62. Why most b2b marketers feel stuck (and how to become strategic)

Speaker A: Hey, welcome Back to the B2B Marketing Gap podcast with me, M. Jade Tambini, aka B2B. Jade. This week I've been prepping for my live class which is happening next week, Thursday 26th of March, 11am UK time. If you want to join us, there is a link to join in the show notes and in preparation of this class, I was doing a bit of a download from my brain. I do this sometimes. I like to just have a conscious stream of creativity where I just open up a Google Doc and I just start typing and. And it really helps me to connect with you, reconnect with you, think about where you are, what you're going through, what's happening for you. And as I looked at this document, which ended up being six pages long, I did not stop typing for a really long time. I thought, do you know what? For this episode, I'm actually just going to read it to you like a letter, like a B2B marketing love letter I was reading through and I thought, people need to hear this. They need to hear exactly what they're going through written out. Because it reflects on my experiences too. The reason that I understand how you feel is because I've been there too. A lot of the time people are like, how do you do this? How do you get in my head? How do you know exactly what it feels like? And I'm like, it's really easy. It's just because I've been there. I'm going to read this document I put together for you. We're going to talk about how you're feeling now, what's going on for you, what the challenges are, why it's happening and also what you can do. I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Bit of a story time. Okay. Okay. At this moment, I was just connecting with a creative flow. So this is not like a grammatically perfect. It's just like a flow, a conscious flowing. Okay. They feel like they know about marketing and they've learned a lot over the years, but leadership doesn't seem to listen to their ideas and holds them back from being strategic by wanting quick wins. Leadership tried to fix the marketing by sending them loads of new activities regularly and let's do this, let's try that. They also change priorities quite a lot, such as let's enter a new market, let's push this product that didn't work, let's do a campaign to this new geography and the marketer gets imposter syndrome because they aren't entirely sure when put on the Spot what they should be doing so they can't really say no. They are trapped in the B2B marketing gap, which is the void between the marketer and the leadership where a marketing strategy that works should be. Problem is often they do have a document called a marketing strategy, but where it goes wrong is that they use this document to try and impress leaders rather than being real with them about what can be achieved. They do this because they feel they lack recognition for their efforts even though they work incredibly hard doing everything they asked and dealing as best they can with constant goalposts changing constant changing of priorities. And when they ask what marketing needs to support the business with, they just get the basic answer of build brand awareness or get more leads in. But the problem is these two things are totally generic. They are a given. And um, they aren't always necessarily the best way for a company to grow either. So the marketing plan is either not truly a marketing strategy, that is it's just a list of activities and campaigns put together in a timings plan to map out how it will all get done, not really connected, or it's got so much in it that is never going to be realistically delivered. So it impresses on the day of presenting and leadership gets really excited. But marketing, my marketer knows deep down there is no way I can deliver on all of this. What needs to happen is a bit of a clean slate and a process that strips back all the noise and gets to the heart of what's really going on here. First, to understand what the company's vision, mission and targets and goals are. Understanding why they aren't already there, I. E. What stands in our way of getting there. And again, stopping the company from wriggling out of we aren't there yet because we don't have enough leads or customers. That's an easy out. This is never the real reason. It could be we are more expensive and we lose more quotes we send out than we should be because prospects don't understand why it could be dangerous to go with cheaper options. Or we're losing opportunity because all our salespeople manage their contacts individually and they aren't using our central CRM. So there's hundreds of people we've interacted with regularly, uh, in the past who we aren't front of mind with. Or we're losing customers to a new competitor who has entered our region, we aren't holding a strong enough bond with our customers to ensure they don't get their head turned or we are a new player in the market and there's low hanging fruit customers we could take from competitors if they realized that due to us being smaller with lower overheads, they could get a way better service with us at a lower cost. Or we aren't managing to help our prospects understand that we could solve their problem better than the company they are with now. So I'm going to read that again because that's an important one. We aren't managing to help our prospects understand that we could solve their problem better than the