Escaping the black hole of b2b Marketing: Identifying & enticing new customers

I can't believe it - in my last marketing campaign, I broke my own rules. I fell into a plethora of cognitive biases. I know this stuff so well, both on an academic and practical level, and yet I screwed up!

It shows how hard this job is that despite all my training, expertise, and dedication, I still made rookie mistakes during my last marketing campaign.

There are so many 'experts' out there who seem to have all the answers yet, so obviously, don't.

If they are so great at marketing business to business, then why does their company only have one employee?

Why do they even have to to sell us on this stuff? 

Surely they should be luxuriating on their yacht as all their dedicated workers carry out their instructions using all their marketing 'secret sauces'?

So yeah, I'll admit I still have a lot to learn. And I'm certainly not saying I have all the answers. 

I don't run the best business-to-business marketing agency in the world. I haven't even given up my marketing day job! Nor am I a multimillionaire yet.

What I do have is plenty of experience and training in b2b marketing which I'm passionate about sharing.

I am happy to share my mistakes and failures with you. Hopefully, you will find them useful and even entertaining!

Let's face it—what story is better?

—the fantastic holiday in the Caribbean where everything went perfectly?

- or the one where your plane was delayed, the hire car broke down, your hotel was a dump, and you were two miles from the beach? 

Isn't failure so entertaining and relatable?

So, with that in mind, let me share my failure. More importantly, I want to know why I failed.

During my career, I have built a tried-and-tested model for creating high-quality sales opportunities. You can look at a successful version of this—the sales team told me they liked this infographic a lot—so hopefully, you will find it useful, too. Simply click on the image to enlarge it. 

I'm not worried about sharing this stuff, because as Steve Jobs, the Apple founder, put it so well 'don't worry about sharing your 'great idea'. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. It's all in the execution'. 

Also, I am aware that prospects are human beings and don't simply follow arrows and a chart. But the picture is a loose picture of a general buyer journey.

But sure, if any of you CMOs or founders want me to come in and execute my best B2B campaigns, I'm happy to do that for you!

I know how it works - you start with a shallow engagement piece of content. Let's say it's an ebook guide 'ten steps to selecting the right cyber security provider/martech provider for your business'

You have to make sure this guide is good—that's why I started hiring content strategists and designers. 

There is no point in creating killer ads and copy and spending tens of thousands on ads, getting great, perfectly targeted leads that are 'in market' right now—only for them to read your guide and decide it's garbage. 

Then, your prospects will never engage with you again. They won't be interested in your emails or any great future campaigns you have; and most importantly, they won't want to talk to your SDRs or Sales reps. 

The second step is to invite them to a webinar. Again, you have to focus on quality. The sales team will push you to have salespeople pitch the company and ask your prospects all manner of sales questions. 

But you must always consider the prospect's perspective: 'Why should I attend this webinar? What's in it for me?'

• Great speakers
• A customer who can describe the buyer journey
• Brilliant topics - do your research
• Well executed with military precision.

You need to get sales involved only after the webinar is complete and we have the numbers—let's say 400 signed up and 200 attended.

They can look through the list and decide who the hottest leads are —the ones most likely to buy from you.

At that point, sure, have a salesperson run a ten-minute pitch at the end of the roundtable. But again, the roundtable has to provide real value to the prospect. This is my tried and tested format:

Amazing topic - a roundtable I ran in the publishing sector was - how to thrive and survive after the demise of third party cookies.'

Great speakers and good attendees (prospects must be 'hot' for sales, but there must also be a good mixture to make the discussion dynamic and interesting).

It's only at this stage, after the roundtable, that sales and SDRs will follow up. If you have eight attendees on a roundtable, you should get three or four sales opportunities. 

But of course, you also have maybe a thousand leads that you can continue to nurture to create more sales with more webinars and roundtables.

Now, what did I do wrong in my campaign, I hear you ask? Isn't failure great to read about? 

I started with an unknown brand (mine - Rudy learning about startups). Neither Damien nor I am a big-name thought leader (yet!), though we are building a good following as micro-influencers. Of course big names and big company brands do draw larger audiences.

Then, on top of all those handicaps, I made the cardinal error of ignoring my entire content funnel and jumping straight to the roundtable before my prospects had warmed to us, my message, or my brand.

The result—miraculously, I got 28 attendees signed up, spending under $1000 (Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads, some email blasts). However, only a handful showed up for the event. I was aiming for 15! 

