5 Lies You've Been Told About B2B Growth [Part 2]

Speaker A: Why are marketers expected to prove performance over a quarter when the average sales cycle is now 192 days long?

Speaker B: Welcome back to Generation Marketing. This is actually part two. So welcome back to Gabe.

Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah.

Speaker B: What we was doing in the last episode, so if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, then please go and do it before you listen to this one because then everything will make sense. We were drilling down on a paper that's just come out of Creemark Labs that talks about the 5 lies in B2B growth and some of the myths around marketing. So we're really excited. Um, we're going to drill down into the next lies.

Speaker A: So let's talk about the fourth lie. A killer value prop will win over buyers.

Speaker B: That's a tough one because you can almost not argue against that because if your product is brilliant, then you're going to win over buyers. One of the first big companies I work for, the CEO was really focused on it and he used to use the line, if you build it right, people will come. And as a marketer, you never wanted to hear that. Right. Because I'd undervalued marketing. And the reality was there was a huge amount of marketing in that organization. But he did create an unbelievable product that got used by, um, those are lots and lots of big contact centers. And it became sort of the standard because we used, um, clients to talk about it. So the first half of that is, yeah, you've got a great product, it will win over. However, a lot of organizations get it wrong because they never get the value of that good product out. So there's two sides to this. One is if you've got a good product but you undersell it or under market it. The other side is you think you can compensate for a bad product by over marketing. And so I'll let you answer that one. But the first one is, when you go into an organization, we do this all the time, Gabe, right? We go into organization, we go, what's different? Or tell us about your proposition and they'll go into one. It's a bit like me describing my kids, right? I tell you all the things they do, none of which is relevant to you whatsoever. Right? But I love it. My creation. And that's what tech people do all the time. They talk about how brilliant the inner workings are, uh, of their solution and they forget what the buyer is actually looking for or what the issue is the buyer is trying to solve. And, um, I'm going to quote some of the stats here that was in the report. So it's something like, well it's written down here 71%. So almost three quarters of buyers don't believe suppliers actually get their day to day challenges.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: So uh, almost three quarters of organizations out there, there's putting across this is how great our product is and the buyer's going, so what? Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think there's, this is B2C Tech but I think it's worth noting Apple, when they released the ipod and it's obviously Steve Jobs, absolute genius here, but they didn't say the storage level, the capacity of the ipod, but they said a thousand songs in your pocket. And that was understanding what the buyer wanted out of that specification. Not the specification. And that's where I think a lot of B2B tech marketers get it wrong is they talk about the specification.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: Store this many cool recordings, you know, uh, to cure yourself against this many cyber threats a month.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But they don't think about what that actually means in terms of the day to day for that buyer.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's all about the feeds and speeds as we used to say. But it's not about why that's important. So a lot of people talk about their differentiation. We are, you know, a lower latency than the competition, we've got higher throughput than the competition, all that sort of stuff. But why is that important? And that's what they don't get. So another stat that I've got down here, let me sort of go through that. It's 89% of buyers are likely to purchase from someone they feel understands their needs. So it's looking at that. Why is it important to articulate. Well, buyers think it's important and if you don't resonate with them, there's so many other people that they can look at. We've just been talking about like vast digital information available to them. So they quickly will click like your buyer is one click away. They won't click away from leaving your site and going somewhere else because you don't uh, resonate with them. So I think that's, that's really. There are so many fantastic solutions out there that are absolutely missing a trick because they're not articulating their solution in the eyes of the buyer. It's that whole sort of thing of you are not the customer, so talk the language of your customer.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think an extension of that and maybe even even deeper, uh, one of the four P's which is the core of marketing is product. So marketing actually has a role to play when defining the proposition, let alone the messaging for the value proposition. Right. The actual, the actual product should be grounded in what buyers want. Because as you say, if a product's good and you've marketed it badly, buyers won't buy it. But even if a product, if you market a product well, but the product isn't right for the buyer, it's not going to, it's not going to grow still. So you have to get both steps right. It's that kind of build it and they will come, or I suppose don't build it very well and. But make sure they come well. Regardless, they're leaving.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's a key bit. Marketing is starting to mature and get there. But so many times a marketing is a function. It's not part of that journey. And marketing is the voice of the customer. Right. It's the voice of the customer that should be feeding into the product organization. We don't want to sort of get our product people to go and put yourselves in the shoes of the customer. No, marketing should do that. And marketing should be saying, these are the trends in the market, these are the challenges that our target audience are facing, and this is what we want the solution to do. And if the solutions or the services match that, then it becomes easy for marketing to articulate the value.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, uh, this is a B2C example, but I think it's worth noting as well. Brewdog do a very good job at turning insights from marketing into products. The reason I'm giving this example is I don't think any B2B tech organizations that I know of do this. But BrewDog have in their social team a kind of social listening insights team that extract that insight and the information from the social market. I think also that probably includes stuff like podcasts. They hear what people, what buyers want and they turn that into products. So whether that's topical, reactive of kind of cultural moments, or just generally understanding this is the direction we need to take this new product in, because that's kind of what the market wants. That's such an invaluable thing. I mean, imagine if a B2B tech organization was, was kind of leaning on the social insights of the world and turning that into the next product or turning that into the next, you know, next version of their product. Yeah, it'd be incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's another big lesson from the B2C world. They spend a lot of time measuring emotion. We tend to forget about that in the B2B world. So how many times have you looked at, uh, the latency of this product is twice as fast as the competition. Gone. Wow, that makes me feel good. Right. It doesn't happen, does it? So it's understanding. But when you read something and go, wow, he really gets. Or they really get how I feel, they really understand. The challenges that I woke up worrying about today. That's where you get emotion and that needs to be real part of it. But let's flip it the other way then because we've all seen it. Absolutely dreadful products, but great marketing that punches above his weight. I think those days are maybe going away.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Uh, I think there's a. I'm not a fan of Scott Galloway, but he does have a quote on something along the lines of the age of bad products marketed well is gone. And I think we've kind of touched on it in the self serve Journey stuff we talked about at the top of the episode. But there's so much choice for buyers now, especially in certain markets. Right. We work with it. MSPS. How many ITMSPs are there in the UK alone? It's so saturated that if you do not have a good product, solution or service, you're kind of done no matter how good your marketing is. And there are foundational things you need to put in place and fix before you even kind of start marketing yourself. Start advertising yourself, rather. I think that's the mindset shift we need to make in this. In the world is marketing come in earlier. We define those products and those, those services with buyers in mind before we start advertising it. But I think the view of a lot of organizations is marketing are there to promote, to advertise.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so they bring them in at the end.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And they say this is our product and this is what. How we want to position it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Off you go. Promote that. And then it fails. And they kind of blame the marketing or the advertising.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think it's because it's just that marketing have been brought in too late.