company they are currently using. So they don't consider us as an option. And so then we need to understand and be really open and honest and clear about what marketing has taken place to date and how it has been going and whether it's working. Are some elements working? Are others not? Could some of them work if given the space and resource and time needed? Have we thrown away marketing activities that would have been great if focused on what are the numbers here? We have to stop showing vanity metrics that make it look like we are doing well. Leaders hate it when we go well, sorry, it's quite hard to read like a literal thought stream. So give me like a chance if I'm like, what have I written here? Here we have to stop showing vanity metrics that make it look like we are doing well. Leaders hate it when we go well. There were no opportunities put in the pipeline, but we did get 75 likes on one of our posts and our email rates have increased. They need to know what the marketing is doing toward the goal. So we have to be open about this in our marketing review. This is so important and it's why so many marketers go so very wrong. Once we've done this marketing review and there is so much involved in this process and will have involved our leaders in sales in getting the numbers and figures and mapping things out in terms of goals for the year and financial targets and the current blocker, uh, from achieving those things. Side note, this really helps build marketing's profile from day one. If you ask CEOs to be involved in helping you review your marketing and set the goals and understand the current limitations, they're going to start to view you differently. So I've written here, CEOs have often messaged me to say, wow, my marketer is asking me questions that uh, are making me think differently already. Then we move into setting our marketing objectives and these will be different than smart, as in simple, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. And they will be different than tactics masked as objectives. This is really common such as get 50 new leads within six months through content marketing. That is literally a tactic and does not solve the deeper issue. This is a given, we need more leads but it doesn't touch on the business problem we are trying to help solve in why we are suggesting and how to get leads. I don't know what I was on about there. I think here I'm basically saying the formula that I use to help marketers build their marketing objectives is quite different than what they're used to using because the typical goals that I see marketers set go set them off in the wrong direction. So get 50 new leads into the pipeline within six months is almost a given. We obviously the outcome measurable will always be opportunities into the business. So in a way that is not an objective to focus on because you'll become obsessed with the outcome m and you won't actually work on what's needed to get done in order to actually get them. You'll just focus on lead gen turning ads on and you won't get into the things that are currently stopping you from growing the business. So I think that's what I was trying to get across there is that the way that I train marketing objectives is quite different because it's quite specific. It's quite a specific approach to how we overcome that. And that is something I will cover in the Masterclass live class next week. So we would take each of the business focus areas from the marketing review, such as the sales cycle being very long or the price sensitivity or the conversion rates being too low and then we would pick one marketing objective per focus area that gets to the heart of the issue. For example business focus area, we are losing customers to cheaper competitors. Marketing objective, understand what is important to our customers and um, position ourselves to our target customers and position ourselves as the right partner for them over the other option. So then maybe you're thinking that sounds a bit fluffy. Well no, because it's what the marketing will focus on, it's what you will rally around. And then attached to that objective we will have a key business result. For example increase win rate of our quotes by 20% within six months. And then success indicators would be directly linked with the tactics we pick later down the line such as engagement with marketing campaign that aims to change the perception or attendance at educational webinars or events, whatever we go with, at least then every activity we pick up can directly trace back to why they're important and why we're doing them. So a ah, webinar sign up would become important because we will educate that individual on the risks of buying cheaper. And then they will be offered a consulting call for free as a follow up to advise them on a current challenge they're facing. So you could say to your leaders, we had 60 sign up for the webinar and so far eight of them have agreed to their free consultation with us. So there's 52 people remaining at suspect level and a suspect is earlier on than a prospect or a lead. I call a suspect is someone who's a possibility, they may want a quote in the future. And then it says here, and eight of them have moved into the pipeline to prospect, which is meaning we are likely able to quote them. So like we've identified that these are people we could quote that they were interested in a quote. And then once we