#245: How to Scale Your B2B Marketing without a Huge Team (Be The Best - Stage 5 of the 5 BEs Framework)

Speaker A: G'. Day. It's George from the B2B playbook. If you're a B2B marketer and you're stuck spinning up some random campaigns based on whatever the business asks you to do this week, or you're chasing low quality leads and you're watching sales take credit for the business that you helped create, but instead you're just stuck, uh, justifying your activities to leadership, well, we have made something for you. The B2B incubator is our, ah, demand generation program for small in house B2B marketing teams. It's built around our 5B's framework and it gives you the strategy, the templates and the system to finally take back control of your marketing and actually align with sales. And we show you how to use AI too, but the right way, not to do more of everything worse, but to know exactly what to focus on and to do that better. It's a top rated demand generation course. We've had over 315 graduates, including marketers like Alison from Rivet who went through it and with their team are now driving 70% more pipeline for the business. And so if you've got some training budget sitting there that's unused, this is exactly what it's for. Applications for the next Cohort Close on 10 July, but of course we have our self service program available if that timing doesn't work for you. So the next time that you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com, join us and take back control of your B2B marketing. All right, let's get on with the show. Welcome to the B2B playbook where we help B2B teams punch above their way.

Speaker B: We're your hosts, Kevin and George. Each week we break down how modern B2B companies build demand, win deals and grow revenue using our, uh, 5Bs framework.

Speaker A: So if you work in marketing, sales or customer success and you want to make a bigger impact in your business, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Speaker B: And remember, revenue growth starts with people, not platforms. Let's talk about scaling without needing a

Speaker A: bigger team, compounding growth that is driven by relentless execution.

Speaker B: Find, uh, exactly what is helping drive your business forward.

Speaker A: You go from random acts of marketing and random acts of sales to. Welcome Back to the 15 minute go to market Fix the miniseries from Deal front and the B2B playbook. We're helping small, small teams go to market smarter, not harder. We're Kevin and George. I'm George, this is Kevin. And today we are wrapping up the final step of the 5Bs framework with Be the Best. Now, the 5B's framework, if you haven't tuned into our episode so far, are all about our system for driving demand for your brand. And today we're discussing the fifth beef in our, uh, 5B's framework. Be the best. And it's all about how to scale what's working without needing a bigger team by turning your wins into repeatable systems. Kevin, good to have you here again, as always.

Speaker B: Thanks, George. Let's kick right into it, listeners and viewers. Let's talk about scaling without needing a bigger team. The whole idea here is that in the fifth stage of the 5B's framework, we're talking about how you be the best, how you turn this whole framework into a repeatable flywheel that, uh, will continue to deliver results for you. And keep behind that idea, is scaling without needing a bigger team. Now, growth doesn't have to mean headcount growth, especially these days with AI implementing a lot of different tools that we can leverage. Just because there's AI, of course, doesn't mean we rely on it for everything. There still needs to be systems and systems in place to help utilize those AI tools as efficiently and effectively as possible. So scale by creating repeatable processes is how you go about doing that. And it's certainly not about adding complexity. You need to dumb it down to make it repeatable, and in doing so, you make it easier to execute and your team's knowledge wins. Workflows that you've collected along the way in building a B2B marketing framework can become the assets if you document them and order that and automate them.

Speaker A: A documented workflow, Kevin, is just beautiful. It's something that you are very, very good at for us, and it removes that need to make so many little decisions, which, as you've shown me, Kevin, because you're much better at this than I am, it saves you so much time in the long run. And like the way that you've been able to document and systematize even our content production system, from recording this all the way to how does that tie back to our framework? What are the key points we're hitting? And then how is that being distributed to people? Like, there's a very specific set of instructions that we follow to do this. You even have that, Kevin, for when we pay our taxes. Kevin even has a standard operating procedure for how to do it. And so even a dummy like me can go through and just follow these instructions step by step and so Kevin, not only does that get that off your plate, but helps the other person step into that role and they're able to execute it because you've built that standard operating procedure as well.

