Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Emir Zecovic - CMO

Emir Zecovic, an experienced marketing professional in the B2B and SaaS space, joins Mike for a discussion about how to market B2B technology products.

Emir highlights how marketers often miss opportunities by not focussing on large non-English speaking markets like South America and India. He shares why marketers should be data-obsessed to understand what influences the buying journey, and why working within start-ups may offer new marketers greater career opportunities.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About TextGrid, 12min and OpenGraph

TextGrid offers communication APIs for SMS, MMS, voice and email. With cloud communications, businesses are empowered to build, scale and innovate.

12min is a platform that chooses, reads and summarises the most important non-fiction books.

OpenGraph generates meta tags and social media previews for any URL on the web in a few simple steps.

About Emir

Emir Zecovic is CMO at 12min and is currently also in transition between roles as CMO at TextGrid and Senior Business Development Consultant at OpenGraph. He is a determined, data-driven and versatile marketer with over 7 years of experience in managing teams, devising and implementing growth strategies for SaaS B2B and B2C companies.

Time Stamps

[00:51.1] – Emir shares how he got to this point in his career.

[04:46.8] – Emir discusses why it is important not to overlook non-English speaking markets.

[08:49.7] – Emir shares his approach to marketing as a CMO.

[16:27.0] – How does Emir encourage form fills?

[20:26.8] – What impact is AI going to have on the industry.

[23:58.1] – Emir offers some career advice to new marketeers.

[26:42.9] – Emir’s contact details.

Quotes

“Trying to be as international as possible in a business is always a good idea, don't underestimate countries you're not familiar with.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.

“I've heard people say that they don't like Google Ads or Facebook ads or SEO, but I doubt anybody has ever said that they regret having a good email list” Emir Zecovic, CMO at 12min.

Follow Emir:

Emir Zecovic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emir-zecovic-074882166/

TextGrid Website: https://textgrid.com/

TextGird LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/textgrid/

OpenGraph Website: https://www.opengraph.xyz/

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 Emir Zecovic - TextGrid/OpenGraph

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Emir Zecovic

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 Emir Zecovic. Emir is currently in transition as we record so he has been working at text grid. But now he is moving across to a new position at OpenGraph. So we're going to have an interesting conversation with him about how to market B2B technology products. Welcome to the podcast, Emir.

Emir: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Mike: Great to have you on. So I mean, obviously your career is in a bit of transition. But can you just tell us you know how you got to this point now in your career?

Emir: Yeah, it's actually an interesting start. So probably you saw on Lincoln, I was born in sculpin. Nord must Estonia. Honestly, nothing about the background was nothing hinted that I will be interested in marketing, just how it happened. I started studying and got interested about when I was 20. And I started doing freelance work and got very interesting. And somehow I don't even know how I got involved with 12 Min, which I'm also there as the CMO. The tolzman actually was founded by Devo Gomez, who is currently the founder of rock content, the biggest B2B SaaS company in all Latin America, somehow promoted to the chief marketing role after two or three years, three years if I'm not wrong, and it just took from there. Meanwhile, I did four, I actually got my master's degree from University of Sheffield. Actually, it didn't travel to the UK for that, because they have international faculty presence in almost, if I'm not wrong, in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania. But maybe I'm wrong for some of the countries. And I don't want to dwell too much on that. Because at the end of the day, it's more like practice. I don't think that the formal education has a huge role or anything of the kind. But it was a great experience. Actually, I learned a lot while it shuffled specifically. And right now I'm here. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I was like to work at to play someone. I love, b2c, and B2B. So that's why I currently have kind of like two roles. It's fun. I don't know, I don't know why else would they did. Definitely fun.

Mike: That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned 12 Min. So let's just, you know, look at that for a minute. I understand that that's a bit like Blinkist, which might be a more well known brand name to our listeners, because I think our listeners are generally North America and Europe. But tell tell me a little bit about 12 Min.

Emir: Yeah, actually, we are direct competitors. So blinkers we kind of started at the same time, if from what I know, Linkous currently is more focused on US and Germany, while we are more focused on South America and Central America, are also expanding, we have us burners, which is great. It actually was founded in 2017, early, like I said, by Guillermo Gomez, who is also the founder of rock content, a huge company very successful one. And it it kind of, I believe, he was looking for ways to read a lot of books, which sounds a bit cliche, but that's exactly how he got the idea. And at that time, he couldn't find anything in Portuguese, or or in Spanish. So he thought, okay, maybe this will be a good idea. I don't know if at that time blinkers was already established, I think yes, if I'm not mistaken. But Pokemon started primarily for the Brazilian market and then moved Spanish and got to English. And now even the our English bases expanding. And we're also looking there to go into B2B, which is also very possible. And it requires a different set of strategy altogether. It's very different than just selling high ticket software, compared to 1000s. of subscriptions. And I don't know if you know, the but the average subscription price on the stores is $40. So I'm you cannot go super high. Like I would say the top markup that you can sell in in countries like Singapore, or the US, which are, let's say, more prosperous. It's 70 to $80 Max, and you have to be very careful what you're doing developing countries and so on. It really depends on the market.

Mike: That's fascinating. And I think, you know, it highlights something that perhaps people like myself who come from an English speaking country, sometimes we're not so aware of what's going on in other countries, particularly if it's not an English language product. And certainly South America is a gigantic market. And I think all too often overlooked.

Emir: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I'll just give you an insight. Do you know the average cost per click mean the difference is 10 to one compared to the US and sometimes even 15 to 108 If you compare, in Great Britain, it's in my opinion, it's even more expensive than the US for some industry. So you can compare that. If you have a conversion rate, that's two times less than what you have in first world countries, so anything from Germany to the UK or US, you can make a tonne of money and the profits, the profit margin is much greater actually, even though it sounds counterintuitive, but the sheer competition in in the US, for example, is crazy. You get high conversion rates, but you also get good lifetime value, whether you're going into B2B or b2c, but the acquisition costs for both of them are super high. Like I remember when we were running ads for things where it's for classic comparison based landing pages with highest, okay, someone might disagree, but they're one of the best converting landing page models out there. Without a doubt, at least in my experience, the average cost per click was $20. If you do the same thing in Brazil, is between 0.5 and $1. In the conversion rates, the conversion rates are somewhat similar with the US having two to one advantage. Now, of course, your order value, if you're running an E commerce shop, or you're providing service of any kind, is going to be lower, you cannot charge the same rates. But just the verified is 20 times cheaper to advertise, it already gives you a huge advantage. So you can you can adjust the price to fit the market, of course, but the advertising costs allow you room to lower your service fees, or I don't know, whatever you're selling, give ecommerce or even a software. So it's a it's an advantage, especially Brazil with with one with 200 million people.

Mike: That's a great point. I mean, I love that I think trying to be as international as possible in a business is always a good idea. And don't underestimate countries, maybe you're not familiar with.

Emir: Absolute in India is also a situation where I think everybody who misses out on India especially or Bangladesh, is missing out on a lot good conversion rates, very low cost per 1000 impressions for both Facebook and Google ads or anything else, for that matter. Yeah.

Mike: And that's a great point, too. I think, you know, there are other markets that perhaps people tend to underestimate. I'd like to move on to where you're going to see, you're moving to Open Graph, I'm not sure that, you know, all our listeners will be familiar with that company. So can you just briefly describe what the company does?

Emir: Yeah, I don't know if they're familiar with the Open Graph, man attacks, which were built in the early 2000s, and tense while I was still in high school, but it allowed that preview function of sharing information, like for example, if you wanted to share an article on Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube, it gave that metadata, you just extracted the metadata from a website or from a link. And it just made things a lot easier. So you can scrape the web, you can do all sorts of things in a much more efficient way, then I don't know then if you try any alternative use, but if they Google, for example, what's an Open Graph meta tag, they will understand just by the preview of how it would look if you remove the metal tags of a link or if a website, so OpenGraph does that.

Mike: That makes sense. And I think, you know, we probably don't need to dig too deep into exactly what the company does. What I'm really interested in as you as a marketing executive going in and looking to drive the marketing strategy, when you started a company or when he even you look at a new year. I mean, how do you approach building a marketing plan as a CMO?

Emir: I think the first thing that, for example, I never heard anyone say especially not in Marketing School, and not even at shovel that you have to be data obsessed, and other main data drives kind of like cliche, I mean, literally obsessed with, we always use this analogy. It's like being lost in the Amazon forest. And unless you're nowhere you're going, you better not move anywhere, you better stay where you are. So the price you might pay if you don't know where exactly you're going is higher than if you just stay where you are. So the first thing that I always do is I obsessively analyse the data. And by that I don't mean just the marketing. I mean, the business data. So you have how many touchpoints to conversions. What's the average lifecycle? Well, how many months days weeks does it take for a product qualified lead to get to a sales qualified position from a sales qualified to actually become a client? And I'm trying to find patterns? Where exactly what where's the elephant in the room? So for example, if you were to Google Open Graph, you would notice that in this you're gonna find his data but I'm saying the traffic like most most of the traffic is run through ads. So you have definitely a problem in the top of the funnel, it's very clear. So you have huge opportunity there. Next, you can move on. And there you think about how the the lifecycle goes, What's the conversion rate on the page, what actually, if someone converts from what was the previous page from where they converted, to become, let's say, subscriber to the newsletter or anything else, for example, we we have a sort of a freemium model, which is you have a free service, but we try to convert you slowly nurture you, and then push you into the one of the two paid plans. But it's not always the case. For some businesses, the main priority is a call immediately, you need a call, ASAP. So I would say, my way of doing things is always, at least in the first week or two, if more is needed, that's fine. Just obsess over the data and tried to find issues. And I mean, all sorts of issues from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom, what channels are being used, was the performance. And especially if there are data problems, whether that's the the forces of data, where's the data stored, or there's, like, I don't know, if you notice, but the most common problem, for example, is in which is kind of so the little bit is tracking, where we will always find the same problem, the tracking is wrong, you would think everybody would be focused on tracking, make sure that the solid, no errors, but it's not the case. And if you have tracking problems, my advice, put the 110% into, into fixing it as soon as possible. So that's, that's how and then from that point onwards, I usually would go with my round and square the huge Board have everything that they found, and I started crafting my plan. Based on the resources, of course, sometimes you just cannot do what you want to do. Because there's there are limited resources, so you have to take that into account. But I would attack first the low hanging fruits. And I can give you an example, in SEO, you go away, and you have, let's say 510 15 keywords that rank from position 10 to 20. Those are low hanging fruits, you go there, you improve the content. And those things rank in two, three months. So my strategy first and foremost, is to attack the low hanging fruit. While we are working on the, let's say, not long term, but like midterm strategy, which I would say it's between three to six months. And the that's usually how I divided zero to three months, three to six months and long term six plus. And but first you target the looking for so that you get the most possible in the shortest time possible.

