The Odds Are Stacked Against B2B Marketers

B2B marketers are working with a probability of less than 1% success. That's crazy. And something has to change. Welcome to the first Cremarc podcast.

Today I'm joined by Gabe and we're going to drill down on what is changing, in terms of the buying cycle and the impact that's having on B2B marketers. And in particular, why the odds are starting to be stacked against the B2B marketer. Yeah, and I'm really excited to talk about this because we've spoken about it a lot recently. So it's good to put it in a podcast medium and discuss that today.

Yeah, right. Let's get going. Let's talk about probability then. Probability, we've been discussing some really great stats recently around how the odds are effectively stacked against B2B marketers.

Yeah, and I truly believe that. It's at a time when it should be so exciting to be in marketing and we've got all the tools at our disposal. We've got loads of different approaches. We've got different channels that we can integrate together.

The people I talk to are actually saying it's harder. They're having to work harder to stand still and in some cases they're going backwards. So what has changed, right? And my view is, it's probably not the way we market or the marketing tools.

It's actually the buyer. So the buyer has changed. So I do some numbers in my head and I'm living by these every day now. If you go, a fact you mentioned a lot, right?

The 95 and 5% rule. Yeah. So if you look at that, 95% of your target audience is not actually effectively in a buying cycle. So that leaves 5%.

So if you take at random 100 people in your total addressable market, only 5 of that 100 is actually in a buying cycle. So your odds go down to 5%. If you then look at it, one of the biggest things that's happened in the last few years is that the buying cycle has got longer. But the proportion of that buying cycle where the buyer is not engaging with a salesperson has actually got longer as well.

And now, depending on who you listen to, right, whether it's Gardner, whether it's other sort of marketing research companies, they say it's between 70 and 85% of the buying cycle is done as self-serve before you talk to a salesperson. So what does that mean? If you take that 85, then you’ve actually got 15% chance of engaging with the 5%. I think if I can do the maths in my head, that's 0.

75. Yeah. So suddenly you've gone from 100 to 0.75.

And then you quote one, which is really good. From Bain, isn't it? That one, which is, I think, it's specifically B2B tech as well, this one. This isn't just general B2B marketing, but B2B tech buyers have 80% of their shortlist of vendors already, just by brand.

They know who they want, or 80% of who they would work with before they get to the formal buying process. Right. So if you apply that 80% to this 0.75%, it's 0.

15%. So you start with 100 people and you've got a 0.15% chance of engaging on a sales activation campaign. So take that up to get at least one.

So this isn't a customer. This isn't a sale. Yeah. This is an engagement with someone who might be, yeah, what we would traditionally call a lead in marketing.

Yeah. So we'd have to go up one. So our original sample, you said 100, we take that to 1,000. Yeah.

To get 1.5 people. Yeah. And not half leads.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, that's probability, right? Yeah.

So you've got to have big numbers to actually make those work. So that's why it's tough. It's a bit, and we've spoken about it before. I don't like the marketing funnel.

I think you agree. Yeah. But if we look at it in a funnel, it's just generally the more you have to put in the top to get some out the bottom, right? Yeah.

We're then talking 10,000 people in the top to get 15 leads. Yeah. And a lot of organisations haven't got 10,000 people in their target audience. Yeah.

Of course. Yeah. So it's probably worth talking about that. We have very complex clients sometimes.

We have clients that have less than 1,000 businesses that they could work with in the world. So. So you have to do something differently rather than the old way of doing things. Yeah.

Because those numbers just aren't going to cut it, are they? No at all. Because also, as we know, when we engage with new clients, they'll give us a lead target. They'll say, can we have 15 leads a week?

Yeah. And then when you do the math. Yeah. If you go backwards up that old-fashioned funnel, the numbers just don't stack up.

Probably not going to add up. Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about very, very low probability for B2B marketers to actually get leads in the traditional sense.