What are the traps I fell into?

Overconfidence bias: Hey, I know my content strategist is fantastic, and I have a lot of good stories, and we have a great rapport. So you'll instantly think that, too, right? Nope! 

I would also add - 28 prospects signed up, so at least 14 should show up, right? - wrong! 

False consensus bias: My colleague and I both thought this was a great idea, as did a couple of my other marketing colleagues (who weren't invested in the project). So, I have at least four experts who agree that it can't fail, right? Wrong!

Halo effect: I have great feelings about how my colleague and I work (I still do), but of course, why do I assume others feel the same way? Especially when they barely know me.

Confirmation bias: I have run many campaigns like this over the years, and the success rate has been incredibly high. But I have generally followed my own guide of building out a content funnel. However the few times I didn't do that, I still had some success. I was lucky. 

Yes, you heard it right. In the past, I was fortunate. 

But this time I wasn't so lucky! However, I learned from my errors and identified 95% of the problems. So I can go forward confidently in my next campaign.

If you are interested in marketing strategies for the business-to-business market. If you want to learn more about how to generate business leads, and how to get the best ROI from your marketing, I hope you continue to read about my adventures in b2b marketing. 

I aim to escape the black hole of B2B marketing with accurate buyer-level intent data and 1st party lead generation.

I'm looking to accelerate sales dialogue with real-time insights into "who" is actively expressing intent in an account, "what" actions that person is taking, "when" those actions took place, and uniquely "where" those actions occurred.

I'm searching for ways to translate content into business outcomes and sales revenue. 

Buyers are out there—you just need to find them, communicate with them, and entice them, all at the right time. So, I will continue to share my stories as I learn more about startup marketing.

Yes, it is hard, very hard. But I continue to enjoy writing about it. 

How to create a culture that scales with your company

There are successful companies with good cultures and successful companies with terrible cultures. I've read the excellent Elon Musk and Steve Jobs biographies written by Walter Isaacson. 

Some of it is genuinely eye-watering. If you look at Apple under Steve Jobs, many today will argue that the company had a terrible culture. 

• When he fired people at Pixar, he made their notice period 'retroactive.' 
• In interviews, he'd ask incredibly inappropriate questions like 'How old were you when you lost your virginity?' or 'How many times have you taken LSD?'
• Steve Jobs fired the employee in charge of MobileMe in front of a group of employees.
• He regularly screamed aggressive aphorisms at staff, such as 'We only want 'A' players at Apple. You aren't good enough to be a 'B' player!'

Similarly, Elon Musk has received considerable criticism for axing 6,000 employees, or 80% of X's workforce. Then, he told his advertisers that 'he didn't care what they think'—this is the base that generates Twitter's revenue. 

The Share price of X has collapsed since then. Sales have fallen for Tesla for the first year, and its share price has also plummeted. 

Founders tend to have a set of characteristics that can make them unbeatable initially. Still, eventually, those characteristics can hold the company back from growth (think about Apple's new CEO Tim Cook's empathetic management style versus its founder Steve Jobs' aggressive and emotionally tone-deaf approach).

Of course, a healthy work culture is more likely to foster a sustainable, successful company. There is now abundant research showing that companies with happy employees perform, on average, better than those with miserable employees. 

There are plenty of companies out there with good work cultures. I've worked at numerous companies, and most of my time there, I was given free rein to develop marketing ideas unhindered by micromanagement. Some of those companies are worth billions of dollars now. 

My wife, Catherine, worked at Akamai Technologies, and for most of her 12 years there, the culture was exceptional. Akamai treated her with great respect and valued her ideas and contributions. 

She developed considerably at this company, starting as a contract recruiter and managing a team of 25 recruiters as head of EMEA Talent Acquisition. So, we both also know about good company cultures........and bad ones!

Values & Culture

• It's not what you put up on your wall, coffee cups, or even necessarily what a CEO says about its culture at events.
• It's how your employees feel on a Sunday night thinking about work the next day. 
• It's what two employees who are good friends say about your company when they're having a couple of beers at the end of the day, or while having lunch together.
• It's what people write about you on social media and employee review sites (although some well-known review sites are no longer transparent or reliable indicators of company culture - more to follow!)
• It's how many referrals you get from existing employees.

Culture is a living, breathing entity, an animal spirit. In my experience, it develops top-down. So, no matter what management says about the values, your company culture will be how the C-level conducts themselves.