Mike: I love that, you know, going for quick wins, I think is always a good strategy. And it kind of clears away some of the things you could do and actually focus on perhaps some of the more difficult tasks. I'm interested when you're you're building a plan, do you look to use his broader mix of tactics as possible? Or do you feel that there are some primary tactics that really worked well for you? And that those are kind of your go to things?

Emir: Yeah, that's a amazing question. I love that. I've been debating that with people in the industry for so long. I remember I was reading an article maybe two or three months ago that said, and correct me if I'm wrong, it is. But I think that the email has 29 to one return on investment compared to paid advertising. I'm trying to say that, if there's anything that has proven to never fail, is that you need to build your email list. Now, I'm not saying that's the only way or the only focus. But if there is, any channel that you can never fail, if you do it right is definitely the email. I mean, we always look for shiny object syndrome. So let's say what AI can do, or what that can do, or this can do. Email never fails, the average person opens their email at least 10 times a day. It's a channel that they prefer. It's a preferred method of communication, especially in in B2B, I will always use a broad approach. So I would I would split them between inbound marketing and outbound see where we can go with cold. But the problem with cold outreach is that at some point, it eventually just hits a wall cannot scale more. You can always expand the persona or build a new one, you have different products. Some companies don't have that. Now if you're an electrician and other know if you do something other on the side. Yeah, maybe you can expand and then instead of targeting just one group, you go after another but if you're running just one product line or division, you certainly will hit a wall at some point. And then the question is what now? But if you have an email list, I don't I've never I've heard people say that that they don't like Google ads or Facebook ads or SEO. But if nobody has ever said that they regret having a good email list. There has never been such a As in history, so there's a reason for that is a reciprocal relationship because you're giving something for free in exchange of the user did. They don't feel like you're selling something to them? You're nurturing them. So it's reciprocal. We're not asking for something while giving nothing in return, so as long as you provide something of value, of course, they're going to reciprocate. And that's something that they found it works crazy. Well, to be honest, the only I've never said that's the only strategy far from it. But I'm saying, if you're building your email list, by very definition, you also need to work on paid ads, conversion funnels, data, front, and of course, you need to optimise the landing page copywriting, it just carries with it. Five, six different, completely different areas. In lead gen demand gen, all of that. You just create so much work. But if you nail it, I didn't doubting that anyone has ever said that they regret building their email list.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think that's great advice. Obviously, the challenge is really building that that list and getting the tactics right to encourage people to sign up. So I'm interested in how you do that, how you actually encourage people to fill in that form or to hand their details over so you can actually add them to the list. Do you have approaches for that?

Emir: Oh yeah, absolutely. Till 2020. Most of the companies, both in b2c and B2B use to one step approach. So what you do is send them to a page, you try to create as much value as possible to Beijing in exchange for their information. This is public knowledge, but I'm going to share something with you, we have something called the bread crumbs approach, which is 20 steps, our average landing page to lead currently is 35%. The average industry is like four or 5%. Of course, it requires testing, I'm not saying everybody should have 20 days, but a good test would be like this. So let's say you have four elements on the forum. So you have name, email, phone number, and I don't know maybe something else, but let's say company, email, or whatever, it's whatever is mandatory. But if you flip that with four steps, which means four separate steps, not all in one form, and the US first for the less intrusive ones. So it could be like, what's your name? Or where do you work with or what's your age, whatever, it's an issue. So as long as a person commits more, it will psychologically make them commit. Further, as you demand more personal things. So let's say their phone number, or their email, or maybe some company information. So what we generally use, and what I would advise is that whatever is the most difficult thing to ask, leave it for less. So as long as they invest in the form, in our case was the Select plan. So if you want, for example, let's say if you have a if you're running a b2c, this is the same actually with B to B. But if your conversion model is most of the sales happened between zero and three days, for example. So you need them to convert past. So how do you do that? So that's how you do it, you make them select the plan endl? And the last step, will having them commit to 15 Steps beforehand. And they're much less likely to abandon it. If the investment is high, as the counterintuitive argument is, is something like why would anyone bother to go through so many steps? The crazy part is that they will rather do that, than just give you all the information into let's say, a single page form with everything was done. In I've tested this so many times, and there has never been one case where the single page four outperforms the breadcrumbs. So in B2B, you don't need 20 steps, because you don't, nobody requires that kind of personalization. But if you find a way to split them, if from one to five, six, leave what you need the most last and tested. And I I mean, I have the one that I don't want to over promise, but it works on us.

Mike: I'm not sure we'll all get 35% conversion rate, but if we could all move it up from the low single digits, I think everyone would be happy.

Emir: Absolutely. Absolutely. The key is to be better than yesterday. Not not for some random industry to average plus the b2c is kind of a bit deceiving, because you cannot measure the B2B and b2c investment in forms. In b2c. The last I saw the average ones like 10% in B2B is between three and five.

Mike: that's great advice. I mean, I think that's interesting. And bread crumbing is certainly something you know, people are not familiar with, they should look at. It's something that I know a number of guests have talked about on the podcast. Emir, I'm interested to look forward. Now. I mean, you've talked about what you're doing today. How do you see marketing changing over the next few years? I mean, is AI going to completely transform things? Or is it going to stay, you know, much like it is today?

Emir: Yeah, that's, if you look at now than the main AI tool. So I don't know if you're familiar with magics. A, it's a company out of Tel Aviv. I don't know I don't want to sound biassed, but in my opinion, they have the best marketing automation software for paid advertising. Maybe I'm biassed I've tried a couple of them. I really liked them. I think the company was founded in Israel, if I'm not wrong, or in Austria, I think it was in Israel. It's actually an amazing software. And right now they even created something called marketer AI is interesting, because you don't see a lot of AI tools actually doing the thinking for you. So usually what AI is focused on is cutting your time. So what does it mean? So let's say if you are running a CRM, or an email marketing software, or at Creative AI, powered software, so what they usually do is that they try to cut the manual work. What I'm trying to say is that what I see is that AI will certainly reduce the need for copywriters for marketing research, anything that was previously done manually, but it requires human input to a much greater degree. Magic has one of their tools is actually that they give you recommendations based on your ads performance. AI based so it says, Well, this was happening the last seven days, I recommend that you do X or Y or Z doesn't matter. So it tries to replace the thinking process. That's revolutionary. So it's not just some task that they're trying to replace, as far as marketers focus on data interpretation, that cannot be easily replaced by AI. But as long as their primary focus is a task, or very tight niche, so let's say link building outreach. Now, you can definitely improve that using AI. But if your focus is interpreting what happens, once you get those links, and how those links transform your rankings, that's not something AI can do. Or at least not not as well as someone who's experienced can do so my focus will be to simply focus on things that AI cannot replace, which is interpreting the results of your strategies. And moving slowly away from things that are repetitive, so including you and to an extent copywriting because if almost every software out there now has an AI assistant, so that you can churn out emails, and usually they're very well written. So it's not something that that you can compete, and plus it cuts the cost for employers, that that will be my worst. That's why they think that AI will definitely impact and I don't think they will impact marketing jobs a lot. Because marketing is still a very creative industry. So it still requires a lot of human potential.

Mike: I think that's that's great insight to the future. And certainly, you know, everyone, check out magic, can you just give the URL for that so the listeners can find it?

Emir: Madgicx.com.

Mike: Perfect. And I think people would want to check that out. So thank you for that. I mean, it's been really interesting, this discussion, you seem very positive about the future of marketing. I mean, presumably, if somebody was young was thinking of entering the industry came to you, you'd be, you know, quite keen for them to become a marketer. So I'm interested in what would be your advice as to how to successfully start a marketing career.

Emir: Probably the best advice that I can give them is that too, especially at the outset to avoid working for big companies. And I know it sounds counterintuitive, but you will usually be just a hog in like hogging the machine. And you won't get enough exposure to real problems. So if you're starting out and all you're given is a task and you're not allowed to question the system, which something that happens super often, you will never get enough exposure to problems to grow as a marketeer. And it creates a problem because AI will replace most of the repetitive things. So I'm not saying that, of course every business is different than it STEM is different. How it operates is pretty much unique. My advice would be to find someone that is willing to throw them in the fire. And at least for the first couple of years to work for either a startup and I know it's not very popular because startups can get really demanding and sometimes They don't have that same kind of work life balance. But starting out, I would definitely give that advice. Because everybody who has worked for a big company, what they usually receive is a set of tasks they perform, not getting exposed to real problems. So you can learn and grow. And even if you want to get exposed, you're not allowed to because the system is already created, you cannot challenge it without creating a mess on for other different areas. So that will be my advice to girls. And the second one is to read a lot, especially understand data. It may sound crazy, but what I would advise them to do is that they take any channels, whether that's SEO, Google ads, LinkedIn doesn't matter. And try to understand the KPIs read all of them, and understand how it impacts further down the funnel. So if you have for example, let's say you haven't a lot of new visitors, but at the same time your bounce rates goes up. So what does it mean? It means probably are getting a lot of referral traffic. And that interpretation of the data is a I remember what I was reading one book about the CHS old intelligence in the world means nothing unless you have someone to act on it. You can have all the data, all the intelligence, if you don't know what it means you cannot act on it. So it's meaningless. Pretty much data doesn't do anything by itself.

Mike: I love it. That's brilliant advice. I mean, Emir, this has been fascinating. You've been very generous with your insight and your advice for people. I mean, if anyone's listening and they'd like to get in touch, what would be the best way to reach you?

Emir: Probably with LinkedIn. I mean, that will be one way and a via email. Zitzewitz Emir 199 four@gmail.com, which is my personal email. Awesome.

Mike: That's very generous. Emir, this has been fascinating. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for being a guest on the podcast.

Emir: It was a pleasure. And thank you a lot for the opportunity actually to be here.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Sean Campbell - Cascade Insights

Sean Campbell, CEO and Founder of Cascade Insights, is the latest guest to join Mike Maynard for the Marketing B2B Technology podcast. Sean discusses the benefits of using market research platforms, explores the pros and cons of qualitative versus quantitative data, and talks about the challenges of getting research responses within the B2B industry.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About Cascade Insights

Cascade Insights empowers B2B technology companies with customized market research and marketing services. For over a decade, we’ve served Fortune 500 enterprises like Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Dell Technologies, AWS, and Google as well as mid-markets and startups.

In an industry that’s ever-changing, we deliver the tools and resources to help businesses navigate the market and seize opportunities for growth. Want to learn how well your brand resonates with buyers, or why your superior product keeps losing to a competitor? Maybe you need updated messaging to win more deals and generate more leads.

About Sean

Sean has been training, mentoring, and educating all his life. An exceptionally well-regarded conference speaker and author, Sean has delivered talks for Fortune 50 companies and top-tier conferences. He has also been the author of several books on technical and business topics.

Sean has also been a professional services firm owner for over 20 years. He is passionate about running a remote-first company, and has been doing so long before it was cool – dating back to the 20th century!

His professional services work has spanned consulting engagements with the Fortune 50 and startups you have heard of; the sale of his first professional services company, and the growth of delivery, sales, marketing, and operational practices inside professional services firms.