Why don't B2B marketers just change? It's clearly wrong, right? Why have we not changed? Yeah.

That's a really good question. Because I believe there's this gap. What the buyer does and the buyer behavior and what marketers do. And that's creating this gap and that's what's creating sort of the challenge to be highly productive or efficient.

But there's lots of factors that's driving that gap even wider. The first one is, and I can say this because I've run a sales team, it's getting harder and harder to sell. Right? Sales cycle's getting longer.

Buying decision making is getting more complex. Yeah. Size of buying committees. Exactly.

Exactly. So as a sales person, you'd sit there or a sales leader, you sit there and your pipeline is slipping. Sales momentum is actually getting longer and slowing down. So the natural reaction is I need more leads, right?

If I get more leads, more things in the top of the funnel, then I've got more opportunities to sell. So they're putting pressure on marketing to generate volume, not necessarily quality. So that's the one. The second one is, and this is probably been created by digital marketing, giving you the ability to measure things.

So CEOs are sat there. Before they couldn't really measure marketing, but now they're saying they can measure bits of marketing. So they're going back and asking for return on investment. What's a return on investment on our PPC campaign?

What's a return on, we're doing all this, spending all this money on social media. What's a return on investment on social media? So that is driving the marketer to say, well, if I need budget, I therefore have to justify every single channel. But we know sitting here that the true value comes from the integration of the channels, not from each isolated channel.

But I'm forced or I'm being driven as a marketing director to focus on those channels where I can show a direct attribution. And that's not necessarily the right things to be focused on. Yeah. But you're saying it's best to have that holistic view, the integrated view of multiple channels working together, but also just channels that you can't track.

Not just channels working together. Exactly. If you look at some of the sort of golden age of advertising, you've got a magazine ad. Impossible to measure how effective that magazine ad was properly, but not directly anyway.

Yeah. But you've got now, you've got programmatic where you can literally see these companies have engaged. Yeah. As soon as, you know, you're a CEO, so it's slightly different.

But as soon as the CEO knows, their marketing department can tell them which companies engage with their ads. Yeah. Well, the marketing team is going to be forced into a position where, well, okay, we've got to show this channel is working because those are the deals that closed and this is how we engage them. Yeah.

But you can't prove that with those other channels. You can't prove that with a magazine ad or a TV ad. Yeah. And it's quite interesting.

If anybody goes back and they look at a good deal, right, a good opportunity that's closed, and then they go and track back, there is not direct attribution. It's so obvious. You see it in marketing automation when you can track the whole journey. Firstly, it's not just one person, right?

Yeah. It's a number of people. Yeah. And secondly, they may come in from a PPC ad.

Right, great. But that might be years ago, right? That's when they first knew you. Then they engage with a bit of content.

And then they may have gone quiet for six months. Then they may have come back and may have gone to a webinar. So there's lots of different things. And then you can look back and go, right, which one of those things actually generated the opportunity?

And the reality is it's not any one of those things. It's all of those things. It's every moment, isn't it? Every touch point.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's why we've got to think differently. Because if you remove some of those things that haven't got a direct attribution, you suddenly break the whole thing.

And that's what's happened is marketers have got so overly obsessed and fixated on the direct attribution tactics. The paid searches of the world, the SEOs of the world, marketing automation and email. Yeah. Everything is focused on those channels because you can show that direct attribution.

Yeah. But they've forgotten the most important ones, potentially. Exactly. And it's driven the activity to the bottom of the funnel where you're getting less than 1% probability of success.

Yeah. Crazy. So to drive it back up, what can B2B marketers do today? What's actionable for them to change their ways and kind of claw back a better probability?

I think the first thing, you've got to go back and look at the buyer, how the buyer has changed what the buyer is doing. And then let's almost work back through the maths we did earlier. So the one that you threw in was 80% of buyers know who they're going to talk to before they enter a buying cycle. Well, that's brand.