Speaker B: Yeah. We're not here to do the polishing and the spinning. Right. It's all about aligning the proposition, the messaging to the market, going back to the P's. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, and that's where it's not just that promotion that needs to be focused on. It needs to broaden back out and focus on the other aspects of it. And listen, I think probably saying podcasts as you've listened to is there was a suggestion that marketing should have customer service, which as a marketing that fills me with dread. Right. You never, never want to do that. But it's understanding. It's getting closer to the customers and understanding those pain points. Bang. Is the way to put your proposition forward.

Speaker A: Yeah. I really do think that there should be a CMO in any organization that owns marketing, owns sales, owns customer experience and customer service, client services. It should all be under that. Because every, every touch point and connection, whether you're a lead, a prospect, a customer, uh, you know, an advocate. Uh, yeah, it's all, it's all a touch point with the brand. And you have to maintain that message and that consistency throughout. And I think there is definitely a case to say that where a lot of B2B organizations fall down is that marketing to sales handoff.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And if that was all within one function and as we spoke about before, marketing and sales collaborated more.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And worked as kind of one unit.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like. Like Rob spoke about in his episode.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I think it would just, it would be transformational.

Speaker B: Yeah. Because I talk about the hand back as well that I always.

Speaker A: Feedback loop.

Speaker B: Yeah. I always talk about the, the sales guys that's in front of customers or the customer success managers or even the help desk. They're the eyes and ears of marketing to a big degree. And it's feeding that back those gems of information really helps to shape that proposition and then shape that proposition back into the product organization or the services organization to craft what they're doing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it really helps us as marketers kind of fuel that continuous innovation. Because there's been so many times where I get feedback from a salesperson say, oh, we had this inquiry in and we got on the call and actually they wanted this variation which we maybe weren't clear enough about on the web page. And that's amazing feedback because then we can go as a team and say, okay, well, they, you know, we didn't mean for it to come across like that, but that's how they took it. Uh, so how do we tweak this so that moving forward, every inquiry is better? And that is. And that is that kind of every single day we're moving another step forward.