If the C level manages by intimidation, bullying, and fear, then that is how everyone in the organization will behave. If the C level is managed by positive affirmation (five times more effective than negative) and creating psychological safety, then that is also how the company will turn out. 

When scaling a startup, all of these ideas are even more pertinent. Since you are creating the base of your culture from the first few employees you hire, just adding a few employees will make a big difference. 

If you are a company of twenty employees and hire five new employees from Microsoft, your culture will shift somewhat to Microsoft's values and culture.

In the last decade, HR departments have moved away from talking about 'culture fit' (very traditionally 'corporate') to 'culture add' (more inclusive). Every employee in a startup will alter your culture since your numbers are still small.

Moving to remote work and the increased demand for a values-driven company are other essential aspects of effectively scaling a good culture at your startup.

When I first joined the workforce, we worked five days a week at the company offices. Office life was almost exclusively inside the building (think the UK or the US show Office). Even six or seven years before the pandemic, many of us started working remotely, albeit usually just one day a week. 

But since the pandemic, the world of work has been revolutionized. Many employees are fully remote, and the rest are typically hybrid. Heads of HR and the C level have struggled to maintain a strong culture when employees rarely connect in person. 

Secondly, the new generations of workers care much more about the culture. They scour the internet and review sites for indications of how a company works. They have become incredibly cynical about corporate life. 

For example, 60% of Gen Z's will regularly 'ghost' recruiters since it makes this generation feel 'empowered.' 70% of Gen Zs would only work for a company whose values align with theirs. So, make sure the culture your company intends to scale with is appealing.

My marketing career learning curve

I have many professional friends: Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants, Psychiatrists, Investment bankers, and University Professors. They don't experience this same phenomenon regularly that I and, anecdotally, almost all of my seasoned marketing colleagues do.

We are all too familiar with the trend of average people suddenly becoming medical experts, which seemed to crescendo during the COVID-19 pandemic. I call them 'Dr Googles'. Some 'Dr. Googles' will tell you with great authority that you should never get vaccinated due to all the 'hidden risks.' 

However, my marketing colleagues often endure unfair criticism from those who know little about this discipline. This may be because much marketing is on social media, and since most people are active on social media, marketing seems effortless and easy.

I work in Business-to-Business with many salespeople. In the organizations I've worked for, they are one group who sometimes thinks they are marketing 'experts'. Now, I get it. Part of my job is fun. It's one of the reasons I do it. My job must seem like' a cakewalk' to the average person. Yet, I have completed enormous training to get where I am today. 

Not only did I spend two years working hard to get my MBA, but over the last fifteen years, I have committed myself to continual learning: three-month intensive Courses in Digital marketing (with four-hour exams at the end).

I regularly take certificates in everything from Google Analytics, Ad management, and Tagging to HubSpot CRM and marketing automation management, HTML 5, CSS3, and Demandbase Account Marketing platform administration. 

At last count, I have nineteen such certifications running up to 2023. In the previous ten years, I have also spent many hours discussing optimizing campaigns or ads with Google and Linkedin, Zoominfo & Salesforce, and many other platform account managers.

I've attended conferences at companies like Adobe or Linkedin on a range of pertinent topics, from marketing strategy to changes in privacy legislation to digital developments. I have put countless hours and massive effort into developing my craft. 

In addition, I studied finance, and I worked for over two years as a financial analyst (Bryant Park Capital, Bank of America, MFS Investments), which means that I'm adept at conveying marketing information to financial experts in a way that they understand: this is an essential additional skill you need when working with (predominantly venture capital or Private equity-backed) startups. 

Perhaps most importantly, I have many years of experience working with fast-growing technology companies, including senior management, heads of sales, sales engineers, and customer success teams. 

I have a good brain and an outstanding overall standard of education, which, along with my experience, has enabled me to develop vital, powerful critical thinking skills. I can weigh up, analyze, and synthesize ideas to apply my knowledge to make difficult judgment calls. 

That's why I've been trusted to manage significant Marketing and ad budgets. I've also purchased and rolled out a global CRM and Marketing Automation platform for a major company. 

Yet someone who has worked as a salesperson for a few years, or another marketer with even less experience than that - will, from time to time, think they know how to do my job better (and will, of course, tell me that!).

And I do understand. To a casual observer, all I do in my job is flick a few switches, send emails, set up some ads, read a report or two, and hey, job done. It must look so easy!

