moved into social media. And kind of my interest grew through the years and from copywriting and social media, I moved into digital marketing and marketing in general. And then I quite quickly moved to B2B because I understood that I like to work and market with products that are not that easily to market that maybe not everyone would take a challenge like that. So I just started to enjoy working with products and industries that not many would find easily to market.
Mike: That's I mean, that's interesting. So you enjoy the challenge of B2B which I love because I think B2B is more difficult, but also far more interesting than consumer. So you obviously joined Credolab? I mean, what did you see about the company that excited you?
Haralds: Yeah, well, I guess, you know, before the crypto lab, I worked in an open banking industry. And at that time, when I worked in that industry, it was still developing, it was still trying to prove its worth. And then when I started like conversations about joining the Credolab, I saw a similar thing. Because like alternative data or behavioural analytic data, it's still something like it's very useful. But maybe the audience still needs some educating to do to understand the value of that and how to integrate it into their products. So I just saw another challenge to take on.
Mike: That's interesting. And I mean, you've hinted a bit at what Credolab does, but do you want to explain what the product does?
Haralds: Yeah, so we basically how risk fraud and marketing teams to take better decisions with advanced behavioural analytics that are based on smartphone and web metadata.
So we basically analyse millions of data points. And with those data points, companies can take better decision, whether it's for risk related things for fraud related things, or marketing related things.
Mike: That's interesting. So you're actually using this process of gathering data to actually do a couple of things. I mean, you know, one is looking at risk and fraud, but the other is to actually mark it. So are you taking basically the same data and using it to inform both sides of the business?
Haralds: Like for each of the for each of the products, the data is quite the way we take date is the same. But then the way what we do with that data is a bit different, but still the decision and how the companies interpret that data is on them. But all of the data that's taken from the interactions with your like smartphone or web, yeah, it's like, interpret that in modules that companies can use.
Mike: So that's interesting. I like to know, you know, what the sort of processes for a company to take data and analyse it? I mean, what are they doing, for example, in marketing, to make use of your data to make those marketing decisions?
Haralds: So we build personas by looking at the apps any user has on the smartphone without knowing the identity of that user. And we look at how organised someone is in saving for example, Contacts, Calendar, events, or anything else that they do on their smartphone. And like for example, do you save different phone numbers belonging to one unfriend under one single, or joint contact or rather John one, John two or John three? Like do you schedule meetings regularly? Or not? How many people are in your meetings? Even? How do you charge your phone? Like, how much battery life do you have for your phone at which time and when? And like, like, we can really help our clients understand their users in a very granular way without compromising data protection, and always complying with the privacy laws.
Mike: So that's interesting, you're almost using the way someone interacts with their smartphone, to kind of uncover their personality. Is that Is that a fair summary?
Haralds: Um, yeah, yeah, we kind of helped like, but not only the smartphone, also the web, the web.
But I think for the marketing product, it's, it's interesting that yeah, we can uncover the personality of the of this person, and then help the company to take better actions and better decisions in into their marketing, like, teams based on this information.
Mike: And so there you'd see someone who's, you know, very organised and very methodical about how they're doing it, you know, perhaps responding to a different campaign, to someone who's perhaps more spontaneous, or maybe less organised. And, you know, you'd see marketing teams customising their campaigns for those sort of personas, Is that Is that how it works?
Haralds: Yeah, you can basically take that data and then customise your images, text approaches, you know, because I think based on people personality, they react differently to different materials, which you see online or receive in your email or like, you know, consume in any way. It is basically based on your personality. So with that data, it might give you additional insight on what exactly to do with it.
Mike: And is this something you know, an approach you're using when you do marketing is trying to understand the personality of people in a B2B process? Because I think traditionally, B2B personas have been around job roles and you assume, for example, every accountant is very organised and logical, even though obviously, that's not going to be the case.
Haralds: Well, yeah, and B2B, it's a bit different than b2c in B2B. You have to think not only about the buyer personas about the ideal customer profiles, but you have to think about the organisation. And then how each of these job titles, because if you're talking about the job titles, how they fit into that process, and then how to work with them. It might like if we compare the B2B and b2c On one hand, it is more complicated to target them and to get what they want, at the right moment in the right place, but another hand, sometimes the b2c is more challenging, because even if it's easier to target the right people with the right message at the right time, the value you get out of that not always is as big as from the B2B side. So each side has its own challenges.