 Time Stamps

[00:41.5] – Sean discusses his career and what lead him to market research.

[03:54.0] – Sean talks about Cascade Insights, what it is and its capabilities.

[06:09.8] – Sean discusses why he chose to focus on the B2B industry.

[16.10.4] – What are the benefits of using a market research platform vs in-house research?

[19:39.7] – Sean shares how he thinks market research is going to change in the future.

[21.59.7] – What advice would you give to someone joining the profession?

[26:07.2] – Sean’s contact details.

Follow Sean:

Sean Campbell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/

Cascade Insights website: https://www.cascadeinsights.com/

Cascade Insights on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cascade-insights/

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 Sean Campbell - Cascade Insights

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sean Campbell

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 Sean Campbell. Sean is the CEO and founder of Cascade Insights. Welcome to the podcast, Sean.

Sean: Thanks for having me.

Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, what we'd like to do first off is just find a little bit about people's background. So keep telling me a little bit about your career and how you ended up founding cascading sites.

Sean: Well, first thing is I didn't, I didn't want a business. I always thought the kids who went to business school classes at 8am for accounting were just boring. I don't know why they would go do that. I was a liberal arts grad. My classes started at six at night. But no, I was actually going to go be a college professor. Then I met a girl that I was worried about being broke. She wasn't God bless her. But like I said, Well, maybe I should go do some other form of teaching. At the time, I wasn't sure if that was a temporary diversion or not. But I ended up teaching Windows for Workgroups in Microsoft Word when a mouse was a new thing when people would use it as a foot pedal. That's a true story. By the way that actually happened in my classroom, somebody put it on the ground and tried to use it as a foot pedal, like it was a sewing machine or something. So I ended up becoming a technical trainer, teaching networking, databases, programming, and then I decided to go become an independent trainer, started a first company with two other guys, that company grew and eventually got sold. Then I started cascade with one of those two guys, he has now moved on to other things cascade solely owned by me. And I've owned cascade for 17 years now, first company out for about seven. So I'm on your 24 of self employment, basically, at this point.

Mike: Not a bad record for somebody who never wanted to do it.

Sean: Well, the funny thing is, I look back, right. And I still love teaching, like all my hobbies are teaching. I'm basically incapable of learning something and not wanting to teach it. Like I've just like, if I find a new thing, I want to go turn around and teach it. And there's a lot of learning if you have the right orientation to a business, like I know. And I know people get into it for different reasons. It's why I struggle with somebody's like, so what are your growth plans? And I'm like, learning. And that's worked for me. I mean, you know, our first business, we got up to like, 25 people, this business, I've got 15 people, so it's not just like me learning. It's like, I feel like I built an organisation that learns and then go figure. What do I end up doing? The first company did what we used to call technology evangelism work back in the day from Guy Kawasaki, but nobody calls it that anymore. And then this company was a market research firm, which is, oddly enough, something professors do, too. So I have this kind of weird circular thing, I think is kind of happened career wise. And at the same time I, I've had the opportunity to be an adjunct in an MBA programme. I still like teaching and volunteering. And so it's it to me, it makes a lot of sense. And obviously, I should say this, I mean, so nobody thinks it's Pollyanna have I had to learn things like what's p&l? Have I had to learn accounting? Have I learned to learn business and operational processes? Have I learned all the vagaries of HR policies by state in the United States? Yes, I've either hired someone to do that. And or I've had to learn that myself. And if I read contracts long enough to put the most caffeinated person to sleep, yes, I've done that, too. But like, there's plenty of running a business that I had to learn. But no, I didn't even really think I was going to do it. At the start. No, I love it. I love everything about it, mostly. But if I said I loved everything about it, you shouldn't believe me. But mostly, I love everything about it.

Mike: That's great to hear. It's worked out. Well. So you mentioned cascade, is the market research firm? Can you just unpack that and tell us a little bit more about what you do and who you work with?

Sean: Yeah, I say we get hired for pain or opportunity. So we either get hired because a competitor has done a better job selling or marketing or building products. Or you've done a poor job selling and a poor job marketing, and a poor job building product, or we get hired for opportunity. So somebody who wants to move into a new market, they've got a brand new products, that doesn't really have a market yet, or there's like, you know, industries they want to move into. And you go one layer below that. We do a lot of qualitative and quantitative research to answer the questions that fall out of those pain and opportunity buckets. Because clients will sit around a table or virtually or otherwise in their office and say, We really need some market insight to make this decision effectively. And so they'll come to us. And I think of us is like great recommenders right. We're certainly really good plumbers we understand how to conduct research really well. But fundamentally we get hired because we produce great recommendations. And the reason we do that to kind of bring the circle all the way Around, is we only work with B2B technology companies. So if you're a business to business oriented company, and you have a technology based solution, and the reason there's a little asterisk there is like, you know, we wouldn't work with Merck, talking to surgeons about cancer drugs, but we might talk to Merck, about a life sciences oriented solution that is SAS based to manage clinical trials, right. So like, there has to be like a strong technical underpinning which in this era of cascade, you know, your 17 predominantly means cloud based solution. So if you're a cloud based solution, kind of regardless of the vertical you're in, that's a great choice for us. On the other hand, if you were like, selling H back solutions to high rises, which we get a lead like that, every once in a while, they'll say, Well, we're technology. And I'm like, Yeah, but not the technology we work with. You know, you're absolutely technology, and you're absolutely B2B, but it's not what we would work with.

Mike: And that's interesting, you've got such a clear focus of what you do, because, I mean, there's this view that B2C, you know, consumer does a lot more market research than B2B. So why did you pick B2B?

Sean: It's more interesting. I mean, that's part of it. I mean, for sure, part of it's, it's more interesting, it's chewier. Now, I know there's a B2C researcher out there, that's like, but there's so much into like, whether they pick the rose coloured phone or the gold phone? And I'm like, Yeah, but it also feels kind of manipulative. So like, I wouldn't really get excited about that. And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the army of people to do consumer packaged research and like, what colour the Clorox box should be, I mean, I understand it's valuable. But it's just different. I also feel like it ends up being a lot more focused, you know, our audiences are very narrow and B2B that we go after, right? We don't serve a, you know, the swath of millennials, right? You know, it's very rare for us to do a study that would be based on like demographic characteristics, it's a lot more like, what are you using? What is your day, like, you know, what is your title? Like? What are the business problems you're trying to solve? That's how we target people. So I just find there's kind of a richness to it. And I think the other thing is, and this is honestly part of the entrepreneurial journey, so try to make this really short. But it's, it's fundamental to what happened to me, our first client in the first business was Microsoft, in 1999. And if somebody listening thinks of market dominance in tech, you don't really understand what it was like, except if you worked with Microsoft. And when they own 97% of computing, that doesn't exist. Now. There's not 97% of iPhones, AWS doesn't have 97% of cloud compute, you know, there's nobody, there's 97% of laptop sales, Microsoft and Intel, were something that's just probably never going to be seen again, unless, like, open AI does it to us, right? You know, or something like that, where you got like, 97%, of something happening in one building. And I say only that for this one reason. We ended up working with their developer division at that time, a lot. And they were very business to business focus. And so I ended up getting I didn't know it at the time, I didn't even think about it that way. At the time, I got this incredible education, on what it meant to do business to business marketing and business to business product development, just because we lucked out is our first account as these guys. Right. And it's it's almost like a version of graduate school for me that I didn't really think about it the time, but that's what was happening. And again, that analogy would hold true even for B2C. I mean, I know those people who like, you know, hung around a big CPG company, and they're like, as a vendor, they just ended up being educated in the world of that, and God bless them. That's great. But for me, I just got drawn into it. And before I knew it, that was the space that I really felt like I could provide a lot of value. And there's some fringe benefits. I'd say, too. I mean, I think the research is, well, I don't want to say it's monetized better, because that's not really maybe the best way to put it. It's not even really what I think it's just really chewy and rich. And that creates one problem, I'd say it's a huge one maybe that falls under the like when I send it like the job mostly is it can be very challenging for us to get feasibility on a study. I mean, one of our perennial problems is cmo wanders up to us of technology company and says, I want an n of 1000 survey. And we go nope. And they go, why not? And then there's this like math problem, we have to explain to them and they're like, I don't understand. And you're like, it's hard to get B2B research respondents. It's really hard. And it's probably the biggest day to day challenge we face in our business at least. So

Mike: I'm going to ask you that because obviously, I think most B2B marketers have tried research at some point or another. And most of them have come across this, you know, situation where they go, we want you know, even if it's a couple of 100 responses, that's really tough and B2B. So how do you go about trying to get higher responses from B2B surveys? Or do you do market research a different way for B2B? Well,

Sean: Well, so that's interesting. So a couple of things in that one underlying that question, you're getting at something that I want to pull out which is that me Many marketers in B2B have to recognise that they might not get a quant study, they might end up with a call study. Just because of the math, right? Even things like a brand study that you would really traditionally want as quant, you might just not have enough people at the top of the funnel. Another classic example of that is competitive studies. You know, somebody says, I would really like a quantitative survey of XYZ competitor customers, and it's like, okay, we'll just do the math, right? I mean, if you want an end of 200, and your response rates are in the low single digits, you need a lot of people at the top of the funnel, and somebody has to have that whole list of competitor customers, that's going to be hard to find. And if you try to organically sourced that list, well, now that's nowhere near the cost that you thought that study would be right, which is a lot of times why the CPI, you know, the cost per respondent can be like, really, really high. And that creates some challenges for client. Basically, I'll give you a short version of how we find people, we could dig into it more if you want, because it's it's definitely an area we could do a whole show on. But like, the short version is don't use a panel, use an expert network, or somebody that is preferably which expert networks do but they don't do always sourcing participants organically, like they're actually going out and looking at LinkedIn and their or some other tool. And they're trying to find people who have exactly the right profile. And then they screen those individuals. Because the problem with the panels are there may be all right for B2C. But they tend to break down very quickly for B2B for one simple reason that I can give you a short analogy on that is absolutely true, and is the heart of the problem. We even have a short video on the website that somebody on the team here did wants that we call B2B Brian, that's kind of a cute way of putting it together. But like so B2B, Brian is 53. And he likes baseball and pasta equally. And at 54. He likes baseball a little more and pasta a little less, you can track that somewhat in a panel of a bazillion consumers and send out surveys. The challenge is the timeliness of it breaks down with business because you are in a study this year, because you work for big Corp, Microsoft, and you are an HR benefits leader. And in a week from now you're going to quit and go be an HR benefits leader in a startup, you're not even in the same study anymore, you're solving completely different problems. And the reality is we do have a database, it's live and out there all the time. It's called LinkedIn the tracks that for us, but that's not the same thing as having a proprietary database. And then you have the the one factor that the barbarians are at the gate, meaning you know, if you can get 50 bucks or 75 bucks as a research participant to fill out a 15 minute survey, you will try desperately to fake and be whoever that person is, there's just a massive amount of challenges there. And whereas in B2C, they get paid a lot less. So there's kind of this like Cold War always going on with like professional survey takers. And you solve a lot of that by recruiting organically because you're going to someone who is most likely to they are they have the background, all that stuff anyway. So wait a little longer on that than I intended. But that's that's basically it. And we just have to constantly be staring at the vendors we work with for recruit and figure out you know, you're good with this audience. You're good with that audience, you're great with this audience. And that's how it plays out. But the short answer is just for the love of God, don't use panel, because you will end up with a survey that you may not even know you shouldn't trust, but you shouldn't trust.