Speaker B: Well, George, I think you're doing yourself a disservice. You certainly are, ah, a very integral part of that process and building all these systems together. And that should be the way it is. Everyone in your team who uses the systems should really feed into how these systems come together, how the users of these systems every day are, uh, utilizing them, and how we can make it best for them. But going back to that point about building those systems, it's really about building those playbooks around everything you do. And specifically in the B2B marketing process, you need to build things around. You know, how do you go about creating your content, how do you repurpose your content, how do you distribute your content and to really pull in insights from the rest of your team, from your subject matter experts so that you can build that trust as we talked about in the earlier episodes. Um, so building those lightweight playbooks that anyone can follow has a lot of benefits. We've gone through some of the examples that you can do there, but really at the end of the day enables, you know, inevitably your teams will change these systems, these processes, these lightweight playbooks will allow any new team member or agency, if you want to outsource particular parts of that process, to plug right in and start executing with consistency without having to, you know, go through a process where they learn about your brand, your voice and everything else. If you have that system down pat, it's much easier to onboard a new team member so that consistency continues. That all important need to be consistent in the market to build your trust. You can imagine if you have a brand that your content changes, voice changes, tone, changes, the quality of that content in terms of the insights that it gives. Every time a new person starts in your team, every time your team structure changes, you're not going to be able to build that trust that really comes from that consistency. So it's really important to think about those processes, those playbooks that you want to put in place to automate or at least document some of the processes that you use so that it becomes consistent over time. That's a very crucial part of this process of scaling without that bigger team or with an ever changing team.

Speaker A: And Kevin, that's been one thing that people have loved about our ah, demand gen program as well, because I mean, we knew it was important that people documented exactly what their go to market strategy was going to look like and how they were going to execute it. And it is something that I think a lot of marketers put on the back burner or you might do once, but it's not properly documented. It doesn't have the buy in from sales and leadership. And so then it kind of just sits on the shelf getting dusty. But in the program, it forces you to go through the exercises, to do the activities, and then to document every single piece. If you go to market strategy, which then has a great benefit of not only you and your team following it, but sales being on the same page and leadership. Understanding that we've all agreed this is where we are working towards as an organization and this is the way that we're going to get there.

Speaker B: And it's important then to take it a step further and operationalize all that across what that, uh, whole go to market process looks like. You know, you can extend these playbooks and processes across the sales teams beyond the marketing team as well as the customer success team, even product teams. In terms of how the feedback gets used, how those feedback loops come into play. When you and marketing may not then have the opportunity to talk to the customers day to day on a more consistent basis, you might need that support from customer success or the market or the sales team to give you that feedback. So make sure to document those processes as well as you expand that marketing function within your business and as the business itself expands and automate the distribution of insights, Automate tracking and processes for setting up tracking, where possible, use project tools, scheduling platforms, shared dashboards. There's plenty of tools out there for that. We go in depth into some of those and how you can utilize them to really help with your system. On the main B2B Playbook podcast. Um, but the goal here is to remember to try and remove as much of the guesswork as possible when you've had success, to standardize that process for reaching that success, and to try and standardize the success itself so that over time you then have the system that's repeatable that you can continue to go back to to find, uh, exactly what is helping drive your business forward.

Speaker A: Evan, should we go a little bit further into each of the lightweight playbooks that people can start to operationalize?