Mike: That makes that makes a lot of sense. You know, in terms of you know, we talked about personas a bit, and I think it might be worth delving a bit deeper into personas. How do you go about building personas when you're doing B2B marketing?
Haralds: It's actually one of the cornerstones I start with, you know, every join company. I do deep research on personas, trying to talk with the management with the salespeople with the customer success people, like everyone I can, and even with the clients to get as much information as possible to build profiles to understand what are their jobs to be done, how we can help them succeed, then to understand what to do on a sales and marketing side to deliver them not just ads or content, but try to deliver them a better experience when they interact with us.
Mike: That's so interesting. I mean, other campaigns you've run where you can actually see that you've had different approaches for different personas. And that's really worked there any examples in your career, you could bring out that show this benefit of really focusing down on personas.
Haralds: I think that the best approach that we have run you know if you for example, see that your product is being used by more than one industry. And I have compared what happens if you lounge, a generalise campaign for all of the industries, but like telling that this product can help you in this way, or what happens if you segment deeper and target the industries with an industry specific message, usually the industry specific message performs a lot better for the emails, also for the ads, because if you can speak in their language with an ad read the problem that that specific individual maybe in the Account Based Marketing space, or if you have a marginalised campaign, for example, in the industry, space has not only in theory, but on also on the practical side, it has a lot higher chances to succeed. Of course, there have been exceptions from time to time. But in most cases, the campaigns that target deeper and have been created more based on what these industries or account types need succeed a lot more.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. Harold's I think I think I can, you know, see that. But obviously, creating these campaigns takes a lot of time. I guess I have to ask the artificial intelligence question. I mean, a lot of people are looking at AI to help them with marketing at the moment. And clearly when you're looking to segment and personalise, there's a hope that AI can really drive that, is that something you believe is going to happen? And is that something you've seen being used yet, either with Credolab or anywhere else?
Haralds: Well, if we talk about the marketing, I myself think that artificial intelligence like it can't yet do the job that you need to do. But what it can do, it's a really big help to speed up like the starting brainstorming or templating processes on which then you can build upon, because in a lot of cases, it takes quite a lot of time to come up with something from scratch. But if you have already some kind of filler, or some kind of a template that you know, that is into the right direction, but still means work, it's already a better starting point than just like starting from scratch. So in my perspective, at least at the moment from the AI that I have seen, for the pocketing, I would say that that's the best approach. And if we talk about the cradle up as a product, we don't really use AI, but we use machine learning algorithms, because using AI presents a few challenges. Like for a start, if you ingest bad, or garbage data, your your output will be garbage results. So basically, it means what data you input that kind of data you get out. So it's also a bit difficult to explain the outcome of an AI model. So So yeah, so that's why our products are basically built on machine learning, not AI.
Mike: So you're learning around the data that you've gathered, rather than trying to create a more general purpose AI. Is that is that the distinction?
Haralds: Yeah, well, we have we feel like it's like a learning based thing that learns on a lot of data points and then tries to like, help find what actions and what like what needs to be done, you know? So it's, it's like, it's like a better approach.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that that makes a lot of sense. And I know, I've seen chat GPT produced some, some very strange and completely inaccurate responses when I've asked the questions. And so I think a lot of companies are going to have to build their own machine learning models based upon data they can trust. So that that makes a lot of sense in terms of what Credolab is doing. Yeah, well, I have used DBT a bit myself and I, the thing that usually its downfall in most of the cases has been When, however, it mentioned some kind of data. When you check it, you can trust it because you find out that it's not a real data. So so yeah. Yeah, I was very disappointed, actually. I mean, I don't know if listeners know, but one of my hobbies is speed skating. And for a short while, chat GPT thought I was an international speed skater. And it was very disappointing now that it says it doesn't know me anymore. But yeah, the data that goes in is is really key in terms of training those models. I agree.
Let's switch back and talk a bit more about marketing. I mean, you talked about AI and being a great way to cure writer's block. If you use AI, you can actually get something you can start working on, you're not faced with a blank page. I love that analogy. I'm interested in terms of the the different areas of marketing you've worked on. I mean, which are the areas that you've enjoyed the most?