Mike: I think that's that's really interesting advice. I'm gonna have to ask, What about focus groups in B2B? Do they work? Or are they hard to be effective?

Sean: They work? I think they work honestly. Great. We try to steer clients slightly away from them. Because like, I really tried to ask why are you asking for a focus group is it preference that you come from B to C, here because there's some dynamics, maybe this is what you're alluding to, in B2B focus groups that you have to kind of watch for right and things that are harder to create dynamic wise, because people might be a little more reluctant to share, especially on certain topics, because they don't really know who else is in the focus group, it can be a little harder to just collect the focus group participants at the same date and time. And it's also one of the reasons that, at least in our experience, we have a lot more success with virtual focus groups in B2B, that if we tried to do it in person, the only exception to that is like when we run them at a conference. Like for example, we've run focus groups for AWS at reinvent, but there's 10s of 1000s of people already there for you to grab. So that's not a really fair test that you know, in person focus groups work all the time. It's just the nature of a conference draws them in in a different way. But yeah, we don't really have a huge issue running them in short, I think you just have to factor in a little different dynamic that plays out and the places we would use them. Message testings a call Number one, that's probably the most common. I would say it's sometimes shows up in crossover studies, maybe like an ICP study, you know, and I'd say one of the thing about it one thing, just and this is probably more personal preference, I tend to steer people away from them a little bit, because I don't know if it's necessarily the best bang for your buck, because I think people over index on the popcorn thing that will happen in the focus group, which all happens in like 90 minutes. And they don't think about, well, if I turned all that cost of running a focus group, and I did X number of interviews that I could listen to, I could read the transcript, I get a much more longitudinal feel. And I can tune the study as it goes along in a different way, for roughly the same amount that you might have run a single focus group. But that's maybe more personal preference than anything else. I'd

Mike: I'd sounds like good advice, though. I mean, it sounds like a very sensible approach. I mean, one of the things a lot of companies do is they try and do I mean, what they see as being very informal market research, but try and do something in house, maybe ask the sales team to go talk to a couple of customers. I mean, what do you see as the issues behind companies running market research in house?

Sean: Well, first thing is, I think it's great. I think if you have a mindset that you want to learn about your market, whether you hire a firm or not, I will just say you're probably ahead of half the people you're competing with, right at that moment of you making that decision, whether you hire a research firm or not to do it. The second thing is it has a lot to do with how you staff, the team that's going to do that research. Have you given them actual time to do it? Do you as a leader understand some of the dynamics we've already discussed? You know, if you go say, go run a survey with our current customers, do you understand response rates? Do you understand that you can't just like say, Oh, they're our valued customers, I'm sure they'll respond to our survey, you have to understand some dynamics that are just like, everyday realities for somebody that runs a research firm. And some companies are good at that, you know, and I think that's great. As far as the specific example of talking to customers, or talking to the sales team, I'd split the two a little bit, I think it's great to talk to you to our customers, I don't think you necessarily need a research firm as an agnostic intermediary. I don't think you'd need it, I think that it can be very helpful because the discussion guide and some of the things that you're going to develop might be canted to meet the needs of a particular stakeholder group and might not necessarily be as balanced as it could be. And that's definitely a rule that we take on. And I would say from the, you know, salesperson standpoint, I actually love it. When we talk to sales books, I say that they are running a never ending qualitative research project. And they need to be interacted with as such. Now on the other hand, they can sometimes be a poor research participant, because they might generalise a lot from a specific or the last deal they closed. But you contrast that with they're sending messaging downrange all day long in a complex B2B sale. And they are understanding where where it comes from, and where it lands a perfect example of that. And I should emphasise this a complex sale, I'm not talking about somebody like selling selling e signature solutions and waiting for the next lead to show up on their screen. And they're just reading a script. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the more complex side of B2B. But like there was a stakeholder meeting, we were in one time with a recognisable fortune 100 tech company and the sales guy pops off when one of the marketers said I think we should test digital transformation is a phrase and the long standing sales guy, probably comfortable poking everyone in the eye, because he probably kept selling a lot. Said, I think there should be a swear jar around here every single time somebody utters the phrase digital transformation, and they're forced to put $100 in it, because it just drives people batty when you say it in a sales conversation. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're here, right? I mean, and I like I said, I think there's this misplaced notion that sometimes talking to the sales team is invaluable. And I think done right? It's, it's a goldmine. It's an absolute goldmine. So I think we provide a lot of value. And I could get into that. But that's probably not the best use of a listeners time to hear a commercial where our value is, but I would inspire people to say, yeah, go learn back to what I said earlier. Like, if you're learning about your market and your competitors, you're way ahead of probably half the companies out there just by making that decision alone. That's

Mike: That's a really positive view of what people can do, Sean. So I really appreciate that. You know, one thing I'm interested in about market research is, obviously today it's quite a labour intensive activity. How do you see market research changing in the future? Do you see technology really affecting what you do? Yeah,

Sean: Yeah, I think in terms of the future market research, there's probably two things I would point to, although there's a tonne of things, one is synthetic respondents, which hold a lot of promise and certain amount of risks, but I'm excited about it. I think, you know, if you're a craftsman of any sort, you shouldn't be worried about new technology. Right, you know, the analogy I've used with a lot of the AI tools around here is that it's more like it's a supersuit, right, or it's like a nail gun versus a hammer, you know, houses were built with hammers for millennia. And then some guy came around with a compressed air tank and a big hefty nail gun, and somebody was dismissive of it. And somebody else said, I think my customer just wants a well built house, and they'd like it a little sooner. And now it's rare to go to any job site and not see guys like putting the house together with nail guns doesn't mean that it's a worse house. So synthetic respondents are a big one. There are some risks and rewards to that, like I said, but I think they're going to be a really interesting adjunct to the the more kind of human centred research that I think we're still going to continue to do. The other thing is AI tools for qualitative analysis, we've always had tools that can help go through quantitative results. But I think the place where it's more interesting is around analysis of qualitative survey, qualitative data where you have a tonne of transcripts and textual data that for all of the vendors who build solutions that would analyse that pilot tax, they weren't nearly as good as some of the tools I see that are AI based now. And that takes a lot of manual labour out of the equation that takes a lot of the time out of the equation, that leads to some consistency when it comes to coding and analysis. You know, back to what I said earlier, I ultimately, nobody's working with us, because they care what tools we use. As long as those tools are appropriate. They want to buy the house, they want to have great recommendations, they want to have a way to change their business. And if we can get to that quicker through some of these AI based tools, I think that's fantastic.

Mike: That's great. And that's a super optimistic view of the future, which I love. As we come to closer podcasts, it's always a couple of questions we'd like to ask, and the first one is around people thinking of entering marketing, or in your case, maybe market research. What advice would you give to someone thinking of entering the profession?

Sean: Well, if I was to give very specific advice to market research, I would say spend time looking at qualitative research. You know, I think it's a real common misstep and mistake to kind of look at market research as surveys. And I think schools sometimes do an injustice there, too. I think when I even taught in the MBA programme, it felt like every student assumed that what I did all day was right, and send out quantitative surveys. And they miss the richness and understanding that comes from qualitative. So I would say that's a big piece. And it also sometimes inhibits somebody who's looking at a market research as a career, right? Because if they see themselves as somewhat of a behind the scenes person, or someone who wants to look at the data, and analysing qualitative research puts you right in touch with the customer. And I think that's going to be ever more important. As we get more and more data from AI based solutions, right? That we have this kind of ability to talk to customers in their element human to human. I think that's like really, really going to be critical. I've even seen some organisations start to emphasise a lot more qualitative research, even technology organisations, because they see the same gaps starting to develop, you know, mountains of data, but not a lot of qualitative research being done. So that's being and a more meta level, I would say read stuff you disagree with. It's it's a general piece of advice. If somebody asked me like, what's the major piece of advice I'd give anybody, business or otherwise read stuff you disagree with? You don't have to agree with it when you're done. But if you really ask yourself, How much do I read that I disagree with? Do I watch the news channel that I don't like? Do I read the articles that I don't like? Do I read books from business authors that just based on the cover, I might not necessarily agree with? One of two things is going to happen. Either you're going to have your own views kind of positively reinforced by engaging with something that's different, or they're going to be changed somewhat. And that's good. So those are the two big things. That's

Mike: That's awesome advice, Sean, I think not just for people new to the industry or thinking about the industry, but also people who've been in the industry a while. So really appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time and all your insight, Sean, is there anything you'd like to sum up with or anything you feel we've missed?

Sean: I know, I think we hit a lot of things. I mean, I would just say, you know, my career has been blessed by just an emphasis on wanting to learn approach problems from that mindset. And I'll leave you with one personal example. Let's just say people are watching the US presidential election, this time around with a certain degree of interest, perhaps not just in the United States, much like they did on the last few elections. And I saw that I'm a citizen here in the States. And the last election happened and I said, you know, I want to learn more about US presidents. I want to learn more about the process around electing presidents and all that and I said, you know, one of the coolest things I think I could do is I'm going to go read a biography on every single US President. So alongside of us bunch of other reading over the last three years. I did that. And I just finished it up a couple months ago. And I can tell you I learned a tonne, I was at times surprised by how our own electoral processes changed. I was somewhat surprised also why things are the way they are. And that led to all kinds of interesting thoughts around, you know, what presidents were good, which presidents were bad, what made a good president? You know, what was the typical characteristics of a president? Well, I don't think everybody needs to do that to vote. I think having a lien to learning more about the process than just talking about it. I think he's the biggest piece of advice I could give anybody, both personally and professionally.

Mike: That's amazing, even if the thought of reading a biography of every American President seems just a little challenging at the moment.

Sean: Well, it was it was actually pretty fun. But I'm a history buff, so but not everybody has. Anyway, anyway.

Mike: Also, Sean, thank you so much. It's been such an interesting conversation. I mean, you've talked a lot about loading if people want to learn more, or maybe even get you to help them do their next market research project. How can they get in contact with you?

Sean:  Just check out cascade Insights.com. You know, thankfully, to the heart efforts of our marketing team, if you just type cascade Insights in Google, I think you're gonna find this pretty quick. So that's, that's the fastest way.