Sales is an incredibly stressful and demanding job. I know because I worked in sales for five years at the start of my career. 

I have an enormous amount of respect for good salespeople. I've worked with many top-class salespeople over the last twenty-five years. Here are a few examples of great salespeople I've worked with over the years:

> The South African who closed our first million pound-a-year deal with Barclays Bank while I worked in Cyber security. 

> Or the American who closed a whole host of million-dollar-a-year recurring contracts in marketing software with Citigroup, Toyota, Crate and Barrel, Uber Eats, and many others. He was also a brilliant strategist and highly detailed (great with updating the CRM).

> A very young English lady who had left school at eighteen, who managed to close countless high-value deals for a document management software company I worked at. She is kind and down to earth. She now runs a sales team and is still only in her mid-twenties.

> A British Sales Director who is a great individual salesperson and an excellent manager (often brilliant salespeople struggle when they move to sales management). To top it all off, he has an in-depth knowledge of CRM technology (more than some CMOs) with a thoughtful and methodical approach. 

> The Portuguese Sales Engineer who flew from Lisbon to Sydney three times a year to meet with Telstra, the biggest Australian Telco company. He was pivotal in securing a $5 million annual recurring CPQ software deal. Soon after, he was hired as a Senior Director at Salesforce.

I particularly value salespeople or anyone (including investors) who is curious about marketing. I've worked with some top-flight salespeople who have been actively interested in projects I worked on—but not in a harshly critical way. On the contrary, they sit in on meetings to try to understand the strategy, the technology, and the ideas.

 I couldn't do this job if I didn't value the massive contribution to building a business that salespeople and sales-related roles make.

But when a salesperson is staring at a significant deficit in their quarterly sales target (which can be intimidatingly large and often dramatically increased), it's tempting to think, this is marketing's fault. If only sales were running things, it'd all work amazingly.

Nevertheless, when I saw sales take over marketing in the past, it usually ended badly. Here are a few examples:

• There are many very fast gut-feel decisions, such as having a drinks party after an event made only two weeks before. The marketing team spends all its valuable resources putting together an event doomed to fail.

• Suddenly, pacifying egos or simply driving leads becomes the goal of campaigns instead of the prospect's user experience (the quality of the white paper, case study video, or webinar). 

> Rather than having an industry expert talk at an event (typically the favorite choice of attendees), we have a C-level employee at the company (usually the least favorite attendee choice).                                               

• When Sales took over a company blog, every other story was about a deal the sales team had closed (Lots of likes - mostly internal, few clicks, little engagement, and no leads).

• Salespeople with little knowledge begin to weigh in on Marketing automation. They disrupt campaigns that have been performing well. A few months later, all the metrics are alarming— email opens, clicks, engagement, and leads from email are down, unsubscribes and spam complaints are up. 

• All the marketing campaigns start to gravitate towards large face-to-face events. Salespeople usually like events because they are highly visible, a good chance for salespeople to get out and network, and their value is easy to understand. At the same time, Field marketing stops being measured effectively for the same reasons, so it has no idea of the event's ROI.

• Management starts to stress out the marketing team. They waste contractors' time on often pointless and/or unfocused meetings. They ask for projects that they then cancel or change halfway through. Over time, the marketing team's morale suffers, and tensions mount.

In the words of a world-class Professor of Marketing who teaches in my MBA program: 

"Marketing has become a fiendishly complex business, with a myriad of media channels to consider, and a slew of direct and indirect drivers of market behavior that have to be taken into account."

The Politics of Performing

'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players',

This week, my father surprised me by suggesting we go to the LSE, where I was a student, to see Professor Richard Sennett of Columbia University's talk on his latest book 'The Great Fear: The Politics of Performing.' 

I didn't take notes, and my insights here are more my impression of the topic and then some of my further discussions with other friends, particularly Damien Seaman, whom I've worked closely with over the last seven years, on content strategy.

Why is it that demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have such incredible success when often their arguments are weak or even irrelevant? How can poor people in the Midwest genuinely believe that a multi-billionaire who's lived a life of privilege cares about them? Joe Biden or Hilary Clinton, who are both closer to them in terms of life experience (middle class or even lower middle class), doesn't connect with them similarly? What is going on here?

Professor Sennett is uniquely qualified to understand the politics of performance since he is a Julliard-trained cellist who, due to a hand injury, had to abandon his career and retrained via degrees and a PhD at Harvard to become a sociology professor. 