There's a hint there, isn't there? Yeah, exactly. You're probably investing brand a bit more. So if you're not, if they don't know who you are, you're never going to get them with a search campaign when it's too late, when they've already made their mind up.

So that's the investment. Then if you go further up and get to the 5% and 95%, at that stage, with the brand, you've got to be marketing to the 95%. Get them before they come into the 5% and they come in with your name, with the trust and the credibility. If you then look at the buying cycle and this stat of the 70 to 85% of the buying cycle is conducted before talking to a sales guy, then suddenly marketing becomes your sales guy, right?

Or your sales person. So marketing is not just about getting attention and converting to a hand raiser and to a lead. It's actually engaging and it's taking people through that buying cycle. And it's not just the traditional going, hey, here's my product.

Look how great it is. It's actually coming across and giving them the information. HubSpot, brilliant at doing this. Right?

So they have a mission to make everyone a better marketer, not just to sell marketing automation, but if they make people better marketers by providing them tools and information and great sort of content, then those better marketers go on to buy HubSpot. And you can apply that to anything. If I can talk about how to protect a company from cybersecurity risks and educate them on all the different angles and all the different areas that they need to protect themselves on, then they're going to come to me when they want to actually put those tools and techniques in place.

Yeah. And that's the same with the whole technology market that we operate in. Digital transformation clients. Yeah.

These are the frameworks you need to transform digitally, to grow your business with technology, put the right things in the right places. Yeah. Then who do they come to? The one that gave them that knowledge and that information and that value.

But if you look at it, where do they go to? They go to your website, right? Yeah. And what do most people do with a website?

Well, they build an online brochure. So it's all about, this is me. This is how great I am. This is my products, my solutions, et cetera.

Throw in a few case studies to get sort of social proof in. And then they stick a resource center on the side. Yeah. Right.

It's hidden away as well. Somewhere in the navigation, there'll be content or resources or blog and you've got to dig into it. But if you go back and say, what does a buyer want to do now? They want to come to your website to get information.

And if they can't find it on your side, they'll go to somebody else. So a website really should be a resource center with a bit about you tacked on the side. It's the other way around. And it's things like that that we need to think differently and we need to change.

But how do you think you would get the buy-in from a non-marketer to do that? Because everyone else, any non-marketer not looking at this data would look at their marketing team who suggests that and they would laugh them out the room. They'd say, what, you're going to tell me? You're going to get rid of our website that says about our products, our solutions, our services, what we offer.

You're going to say, hide that away slightly and let's provide free value. Let's invest in content and give it away for free. Yeah. And it's hilarious because we're still having that battle.

Do you gate something or don't you gate something? How many times? And the whole thing is don't gate anything because all you're doing is trying to force somebody to say, talk to me when they don't want you to talk to them. Well, that's why do people gate things?

It's literally the whole reason is I want their contact details so I can see they've downloaded it. Well, if it's good enough content, you should be confident enough to leave it to them and they'll come back. And the other option is, which is kind of almost ruined marketing, is people have this tactic Right. We’ll gate it.

And then as soon as they get that form fill Right. Sales team - on them. Yeah. Or here's eight emails you didn't want in your inbox about that same thing you've just read.

Well, not fussed. That just puts you off. So I think there's a couple of things. Firstly, well, you talk about this fear of doing something that puts your head up and sort of say put a target on your back, but puts you in the spotlight.

So it's so easy to do the same thing, right? Nobody gets fired for doing the same thing, right? But if you do something, it doesn't work. So you've got to be a little bit brave because you will get fired if you're going backwards and backwards and backwards.

Or there'll be less investment in marketing. So marketers have to be brave, right? They have to come forward. Then they have to stop looking at this direct attribution and looking at the whole sort of side.

So it's now it's about correlation, not about direct attribution. So it's looking at the mix. The ultimate goal you're trying to do is generate more sales momentum. So you're trying to generate not necessarily more leads, but you're actually generating better qualified leads that progress through that sort of closing funnel quicker and more effectively.