Mike: That's, that's amazing and nice and simple. Sean, thanks so much for being a guest on the podcast. I've really enjoyed our chat. Thanks

Sean: Thanks for being here, man. Take care.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Christopher Rack - MRP

Chris Rack, CEO of MRP, a demand generation solution, joins Mike Maynard to discuss intent signals, lead generation, and how MRP can help accelerate B2B businesses' demand generation activities.

Chris explains the benefits of aggregating different intent signal sources and why this can work better across different industries and services. He shares why direct mailers may be the best strategy when targeting C-level personas and why sales remains a vital ingredient in the sales/marketing mix.

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 MRP

MRP is a demand generation platform connecting assumptive and deterministic engagement signals to help brands identify target accounts with the highest likelihood for conversion.

Time Stamps

[00:39.0] – Chris discusses his current role at MRP and his career journey.

[01:18.1] – Chris dives straight into what MRP delivers for its customers.

[07:45.4] – Chris offers his insights into how to target the bottom of the sales funnel and how direct mail might make the difference.

[14:05.0] – Sales is here to stay – Chris gives his thoughts on the vital role sales continues to play.

[17:38.3] – Chris discusses how MRP approaches its own marketing.

[20:55.8] – Chris shares some marketing advice.

[22:33.6] – Chris’s contact details.

Quotes

“Most of the conversations happening in B2B sales and marketing are about tactic... but those things are generally irrelevant if you have good timing.” Chris Rack, CEO at MRP.

“If you happen to know that a company is really, truly interested or has a challenge that your product can solve and you reach out to them - if your timing is good, your conversion rates are almost always good.” Chris Rack, CEO at MRP.

Follow Chris:

Chris Rack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherrack/

MRP website: https://www.mrpfd.com/about-mrp/

MRP on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mrpfd/

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 Chris Rack - MRP

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Chris Rack

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's guest is Chris Rack, who's the CEO of MRP. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on now. We always like to start off, let's just learn a little bit about yourself and your career journey. So you can can you give us a bit of background and how your career has developed over the years?

Chris: Yes, I mean, I started out in sales in roughly 2004, I entered the the B2B demand generation space 2006 2007, I've been through a couple different roles ranging from I was a BDR. At one point, my last tenure was at a company called demand science. For six years as the Chief Revenue Officer of that company grew from very small, roughly 6 million, just over 100 million, and that six year timeframe. I started as the CEO of MRP, May of this year, so I'm right around seven months in and really enjoying it so far.

Mike: That's awesome. I mean, let's dive straight into MRP. Can you tell us a little bit about what the company does?

Chris: Yeah, so we're demand generation solutions provider, primarily in the B2B technology and enterprise space. So the core of what we do well, is we, I like to say we make the haystack smaller, right. So we have a nice piece of technology that identifies companies that are showing propensity to buy across roughly 700 product categories. And then, unlike most vendors in this space, we just deliver that data and let the marketing team kind of do what they do with it. We monetize through a series of solutions or services to drive. In essence, what are leads for the B2B technology marketers, so top of funnel leads all the way down to, you know, very down funnel leads driven by my US based call centre in Philadelphia. So I guess that's probably describes it as simply as I can.

Mike: So it's interesting. So it sounds like you're a mix between marketing technology all the way down to actually execution with a call centre, is that right?

Chris: That is correct, I found over my my career is that there are so many marketing tech products, and the stack is so big that it can be a bit daunting for a marketer to take on a new technology can also take a lot of time to implement. And there's some costs associated there. So we monetize on the services end of it, because it's generally easier to execute on right. And we could do it on, you know, a more per lead or more per monetization basis, which a lot of customers in our space.

Mike: That's sounds like a really good solution for a lot of marketers who maybe a time press they want they want good results. You talk about the database, can you give us a little bit of background about what you're doing to understand this propensity to buy? I mean, how do you know whether someone's ready to buy.

Chris: So we probably heard of the phrase intent, it's quite the buzzword over the past two or three years. So we're not dissimilar. I believe that a little differently that most vendors have a single source of intent that they'll, they'll leverage across their data set, right, whether it's a bid stream or website engagement across a network of sites, or something of that nature, I believe that intent or true signals should be aggregated. So I have two or three proprietary sources, right. Some of them are, I call it voice verified intent, where we listen to calls. And we understand based on the call centre, what B2B decision makers are buying based on those calls, we have an email engine that kind of disperses case studies out into the space, right, we tRack engagement with those case studies, because again, they're a bit more down funnel than just regular website engagement. And then I partner with two of the five largest review sites, I'm to ingest their data into my algorithms as well. So by aggregating multiple sources of intent, I can drive a solid volume of folks who I know are interested, but I also eliminate the false positives, the biggest issues with content providers is that they're too singular focused. So you'll find a lot of people who you think they have intent, but they just don't, because it's not cross verified. So my tech is built to ingest as many signals as I can. And I'm always I'm always building new ones, partnering with new companies and trying to adjust as many as many different types of signals as I can to identify with the highest propensity, what companies are actually in market across software and technology categories.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, are there particular categories that this works, you know? Well, for? I mean, quite often, the review sites, for example, you mentioned, they're pretty focused around SAS products. Is that something that the system works really well for? Or is it applicable across a broader range?

Chris: They're pretty focused on SAS products and tech products, because that's where most of the spend is right now. And SAS and technology tend to be fairly progressive and how they market right I do believe the next wave from a from a B2B marketing standpoint, especially in the technology is all of the other industries and categories that haven't quite been as developed as tech and at SAS. Right. So, I mean, I have a friend who works at a $3 billion packaging company, for their marketing and sales team still uses Excel. Right. So, you know, there's hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on events in packaging and manufacturing. And, and some of these, I guess, you would say, less innovative, right marketing teams and sales teams that I think is like the next step forward. So again, that's why I'm focused on many different types of signals, because in the B2B tech space, they might see a lot of value in website engagement and review sites. But in the procurement space, I might want to partner with an event company, right to be able to tRack what companies have been or attended events in the past six to 12 months, right. So what I'm doing is leaving myself open options to be able to ingest and aggregate signals that might work for different industries or different products or different solutions better.

Mike: I'm presuming that's always going to be a work in progress.

Chris: There's always new sources of intent, that consistently being refined, right, and I believe at the end of the day, if you can solve for timing, right, most, most of the conversations happening in B2B sales and marketing are about tactic. Should I email should I call? Should I LinkedIn message should I do this? What software you know, like, those things are generally irrelevant. If you have good timing, right? If you happen to know that a company is really truly interested, or has a challenge that your product can solve, and you reach out to them, you could reach out to them on the street, or in an aeroplane. And they happen to have that pain that the moment you reach out to them. If your timing is good, your conversion rates are almost always good. So I've been really pushing my team to solve for that sold for having good timing, and then the ways that we can monetize it are infinite. You know, the joke I have with my team is if I went to the VP of Sales for an HR software company, and I handed him a, a post it note with five companies that are looking to buy HR software the next three months, and he cold calls those five and two of them schedule a meeting, right, that VP of sales would pay me $10,000 For that posted note, right? Because it got it got him the two meetings that he needs, you know, that he needed with the least amount of effort possible. And so that's what we're trying to solve for here at MRP.

Mike: I love that simplify it down to a post it note is a real goal. I mean, presuming you're not giving people post it notes at the moment. So can you just explain your how people can engage with the product. So maybe someone from the marketing side how they might engage to get perhaps at some of that top of funnel intent. And then obviously, you know how you'd work with sales to get some of them or bottom of the funnel.

Chris: So on the top of the funnel, we have a pretty dynamic content syndication engine, right? So B2B, marketers are giving us their content, we disperse it via email across our engine, and we're generating leads on a CPL basis that go into that top of funnel. And then in the mid slash bottom, I have a pretty innovative direct mail solution like actual physical mailer, that connects to a digital landing page, where we're able to capture both survey and request for sales call information that customers are really loving right now, because the desktop or the screen is just so crowded, right? And to be honest, the mailbox isn't crowded right now. So we're seeing a lot of great conversion rates with customers, leveraging that turn G physical mailer, and then I have a, I have two call centres, one in Philadelphia, and one in Belfast. So for my US customers, I provide really high quality, voice verified BANT type leads driven by a US call centre with very talented high skilled callers, right, which is unique in my space, because most of the calling teams these days are outsourced. And then in Belfast, I do about six languages across Europe as well. So being able to do that, and again, similar style, you know, high quality, long tenured, you know, outbound phone callers who are generating leads that have high propensity to convert into meetings and deals and pipeline because of the quality of them. They're not cheap, right? We're not that particular solution is at the bargain basement per lead, right. But if you're a customer in this space, looking to drive quality and not quantity, right, then it's an it's an amazing solution that we see a tonne of success with as well.

Mike: That's that's sort of interesting. I'd like to get back to what you said about the middle of a funnel. You mentioned postal mailings. Before COVID People were starting to see postal mailings working really well. And then obviously, as everybody moved to work from home, postal became harder. So how were you seeing postal mailings? Right now? Do you see people coming back to the office? Or are you having to find home addresses for people?

Chris: It depends on your persona. So we only send to the office addresses because finding the PII data attached to home addresses is fairly difficult, if not impossible, and in fact, if you could, if you had the data it would Probably be worthless in two years with all the data privacy regulations coming. So it really depends on the persona. So we we sell a lot to customers who are looking to target it, finance, legal, HR type personas, those are the personas that they have a high propensity to be hybrid and go into the office, and B, have a high propensity to engage with male, it finance, legal, and HR are the four personas that a business that likely engaged with the male most regularly it because they're always getting something a package, a delivery, a service, a server or something, HR and legal, you know, somebody's always sending a document or a paperwork or something. I'm in finance, because usually someone in finance is, is checking the the mail for checks, you know, obviously, so the bills can get paid. Interestingly enough, we see great engagement at the C level, just what happens is someone who may not be the C level is the person checking the mail, they see a very formal mailer with an in an envelope addressed to the C level person that looks somewhat important. And it's actually hand delivered to the C level person, which generates obviously a high level of engagement and open because it's delivered to the person like, Hey, you should read this, right? So, um, you would think Oppositely, but one of the most successful, you know, audience bases that we reach are those very high level or C level, folks, because the mail is usually dispersed directly to them by hand.

Mike: That's fascinating. And then presumably, on the other hand, you know, maybe someone like a software engineer might be harder to reach, they don't tend to engage with mail. They're quite often remote with that, would that be a fair comment?

Chris: Yeah, you know, software engineering, and marketing, from time to time has a high propensity to work full time remote, those are probably the two is the most difficult personas. What we're also seeing as well, too, is, again, we're not a gifting platform, so we're not sending heavy, you know, heavy boxes, or bulky bottles of wine or some of those things. So a lot of companies post COVID have set themselves up to forward mail, simple postal mail to the home addresses of those folks should they be sent in. So I mean, our delivery rate across all personas is over 90%. But in some of the higher you know, those those, those personas that we really resonate with, it's 97 98%.

Mike:  Wow, it's amazing. That's, that's up there with email, although we know most of those emails probably get delivered into junk and never get read.