Talking about our Prime Minster Boris Johnson, who won a landslide election in 2019, he said that he was certain that Boris had perfected his persona, with the unkempt hair, and slightly clownish appearance. Every time Boris speaks, it is a highly staged 'performance'. 

He contrasted this to Rishi Sunak, who, whilst seemingly far more competent, organised and business-like, comes across like a man with a 'tin ear'. And he will undoubtedly preside over a landslide, in the other direction, against him (though you probably can't blame that all on Rishi Sunak).

Professor Sennett mentioned Donald Trump's appeal many times as well. What did he think the results of the US election would be? Would 'Sleepy Joe' prevail? Or would Trump's bluster, seeming youthfulness (only compared to Biden, since they are close in age, Donald 77 to Joe's 81), and greater energy tip the polls in his favour? I would also have liked to ask Professor Sennett what practical applications of his ideas could President Biden apply to ensure his win. 

This lecture led to a varied and funny discussion with my father, Sir Kenneth Parker, at the Delaunay, where we had dinner afterwards. Coincidentally, Professor Sennett and his entourage were at the same restaurant! 

Dad mentioned a book he had just read, written by one of Donald Trump's advisors, about some of Trump's more radical/crazy ideas. One absolute corker was to build a trench across the US border with Mexico and fill it with alligators! But then again, I mentioned that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, had just been interviewed about Trump, and Dimon highlighted all Trump's successes:

1. Growing the Economy
2. Possibly now being right about the Covid virus coming out of the Chinese Wuhan virus laboratory.
3. Certainly, being correct about Germany putting itself in strategic danger with its over-reliance on Russian gas.

I hope this doesn't make it sound like I'm a Trump fan? Because I am not. But I do believe that we are losing nuance in our debates. It's too easy to dismiss Trump as an idiot. Hilary Clinton did that and learnt the hard way.

The following day, I had lunch with my friend and colleague Damien Seaman in Chinatown in Soho. We discussed this topic again. We were in complete agreement about the performance aspect of life. 

We have been working together for some time on projects in the Human Resources Sector. So much of HR is performance. How your colleagues perceive you to some extent, certainly how you present yourself to senior management. Even how you settle disputes. And certainly, how any employee interactions are recorded officially often ends up as highly performative. After all, these 'performances' could profoundly affect your career and financial wellbeing! 

Human resources departments of companies are on a mission to 'level up' the differences of race, sexuality and sex right now.  I am fully behind these efforts, which are long past due. However, many argue that inequality has become an even more serious problem in the last 40 years. Inequality has been rising precipitously in the developed world. Perhaps levelling up financial inequality is a bigger challenge?

The Economist Thomas Piketty writes in his book 'Capital' that we are heading back in the direction of the early 19th century - where capital will become everything, and there will be almost no chance for a person to rise above their circumstances through hard work (unless the government takes serious measures to stop it). Can you see why corporations may be far less keen on tackling this topic than some others?

Right now, the 'mot du jour' is 'authenticity': Everyone wants to achieve this. Damien and I laughed at how even 'authenticity' has become a performance. How people even try to one-up each other on how authentic they are. This scenario is the opposite of true authenticity. When someone says one person is 'fake' whilst they are 'real', is it simply that they are a better performer?

Professor Sennett said that The word 'person', is derived from the Latin word 'persona' ("mask used by actor; role, part, character"). Isn't it interesting that we are now continually asked not to refer to men or women but to a 'person'? 

I didn't get to ask Professor Sennett my question, since so many people were asking questions during a relatively short Q&A. The question that stood out for me during the Q&A was from an LSE graduate student. He wondered if the trend of social media, and video, alongside people shortening attention spans, condemned us to be ruled by these demagogues, who master style over content. 

Professor Sennett answered that yes this was disturbing. He referenced how the UK had made one of its most significant policy changes in history, based on just such performance. Indeed the mastermind of Brexit, was Dominic Cummings, an expert at leveraging social media and digital advertising. 

Finally, another one of Professor Sennett's stories resonated with me. When Niccolo Machiavelli was writing 'The Prince', his career was over. He had been imprisoned earlier, was almost penniless and was living in a Tuscan Farmhouse far from Florence. But each night, he would don the robes he had worn as a respected and prestigious advisor to kings and dukes, to write; 

'When evening has come, I put on my regal and courtly garments, and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me.'