Swag? Field Marketing Builds Pipeline!

Your B2B Marketing Pint is the podcast for B2B technology marketers who want to sharpen their competitive edge. Joined by other marketing veterans, your hosts Brian o' Grady and Brendan Ziolo share expertise on what works today and why. Grab a cold pint of hot takes on branding, content marketing, demand generation and more. Served with a side of sarcasm. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Depending where you're listening from. I am super excited to kick off the latest episode of the B2B marketing pint and can't wait to dive into this week's topic. But before we get to that, Brian, who did we con into joining us this time? Thank God she agreed. And thank you for asking. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is Chelsea Ogilvy. On your screen, Chelsea's waving right now. Chelsea is a field marketing leader. I haven't talked to a field marketing leader yet. So, Chelsea, I think you're our first. And one of the differences apparently between what Chelsea does and maybe some others do is she actually builds pipeline and not just programs with this field marketing thing. But we have history. I've got to be transparent. I've got to come clean. Chelsea and I go back to the water slide industry together. If you can't have fun marketing water slides, you just can't have fun. And then we parted ways, part companies, and we got back together again. Another company named Kinaxis, Chelsea popped up there, search warrant, did a bunch of work with them, that was a lot of fun. And then like good B2B marketers, we moved on again and we kept track of one another, we've kept in touch and we want to know more about what Chelsea's up to now. Because, Chelsea, you are at Motive, where I believe you are building field marketing and other marketing from scratch. And to be further transparent, there's some DNA background among all of us for that. Ottawa, Silicon Valley, North, Scene Telecom. Because if you look far enough back in history, Motive goes back to Nokia, which goes back to Alcatel, Lucent, which goes back to Alcatel, which goes back to a few other companies, which basically means everybody is related to everybody in high tech in Ottawa. So if you're only 2 degrees away from everybody in Ottawa, eventually we're going to get to have you on B2B marketing pint. And here you are, Chelsea, I'm really glad you joined us. What are you sipping today? I have a gone fishing light lager. It is apparently a farmer's creed beer. This is a random selection that I'm very excited to try. Fantastic. And hopefully she doesn't go fishing until after we are done the episode. We're here for an hour or that's a new angle we could take. Sure. Next episode, deer fishing, marketing pint and fishing. Reel them in. There's lots of good imagery there on my side. This is one that will. To our Canadian audience, I think it'll be quite familiar. They had a moment in the 90s. I think they're having a moment again now. It's an Alexander Keats classic. Yeah, allegedly. Allegedly an India pale ale. But I think those who've had it will know better. But they're having a moment, and I'd be the last guy to get political. One of the reasons they're having a moment is around the beginning of a certain presidential administration, they created a crate of Alexander Keith's, which you could order with 1,461 beers to get you through four years of a presidential administration. So that's a thing. In case anybody's wondering, that's what. That's what I'm sipping today. Brendan, what do you got? How many are left in your crate, Brian? We're not talking about that. We're not talking about that. Listen, you're gonna set yourself up. I'm gonna knock it down. I, of course, screwed up once again and poured before I was supposed to, but it isn't a labeled glass, so I think I'm covered somewhat. I am drinking once again the non alcohol variety of Guinness, a favorite of mine, as you know, if you followed the podcast, because I'm sure this is the 4th, 5th, 20th time I've had it on the show. Have we done 20 episodes? We gotta go, go, go. All right, go. Quick, quick. Pour, pour. Tip. Don't pour over your keyboard. Oh, yes. Yeah, that's kind of why I did it. I'm still worried I'm gonna blow it up really careful. Yeah, do it on the spill, Matt. I suspect, but I don't know for sure that these characters, Alexander Keith, would claim to be the original Canadian microbrewery. Well, no, I'll know for sure when they comment all over this episode. You'll probably be sponsored by next week. Let's be perfect. Now you're talking. Higher, Chelsea. Fantastic. Cheers. All right, one more before I ask a question. Oh, All right. I think it's my turn to get started, Chelsea, so I will. I'll lob you the softball question and let Brian give you the really nasty one. So there's. I think it's fair to say, and you can Correct me where I'm wrong, that field marketing has a general perception and by most people or many within many organizations, maybe most is wrong, but let's go with many that you're basically just doing events and swag. Now I know in our pre conversation you're definitely doing a couple events a week, a month, a day, an hour, something like that. Yes. But I do like what how you see field marketing or how I believe you see field marketing, which is it's more about being a revenue