Chris: Or there was so much automation right now, on the email side of the fancy that I mean, I think, like yesterday, I got like 172, prospecting or inbound emails from vendors trying to sell me something. So it's pretty gnarly.

Mike: Hard to stand out in amongst 172.

Chris: Yes, but it's easy to stand out amongst the two direct mailers that they might get. So again, it's been it, I will say a pleasant surprise. When I took the role. I knew we had the capability, but I didn't have an opportunity to kind of jump in and kind of see it. And it's been really favourable as we've combined. Our syndication solution, the top of funnel leads solution with the direct mailer. So we generate a lead for the customer through syndication, which is valuable to them because they have a high conversion rate over time. But a lot of buyers of syndication are getting pressured by their leadership team to convert faster, right. So by combining the direct mail nurture follow up to the syndication we're delivering leads at a very solid CPL, through syndication with our customers like, but we're also converting them at a higher clip, because we're attaching that direct mailer follow up to it, which is unique in the industry that I work in. And again, customers are really digging it.

Mike:  That's awesome. I love that. That sounds great. I mean, traeth talking a little bit more about COVID. I mean, one of the things a lot of people have said, is it's harder for sales teams to engage customers, post COVID. Basically, customers enjoyed not talking to salespeople during COVID, and actually doing a lot themselves self directed research. Is that what you're seeing, and that's why people need those, those leads more, are you seeing other trends?

Chris:  I've been in the sales, and I've sold to marketing for the better part of 17 years and the amount of times over that 17 years, someone's referred to the buyer journey changing. You know, I think there's enough times to where I can, I've lost count, right? The amount of information available to buyers, more now than ever is more than it's ever been. Right. But the part that sales brings into the mechanism. As far as the buying process standpoint is sellers are there to make a buyer feel good about their decision. And if you're a great seller, you have the expertise and the amount of knowledge to make a recommendation to that customer that makes them feel secure in the decision to sign that paperwork with. And that might happen a little bit later in the process these days because people are collecting information. Right so that really what's happened and the only part of the buyer journey that's changed is that the role giving customers information has pivoted a bit more from the seller to the marketing side of the house. Right. But what's the the buyer has collected the information required to move forward, that motion is still very much handled by the sellers. And again, the good ones are the ones who aren't continuing to give information. A good sellers are the ones who are making the recommendation that makes that prospect feel feel comfortable and good about their decision. And that's what that's the real difference in this, this, this consistent narrative of the buyer journey changes. It's really just a simple, small pivot in whether the sellers are disseminating information or marketing. Right. And that's the difference between 2004 and 2024.

Mike: Interesting, I think that's a really neat way of looking at, you know, some of the changes we've seen is it's just a slight pivot between sales and marketing. I love that. Looking at the product, I mean, you know, I'm interested in lead generation, it can span a huge range of costs. And obviously, the quality of the leads spans and even vaster range of qualities, you've obviously indicated, you're at the top end. So is working with MLP. Is that is that an expensive thing you need to be a big company for? Or can you address the needs of some of the smaller startup companies?

Chris: I mean, I have large customers, you know, that are that are fortune 100 technology companies that are seven figure commitments annually. I have I have small companies that are are simply looking to just begin their outbound journey or begin their inbound journey, right. So a commitment can be as low as $15,000 A quarter, right or as high as 15 million annually. The only real qualification point for working with an MRP is that you sell B2B products, right, I don't do b2c And the most difficult part for me is when I'm, I'm generating my own leads and navigating paid search and all that like keywords like lead generation bead 17,000, things ranging from I'm looking for mortgage leads to roofing leads to plumber leads to LinkedIn, like, again, like the term lead generation is so vast that it becomes sometimes difficult to navigate, you know, the type of lead generation that we do, because there's so many different types of quote unquote, lead providers out there.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a real challenge that range of what lead generation means. I mean, how do you market MRP? Is it primarily through search where people are actually looking for a product? Or are you doing other things to promote the company?

Chris: So we most certainly practice what we preach all the products that I've described here we use, right, so I send monthly direct mailers to targeted groups of people. I have outbound callers from my Philadelphia call centre, my Belfast call centre that are hooking, you know, interested bent type leads that my BDRs follow up on, I do syndication that I nurture and score up to the point where my BDR team is looking. Yeah, so all of the things that I sell, I do, which is wonderful, right? There's nothing better than nothing better than selling someone and they're like, Well, how do I know it works? And I say, Well, I'm talking to you, aren't I? Right, you know, like, so it's a, it's a tends to be a pretty strong use case. And you're convincing someone that direct mail works if they were someone who became a lead because they engaged with your direct mail, right, so we knew that my, my target audience, again, I know the companies that have a high propensity to buy, we do so My Tam is not small, but very focused. I'm only, like, 40 ish, million dollar company, right. So my resources are infinite, that I can't boil the ocean. So I have a very focused group of companies that I know have a high propensity to buy, I use our technology to further refine that list. And then I have, you know, obviously a team of outbound sellers and a small group of BDRs that, you know, really focus on, I have a very full cycle selling org, right, I have a small group of BDR is but they're mostly for lead qualification and passing, I don't do the SDR and, and the seller and the renewal rep. I don't have the multiple facets, it's, you know, single sellers who handled the whole lifecycle lifecycle of the account and the prospect. Again, keeping it simple, right.

You know, the go to market is changing massively right now, to be fair, you know, we've killed it ourselves. Right, you know, like, all the technology, all the automation, all the products that you know, all the spray and pray that, that marketers and sellers have been leaning on for the past three or four years, right? It worked in 2019 to 2021 because interest rates were so low, that money was free, and everybody was investing, like it was going out of style, right? And again, a lot of sellers in this current market never sold in 2011 2009 2008. I have zero so people are always like, when's it gonna go back? And I'm like, It's not this is it? Like this is what sales is actually like before money was free. So you know what, what we're seeing now is, is really what I call like, a thinning of the herd. urge sellers and marketers and revenue teams for those who are actually who actually have the skill set dedication, and, you know, again, general focus to be able to be a career seller or marketer, right? Those are the ones that are emerging to the top right now, and those who don't who just happen to be in the right place at the right time, in 2021, are going to be slowly working themselves out of revenue teams.

Mike: And that's a bit of a warning for people in careers, then they gotta gotta learn what the new reality is, or maybe not the new realities, obviously, it was a reality back in 2011, as well, Christmas has been been really interesting. Before you go, there's a couple of questions, we always like to ask people, you're doing a lot in terms of helping marketers find leads, and really almost expanding what marketing does versus sales. I mean, what would be your advice to a young person who's thinking of a career in marketing.

Chris: Play the long game, marketing isn't an instant thing, your leadership is always going to continue to push you to try to solve things very fast and quickly. And with that comes my second piece of advice, learn how to manage up, like setting expectations is the most valuable thing to do as a marketer, right? And what happens is why most 10 years of marketers, especially marketing leaders is so short is because they're just not great at setting expectations, they over promise, which vests and sets them up to under deliver, and then you know, things don't work out. But you have to be able to sit down with your executive team and say, Hey, this is gonna take time. And if that doesn't work for you, I'm not your person.

Mike: That's great advice, I think not only for, for somebody new to marketing as a career, but people already in marketing, talking about that, that advice for people who are ready marketers, is there something you give us like the best piece of advice you've ever received, about marketing about how to do marketing?

Chris: The best piece of advice I've ever received was from one of my earlier mentors, and it's, you know, learn how to say very complicated things in very simple ways. You know, that's always resonated with me, if you can't, you can't say something in two sentences or less, you're probably overcomplicating it and your audience isn't receiving it. And that works in both marketing, sales, leadership, life business, you know, all facets, but it's, I guess, especially relevant in marketing, given that sometimes you only have 10 to 15 seconds to catch someone.

Mike: That's awesome. That's great advice. Chris, this has been fascinating. I mean, just to finish off, is there something you'd like to say to you know, the summarise what MRP does? Or perhaps anything you feel we might have missed during the conversation? No,

Chris: I think we've covered it really well. And again, and for those looking to increase their pipeline, right cost effectively, generate leads for their revenue teams in the B2B marketing space. You can always reach out to myself, I'm on LinkedIn at Christopher RAC, M MRP, is on LinkedIn as well. We're also on most social channels, or hit us up at MRP fd.com.

Mike: Thank you so much for your time. This has been fascinating. And thanks for helping everyone you know, understand a bit more about the world of lead generation.

Chris: Awesome. Thank you so much, everyone, have a good weekend.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Asaf Darash - Regpack and Kirsty Dawe - Webeo

Asaf Darash, CEO of Regpack, and Kirsty Dawe, CEO of B2B website personalisation software Webeo, join Mike to discuss their collaborative project and how Webeo's software enables Regpack to increase website conversion rates and enhance the customer experience.

A great success story, the project demonstrates the impact personalisation can have on lead quality and Asaf and Kirsty share their advice on undertaking similar projects.

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 Regpack

Regpack is an online registration, payment, and user management system that enables organisations to register applicants quickly and effectively.

About Webeo

Webeo is a software tool enabling B2B businesses to increase website conversions through personalisation.

About Asaf Darash:

Asaf Darash is the founder and CEO of Regpack. With extensive experience as an entrepreneur and investor, he has built three successful companies to date. He specialises in product development for the web, team building, and bringing a company from a concept to profitability. His specialties include extreme programming, programming languages, JavaScript, MongoDB, system structures and new media, enabling him to build versatile products based on achievable business models. He holds a PhD in New Media from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

About Kirsty Dawe:

Kirsty Dawe is the CEO of Webeo, B2B website personalisation software that delivers a proven solution to the website conversion problem in B2B. Webeo’s software helps B2B organisations increase website leads by delivering a highly relevant, personalised experience to the B2B buyer as soon as they hit the website and tailoring that journey as they move through the funnel. Before Webeo, Kirsty held the role of Managing Director of award-winning agency Really B2B for 15 years. She has extensive knowledge and skills in B2B marketing, website customization, business growth, technology innovation, and full marketing mix in various sectors.

Time Stamps

[00:50.02] – Kirsty and Asaf share their respective career journeys.

[05:53.02] – Asaf explains why Regpack needed to work with Webeo to overcome challenges.

[11:24.09] – Kirsty explains how the Webeo platform can personalise website content.

[19:35.05] – Asaf discusses the time and cost investment involved in the project.

[21:14.00] – Kirsty shares the way businesses can ensure personalisation whilst sticking to legislation.

Follow Asaf:

Joe Zappa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asafdarash/

Regpack website: https://www.regpacks.com/

Regpack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/regpack/

Follow Kirsty:

Kirsty Dawe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirstydawe/

Webeo website: https://www.webeo.com/

Webeo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/webeoglobal/

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.

Transcript: Interview with Asaf Darash - Regpack and Kirsty Dawe - Webeo

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Asaf Darash, Kirsty Dawe

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 have two guests, I'm joined by Asaf Darash, who's the founder and CEO of Regpack, and Kirsty Dawe, who's the CEO of Webeo. Welcome to the podcast, both of you.