Haralds: Yeah, well, I guess I enjoyed the most like ads, especially the LinkedIn ads, email, then I like working with the flip side, some conversion rates, like with websites structure, and then I enjoy a lot working with automation and CRMs, and a bit of our technical integration tool stuff. So I mean, all of those, I guess, are areas that AI could have a significant impact in on in the future.
Well, if it becomes better at what it does, then most likely, but it really depends on there is always, you know, there's, like always the right tool for the right job.
Mike: So it's just a question, can you find that right tool for the right job that you want to do?
And obviously, I mean, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is digital. I mean, that's relatively new in the world of marketing, you know, maybe the last 10 to 20 years, if we look at some of that. I mean, do you think marketing is gonna keep changing as quickly as we've seen in the last few years, as we look forward into the future?
Haralds: Well, if the AI really gets to the point, as you're saying that it can do a lot more stuff than now, then I think it will accelerate even more. Because you know, in marketing, it's all about how quick can you do things? How quick can you brainstorm and put out new things to test and learn and move forward quicker. So if that, like, if the speed of the technology increases, then most likely the speed of the marketing will increase as well.
Mike: That sounds a bit of a challenge. I mean, if if you were talking to a young person who was maybe thinking about a course to take at university, I mean, would you recommend marketing as a career? Do you think it's still going to be exciting and rewarding in the next few years?
Haralds: As I said, that really depends, like I like it's hard to predict. But in general, I think marketing won't disappear, at least not yet. Because even though if you could use the AI, it still means somebody who understands what they are getting, like not only inputting but also getting from the output and understand if that's valuable or not. So I would say that for now, it looks like that, yeah, the marketing is still an exciting place to be, maybe some smaller parts of the marketing will change. Like, you know, I don't know, the research will become faster. So maybe you won't have to spend so much time on the research data and analytics, I would imagine will become easier, faster to do than just like going through the sheets, or something like that. So of course, there will be changes. But in general, I think, still, for now, the direction looks like that, it will be that you still need that person who knows what is going on? Who checks if the thing that you are doing actually work or not.
Mike: And that's great to hear you've got such a positive view of the future. And it sounds like actually, some of the things technology is going to do is to remove some of the less fun work. And I have to say whilst analytics is super important, sometimes actually doing that number crunching is not as fun, is it?
No, no. And sometimes it just eat up your time. And then you'll think, oh my god, I just loved so much time just to come to this conclusion, and I need to restart the testing phase. So I'm basically back to square one. But at least I learned that thing, but But yeah,
Mike: I have another question. Actually, Harold's one of the things we always like to ask people is about the best bit of marketing advice. So what was the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Haralds: Like the best bit was, there are like, for me, at least there are no problems or issues without solutions. Like you know, if you can't find a solution, at least at that moment, that it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist at all, even if nobody has discovered it. So, this advice like has shaped my mindset and approach towards challenging situations in marketing. So I always try to find, as I said the right
Like tool or the right solution for the job that you need to do, and I have found that there always is one, maybe just at that moment you can't see it or like, you need to dig deeper.
Mike: So another positive view of things which is which is great to hear. Harold's I really appreciate the time you've spent on the podcast it's been really interesting and, and actually inspiring because I think, you know, you see a lot of positives in the future of marketing, which is great. If people want to contact you or find out more about Credolab, what's the best way to get in touch?
Haralds: So yeah, well, they could find me on LinkedIn platform as handled governance glucose or by searching Credolab on the thing. And then like finding me through the people's section, or visit the website and going to Credolab website and our website is quite calm. So you can go out and check out and see what we can do.
Mike: That's brilliant. Harold, you've been a great guest. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
How Should You Optimise Marketing Strategy?
Find out the role dynamic content plays in B2B marketing, how to build strategy into marketing automation programs and the benefits and limitations of using polls to collect data.
Mike and Hannah also share how to leverage marketing automation to successfully support face-to-face events.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Seven - How Should you Optimise Strategy?
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment. Today we talk about dynamic content.
Mike: Marketing automation strategy.
Hannah: A survey that shows B2B marketing leaders are focused on optimising strategy.
Mike: And give some tips on how to use marketing automation to make your events more effective.
Hannah: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of marketing automation moment. It's great to be back, Mike, isn't it?