get to this point, it would move to sales when it's ready, meaning it would then be considered a lead or a lead. A lead is when someone has actually requested a quote, is ready for a quote, is ready for a meeting. So there's actually two steps before that we want to be tracking. This helps us explain to sales why campaigns and events won't give them immediate results. But we can trace back, okay, 40% open rates on our emails. Inviting our list of the webinars is a good signal because it means last time we got 60 signups, not 30, when our open rates were lower and our database was smaller. And so you can also apply this to our social media posts since every time we're in our, uh, social media, we always link to this event that we're promoting there too. So higher engagements tell us what content people are resonating with most and the higher engagement leads to more webinar signups. So everything funnels into the exact same place. Obviously here I am talking about quite a lot of tactics, but it's to illustrate that whole connection piece. From speaking to leaders about doing activities and then when challenged, often aggressively, by sales on where are the results? We are able to confidently talk openly about what we should hope to expect. And then our conversations move nicely more towards how we will improve email subject lines to increase open rates or how we will adapt the webinar content so more people convert to meetings. And we can educate how introducing people to sales too early will kill the entire plan. But because we've got to educate them and build that trust first, then we move into setting our budget first, we'll do a lovely exercise where we look at what percentage of sales revenue they're spending currently on the marketing. This is so fun. I think What I ended up doing here is like actually mapping out my program so that I could, like, brain, like, download the experience. People go on inside the B2B Breakthrough Academy. Then we move into setting the budget. First, we do a lovely exercise where we look at what percentage of sales revenue they're spending currently on the marketing. This is so fun because they get to go, huh? Ha. I knew it wasn't me. Then I train them on how the budget. If profit margins are standard and healthy for the industry, then typically it is safe to work within the parameters of 4 to 8% of sales revenue on the marketing budget, with three factors defining the level it should be. Those are, number one, how ambitious the company goals are, number two, how active the competitors are, and number three, how well we're known. So how established we are, I. E. How big is our brand challenge. Then we score for each of those and set a budget roughly at the level we think it should be on a sliding scale. If they need to build systems for the marketing, have got no positioning, need a new website, need new collateral, and have a big growth plan, they're likely to need an even bigger budget. The reality is that many of the marketers listening to this right now that you're dealing with 1% of sales revenue and less. And it's often what people are working with because leaders say things like, you don't need to outsource. You can just do that yourself. Or I'll give you more budget when you deliver return on investment on that budget. But that doesn't work because it's like saying, here's not enough ingredients to make a loaf of bread and you have no oven, so show me bread and then I'll invest in us, uh, setting up a bread factory. You need the basics to get going. And so we don't want to freak out our leaders into thinking they have to go from, say, £60,000 marketing budget a year to £240,000 a year. But what we do want is to have the conversation about why, typically, a company like ours. I'm out of breath. Could be. How. How did I write so much? It's beautiful when you just channel. I recommend you guys do this. Channel your challenge and your ideas. Like, step away from the AI for a minute. And I'm not outdated. Uh, I do use AI for many parts of my business, but you have, you have to stream your natural creativity and problem solving as well. You have to get everything downloaded from your brain and then use that to fuel your AI. So our breath. What did I say? Typically yeah. So, uh, you're saying to them, typically a company like ours could be spending safely on marketing this amount with all being well and everything set up well and then go project based, getting sign off on items as you go within your plan, that, that without a marketing strategy like the one we're on a journey to build, activities are disconnected. And so that would mean that the agencies and specialists that we hire won't have a hope in hell to deliver any results. They'll blame us and we'll blame them and then the leaders will go, well, we tried outsourcing but it didn't work. So you just do it. In fact, one of the biggest challenges for marketers to overcome is, no, you don't need to outsource, you can just do that. It's almost like the new they're the colouring in team mantra that drives us up the wall. And then to start with, they have too many activities going on in the first place and um, they're trying to do all of it themselves, meaning none of it gets done well. And so then it's this cycle of desperately trying to show results, any results, even if meaningless, becoming defensive in our language and oddly gaslighting our leaders. Because when they're