Kirsty: Thank you for having me.

Mike: Great. Well, it's great to have you both on and we're obviously going to talk a little bit about a project you've done together. But before, I mean, maybe I can just ask you to give us a little bit of background about your career journey, and also introduce your company and what it does. So Kirsty and then if you want to go first?

Kirsty: Yeah, sure. So I am currently CEO at Webeo, who we are going to talk about today, alongside SF, we are B2B website personalization solution, working with customers purely in the B2B space to help drive their conversion rate optimization, free website personalization. I am now vendor side and feel very passionate about what we do. Because as a B2B marketer, who's been client side and agency side, I understand the pain of driving really great quality traffic to your website, and then not getting you know, much more than a few percent of that traffic actually convert into valuable opportunities and ultimately revenue. So that's why Webeo was born. And I think the reason I feel so passionate about it is because prior to web, eBay was agency side, so I built up ran B2B marketing agency, really B2B, we worked with a range of different clients, everyone from software to professional services to digital transformation, and we won some awards, we were very, we are very, I would say they are very demand gen focused, so results driven, which fits perfectly with the offering that that we have in having Webeo. And it just seemed like an ideal transition for me, you know, looking to move out of the agency space to go into a business where I could really see the value of the product, and also how that would bring revenue into the clients that that we worked with. So that's a bit about me,

Mike: I love that you've moved into a company that solved a real problem that you had in your previous role. That's, that's brilliant. And so can you tell us a little bit about Regpack and how you ended up founding and running the company?

Asaf: Sure. So Regpack is basically an onboarding tool for businesses, mainly service based businesses, the best way to think about Regpack is Shopify for services. That's the easiest way of sort of like a calculate exactly what we do. Services have unique needs that normal ecommerce does not have, mainly the problem of space and time. And the way that that they can give their offering only in specific situations, they have caught a problem, they don't have shipping problems. It's very, very different. And it's really missing in the market right now that services have a dedicated platform for them. My my personal background is somewhat different. I started with an academic career, I was a Fulbright Scholar, I did my PhD at Berkeley, and then later, my postdoc was in Berkeley and Stanford, I mainly was interested in computer languages and how they affect human action. as nerdy as can get. And while I was doing my, my first and second degree, I also built technology companies that would mainly like code that I sold one to Excel or company and the other two to venture capital eventually, like totally sold, I didn't want to do anything with it. And then what happened is, I, I started building a prototype during my my PhD, to see if you can build something that has no constants in it. Only variable, I built a prototype I saw I showed that it's possible. And I was like, Okay, great. You know, a lot of times you build something in the academia, and they're like, Yeah, that's fine. We're done. And then I remember, my, my professor at MIT is like, you know, okay, so who needs this? And like, I don't care. And he's like, No, but who needs this? And he's like, go check if someone needs it. And that sparked a real interest in me to find a real use case that would use that. And I noticed that services have unique business processes that are different from each other. What's very different from a service based business and, and like a just an E commerce or just someone selling stuff is that they have an onboarding process. Think of it like your lawyer, your doctor, anything that giving you a service, they have an onboarding process. And the onboarding process is always unique. Because every business is a bit different. And this fit exactly to what I built. Because it's like, you need to be able to create something that is, is like, it's like it more. It's like Lego, right? Like you can put things together. And I was like, Okay, let's build a company out of this and enrich pack is the baby.

Mike: Right? I mean, I love that I love that you came up with this concept, and then then look for the market and found found that market that needed the product. Obviously, the reason we've got you both on the podcast is to talk about how you two have worked together. So So can you tell me, you know, you have this business, you know, helping service companies on board? What was the problem you had? And then why did you go to where the Oh,

Asaf: so the biggest problem that we had, and we still haven't much back is our biggest strength. Okay, we can cater at the same time to a SaaS company, to a camp to a conference, to a lawyer's office into a doctor's office at the same ease. Now, if you walk into a restaurant, and you see that they serve sushi, and steak and pasta, you'll say like, this sucks, right? This is restaurant, the food is truly terrible, right? And you walk out. And that was exactly our problem, like people would see that. And they would be like, there's no way you can do all this, there's no way that you can do this in a good way. And the thing is, like, because the technology is so unique, and how it enables it, it's very hard for people that are even for people that are technical to believe that this is possible. And that was the problem where we would talk to a client, and they would be very, like, they wouldn't believe that this is possible. Now, on the other hand, this is exactly our strength. Because no business does one thing, they always do multiple things. Think of a school, a school has the actual school, they have the after school, they normally have a camp, they normally have a bunch of events and constantly, right, and there's just like a normal school right? Now, that means that a school is using between four to five different software's just to run basic functions, which is terrible, right? So on one hand, when the client understands that we can do all these things for them, and they start doing the various things, they become a client for life, because from their perspective, replacing reg PAC is replacing it with five software's which no one's going to do, right. But actually getting them to start was close to impossible. Because they didn't believe that you can do all these things. And they would just like, you know, zone out right in the beginning or never convert. When when we found Webeo. I felt like, you know, well, I found the solution at last, because we can detect what they're initially interested in, like, why they came in, okay, think of it like, I don't know, the restaurant analogy, again. The person wants to eat sushi, should you're just giving them a menu only of what you serve for sushi. And they're like, Okay, great. This is the sushi restaurant, this is what I want to eat. And then they're like, Okay, I'm willing to listen to you guys. I'm willing to see the demo. And we even took it a step further in the initial communications with the client. We never told them that we can do other things. But they came in only for a conference. We're like, Yeah, we're just conferences. Oh, that's the only thing we do only conferences. And then only when they actually become a client, that the project manager that works with them the first time they're like, Okay, these are all your options. What do you want to build? And they're like, what, you can build all these different things? And like, Yeah, whatever you want. And they're like, wait a second, so I can do the conference. And the HR together was like, Yeah, let's start with your conference. And that's the aha moment for people. So whether you're really solved a major marketing problem that we had, which, on the one hand, it was important to hide it like to hide disability, but eventually, it's our strength. So it was sort of like the creative, exact dance that we needed.

Kirsty: That was one of the most bold approaches that rage pack took, because so many B2B marketers, organisations wouldn't take that chance, they would still say, but we still haven't say all this other stuff, because shareholders and, you know, the sales team, and, you know, the fact that obviously, I serve as a CEO and founder he could he could make that decision, but it was pretty bold, and it really, really paid off, you know, restricting the experience to just what that that buyer was interested in, and then getting them into the organisation. So yeah, really powerful.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great idea. It's very much almost, rather than looking for an ideal customer, you find out what the customer wants, and then you create their ideal product. I think that's a really neat approach. Was that what you were thinking SF.

Asaf: I wouldn't say that. We were creating their ideal product, but we were presenting the product as ideal for them. The product is the exact same product all the time. It's just, it's just that we present it as how I say, it's very similar to the computer, okay, like the computer can do a lot of things, right? It can compute, it can create a can be a communication machine, it can be a number crunch. It does, like in academia computer is called the all purpose machine, right? Now, if you try to present to, to normal people that the computer is All Purpose Machine will be like what he's talking about, I use it in order to call my friends and send like, you know, emojis. That's what it is for. Right? So it's about speaking the language in a way. Which, by the way, one of the things that we do in the software as well, is like, if you have a camp, we change all the verbiage to campers. And, and let's say families. Okay, and if you're doing a conference for for a company, we change the verbiage to employees and companies and and that lowers people's anxiety, just right away.

Mike: I love that. I mean, I think one of the things people are going to wonder is he mentioned this asset that you are able to work out what people are interested in when they come on your website. So I mean, kirsta, you're providing the technology that does that? How do you do that? I mean, that's fascinating. Yeah,

Kirsty: I mean, obviously, there are a number of different ways to do that. And the most used way for the wider web to customer base is IP data. So we can identify based on a business's IP address, as soon as they hit the website, the industry, that they're in the vertical that they sit in, and then serve that personalised experience across the whole site from the minute that they hit the website. And SF and the the team use that for some of their major sectors, particularly education. But what red pack does that was really smart, is they layered on behavioural personalization. Alongside that, because some of the sectors that red pack focus on are particularly niche. And when you mentioned camps, there's not something that's very easy to identify based on a zip code or a nice code. And obviously, we can integrate with HubSpot, we can pull in the data that's already in the client CRM. But using behavioural personalization, where visitor goes on to the website and hits those key product pages, so identifies themselves, right, okay, I am in the camera vertical, or I am in education, and then in real time, changing that entire experience so that it's all completely you're using the verbiage that the as I've talked about earlier, in real time, okay, I'm looking for software for my camp. Okay, great. Now, the whole experience is just relevant to that. And everything else that applies to other ways that the software might perform for other industries that hidden and it's all just laser focused on offering that to the customer. And that was why they increase conversion, and then subsequently, better quality of leads as well, because people knew exactly what they wanted, when they came in as a lead. And I think that the final bit that I know, that we talked about before was we can see by someone's behaviour once they visited that website, but we came up with together a really great idea around getting prospects to self identify and confirm themselves what vertical they sat in what they were interested in, as soon as they hit the website, whereby we couldn't identify behaviour because there exists something called cookies. And we need first party cookies to be able to do that. So as surfs dev team got involved, we were working together so that when a visitor hit the website, they were served a pop up experience that asked them to identify the industry they were in it then pushed them into that behavioural experience. And again, the whole thing changed. And once they were in that they were in that for their entire customer journey. So I mean, I don't know if you wanted to add anything on that asset because it was a it was definitely a collaborative approach.