Mike: It's great to talk to you again, Hannah. I mean, it's been a little while I know you've been incredibly busy. And you're off on holiday as well, next week.
Hannah: I am indeed a nice couple of weeks in Italy.
Mike: I hope you enjoy that. And I'm looking forward to getting another episode recorded when you get back.
Hannah: Absolutely.
Mike: So, what have you seen in the news today about marketing automation?
Hannah: Well, I came across an interesting article on the robotics and automation news site, actually. And it was really talking about dynamic content, and the different ways you could approach it to enhance your results of market automation. And it's quite interesting, because the article in itself, to be honest, is quite basic. It talks about personalization, it talks about the kind of simple things you can do to make things more engaging. But what I want to have a chat about really is about dynamic content, and the different things we can do for dynamic content and market automation systems.
Mike: So I guess here, what you're talking about is not just changing a little bit of text dynamically, but actually putting in, you know, for example, something completely different, like a video or a picture or, you know, some other engaging content on the landing page. Is that what you're thinking about?
Hannah: Absolutely, Mike? Yes. So I'm thinking, you know, if we've got a landing page, and we add something as a poll, for example, what sort of information is that going to be able to provide marketers? And realistically, as well as visitors going to interact with this engaging content?
Mike: Well, I mean, a couple of really good questions there, you know, do you get information that's useful from polls, I mean, a lot of marketers use informal poll information. So sometimes it's the best data you've got, it may not be, you know, mathematically or scientifically accurate, but it's the best data you've got. So I think this sort of thing is useful. The problem is, as we know, a lot of our B2B audiences aren't really engaged with things like polls, they don't want to do that, particularly very technical people. And so I think what dynamic content gives you the opportunity is to run things like this, where you know that a proportion of your audience, and maybe, for example, you might think that the purchasing proportional purchasing segment would be much more interested in engaging in a poll than an engineering segment. So you can place that content just visible to the people who are likely to engage with it. And I think that's a good idea. I mean, there are lots of challenges in terms of doing that, when you look at a lot of, you know, B2B campaigns and some of the limitations around those.
Hannah: So it's been a bit more Mike, what do you mean about the limitations regarding dynamic content?
Mike: Well, I think we're really different from consumer marketing, there's a lot you can do with consumer marketing, because you have, you know, huge volumes, in terms of your audience size. Quite often, when we're looking at campaigns, they're very, very focused, and you know, Account Based Marketing is, it's certainly a thing, right. And, you know, there people can be targeting a small number, or even maybe even one account. So the numbers are quite small in B2B. And actually, what that means is, it can be quite difficult a to generate multiple different pieces of content that can be placed on the landing page, and then be to get enough volume where you're looking for interaction, like for example, in polls. So although it sounds very attractive, sometimes it can actually be somewhat cost and time prohibitive. And it also can be difficult to get sufficient audience size as well.
Hannah: As a really interesting point, my can actually I was listening to our other podcast marketing B2B technology. And we recently had SendinBlue on and and he was talking about how actually, we can take inspiration from b2c campaigns for B2B. But obviously, it's a really good point, because these are these limitations. And so we have to recognise that we are in the B2B industry. And so it might not necessarily be the best path, of course, for companies with dynamic content.
Mike: Yeah, I think sometimes it's just more difficult. And often, you know, in B2B, we sometimes always want to invent new stuff. And if you're looking to dynamically insert content into a landing page, you might be better looking at what you've already got, rather than trying to create something new for that particular campaign. So I think there's there's opportunities to do this and marketers should be thinking about, you know, should they be customising things like landing pages for different audiences, and if they should be customising it, how can they do it? But also we have to remember that sometimes It's not practical to make everything personalised and everything customised in our industry, just because of the balance between the relatively low volume and the relatively high cost of content creation.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I think this links on quite nicely to our next point, because we have to consider these things when we build a strategy for our market automation. So I actually came across an interesting blog, which talks about how strategy fits in with market automation platforms. Did you see it?