Speaker B: Yeah. It all ties together. These things fit together.

Speaker A: But we planned it.

Speaker B: But it's. It's that logic that there's multiple touch points in content. It's not that one slogan that's on an advert that gets the click, that gets a form fill, that gets the sales guy the, the meeting. You. You're taking people on a journey. So therefore you've got more opportunity now to actually shape and meander. Uh, uh, and also we talk about self service. Self service, an ideal. One of the benefits of self service is people will gravitate to the content or the type of content that best suits them. So therefore, you can actually put a selection of content out that talks about a lot of different issues, but really drills down on specific needs for a specific Persona. And by self service, they will gravitate to that particular thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's a really good point. And makes me think when traditionally on a website, you've kind of got. You kind of got what we do and then you've got who we do it for, and it explains the who we do it for. But do we even need a step down from that that says who we do it for and. And how it affects each department or. Yeah, yeah, the word is better. But that kind of value prop. Per Persona. Yeah, that's like, oh, you're a finance person in this industry and you're looking for this. Well, this is probably the best thing you should look at is an ROI calculator. Uh, you can see some of our credibility here. You can see here some, some previous customer testimonials. Yeah, CFO will go tick. I'm happy from my side. But, you know, the actual person implementing it needs something totally different.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's almost another lie that I want to throw in so we can throw this one bonus lie. Yeah, bonus lie. It's like we have to dictate the journey. No, the buyer dictates the journey. Well, we've got to be there. Is there providing them what they need on each step of those journeys. And the more we try and force them down the line we want, the more we're going to lose.

Speaker A: And I think that is a really good segue into my, my classic, which everyone always laughs at me about, which is the marketing funnel is dead because you cannot push a single buyer down a marketing funnel. The one. The funnel doesn't even exist because people look at what we would deem bottom of funnel content first. In some cases, a pricing page. Well, that shows intent to buy. Well, no, they're. They're just checking if this brand is even in the, you know, in the remit of what they could possibly think about. Right. So you can't force people to go from a top funnel lead to middle of funnel lead to bottom funnel lead to an opportunity. It doesn't exist. Because you're right, people jump around, they take different journeys at, uh, middle of funnel when they're considering different Types of solutions, they might find a solution provider early and go, well, I haven't, you know, decided on that journey, but that could be an option with them. Yeah, they might throw it over to the CFO or the procurement team to go, can you have a check in to them? Is that the right route? We should go down. They're not bottom of the funnel yet. So. But that all those intent signals we fire in salespeople on the phones, you know, email sequences flying out the door, it's totally wrong. M. This is the key thing that self facilitating, self serve is the best way to kind of look at, uh, look at that kind of outbound marketing or inbound marketing.

Speaker B: So just to summarize, a killer value prop is important. However, what's more important is having a killer, uh, marketing or effective marketing approach that addresses the buyer's needs, the buyer's aspirations, the buyer's challenges, talks their language and really gives them the information they need to progress their buying journey. Right.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Right. Let's move on to the last one that's in the paper. And this one is unqualified leads are the reason your sales are slowing down.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think this, this is such a big misconception that happens so regularly. You pass over a lead to the sales team and it, you know, it takes months to close. That's just kind of the reality now. It's not because that particular lead wasn't as qualified as it should be. It's just because that's how people buy now.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I also think as well, it's that balance between where the self serve journey finishes and where the sales come. So if we're saying that's moving down, it's maybe that lead has been jumped on a bit too early. So I've got some stats here that's in the paper. The first one is that the average length of a sales cycle or the velocity of a sales cycle has increased by 30%. So it's got longer. That's backed up then by a stat on the number of days. So the average, and this is an enterprise sale rather than a commodity item is 192 days.

Speaker A: Wow. So I mean 190 days. So I think we saw a stat a while back, might have mentioned it already on the podcast. But the average time span that marketers measure campaigns on is something like 150 days.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So if you think about that, uh, yeah. You haven't even. We've already just assumed it's all failed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You might have a load of opportunities that are still Kind of in self serve buying journey mode.