saying, where's the results? And we're going, oh, this, this, this, this, this, and we don't even feel confident in ourself, in a weird way, you are gaslighting your leader even though you're coming from a good place. So it's understandable why those leaders get frustrated. What we need to do is relax our jaw and clench our belly because this is what we do. We hold that tension in our jaw, we clench our stomach and we kind of white knuckle our way through work. We need to step up, uh, to say, yes, this is not working what we're doing. It's not working, but I have a way to fix it. We then do all the work on ourselves. If you're multitasking, I want you to listen to this part. We then do all of the work on ourselves to stop internalizing all these problems and stop enabling everyone around us to jump around consistently. Stop allowing people to think that coming up with marketing ideas is marketing. It is not. It's just ideas that won't work unless they're connected to a plan. We need to find a way to educate internally that gets people to realize, okay, strategy actually does make sense. It's not just this big word salad. They aren't just pushing. What am I on about there? They aren't just pushing I m can clearly see how everything we want to do as a company directly connects with what my market is suggesting. And so now I'm going to give them the space and time and budget to deliver on this because. Because I really believe in it. And the marketer will feel happier once they have managed to do this because they go home happy. They were heard knowing that their value isn't attached to whether the company buys into delivering good marketing or not. That they can go on a journey to become a strategic marketer themselves whether their company recognizes it or not. That they aren't going to beg anymore. That they will adopt a slightly more finance director energy where they are a bit more take it or leave it in how they consult internally. If we do this, here's the likely downsides. If we do that, here's the likely upsides. I recommend this. What would you like to go with? FT Energy? Okay. It's your company. I don't think that's the right choice. I don't think that we should go that route. But it's your business. Let me build that into the plan. And I will caveat that there will be impact on the other core strategy areas that we previously agreed, which likely means our results are more likely to show up in Q3 instead of Q2. And then you go home and rest easy and eat your big bowl of pasta and long term decide if you want to take your strategic ass somewhere that really wants you and really values you. So the transformation is truly huge. So once our objective's done, we pick the marketing strategies and I tend to say max three to four strategies for a plan and ideally ones that serve multiple objectives in their application. And I will be showing examples of this in the master class on the 26th. It's actually a week today from this going live. Make sure you save your seat. There's 780 people coming so far. It's going to be so awesome. It's going to be the best one I've ever done. And I'm going to share examples of how you would pick strategies against objectives because I don't want to do all of that right now. So I tend to say that three to four max strategies for a plan and ideally ones that serve multiple objectives in their application so that we don't end up with too many different things going on. We need a solid buyer journey funnel plan so that everything is interconnected and that everything is leading towards moving people along the pipeline journey, not scatter. Here I talk about B2B Breakthrough Academy. I have Sections within this model called I think I started moving into like briefing AI on my, on my program at this point. But it's still interesting. I have sections within this module called Foundational Strategies and this is something marketers totally miss. They dive straight to cool things like Lead Gen or account based marketing or a new AI tool. But they forget that do we have solid brand positioning? Is our CRM M system working and flowing and up to date? Do we have dashboards that uh, give us meaningful results that uh, are connected across sales and marketing? Ooh, uh, and oh and do we have reports we can pull? And is it all connected with the other areas of our marketing like our forms on websites, our social media accounts so that everything ties together. Then we also have to think about creative and website. Do these take people on a journey toward entering our pipeline? Do they clearly express why we are the best choice and why they should work with us, not the other options available? Then I have sections on all sorts of other strategies like Lead Gen, like customer retention and lots more. So they pick the big area of focus. For example, overhaul our online customer journey so it matches how our prospects research and make decisions and ensure our content strategy serves them the information that will help them viewers as consumer, a good supplier. Then do that for each marketing objective with the strategies that make most sense. It's the big area of focus. So uh, a strategy versus a tactic is the big area of focus. What's the big thing we're going to be doing? It's not actually what we'll do. It's the big area of focus. And then next we pick the tactics and we put down what we will actually do. For example with that example