So it's looking at those top level numbers. And if you're showing and demonstrating increased sales momentum, then you're doing a good job. Then it's looking at the correlation. Right.

If I do more social, am I getting more visitors to my website? If I'm getting more visitors to my website, am I getting more engagement with content? Out of the people that's engaging, am I getting more people in an organisation, or just one person in an organisation? So is that person sharing content with their peers?

And if all of those things start stacking up, then you can see, you can start looking at intent, right? Which is another cracking area is, is it's not the amount of activity somebody does, it's what type of activity they do. And then that shows that you're progressing them down that sales cycle. So on that, the intent stuff's great.

I mean, some of the tools we've got now, like I was about to do a “BBC”, other brands are available, but there's loads of different variations, loads of options. Everyone knows them. Yeah. Why do we think we need to move towards that and away from that kind of traditional lead scoring approach of, you know, looked at a webpage one point, looked at, download, you know, clicked on an email one point.

Yeah. And to be honest, that changed the game. When we got marketing automation and we had lead scoring and suddenly you knew who was going to your website, you knew what they were engaging with, you knew who was clicking on your emails or clicking on your social posts, et cetera. So it's fantastic.

And you can build that up, but it's, if they're now spending 85% of their buying cycle and engage with marketing, at what point does that score become real? And it's not a bad activity. And we've also seen as well that there used to be the traditional funnel where you, you've got, you know, awareness, consideration, decision. It doesn't happen anymore.

You used to put your content into each of those different buckets. People don't do that. Sometimes they go straight to pricing. Can I afford this?

And once they work out, they can afford that, which is used to be a real buying signal. Yeah. It's now I can afford it. Let's go back and understand what it is and what it does for me.

Yeah. So it's recognising the fact that it's, it's more like a flywheel now rather than a, than a funnel. So you've got to be smarter in terms of what you're looking, what are the intent signals? I will say it's, it's not one person doing something from an organisation.

It's multiple people, that shows that it's not one person's got some interest. It's actually a topic that, or an area that the company is looking at. Then it's looking at the amount of content, the depth of content, the frequency of content. And it's things like that, the really shows a sign of intent.

Yeah. So we put that into, they use an analogy. If you're an ice cream salesman, stick with me here. Okay.

An ice cream salesman. Yeah. You want to be looking at the data that tells you how many people want ice cream in a given location. So you know where to park your van.

Yeah. That's the intent side of stuff, right? Even better, you know who those people are. You can park outside the house, right?

Yeah. But the traditional way of gated content, lead scoring and sales attack as soon as they download something was like, someone goes into a library, they, they read a book, they pick up a book that's like history of pistachio ice cream or something. Yeah. And then you got ice cream van burst through the wall, like in some sort of A team fashion, sirens blaring and they're like, do you want to buy an ice cream mate?

And that's, that's, that's the original way that B2B marketers used to look at it. Yeah. It's like, well, that person's looking at something related. Yeah.

So I'm going to jump on them right now and try and force them to buy. Yeah. I mean, what's the likelihood of you jumping into a library and trying to sell ice cream to someone? Less than 0.

1%. 0.1%. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so exactly. It's all a good example as well of how it's changed. If you look at the business and consumer world, it gives you good signals of how things are changing because at the end of the day, B2B buyers are people.

So if you look at, um, cars, right, if you're going to buy a new car, traditionally you'd either, well, going back years and years and years, you'd go to things like the motor show, right? And look at all the new cars and work out, which is the best. Um, if you couldn't get to the motor show, you'd actually go through all the dealers. You'd go and see BMW, Mercedes, other vehicles are available and you'd look at all of them.

You don't do that now. Right. When I last bought a car, I went straight to the dealership. I wanted to, I knew exactly the make, the model, the color, everything that I wanted.