Speaker B: And if you use enjoy marketing funds from a vendor. Uh, right. It's 90 days.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So 90 days, you got to find them, you got to self serve them, you've got to qualify them, you've got to close them. 192 days. No, it's not going to happen.

Speaker A: Tough, tough.

Speaker B: And then the bit that might sort of offer a bit of a clue for why that is, is the average buying committee now in B2B tech is 11 people. So that's gone from the find the one decision maker, uh, to the maybe one decision maker uh, with a couple of influencers now to 11 people. So no wonder that sales cycle or buying cycle has got longer because there's more people involved and we all know the bigger the committee the longer or the lack of a decision is more prominent. So what's your view on that in terms of, is it purely the qualification of the lead or is it just another symptom of the change of buyer behavior?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, it's a really, it's a really good point. I think there is a gray area like you say in between where the self serve journey ends, that kind of marketing owns and they're then where the sales process starts. Because I feel like a lot of B2B tech companies aren't transparent enough about the service. Definitely not the pricing. And I feel like that's a huge, huge part of buying journeys. Right. You need to kind of understand when you sit with a solution or a service provider.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What if it's going to cost you a trillion pounds a month? Right. Well it's better. So you kind of need to know that early that that's probably not just the last thing you do. And what you want to get in a proposal on a call, you want to kind of get a rough gauge.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So are uh, people maybe self serving to the point where they then reach out to sales to still continue self serving. Like midway through the self serve they actually get in touch with sales but then they go back to self serving and sales goal at least gone cold. That one.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I think that's, there's definitely cases of that and I think the SaaS world has changed it because now you go onto a SaaS website and you can see you've got your professional pack, you've got your starter pack, you know exactly how much it is, you can work it out, you can even put in your data volumes and it gives you a calculator online. So tools like that is starting to condition us of Those quick questions and then we go to a world that is maybe SaaS like, but not SaaS yet, where there is a bit of a black art with pricing and you've got to do that. But as you say, you're not ready to make that decision. You're just trying to compare apples with apples and some cases you haven't got that.

Speaker A: Yeah, you're comparing apples to pears to bananas. And really the finance team only want to see the bananas. So uh, you kind of just get rid of the others and the bananas

Speaker B: haven't got a price on it. So where did you go? So it's that whole thing and it's also that as you said, there's steps on the journey. If you've got multiple Personas, do they all get to week three and go, okay, we've done our self serve, now we want to engage or do you have people coming in at different stages? And I think that is definitely a case.

Speaker A: That's a really good point actually. We always hear from clients when we speak to them about who their buyers are, uh, who we need to engage, who do they always say, oh, we need to speak to the CEO, needs to speak to the cfo, need to, to speak to the coo.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Do you. Because they're not the ones doing that self serve. It'll probably be, I think Rob mentioned C Suite minus 1 or so or Manager minus 1. It was a really, is a really good way of looking at it because the actual self serve is almost, almost delegated, but not that person, other person is driving it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then. Well, as you know, the CEO makes the decision, but it's at the end.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You don't tend to do the research yourself.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It will more be, more likely be. Here's a proposal of a couple of brands or a couple of solutions.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What are your thoughts? And you come in at maybe the last week.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Sort of timeline.

Speaker B: Yeah. Because things like that is either they're driven top down, but it's more of a go and have a look at that and then they're out.

Speaker A: Delegation is what it is.

Speaker B: Or it's bottom up where somebody's coming up with an idea and then they take it to the, to the budget holders or the budget creators. And it's that whole sort of dynamic of different people getting involved, different times, each going on um, their little journeys and everything else. So it's, it's really hard. What, what does a qualified lead look like today? Because before it used to be bank qualified. I've spoken to Bob, the budget holder who's got a timeline, uh, he's got

Speaker A: a project in mind.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Got the budget ready.