engine. So it's not the events and swag, they're part of it, but it's a revenue engine. So maybe walk us through why you feel that way and where I got that interpretation wrong. Well, I think you got the interpretation right. Field marketing really is a pipeline accelerator. I'd say it's definitely not the entire revenue generation, but it is a really important piece of it. And I'd like to think that piece is the human connection. So especially these days with all the AI and all of the extra automation happening in all of our jobs, but largely in marketing too. Field marketing is a means to get the right person in front of the right person and say exactly the right thing. So it's about distilling the data that you have available to you and using it to create a really memorable human experience. And that could be at a physical event. It could be, but it could also just be on the phone by serving up the right thing at the right time. That sounds kind of like a dating service. Well, in some ways. What is business? Yeah, and I love the pipeline acceleration point. Chelsea, that's an awesome perspective, at least in my opinion because yeah, I think marketing frequently looks at, you know, demand gen or lead gen or however you want to classify. And then it kind of stops there when you know, the ability or capability to, to accelerate pipeline can be even bigger than what you might do on another front. So yeah, it's a common trade off in marketing. Right. Like marketing putting all the leads through sales isn't following up on them. BDR didn't do their timely response, but sales pushing back and saying, oh, it wasn't qualified enough. The reality is these things, especially in tech and telecom and another layer of that, it's a really long buying cycle and your offering isn't, you know, remarkably different from the competitors. If you really want to boil it down. There are the nuances for sure. But people buy from people and field marketing is about getting the people together and letting them differentiate themselves, I think in a more meaningful, organic way. Okay, I'm going to riff on that because I think you've already. You've taken us in the direction I wanted to go next because I have bumped into organizations that have quotation marks. Everyone says they have field marketing. It's like abm, right? But some teams say they've got field marketing but they never leave the office or, or they're one or two or three people who never leave the office. Others I think have field marketing sounds a lot more like what you're up to, which is spending a lot of time on a plane, pressing a lot of flash, meeting a lot of people, going a lot of places can when it's done well, can you do it without that piece or do you not need the digital side at all? Can you just do it in person, old school or does it take the full range in your opinion? If I had to set up a field marketing team tomorrow and make it execute well, what do I absolutely have to have? But what's nice to have. I think the digital signals are really important checkpoints to say I've got the right person at the right time. And that's an interesting way we're leveraging AI right now too. Is that buying intent and helping us fill in the story digitally on what's up with that account right now and helping sales get a much more meaningful conversation happening. So it's not just hey, I saw you looking at my website like that. Those days are so far gone. It's hey, I saw you're going to be acquired or you've just released this new product or hey, you might have had this challenge right now where everybody is, you know, where. Quite a public challenge. I should just say. I won't add more color than that, but position your solution, position your outreach as part of that narrative and again create a more meaningful, personable human story for them to respond to. So can you do it? Probably. I mean if you had a list of the accounts that you wanted to tackle and you could make some assumption at who are the key stakeholders within that account with sales alignment, that's the part you cannot compromise on. You absolutely must be in lockstep with sales on. This is the account and this is the problem solution we're positioning ourselves with. With that, you could then just go create an event in that city, leverage a partner, you know, add some kind of a credibility hook a customer hopefully to help amplify your story and your solution. But we're really lucky and better for the digital savvy know how that that we available to us now. Okay, well it's encouraging to a guy who works at a digital marketing agency like me. But I, I think what I'm hearing is if you really want to knock it out of the park, you need both sides of it. You could get, you could do it with either one, but if you want to kill it, you better have it all. Everything everywhere, all at once is probably marketing in a nutshell these days. But obviously with a very clear strategy like responsibility, Matrix makes sense to me. I'm going to take it in a different angle before Chelsea totally overwhelms us with being everywhere all at once. Or maybe I'm not now as I think through this question. So, I mean, Brian knows you far better than I do, but my understanding is that you, when you were at Kinaxis, obviously a larger organization, and you did field marketing there and you were