Speaker B: Yeah, we certainly can give some examples. On the content front, for example, you can talk about content creation and the processes that you can build there. Uh, you know, what formats work. Perhaps you can build that into your content distribution plan. Perhaps you can build that into your content repurposing plan. You've taken learnings from what you've tested before, and now certain channels that work, certain formats that work, are now part of your content repurposing platform. Every week, every month, whatever that length of time is, you're doing that same repurposing to those different channels that you or formats that you know is going to work. And maybe that whole process starts with extracting insights from your subject matter experts. So maybe that process in itself is also standardized. So maybe you have a set time with subject matter experts, and you rotate through subject matter experts at relevant times of the year, and maybe you meet them once a week, once a month, you record that session in a particular format and then you have a list of next steps to follow to repurpose it from there. And so that exactly, you're going to be talking to your subject matter experts and they're also clear on what that schedule looks like. So again, standardizing how you create content in the first place and ensuring that that content has that relevant level of expertise and insight, because you standardize that process of going back and starting with those experts. And then when you talk about distribution rhythms, potentially now that you have that content created, you can have schedules for weekly social posts, emails, even paid ads, plans in place off the back of certain pieces of content being done. Maybe it's a week delay from the socials going live to setting the paid boosts of those ads, maybe it's a month. These sort of things again, as you learn over time, you can document them, you can set a process for doing that so that more and more you can have a lot of that running on repave, running on autopilot, ensuring you're being consistent and building that trust over time.

Speaker A: Maybe just to share a little more, Kevin, at how we tackle some of that, you know, we have a system for every piece of content that we put out there. We try and map to the five stages of awareness, which is one of our favorite frameworks for mapping the buying journey. Basically the journey from someone going unaware that they need you to being led to the logical conclusion that you're the perfect solution for them. There's, you know, five stages you can kind of break down that journey. Of course, the questions that people ask are, uh, different at each stage. And you want those questions to be real questions that you have actually mined from people, like from your sales team who are speaking to them over the phone, or if you're lucky enough to do some customer interviews, you want to map those questions to each stage and then you want to make sure that you have content that answers every single one of those questions. Because we know that 70% of the research is done before someone talks to a sales team. So we want to be answering those questions. So Kevin and I make sure on a regular cadence, that we're mining those insights from those sales calls, that it's being mapped back to the five stages of awareness, that pieces of content are, uh, being built out under each of those five stages, that we are then testing each of those, posting them, you know, with a regular cadence on, um, LinkedIn, for example. And then those best ones, like, are we boosting them as thought leadership posts to our ideal customers, to our cold audience, sending them unaware, problem aware, solution aware, and then to our warmer audiences, sending them all five stages of awareness. And then having a measurement system as well to see which one is getting really high engagement rates, which one are people then going, clicking through and learning more about. So we can end up rotating and seeing when a message starts to get tired, when it needs to be changed out. Like, it all just comes back to having a system. And Kev, I don't think you need, like, really expensive tools to do a lot of this. I mean, you and I are pretty hacky. We're tight, tight asses for ourselves occasionally. And we do a lot of this out of Google sheets, and we pull data and build reports with super metrics. And I know that's not for everyone, but simple systems can live in a spreadsheet if everyone has access to them. And as you scale up over time, you obviously want to move to a platform that makes it a little easier.

Speaker B: Yeah, certainly, you know, adapt the systems and tools to where you are as a business, but definitely don't let the tools drive the system. Make sure that the system itself is documented somewhere that's easily accessible for the whole team, easily discoverable, and then we can adapt the tools over time as they become needed. All right. Another concept that we like to talk about in this Stage of the 5Bs framework is when do you know to double down or when to pivot away from something that you're testing or you're trying out. And I think a very easy rule of thumb, obviously this is a more involved topic, but a very easy rule of thumb to follow here is to use your leading and lagging indicators to guide decisions. You know, it's very easy to double down on a tactic if it's consistently driving pipeline, and it's obviously supported by a lot of qualitative, uh, feedback as well. But make sure, you know, you do have a look at your leading and lagging indicators over time to help guide your ideas. If there's a lot of indicators that on your leading indicators that this is starting to get traction, there's a lot of uh, your ICP starting to interact with your brand and with your business, then you're probably on the right track and you should double down and let it go for a little bit longer to see where it goes. But definitely you can pivot away if you're not seeing any traction at all despite enough testing. And often we find that the problem is people don't stick with it long enough or they're not looking at those leading indicators, um, so that they move too quickly away from a thing that just needs a little bit more time to show those signs, uh, to show that pipeline impact. Uh, we talk about, you know, at least sort of 6 to 12 months before that impact can really be seen. And we'd say that is probably still correct. It still takes time. Even with things speeding up with AI, it still takes a long time for the human behind the decision to get comfortable with the idea of making uh, a decision, particularly a business one. What we like to do also is to use quarterly reviews as an opportunity to assess performance and to adapt and to just check in whether everything we're doing fits with the purpose and direction that we want to go as a business. This is something, as George mentioned earlier, we do in our own business. We sit down every quarter, we look at our business objectives and goals for the next three months, six months, 12 months, we look at the leading and lagging indicators of the projects that we're working on and see if they still align, see if they're showing the right signs, go back to that qualitative feedback and figure out, uh, we still aligned with where the market is and where the market needs are. If not, then we'll make the decision to pivot towards where that is. But always based on that qualitative and m quantitative data around what your dream customers want and what is going to best serve uh, your business objectives.