Speaker B: But poor old Bob is not in charge of the decision. He's got another 10 people now around him. So do you qualify it on the one person or do you qualify it on the team? And I'm finding more and more sort of organizations we're working with and talking to are looking at that sort of team approach and creating the heat map. So they look at uh, not the qualification on an individual but the qualification across multiple individuals. So it's an account based qualification rather than a band. So I think Bant is going to go out the window. I think there's going to be a new mechanism in there which measures the engagement and the intent of multiple stakeholders that then gives you a cumulative intent that means something's going to happen and that's where qualification will come, not what one person says to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, and there's, I had a really good example of that quite recently where for, for a managed service client we had a company in our database only, only one contact for, for quite a while, I think a couple of months. And we were kind of nurturing them. We have a sort of monthly warming pot type approach that we do where we kind of just give out valuable content a bit sort of to fuel that self serve approach. And then we did a webinar, uh, and clearly they'd forwarded the invite to, I think it might have been the COO or the VP of Operations or something like that and they joined the webinar too. So there were two people from this company and that gave us a kind of view of intent because we were like wow, this, this company must have something kind of going wrong here because there's two of them, there's two of them taking half an hour out their day and from there we, we then got some questions from both of them separately in the Q and A at the end of the webinar and we're like wow, this is, this is clearly something. And we gave that insight and that, that kind of information to the sales team and that's kind of turned into a proper opportunity. But I think if that had been one person, you're right, the rest of that, it tends to just happen in the dark. That's a, that's an anomaly that that happened now in the light that we could see.

Speaker B: Yeah, but we're doing more of that um, again with some of our clients and some of those sort of ABM enterprise sales approaches where we'll run a paid media campaign and if one person from an organization looks at something they might be interested. But if multiple people from the same organization are looking at the same thing, then that's clearly showing there is something going on. This is a key topic, this is a key challenge. So it comes back to this sort of laser guided marketing. So you can start leaning in where you're seeing clusters of intent from either one organization or maybe clusters of intent from a particular sector, which in itself, again, too many clusters here defines a cluster. Right. To go and do that activity. But I think it comes back to answering this question is it's what is qualification? And I don't think it's a case of unqualified leads. It's just we don't understand what all we're not getting right that qualification and we need to rethink that. And we also need to make sure that we're not handing over leads. We're handing over leads with intelligence and continuing the marketing program or process in parallel with the sales engagement and then that supports that. And it's, it's no longer about how long a lead takes to close. It's how we can create that swell and momentum to close it quicker but optimize or increase the chance and probability of it closing, uh, at all.

Speaker A: Yeah, And I completely agree with that. And I think to extend that point, there's different qualification stages or types for different members of the buying committee. So actually all you may need to do from a qualification standpoint for maybe someone in the C suite is make sure they've heard of the brand.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And they know that you're actually a credible brand. You exist. Right. Because that might be qualified.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Because someone else goes to them who, who's done, who's more heavily qualified and goes, this is the business proposal. And they go, oh yeah, I've heard of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that, I hear they're quite good in this space.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: There's, there's loads of studies that show people believe that businesses are more credible just when they've heard of them.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: Because they, because I think there's, there's kind of some kind of psychological thing where if you've seen something before, you assume it's kind of established.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, and I mean that's a really, that's a really thing uh, that marketers need to be aware of now is that there are these different levels of qualification. So kind of lead scoring models don't really work as a one size fits all anymore.

Speaker B: No, no, it's going back to the original point of sales, supporting marketing. A lot of the C suite or the budget holders, it's almost a tick box at the end. But that credibility could have been done way before an opportunity ever existed by a piece of content. They saw a podcast, they listened to a message that came in their LinkedIn feed. So it completely changes the game now.

Speaker A: Yeah, and that's, I suppose, a really good point, that brand building needs to be always on and it always needs to be happening because that would slow down the sales cycle. You get to that stage, the member of the C suite hasn't heard of you, therefore you don't break that barrier. But if you've, you've been doing that work over, over months, over years, you've kind of already done that job. So it streamlines that sales cycle. And that's one of the ways we can kind of shorten them.

Speaker B: Yeah. Remove the blockers by the effort you put in up front. Right. Love it. Absolutely love it. So I think we stop it there because we finally come to the end of the five lies. There are many other lies. I think we could go on, we could invent some more, and I'm sure there's going to be another podcast episode where we drill down on some of the other myths that's, um, distracting us all in the world of marketing. But thank you for joining me, Gabe, on this one. Hope you enjoyed it. If there's any particular topics, um, you want to drill down on or ask us questions on, then please get in touch with us. Either leave a comment against the podcast podcast or come back to us on podcastreamark.com and if there's any lies you want us to drill down on and, um, decide whether they're true or false, then, um, please fire those in as well. Thank you.