Mike: Yeah, I did that. I mean, I thought this was was really interesting. They're talking about, you know, using strategy right from the start before you even get a marketing automation system. And, and that was one of the things I thought was was, was fascinating, because actually, most people in B2B now have some sort of marketing automation solution. And I'm not sure that the strategy is around picking a platform. And let's be honest, most of the platforms can do most of the things you need. I think it's much more interesting when you look at how you can use strategy to create better campaigns.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, I came across this stat that actually 51% of marketers are looking to increase spending on market automation this year. So can you give a couple of examples of where strategy really comes into what you need to implement on the platform?
Mike: So I think it's really interesting. You know, we see people who still use marketing automation tools, you know, much like a kind of souped up email system. And actually, I think what strategy should do is it should be looking at what you're trying to achieve with different segments of your audience. And one of the points that was made in the first article, you mentioned, was actually that it's really important to understand that buyers journey, and we talk about this a lot, we bang on about buyers journey a lot at Napier. But I think sometimes what you've got to think about in strategy is think more than a single campaign. And think how your campaigns can combine together to actually help your prospects move through that buyers journey, and getting those campaigns to work together, that generates synergies that absolutely are going to make your marketing automation campaigns more effective.
Hannah: I fully agree, Mike, I am a big fan, as you know, on the personas and the customer journey, and the stuff we do here at Napier with our marketing automation platform, I would be lost about it, it makes my life so much easier that we have our workflows and our content down to our personas. It's so valuable.
Mike: Yeah, and you do a lot of this, you do a lot of looking at, you know what we're trying to do with particular personas and moving them from step to step. And I think that that's a great example of what people should do. I think one of the challenges you have is particularly when you have a large enterprises, you have lots of kind of siloed groups that are all trying to run their own campaigns. And sometimes that means those campaigns don't necessarily work together. And one of the things that we as an agency can do is actually start helping people ensure that, you know, campaign that one particular team is running is at least somewhat synergistic with what other teams are running.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, I was helping out one of our account managers the other day with the development of a plan, and we were talking about the different email sequences that had to be implemented. And sometimes it's not a lot of work. It's just a slight tweak, but he's accepting that they do need slightly different messaging to be able to resonate with them. I think
Mike: That's a great example, Henry love that, you know, it's amazing how many people spend so much time on a sequence of emails, making sure that they flow nicely from one to another, which is obviously important, but then they completely forget that the next sequence should really flow from the previous one, because they deal with those two sequences separately. So I think that's a really important point. I love that.
Hannah: It's brilliant. So moving on, Mike, again, just focus on some stats around the market automation. You know, I love a good stat. I came across a survey from Insightly and they did a survey of 200 B2B marketing leaders. And I think it matches of what we're saying. But they found that five out of 10 of these leaders said that optimization of their overall automation strategy would be a primary goal for this year. And that actually, the areas they're looking to utilise the most are email marketing, social media, content management, and landing pages. None of this surprises me, Does it surprise you?
Mike: We did sound a bit like a laundry list of the main automation tools. You know, I think it's not surprising. I mean, if I'm a B2B marketer, I've got a marketing automation system. You know, I'm surprised of the 13% that are not worried about optimising the customer journeys. It seems to me like everybody should be looking to get their marketing automation system working as efficiently as possible. And clearly, one thing it does say, though, and I'm being a bit facetious about the features, but, you know, you point out that it's those core features of marketing automation that people really need to focus on. And I think that's interesting because what it's saying is, what we need as marketers is we need those core features, but almost the dole things to be optimised and improved and made easier to use, rather than necessarily market automation vendors trying to find, you know, little niche features that maybe don't appeal to a lot of users. What do you think?
Hannah: Yeah, I agree. I think I'm actually pleasantly surprised, because two years ago, we would have had a chat about this. And market automation was still this huge, nobody knows what's happening. Nobody knows how to use it. And actually, this gives me hope that they need these core features, but they know they need it. So they know they're going to use it to be able to be successful in their campaigns.