And it was like, this is what I want. And that was because you'd done the self-serve. Well, you knew the brand you wanted. Exactly.

And then you did the self-serve journey. Exactly. I was bought into the brand. I did my research and then I went in and, and basically said, this is what I want to buy.

Yeah. So that's, that's the way the world's changing. Yeah. So if we talk about the B2B buying cycle and the buying committees that go through that buying cycle, the different people within the business, how has it changed over the last few years?

I think it's changed a huge amount, right? Absolutely huge amount. A real common thing. When I go in and talk to people, they go, right, we want to, we want to get higher in the organisation.

So my website needs to appeal to the CX level. Right. Typical. Every time.

Yeah. And then you go to the sales guys and go, right, who do you engage with? And they go, well, I do engage with the CX level, but it's normally at that tick in the box, final decision presentation moment. So they're not the people that come to the website.

So I think the first thing is the buying committee, so to speak, has got broader. So you've got people that influence, you've got people that's actually end users that are asking for things that then get the researchers to go and look for things that then take it up to the next level of management, seniority to, to look out and try and do the budget. Sometimes budget comes down, but sometimes budget's generated by pushing things up. So you've got this massive spectrum of personas and that's the challenge we've got now is you've got to understand which persona you're trying to engage with at which time.

And that is what is driving us to think more about content. And I think we've got a podcast coming up. There's going to be a focus on content, but you've got to appeal to all those different people at different times. So going back to the funnel, it's not the funnel anymore.

It's all of those different pieces of content, all those different touch points and people are coming in at different points and they've got different agendas. They're coming in for different reasons and it's trying to sort of pull that together. So that's, that's step one, right? The buying committee is, is, is bigger.

The second bit is as soon as you start introducing more people, then you've actually got a longer sales cycle. And then if you compound that by the fact that people are more cautious, right? We're constantly going from one sort of level of economic, political uncertainty, et cetera, to the next one. And also companies are more global than they ever used to be.

So it's not just what's happening in the UK. It's what's happening in Europe. It's what's happening in the US worldwide, et cetera. So you've got all those factors, which is making people think harder when they're making decisions.

And when you think harder, you think longer, right? So the whole cycle is getting longer and longer and longer. And then coming back to the point we made earlier, that is not the time engaging with a sales guy. That is in time that you're self-serving.

And that again, elevates marketing. Marketing's got to engage with more people for a longer period. So it's not just about capturing their attention. It's about keeping their attention and fueling their sort of trust, appetite, sort of desire to engage with what you've got over the long period of time.

So is there anything strategic marketers can do to make, you're saying the buying journey is longer. Yeah. There's more people in the buying committee. What are the stats?

I think it's a hundred and how many days in a buying committee now on average? 172 or something like that. Yeah. Something ridiculous.

Completely range. Yeah. We've got some clients that do things within a quarter, but that's very, very seldom more commodity products. We've got some, their sales cycle can be up to two or three years.

So it just really shows the difference. Yeah. So if we're talking sometimes potentially two years and you've got a committee of five, six, sometimes seven people, I think seven was the recent status offer enterprise businesses. Yeah.

Usually minimum seven people in a buying committee. Yeah. What can marketers do that's strategic to make the content they create more shareable within that buying committee? How can you almost drop something in and let it circulate?

Yeah. It's all about educating. Right. People want to learn and we forget that.

What organisations tend to do and we've tended to do in the past is we want to talk about how great we are and our products, how great we are. It's like we look internally and go, these are brilliant things. Let's tell you about them. Where it's the other way around.

It's sort of going, you are sat in this situation. You have got these challenges. You've got, you use the term, jobs to be done. Yeah.

And aspirations of things you, where you want to get to. And you've got to appeal to those sort of things on almost equal measure. So you've got to address it today while showing them you can take them to tomorrow. And that's not about, this is what we can do.

This is what, how great my product is. This is taking them through the thought process. What are the things they need to think about? I talk a lot about, um, you say what your differentiation is.