Speaker A: So Kev, you can really take all these principles and really apply that to creating your own internal demand Gen engine engine, demand generation machine, which is what we talk about with the 5B's framework. And I think a true demand engine is built around systems. It's not built around one off tactics or little tricks and that kind of stuff. And that's actually what caused us to go out and create the B2B playbook and release our five base framework. Because we Felt that a lot of information out there was like siloed tactical information that wasn't going to build a long term sustainable engine. And of course that engine has to start with everything we talk about in that be ready section of the five base framework. Those inputs which are uh, those insights that you get directly from the customer, the content and the information that you get to answer all these questions, that builds relationships with them, um, that make sure that they remember you at the correct time for the correct thing. The distribution that is built into that as well to make sure that people are actually seeing your stuff and they're seeing your brand. And then of course looking at what the output is, is that resulting eventually in more opportunities for sales? Is it building more trust with the market? Are they remembering us more? Are we starting to build influence with the right people? These are the outputs that we like to measure. And then of course having that feedback loop as well. So every quarter evaluating what worked, what didn't, how can we optimize our playbooks so we spend less time doing things that aren't working as well and more things on things that are working really well. And again that's not always going to show up in a dashboard straight away because we know that there's this big time lag effect for marketing. That's when those leading indicators, when there's tight feedback loops from sales who are right at the coal face, having conversations with customers are able to tell you what's working and what isn't working and vice versa. That's Kev how I think you go from random acts of marketing and random acts of sales to compounding growth that is driven by relentless execution.

Speaker B: That's it. Listeners and viewers, key takeaways for this episode. You don't need a big team to scale. You can scale with repeatable systems. Second, build playbooks around everything in your B2B marketing that includes content distribution insights, uh, so that success isn't tied to individuals or one off tactics. You know, you have a repeatable system and learnings that is documented that anyone jumping into the team can then jump into and continue share what works across go to market teams as well. Marketing should be empowering and be empowered by sales and customer success. At the end of the day we're all part of that one go to market team and finally review and refine regularly to build a true demand generation engine within your business that keeps improving over time.

Speaker A: Beautiful. Thank you Kevin. Okay, well that wraps up the first half of our miniseries with deal front, the 15 minute go to market fix thank you so much for joining us. As we unpacked um, our five base framework with Deal Front. We hope it gives you the roadmap and the practical steps to really build that demand generation engine that's going to help create compounding growth for your business. For more support and resources, head to the B2B playbook.com or over to Dealfront and make sure you subscribe to Stay in the loop for all our future content. Thank you Kevin for your time. Thank you listeners and viewers. We'll catch you next episode where we are starting part two of our miniseries with Adam Andrevich, a two time CRO seven times ex Head of Sales who's going to provide that bridge from everything that we do on the marketing side through to the sales side for a complete commercial system. Before you go, head to the B2B playbook.com and subscribe to our newsletter for more resources and insights on all things B2B marketing, sales and customer success.

Speaker B: And make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any any future episodes. And remember, revenue growth starts with people, not platforms.