scaling and growing it, but there were foundational pieces at least in place and there was, there's some stuff there. And then you decided, we'll let the audience decide whether it was a smart or right smart or not move. We could maybe open a poll or something. But now you've decided to build it from scratch. So what are some of the differences? Like, are they still the same? What are some of the things you need to do when you start from scratch? And maybe what's the thing that surprised you when you started from scratch? Well, at Kinaxis, as you say, they were familiar with the concept of field marketing. I was running field marketing in North America and was actually the first hire for field marketing there. But in some regards, the sales leadership was exposed to how that collaboration works. They were used to trimming their list of these are the accounts we absolutely cannot lose. And these are the accounts that we're getting some indication from the field that we should be able to close this year. So you have a plan, you've got somewhere to start. When you're building it from scratch, you really are building the ship as you're running it or flying it. Whatever device we're trying chartering here, you have to build a foundation and set a foundation as you're executing. And in our form of startup, we were a carve out. So we did have a pretty mature customer base and had that challenge of reintroducing ourselves as a new company. And as you alluded to at the beginning, Brian, there were several acquisitions over motive's history, but it was originally motive. So so very few customers, or just a shorter list of customers that had been with us from those early adoption days where there was less of A challenge of reintroduction. But it's like, hey, here we are again, it's another new name. So I mean really, I was energized by the opportunity to build something from scratch and to test my systems, test my approach, test my collaborative nature and see what we could build financial functionally from nothing. Field marketing is largely about, like I was saying, person, place and time to your former point, Brian, like we don't have any digital, digital indications when you have nothing. So you do have to trust kind of old school way of which events do your sales team remember having success with? Perhaps meet a few of the customers that are in that advocacy stage and see, you know, where are you going in a year and try to double down on that. We had to be really smart about what we were spending and how we could maximize that opportunity. So physical events, as much as it feeds into the stereotype of this is all we do. It was a good opportunity to check a few boxes at once and create some new content, get it recorded, leverage AI after the fact, make it into an asset. If we were able to get a customer to participate in that, build a case study out of that. You've got got PR about this momentum that you've, you've started to draw and you start to get some confirmation of your icp because who's engaging with you at these events, who actually saw your speaking session, who's responding to the emails and you can really drill in on a few things, a few assumptions that you're making. Cool. Okay, you flirted with budget and assets. And so I'm going to circle around to the money question. We like to talk about the money on B2B marketing pie. The money question I have for field marketers, especially since you've done both, you've done the big organization, big team, which probably has a decent budget to operate with and you've done the shoestring, make it up as you go. You're an army of one. I think you were an army of one when you showed up at Motive. Yeah, build it all, build it all from scratch. Which means you've also done the other side of the ledger, which is probably a smaller budget. Or maybe you had to go and explain that you needed some budget in order to do your job. So in a situation like that, again, I'm a digital guy, so I'm hooked on optimization and efficiencies and gains. And what can you tweak and what can you adjust to? Stretch a dollar or a click or a visitor. Whatever your KPI is So if you've seen both sides of that in the field marketing arena and your budgets were going to get cut for whatever reason, where would be the most likely spot you could look in a field marketing program? Or a better question would be if I walked in, if I got tasked with fixing a field marketing program in an organization tomorrow and I had to walk in, what would you say are the first rocks I should look under to try and find some gains in terms of budget for field marketing? Where can you optimize there? Where the money is already being spent. So outside of field marketing, where as an organization are they investing? What is, what is on their ledger already that you can work with? At Kinaxis, we had, you know, some sports sponsorships and like larger corporate initiatives, engagement in Ottawa, like more on a careers and HR side of things that, you know, that's a pretty large ticket item and it was not really being tapped outside of that one. Like we support Ottawa kind of positioning and for, in that example, like our sponsorship was their away helmets. So there actually wasn't a whole lot of branding in Ottawa for that specific spend at all. The spend was in the US which just happens to