The offer vs. argument problem: why most B2B promotion is just sophisticated coercion (feat. Liam Moroney))

Host: That's not an offer, that's an argument.

Co-host: This is the reason why lots of software doesn't get bought. A lot of it is no decision. Right? It's, you know, we're evaluating something and we're just going to stave it off because we can't run a test process in parallel to understand whether or not this is actually better than the way we currently do things, or I'm not convinced enough about the implementation of whether it's going to make life easier. And I've worked and I know Ryan's on this call. And like, one thing that's really interesting, constructive for me when we do these kind of exercises with clients is having a third party actually do. That kind of exercise really removes the bias from, from understanding what evaluation criterias and preferred evaluation paths look like. Because ultimately you lead the witness a lot when you are inside the company and you're the one who's trying to talk to someone who's out of market and understand it. Because what you ultimately want to get is a, is a conclusion that's going to satisfy your leadership. And then you guys are going to go and build from an uninformed place or a biased place. So when you were talking about doing more things in product or messaging or positioning. Right. I mean, I think it's really important that you think about not just that you involve yourself in it, but also how you do it to remove bias from that process for yourself. Because ultimately the search should be a, uh, search for truth. Because going all the way back down to the idea of promotion, you're not going to build a great offer for someone. You're not gonna build great performance marketing. You know, if you're going to just bias yourself towards what you think people want instead of hearing actually how they evaluate stuff and then building an offer around that to de. Risk them wanting to enter a sales process with you.

Host: And I think the offer is a key part of it because if you don't know what place they're in relative to their problem, then you. How do you know how to frame your solution? Like we were chatting about offer the other day when we were prepping for this and, and I've been looking around LinkedIn nonstop and I've seen countless examples where the messaging and the offer is basically, don't do this, do this instead.

Co-host: All this fear, uncertainty, doubt, messaging. Yeah.

Host: And it's like, and that means that you're like, when you peel that back, what you're essentially saying is you don't believe this. And I'm going to try and convince you that you're wrong and that I'm right. That's a heck of a lot to try and accomplish in an ad for from a rando showing up in your feed. But I think that's a lot of it where, you know, we're trying to explain to people why you need better or you don't need that, you need this. And that's not an offer, that's an argument.

Co-host: Right, right. And it goes back to like talking to customers. Again, marketing is so far removed from the customer right now that they don't even understand what to ask or learn or say to them. And instead they have to rely on things that are fear, uncertainty, doubt, fomo, you know, just like. And then also having to overly incentivize someone as well. Like, the range of performance marketing offers that largely exist right now are either get a demo, which nobody wants. I mean, almost any time we've run this kind of exercise, I think less than a quarter of people even want a bespoke demo. There's, there are at least three or four other key sources of, uh, of information or key things they would prefer as an offer to kind of go into a sales process with you. Or it's literally trying to pay you for your time and incentiv people with money to sit in on a meeting. I'm not saying that none of those, neither of those things are worth trying to do. But I'm saying that there is such a huge gap in between those two offers and just a lack of getting in front of your customer when they're not in market to understand how they want to purchase beforehand is leading to this huge chasm of creative offers and offer design that is just being left on the table. And I just think companies leave money on the table as a result of doing that.

Host: And I think those incentivized demos, I'm sure there are cases where they work, but I've seen the origins of those arguments. I've talked to sort of like, you know, seed round founders and Series A. And a lot of the messaging they'll say as they're starting to spin up a marketing function is, well, we just need to get in front of people. And then the product sells itself.

Co-host: It does.

Host: And that's just not, that's not how the world works. That's an absolutely foolish thinking. And it doesn't happen when you try and scale it. And so a lot of that type of promotion is we'll just get them on the call and the salespeople will do the rest, and you make huge assumptions in that. One of them is that people can be easily swayed away from a decision with a single argument from a rep. And that just isn't true. It also assumes that that person is actively ready or can be made to be ready to buy this product with enough of an argument. And it's just, it keeps going back to the same problem of are they buying something like this? How often do they buy something like this? How often does anybody buy something like this? Why would they stick with the status quo? What are they unhappy about when it comes to the status quo that we could take advantage of? Because I think, you know, uh, Dale Harrison and I have been talking about this a lot recently about what is performance marketing. A lot of the time it is trying to get into lists you weren't part of as late as possible before, like and try and steal it away. It's, it's a long shot way of trying to win when you don't do it with brand, with brand support. You're trying to say you don't know me and you've mostly made a decision or you're actively looking at all these other options and you've considered a few of them and you probably have a favorite. But I just want you to think about me before you make a decision that is ultimately what you are trying to do. Which means you need to understand what about the current set? Are they fine with, you know, are they too expensive? Are they too clunky? Do they have more features than they need? Do they not like the service that comes with this product? Like, if you don't know these answers, how can you show up late in the game and go, I know a Mirando, I totally get it, but give me five minutes of your time because these things are, are things I can alleviate that I know you experience.

Liam Moroney: Then on the P side, uh, for a promotion, I still think yes, that's marketing's. Like, I don't think anyone would disagree, uh, that that's marketing's role, right? Is promotion. But like the other three, I just don't see a world in which we would ever, ever own them. And especially in the B2B side of things. And then within the PIA promotion, I still think we're only operating a small little sliver of it.

Co-host: I 100% think we operate a small sliver of the promotion. I think largely it's just demand. I mean we have a brand demand expand framework. And demand is really the only place I see a lot of B2B companies play in Lead gen, bottom funnel, direct response, uh, ROI within a sales cycle kind of motions. Right? And that does make it difficult for you to build long term brand recall. It also helps it, it also makes it really difficult to justify any other investments that you have because I made this point earlier this week or maybe it was late last week. You know, brand spend when deployed well makes all the other functions of your go to market your revenue or better. Right? It makes your outbound prospecting better, it makes your partnerships more effective. It gets you more from, from your trade shows and other events you do that are not just digital advertising. Right. And I think part of what marketers challenge is when it comes to those kind of budget items that brand demand, uh, especially that brand budget item is they just don't, they have very few ways to look at roi, uh, with it. And ultimately what you have to look at, and I argued with this with the own skill that I, that I'm working on and hopefully we'll roll something like that out, is you brand ultimately is a, is a halo effect across the rest of your organization. So you should be looking at it as ways that it gives lift in other, in other motions that you're doing. So maybe you run a big brand campaign, maybe you run CTV in a certain region or a certain few regions and see what connect rates look like for outbound messaging or cold calls against uh, against places that you don't. So looking at brand through lenses of incrementality at a granular level and then at a macro level, looking at it against cost of goods sold and amortizing that spend over periods of brand decay to give yourself a true ROI look are ways you can look at that spend and justify it to finance and also look at whether it's effective or not. I think there are ways to look at brand spend and measure it, but the problem is people ultimately always want to measure brand spend against the lens and the prism of performance marketing. And it's just not simply how that budget works. And ultimately marketers need better tools to kind of help themselves measure brand spend and show that it's effective and that it impacts the organization positively.