Asaf: Yeah, I want to add basically, how we reach these points, because probably the listeners are like, you know, so how did you come up with all these ideas? Right? So the way that we started is we started with the IP data. We started with the IP data, and we were like a, I think five or 7% personalization of the visitors and we were seeing good numbers. Once we personalise we were seeing good numbers, and we said okay, so now our goal is to reach 50%. We want 50% of the visitors to be personalised. Now, how do we do this? In the beginning, we were like, Okay, let's use Google. We have we have very strong SEO and what how As is, Google will send people to a pillar page like a page that is talking about exactly about what they're interested in. So we said, Okay, anybody who hits this page automatically gets personalised. So if anybody hits a camp page, from this point on rich package just for kids, or anybody who hits after school, from this point on, it's only after school. So first, we were using Google. OK, Google is helping us. Obviously, we were using also the landing pages and any any paid search, etc. So I think with that, Christy, we reached like 15, or 16%. And we were like, Okay, this is great, but it's not enough. We need to go a step further. So, at this point, I brought in my dev team, and we're like, okay, let's, let's create a pop up on the website that we can control if they can close it, and, and how long before it pops up? Which basically tells them, what do you want to build today? Okay, or what are you looking for, and it took a long time to find the exact time that will pass when they're on the page, to have it pop up, so that the bounce rate won't go up, if to allow them to exit out and not allow them to exit out. It was like a real, as you understood before, like, I'm very analytical and scientific. So it was all like, you know, very, very done in a very scientific way where we were looking at data all the time. And eventually, we got like, you know, the right combination. And right now what's happening that are specific pages that we give it between 35 to 42 seconds to actually read the page, and then a pop up comes up, and you're locked in, you have to say, like, what you're interested in. And what happens is they're sent to the pillar page. And we do that also to help them understand, you know, what we can do for them, but mainly in order to personalise, because from this point on, they will be personalised to that specific vertical that they said that they're interested in. And that's when we started seeing really high conversion rates. I also want to say something that's very interesting that happened, the number of leads, did not go up in like, you know, a crazy amount. It went up about twice, right, which is amazing, right? But the biggest difference was the quality of the way that we measure it is like we care about the leads, and then we say, okay, who are invalid leads, no contact leads, etc. And then eventually we have, how many leads are actual possible deals. Okay. And if in the past, we had about 27, to 30% of leads became possible view, we're at 67%. Now, 67% of our leads are possible deals, it means that they come in, they understand exactly what they're gonna get, and they're interested in talking to us. They don't like cool down and like, No, I don't want to talk to you guys. And that was the major difference. So in a way, the personalization is, like Webeo is one element of the personalization, but goes through the whole system, where the email that they get is based on a pillar page, like the email after they become a lead, is based on the pillar page they came in, everything is personalised, all the experience, the specific team that works with them, and sales is only the team that takes care of this vertical. And then the pm that works done is only the team that works on this. So the personalization goes throughout all their experience. And then like I said, they have the aha moment only at the end of like, we can do more for you. But whether you're really like, beyond giving us the technology to do a lot of these things, they gave us the understanding that we need to have this type of personalization throughout the process.

Mike: And that's impressive, because actually, what you're saying is the impact on volume of leads, which was to x is actually slightly less than the impact on quality, where, you know, the percentage quality has gone up about two and a half times. So presumably, a lot of that is you're actually moving prospects further down that customer journey before they're filling in the form. And just doing some quick maths, it's like, it sounds like you've got about five times the number of opportunities than you had prior to using LabVIEW. Yeah, I've got to ask this question. I mean, you've talked about a lot of things. You've talked about the pop up, you've talked about, you know, doing the the optimizations around where people land. I mean, so how much time and money did this take to actually implement it? I mean, is this an incredibly expensive and time consuming process? It's

Asaf: not expensive, because it's only you know, you need to think about the ideas. So you just need to be sharp, I guess, in terms of like, time, it took about, I think, Christie, like six months until we reach this point, right? But it's like it's continuous iterations. Now, maybe it's my software background and the understanding. It's just this is how you build software iteration like you. You constantly try to improve it like if you're like a Can we reach the point? What? How do we make it better? How do we make it better? How do we make it better? By the way, in our emails, like our Moto, in the company is, is getting better. Like that's what we believe in, like constantly getting better. So it was like, for us it wasn't like trying to reach an endpoint. And I think we're not in an endpoint to right now. Like, we're continuing to improve on it all the time. Now that we've reached a high number of personalizations, you know, you get radio says, Let's have 70%. So, so it's, it's yes, it's time consuming. But it's like part of what you do like marketing is, this is what you do you constantly looking at numbers, you're constantly trying to improve the numbers. You you find ways that that you can do something that is smart. If you do what everybody else is doing, then yes, you're going to spend a lot of money and you're not going to see results.

Mike: I mean, that sounds great. One other question I'm interested in a lot of people when it comes to personalization, are worried about privacy and GDPR and legislation. Now, Kirsty, you are very specific in that you mentioned the use first party cookies. So this is obviously something you've thought about or Webeo. What are you doing to make sure that people can personalise but still say the right side of all this privacy legislation? Yeah,

Kirsty: of course. So, obviously, IP doesn't fall under the same legislation as GDPR. Because we are processing personal data. So you know, the ICAO have worked with us on that. And you know, we're really clear about the opportunity there, we are identifying a business IP address and marketing to a business, there's no way to personally identify, so I think that will always be a part of the future. But the you know, first party cookies provide great context. And so it's just about leveraging that as much as possible. Most of us, we're all of our behavioural personalization sits behind cookie consent. So obviously, we give the buyer the opportunity to receive that personalization. Once they've accepted cookies, I think, you know, it's about working closely with our customers so that their own privacy statement works. But also, they work hard as well, to encourage consent, because ultimately, the buyer does get a better experience. And so so that does continue. We're also beyond the first party cookie data that that we capture in, in web you, we are powerfully able to leverage our customers first party data. So any of our customers, you have Marketo, HubSpot or Pardot, will be dropping a cookie, on their website for a customer and with consent, again, capturing that data. And they'll have a lot of rich insight on those potential customers and customers that sit in their MA platforms. And we're able to pull that into Webeo. Again, we're not seeing any personal data, all we're doing is knowing that visitor as part of that Marketo Smartlist. So we're going to serve them this experience. And we actually do the same with sixth sense as well. So it's always with permission, but doing as much as we possibly can to leverage that data. So we don't use any party cookies at all first party. But ultimately, what we are seeing when we do that is a richer experience. And also, that is when our customers kind of softer stats really start to improve as well, because, you know, we're seeing, okay, people are getting the experience that's relevant to them, more time on site, more pages viewed lower bounce rate. So I think there's a there's just an ongoing piece to be done by all of us, as B2B marketers to educate our buyers about the value of, you know, serving them something that's powerful and relevant, like we used to it as consumers. So it makes sense in the B2B space to.

Mike: That's great. And I think, you know, one final question on this is, do you think this is all finished now and done? Or are there things you're looking to do to further improve your number of leads and conversion rate, and also the softer time on site metrics?

Asaf: So first of all, we're capitalists and we're greedy. So we won't. But yeah, like we want to improve the conversion rate. We want to give even a better personalised experience to people and get more people seeing the personalization. One of the issues is exactly what you talked about the cookies where I think all Apple users all their cookies are blocked by definition unless they, they change it. So I'm trying to convince Kersey to implement a device recognition technology, which GDPR does not cover and I think that's fine because it's only for that specific session. And from our perspective, that's, that's enough. For example, our whole system is cookieless. And we do everything based on device recognition. and which from our perspective is the works? Well, I think also one of the possible issues that will arise eventually with IP data and all that is the fact that a lot of people work from afar now. So it's very hard to detect what they're like, what's their industry or what company they're working for, basically. So I do think that the future is in device recognition. And, and we're seeing a lot of a lot of companies pop up that are connected to that and that are creating real value through that. And eventually, I'll convince Kersey to implement that, and then we'll do more.

Kirsty: Yeah, I think, to add to that, I think, you know, our US customers do find it easier with regard to GDPR. And, you know, cookies and similar tech, as is included in the legislation, the US legislation, as far as privacy is not as strict as it is in Europe. And, you know, there are challenges with businesses, I think, and this is, this is a key thing, that's a really important point to make, because I love as I've saying all of that, because he's got the right attitude. Sometimes within a business, the people making decisions about what should be done with privacy on the website, have no connection at all, to what that organisation is trying to achieve. And, you know, they're implementing things that, you know, make it really, really difficult to have a conversation with the buyer with no context of okay, well, that's going to impact our ability to pop up the chat or serve a demo request. And so organisations have to be connected on privacy. And, you know, marketers need to be really informed so that they can have that argument back to the legal team who just snapped blindly. But like, you know, there's always ways that you can take advice and ensure that you're combining the best experience with you know, respecting that visitors privacy is really important.

Mike: I think that's great advice. I mean, I really appreciate the time both you've given us explaining what you've done, it's been fascinating. And we'd like to ask a quick question. And one quick question for both of you. I don't know, Kirsty, if you want to go first, I'd love to know what the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given this?

Kirsty: Well, I'll say the piece first, and then I'll say why. So I mean, it's measure everything. Because if you get the input metrics, right, the output metrics happen automatically. And I have to say, when I got into marketing, I did not think I'd be spending my time analysing spreadsheets and data and getting excited about a slight change in percentage, but that now is what drives me I, you know, I definitely was of a creative mindset. But I think the gift with marketing is that you get to combine that that creativity with Okay, so what has that idea? What is that hypothesis actually done in terms of numbers back into the organisation? I think, you know, I see it so much having been agency side and obviously working with clients now that, that lack of rigour with regards measurement makes it really difficult for marketers to justify what they're doing. And we should be measuring things like, as I've talked about, right the way through to revenue, it's happening much, much more nowadays. But that's your point of justification, measure, measure, measure, and, you know, anyone looking to get into marketing, it is exciting. I promise, the measurement is exciting. So don't think you're gonna be all math it, but it is, it's the best part of it. I

Mike: love that. And I mean, listeners will know that I'm actually I started my career as an engineer. So I love numbers. That's great. And lastly, so if I mean, from your point of view, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've received?

Asaf: I would also agree with Christy, I always tell all my marketing team, leave your ego at the door, bring your creativity. And remember, this is a science. It's a science, it's now it's not like, you know, the 80s where it was about, you know, creating the most creative thing, no, this is a science, you need to find out what is working, and then push on that. I would add to that one thing that some marketers fall into, they fall into only looking at the numbers, and forgetting that marketing is creativity, you sometimes need to do a leap of faith, you need to say, I think this is what's going to happen. And this is exactly they were like what we're talking about. Here's an example that this was a leap of faith, we believed that this will work. And we said okay, we'll try it out. And and it worked. Now it could have failed at the same time. And then we would be like, Okay, fine, let's try something else. But I think that's something that a lot of marketers today are starting marketing right with only analytics. Forget you still need to be bring your creativity and you still need to do those leaps of faith. Where you say I think this is going to work. Why I have no idea. I just think it is

Mike: That's brilliant. I mean, great, great advice from both of you. I really appreciate your time. If people are interested in finding more about what you've done or about your respective companies. I mean, what's the easiest way to contact you, Kirsty? What's what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Kirsty: Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm always happy to hear from people on LinkedIn. So please, obviously, send me an InMail. If you want to hear more about Webeo understand more about what we've done. Obviously, we've got the website's got loads and loads of rich content on there. But I'm happy to receive contact personally as well via LinkedIn.

Mike: Awesome, and Asaf.

Asaf: I'm not gonna lie, if you send me a message on LinkedIn, you're not going to get an answer. Probably want to learn more about Regpack, just Google red pack, and you will find like a tonne of information there. You're

Mike: a busy guy building a building a company and growing fast. I totally understand that. That's very honest. And I really appreciate that. Thank you both for talking about the you know the project you've worked on together. I'm sure a lot of people are going to find it, you know, very thought provoking and helpful. I really appreciate you both being on the podcast. 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.

by Natasha Websdale

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.

by Natasha Websdale

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.

by Natasha Websdale

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.

by Natasha Websdale

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.

by Natasha Websdale

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.

by Natasha Websdale