be my market. So, you know, you layer in a market intelligence firm, which is a little bit of, a little bit of an investment, try to figure out where the geographic, like where people are concentrated residentially. I don't need to have access to that information. You leverage a partner to find that and then you create these really bespoke events, kind of navigate the spot sports, the sports rules because they're at home and they're not having to travel for this activity and just go enjoy a hockey game, maybe have a dinner afterwards with customers with partner with prospects in this little ecosystem hub that is their backyard. So I, I've had, that's just one example, but I've had a lot of success just keeping an ear open and you know, stealing, stealing from everywhere, being inspired by everywhere. So I would say get in, start listening immediately, see where things are already in play and take that with your marketing lens and say, how can I turn that into some kind of an experience for prospects? Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I think, I think the team, I'm nervous to even say the name out loud now given recent events, but the team you're describing is the Ottawa Senators. Chelsea and, and I think we've got, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe we've got three Ottawa senders fans on the podcast today. Yeah, don't, don't, don't I, I thought we weren't going to talk about that. It's too soon. Too soon. Thanks, Brian. Those of you who are listening don't know what we're talking about. Tragedy struck the Ottawa Senators this, this playoff season. We're not going to talk about it. No, not a real tragedy, but tragedy all the same. Backpedal, backpedal, backpedal, back. So I know, Chelsea, I said Brian was going to ask you the hard questions and I don't know if this is necessarily hard, but maybe a bit of a curveball. We went down the path of where you would look for funds if you were tight for cash. But let's have a bit of fun. Your CEO, I don't know, won the lottery. We'll figure out someone came and delivered you. I'm not going to throw a figure, but delivered you a sizable chunk of cash that you could spend on something in the field marketing area. So, you know, I like to think of myself as Santa to Brian's Grinch. So that's kind of what we're playing off of here. So yeah, I'm here, I've got lots of cash. Let's have some fun. What else would you do now that you're not scrounging for budget Roadshow. Roadshow. That was quick. Same concept as the sports, right? Bring the event to the people. I think we got really stuck in our ways for a long time prior to Covid of having our big customer experience events. Everybody comes in, it's like billion dollar billion, but you know, multi million dollar budgets, huge production value. You've got a million things going on at once and there's a lot of energy within that, but you can replicate that at a smaller level. And if you had an endless budget, you know, do it yourself. You're not really looking for partnership in the same way. You need your credibility hook. You still need your partners, you still need your customers, you still need the cross functional activations from your side. But you can start looking at some really interesting keynote speakers that create more of a unique experience layer in the music thing, but still make it easier, more approachable for people to travel to. People still like to travel. I mean, I don't think we've lost that. People want a unique experience, but travel budgets for events are still heavily scrutinized, especially in North America, I'd say. But you really have to justify what it is you're going to learn from that spend and you cannot compromise on a really high performing, valuable learning experience in exchange at any scale with a roadshow Type event. One of my favorite things to do when I'm given the opportunity, if I have to run a marketing program, especially if it's on a shoestring, is I try to attach it to some other kind of hype that's already happening. You describe sports well. You're basically taking advantage of the hype around the sports. When people go and do shows in Vegas, well, they know they don't need to work too hard to convince people to go to Vegas. So you're taking advantage of some pre existing hype to extend your message or encourage people to participate. Is that a big piece of the field marketing story is seeing what else is out there that you can latch onto and get some extra mileage from? Exactly the extra mile mileage thing, yeah. In our reality though, we have the data to know like a Vegas event would be well attended but wouldn't be well engaged. You know, the same people don't stay as long, you know, you're going to lose them halfway. But smart. Like I was at a supply chain event a couple of years ago who were doing it really well. You know, they had a puppy, like a puppy area where you could adopt a dog. They had the wine, the rose, all day, kind of a stand. The hours were like three days, I think, but more of a middle of the day type activity. So it doesn't start at the crack of dawn and the important sessions are really before 3pm when people start to wander off. But from a field marketing perspective, okay, where am I? Who am I talking to? When are they actually receptive? Well, with the location, we've got some of the