of the customer journeys online. You would then say do new wireframes for our website to incorporate our new webinar signups as a call to action and recategorize our services so they tie in with our new positioning and match the way that buyers want to browse and explore services once that is ready and so on so forth. Within this part of the process they also have. Yeah, this is getting a bit too detailed. If you are finding this interesting, doors open fairly soon for my next round so you can always join the wait list for that as well which I've linked. Okay, I'm going to skip over a little bit because I don't want to just talk to you about literally the structure of my program. At this point it's really important to start mapping all the activities in into some form of Excel Gantt chart about what happens when who's doing it. And then they're able to look at that document and be honest, did I put in too much? Did they need to go back and revisit and simplify? This is something where my students have gotten stuck in the past, where they've done this whole piece up to now and then when they've gone to actually plug it into the template, which is showing them, like, who's doing what and when. Then they've gone, oh, right. And then so it's like, don't worry, just go back a couple of steps and see where you bit off more than you could chew. And then they have to be honest with the company. The CEO saying we need to double the leads from marketing, but budget is the same. You tell them, well, without more resource, that won't happen. It looks like we'll have modest results this year. Things will move slower without X, Y or Z. And so we should expect X but not Y. It can feel uncomfortable, but isn't that now, this is another point. If you're multitasking, listen to this part, because this is the bit was like the work that you can do irrelevant of your leaders. It can feel uncomfortable to express to CEOs that they won't get what they want without the right investment level. But isn't that better than going along with it? And then it doesn't work anyway. And then there's the awkward conversation of like, why? Why didn't it work? You said it would. Or worse than believing you're no good at your job. And I have had many, many, many conversations with CEOs just like yours who literally say to me, jade, they just can't do it. It doesn't matter how much I support them or how many ideas I give them, they just don't do it. And so then when all that is planned, we go to the part where we need to build a marketing results report, all connected directly with those metrics we mapped out in the objectives. The whole plan must link so closely together with the objectives. Won't forget that earlier. What are we going. What is Jade going on about? Won't forget that earlier on we do cover things like who we are. Don't forget that earlier on we do cover loads of things like who we're talking, what they care about. Okay, this is just me having a freak out as like, oh my gosh, I've gone into loads of detail at this part, but earlier on I didn't go into loads of details. So I'm like, don't worry. The review part at the start covers way more than I've talked about. There is not a single word of jargon in the entirety of my program and it's been built as the antidote. Um, to them feeling stupid and like they should know more. This is truly the best thing for SME. Okay, now I'm just bragging I'm gonna have to censor a little bit of this. Okay. Honestly, it's just a thought consciousness. I don't even know what this document's meant to be. There is not a single word of jargon in the entirety of my program and it's been built as the antidote to them feeling stupid and like they should know more. This is truly the best thing for marketers in B2B companies of small and medium enterprises. The other well known courses are often just too lofty and there's no application. There's really well known courses which are much more designed for big corporate company marketers who have a ton of budget and resources and nothing really that practical. Taken from many of the programs that I've witnessed, this is just the feedback I have had from students who've loved B2B Breakthrough Academy. So then after building that report where we strip out anything useless that is not needed to be measured and we only report on things that connect with what we'll be working on, that connect with the business focus area for enabling growth. We also have a budget plan for where the budget will be spent and what external partners we will pay in marketing salaries as well to underpin any additional hires we need to enable the plan. And that uh, there is a tracker there too for budget spend. The final part is that they stitch all of those document templates together into one final doc and ensure it flows really beautifully, deleting out any sections that are not necessary. It is so important that they have several meetings with leaders right from the start of this process to gather info and keep them on track along the way and ask their feedback and discuss budget so that in this plan presentation meeting the there are no shocks that will derail this. The marketer will need to have worked on all my mindset work and have what I call their mind strategy locked in. Imposter syndrome has been overcome. Panicking and answering questions in jargon or babble has stopped. If they aren't sure. Again, if you're multitasking, listen