These are the features, benefits of my solution, but you don't tell the audience why that is important. And that's what you've got to do in terms of educating. You've got to make the audience know why something is important. And then you can sell why you, you sort of solve that.

Yeah. So, it's the art of the possible. A lot of the time it's like, this is what you could be doing. You didn't know it existed yet, but I'm going to educate you.

It's going back to the HubSpot example you used. It's a perfect example because they're educating marketers on things they didn't know were possible. Yeah. And they're giving them, these sort of downloadable checklists and calculators and templates and frameworks for free.

Yeah. And saying, look here, learn this. Yeah. Because we know that when you learn it, you'll realize, well, marketing automation is going to be pretty key in this journey I'm going on.

So if I'm selling, for example, enterprise software for HR, right? Yeah. For people management. If I'm talking to HR people around talent acquisition, what's the best processes or the best steps to do talent acquisition, they're going to become better HR people.

And then they're going to go, well, what tools can I use to get me there? I need a system now. Yeah. Exactly.

You've got to convince them how to do things the right way or what's important. And then your solution overlays on that or your service overlays on that. So I think what we're talking about is, I think there's an interesting point here. What we're talking about is thought leadership.

That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Is that education, that art of the possible. Yeah.

But B2B marketers have been doing that before. Yeah. Do you think the only problem with what they've been doing so far in that space is the fact they put it in the form of a white paper that's really long and boring and they gate it? Or is there another problem as well?

Yeah. I think there's lots of it. Firstly, if you look at most ads that come up in your LinkedIn feed, for example, how dull are they? Yeah.

If you sit at night and watch the TV, you've got some great ads on the B2C world that captures your attention. You come to work the next day, you talk about it. How many times do I talk about an ad that appears in LinkedIn? Never.

Right. Because they're all dull. Do you even remember? It's probably the first point.

So B2B marketing doesn't have to be dull and boring. Step one. The second bit then is the content needs to add value. If I read a book and I can apply something I read to my life, I remember it, I apply it, and I'm enthused about it.

We don't do that with content, right? People will read short form content. They want to get to the point. They haven't got the time to read War and Peace.

But a lot of content out there is still that long form. So it's got to be short. It's got to be easy, digestible. And then the next bit, it's got to serve the buyer, right?

Marketers shouldn't sell. They should be satisfying the needs of the buyer. And I think that's a very subtle sort of term or subtle sort of way of looking at it, but it's a real important one. So it's becoming more buyer focused rather than attribution focused now.

Is that? Yeah. The buyer's on a journey. And what we're doing is we're marketing the destination.

Yeah. We're not taking them on a journey. And you've got to go on the journey. The first bit is on a journey is plotting your course, plotting your route.

So if you can help them go, right, this is your best route to get to where you want to be rather than saying, I sit where you want to be and I can get you there, right? It's taking them on a journey. So in summary, the odds are stacked against the B2B marketer, but the power is in the hands of the B2B marketer. So if they can change, they can adapt to this new buying world and really see some improvement in their results.

Definitely. Definitely. It shouldn't be feared. It should be an exciting time.

There's so much we know more about the buyer. All we've got to do is tune into them. And what we're going to do in our next podcast or the series of podcasts is we're going to start drilling down into some of those things. So we're going to talk about brand.

What can you do to get that brand out there and tune in to the 95%? We're going to talk about content. How can you facilitate and support and guide this self-serve buying cycle? And then we're going to talk about on another episode around sort of how we use different metrics and how we start measuring marketing performance.

Yeah. And how we look at intent and how we look at media distribution. Everything that we believe can help B2B marketers of today get more in touch with a buyer. Exactly.

What we call realigning B2B marketing with a buyer. Brilliant. Yeah. Great.

So thank you for listening to this episode. We hope you can join the next one. As Gary says, we're going to be talking about all these fun subjects in the coming weeks. Thank you.