best restaurants in the world. You know, people are going to leave at three, so at five you can have a really unique dining experience that they're not going to go afford on their own. They're not going to expense Guy Fieri's like market table, you know, so. So again, an opportunity to just be creative and create some human experiences with, with context. To, to your point about everyone's going to want to go to Vegas, but you may or may not get the engagement you're after. I can confidently tell you that two out of three participants in today's podcast have come home from Vegas blonde. And that was not on the itinerary. Wait, was I blond to start? I thought what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas breaking like rule number one of veg. I just want to clarify though, only two out of three were not blonde when they arrived in Vegas. And just for further clarity, because I feel like I have to, I Had hair then. It was a while ago. Just the mustache. No, no, no, I didn't have. Yeah, I didn't have hair here. I had it here. And yeah, it was not blonde when I left Ottawa. And just off throwing this out here. Chelsea, if you ever need a podcast on one of your road trips, when you get all these massive budgets and stuff, like a couple people who would not say no, it's true. And we. We won't dye our hair blonde. Noted. Not till after the podcast. It's not a video. Brian, do you want to bring it home with our favorite question? Is this my question? I've lost. I'll do it. All right. Tell yours. This is. This is the trademark question, Chelsea, because I'm sure you've listened to every episode with bated breath. So, you know, exactly going. Yeah, yeah, it goes like this. Every discipline in this B2B marketing world has truths, it has fables, it has outright myths. It's got a fair degree of baloney. There's more baloney in marketing than I ever would have thought possible when I was young and impressionable. But there's a lot of baloney in the industry, too. We're going to give you, in Brendan's words, a soapbox. It's your big moment. There's a lot of people out there who maybe have heard or believe something that is not true about field marketing. Some kind of big myth. And we're going to give you the microphone and the opportunity to correct the record and tell us what's the biggest myth about field marketing and what's the reality of the situation. Thank you. I really value this opportunity to. You've been scarred. I can tell. Opportunity. I never knew I would have. I think the most common thing about field marketing or the most common misconception about field marketing is order taking from sales, that you're just doing, executing whatever whim, you know, create an event here. I really need to please this customer. You know, this is my one problem I'm trying to solve. Create something around that. And the misconception is the alignment piece, right? It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist without the marketing acceleration. And the marketing acceleration can't happen without the sales intelligence. So it really is a collaboration. I mean, much broader than marketing and sales, but that's the foundation of it. You need the field intelligence to know that this is the right person in the right time, and you need the marketing alignment to create something unique from that knowledge. Otherwise they could just do it themselves. So rather than being order takers from Sales. What I'm hearing is an intersection among customers, sales and the rest of the marketing team. You get to sit there at the middle and figure out who's right this time and who do I listen to and who's got the accurate perspective or who do you activate at which point in this particular journey, because it is a journey. These are really long adoption cycles. So it might pause for a bit after play. 1, 2, 3. It might just sit back with BDR for a little bit. You might hand it over to a partner for a while to nurture a different angle and really surround that. But for me, I mean that's almost more of an ABM type philosophy. But it is the foundation, I would say of all marketing activity is just cross functional alignment. And if you can nail that, you are going to be the most human person in the room. In their room. I like that because there's a good line to wrap up on. So you heard it here first, folks. Field marketers are not just taking orders from sales if they're doing their jobs right. Awesome. Brendan, bring us home. Well, it's been awesome having you on, Chelsea. Really appreciate it today and it was great to meet you. I'm somewhat surprised our paths have never crossed being from that long history lesson, but let's call it the Nokia Alcatel Lucent side of things. And also a fellow Ottawa person. So thank you very much for joining us today. Really appreciate your insights and we can check field marketing and the myths around it off the to do list now. Brian, thank you for the opportunity, guys. It was really fun outside of the box experience and I enjoyed it. All right, and before we sign off, cheers everyone. Cheers. Thanks, Chelsea. Hey folks, if you liked that episode, you won't believe the next one. So don't forget to subscribe on your favorite platform and you won't miss out. Or if you've got an idea we haven't thought of yet, hit us up in the comments. We'll cover that too.