to this. If they aren't sure, they take a note and advise. They will confirm the answer once they found it out. They do not beg, they do not persuade, they consult and guide and they don't take things personally and everything flows beautifully. And ideally, leadership do make some decisions on this beautiful new strategy their marketer has built for them. Maybe all of it gets signed off, maybe some of it does. But it's important in this transformation for the marketers to feel and deeply know that they made their breakthrough whether this plan came to happen or not. That they can't control beyond the measures of the ways in which they can educate them is what I think I'm saying here. They can't control what their leaders do. All they can do is work hard to influence, educate and connect with them, to give them the very best chance when they go home, eat their bowl of pasta and uh, know they did the right thing. They don't feel beaten up, they know how to handle different difficult questions, they know how to stand up when sales try to belittle them and they feel truly strategic. This transformation was previously done and took 12 solid hard working weeks in the past. But thanks to Jade AI's new prompts, the 2026 version of this program is now possible within just six weeks. Together in her live B2B Breakthrough Academy experience, which has roughly three cohorts a year with doors shut in between is the moment that I decided what it was going to be and how it was going to look. So it's me like channeling. So let's see if it's the same as what I plan to do, which has roughly three cohorts per year when doors shut in between all content for the module lessons and bite sized training will help these marketers work through each and every section of the templates to build. The plan is found within the course platform and a new module is Drip released every week. Jade does a 30 minute call to guide them through the AI prompts for that week to help them complete their templates. That is what I'm going to do as well. And then she does a one hour live Q and A to help them with sense checking anything that they've done and built and written and any like gaps, blocks, issues. There are also six mindset motivation sessions they can watch and she wants to bring in a prep module that is basically a workbook that they get two weeks before the start of the program and she does a call to help them through that onboarding, lots of personal reflections, etc. That's truly the end. That's what the document looks like. That doesn't end very pretty, does it? It was six pages. I didn't even know what I was reading when I was about to Read it. But I hope that you enjoyed that and I hope that it, like, helped you feel less alone because that all of that insight is based on the hundreds of marketers that I've coached in the past and how they felt. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted to find a way to bring everyone together in a community and insider program and a live experience experience. Because I was coaching people on their own and I was just like, there are so many people I'm talking to every day who are exactly like you. And I want to bring you all together. So that's the whole reason that I set up this business. The next step in you becoming a strategic marketer and you deciding, I don't want to feel like that anymore. I don't want to feel undervalued by my leaders. I don't want to feel like my talent in marketing is repressed, is not used, is not seen. Like a lot of marketers report to me to feeling invisible. They're physically present, people are talking to them. But invisible in the sense of, you don't get my value. And I'm questioning it myself. But I think what's important is the people who I help the most are the ones who have that deep feeling of like, what if I'm not good enough? But there's, there's a little sparkle in there that has. That there is something worth fighting for and that you think, actually, I do believe I can do this. I do know the basic foundations. I just don't know how to stitch it together. And so a week Today, on Thursday, 26th of March, that's what we'll be doing in the live class. A big group of us. It's going to be so fun to get together and help you start identifying the specific things that are holding you back, that are stopping you being strategic. And then we're going to come up together with an action plan for you to take away and then check in again soon after. And on that call, I'll also be announcing our, uh, doors open for the program right at the end. It's not going to be the main focus of the event, but I'll be opening the doors soon after that event so that people who do want to continue that experience can, if they want to. As always, thank you so much for being here. Make sure that you like this video, if you liked it, and subscribe to my channels. And I would absolutely love to hear from you in my inbox or via my social channels. You can email me on Jade.ah2b.jade.com. you can explore all of my resources at, uh, www.do we say that anymore? No, we just say btobjade.com. you can explore all my resources on there. And I really look forward to seeing you next Thursday. Drop me a line if you have any questions for me. And I always find it really hard to end these because I'm just like, what do I say? See you soon. Bye. Oh, that was really tiring. Oh, my gosh. My breath. I'm so out of breath. So out of breath.