Mike: I totally agree. You're, you're absolutely right. And I think that learning that you've identified over the last couple of years, to some extent, has been driven by a sort of strategic imperative for businesses, as people work from home during the pandemic, quite clearly, you know, things like face to face sales visits just disappeared. And so marketing automation became very, very important. And organisations, they had to learn, they had to understand and I think the pressure that, you know, pandemic produced, although there was lots and lots of negatives, I mean, one of the positives is, is that a lot of businesses have actually improved their marketing automation game, don't you think? That's right.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, actually, Mike, you wrote a blog about this, about a month or so ago about this change that actually sales have got to rely more heavily on marketing to be successful, because things like sales meetings, that they're not as popular as they used to be. And actually marked automation is becoming crucial to dry people through the customer journey, because sales is, it's not as important as it once was. But a lot of customers and visitors are now building their own customer journey through the systems and the content that they read in.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Right. I mean, you know, analysts like Gartner have shown that more and more, this customer journey is what they call self directed. So the prospects are actually driving the journey. They're not talking to the supplier. And I think this is, you know, a bit of a legacy, again, of the pandemic, where we went from a position where face to face was, you know, sometimes almost the default, it felt to face to face disappearing completely. And clearly, you know, face to face is coming back now. And we're seeing trade shows return. And we're seeing certainly some positivity around conferences, and that's nice. But I still think that feeling amongst buyers and decision makers, that they should be in control of their customer journey. That's a change of approach that I don't think it's going away. And marketers have got to realise that they need to support their prospects in driving that customer journey, rather than trying to dictate a customer journey, because it's just not going to work in the future.
Hannah: I absolutely agree. And it'd be really interesting to see how that pans out throughout the rest of the year.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it's not just this year, it's going forward. But you know, with more and more data available digitally, it's inevitable that people are going to feel like they want to be in control. They don't need to contact salespeople. I mean, I don't for a minute, think the sales function is going away. Clearly, salespeople are going to remain very, very important. It may be that organisations have fewer salespeople, and those salespeople actually responsible for many more sales, some of which they don't get involved in, because it's driven through an online engagement, which is primarily marketing. I mean, in fact, I talked to one clients a little while ago, and they said, you know, five years out, maybe we only have 10%, of the sales force that we have today, because of the move to digitalization. I mean, I think that's a little bit aggressive. But it was certainly interesting to see clients already thinking about, you know, really quite dramatic changes in the balance between sales and marketing. And this increased importance of marketing.
Hannah: Definitely. So I want to go back to something you mentioned a little while ago, Mike. And that was the return of trade shows and conferences, because we know face to face is back. But for insightful tip of the week. This episode, I want to talk about how to use market automation successfully with events. So can you share what you think the secret is to utilise in your market automation platform to help you be successful when you're going to a trade show or conference? Any kind of face to face events like that?
Mike: That's a great question. And I think, you know, it's really simple. We see a lot of companies doing effective outreach prior to events. So they're activating their database, they're encouraging them to meet at events, it's relatively straightforward. They're sending emails out, they then come back from the event, and they don't really nurture those leads. And the reason for that is that people tend to leave that kind of lead nurturing, post event engagement to after the trade show or after the conference. And the reality is, is they just don't get campaigns created after the conference. And I appreciate it's difficult. I mean, I've done trade shows a run to trade shows is fraught. But if you want your marketing automation to be effective, you've got to build the follow up nurture, prior to the event, that's the only way you're going to do it. Because unless it's ready to go immediately after the event, your emails are going to be late, they're not going to resonate as effectively with your audience. And also, you're going to be stressed, following up the event and tidying up all sorts of other loose ends. And you're probably actually not going to get that nurturing flow done. So, you know, to me, the secret is preparation. And if you can prepare, and get that, that campaign ready, you can then just drop the leads in straight after the event. There's no stress, and people will get that nurturing flow. What do you think?
Hannah: I couldn't agree more, Mike, I have learned the hard way, how important it is to get everything prepped before you go, because there is nothing, you're more thankful for them. When you get back from a trade show. And you're tired. You know, this is really important that you can just press a button on the system, and your leads are being nurtured.
Mike: Yeah, and you've done it really well. And I think one of the things you do well, is actually you realise you don't have to reinvent the wheel. So sometimes you can take existing content, and with relatively small modifications to, for example, an email sequence, create a new email sequence that works for the latest trade show. You don't have to sit down with a blank sheet and start from scratch. And I think that's something that you know, you've really bought into, and it makes that preparing in advance much less stressful.
Hannah: Absolutely do not need to make it complex. And the easier you can make it for yourself, actually, the more successful you'll be.
Mike: That's a great insight. I love that.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic discussion.
Mike: No, thank you, Hannah. It's been great. And I look forward to talking to you again on the market automation moment.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the marketing automation moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.