Why B2B Marketing Doesn't Work - and the Closed-Loop System Built to Replace It

Speaker A: Welcome to the GTM Reset podcast. This is the audio edition of the Sales Exchange live show for CEOs and revenue leaders who already suspect that the standard business to business growth model is no longer fit for purpose. If your martech stack keeps growing, activity stays high, but revenue is still slow, costly or unpredictable. This series is for you. Each episode explores what comes after traditional go to market thinking and what it means to replace fragmented activity with a new business operating system. This episode was originally broadcast as a live stream, so if Nigel refers to diagrams, frameworks or on screen illustrations, you can watch the full version using the link in the description. So let's get started.

Speaker B: I've done it again. I get so kind of focused on it and I realize, oh, there's no sound but there's, there's sound now I can see it. Um, and ah, that's part and parcel of this that um, you know, you can, you can look at how you approach doing live streaming and a lot of people say well you know, it takes, takes a lot of effort and everything else. Well, if you do it by yourself, you know, and you're pressing all the buttons and setting everything up yourself, that's one thing. But the point is, is that you wouldn't do it by yourself. You would normally typically have um, some people behind the camera pressing the buttons and doing all the various technical uh, side of things and they'd have checklists and so on. But the reason we've been so busy is. I'll explain, I'll explain. Now, um, as you know, we have an infrastructure that is designed around generating new business. And the point of that is that, the point of that is that businesses have followed a certain route. I mean we're talking every single B2B business in the world has followed a certain route. And our objective has always been how can we change it, how can we make it better? It's really important, I mean really, really important because businesses, if you know the statistics, um, lots of business start up, lots of businesses fail, um, the statistics are in the region of like 20, 30, 50, um, 20% the first year, 30% second, 50% by the third year, by year 10, 70 odd percent collectively, um, or compound, that works out to 91.6% of businesses go bust in 10 years. That's not good, that's shocking. And the stress and grief that accompanies that for absolutely everybody is awful. So why does it happen? And it boils down to just not enough business. Because if you had loads of business coming through the door, some businesses will still Go bust because people would just blow the money. But ostensibly it's about we just couldn't get enough business, we couldn't generate enough revenue and so on and so on. And you know, you go get into hoc with the banks or you go down the path of getting investments. And the whole thing about investment um, has its own set of problems, you know, and performance related issues and so on. So what, what can be done to change this, to change this for businesses? And it's not another bit of software, it's not another, you know, it's, this is what everyone's tried for the past, I don't know, 20, 30 years. I'll put more software and you know, CRM and then evolve into SaaS and then all the different SaaS platforms. Now you've got um, 30 PL, 30,000 plus SaaS platforms and half of them are for marketing. And it's well if they were all so good, why aren't um, people flying? Why have the failure statistics stayed the same? So they, by definition it doesn't work. You don't need to be a genius to work that one out. It does not. The solutions, the stuff out there that are used for marketing doesn't work. And then uh, you know, you've got the whole thing about oh let's, let's we'll now call it ABM doesn't work. Everybody knows it doesn't work. As a result me rushing around earlier, um, so the, the whole methodology behind selling business to business has to change. It's got to change because if what we've been doing for the past 30 years is not delivering the results same old same old, then it must be the way that we're going about it. And of course you've got this contrast between businesses and consumers and the consumer methodology and mechanism skips off into the sunset. Communicating to millions, selling to millions. And that's just doesn't happen within B2B. So we have to change to change things around. And we created this m, um orchestration, um, methodology and infrastructure. Um, that is closed loop. The whole point of this is closed loop. Um, if you want something to send an email, fine, get some. Get a platform that sends email. Not, I'm not talking about an email service provider. I'm talking things like the automation you can get AI that relates to um, sending out emails. But the point is, is that clearly that's not enough and business owners will go down the path of thinking what's the next best thing? You know, people want to go for the next shiny thing which Is like AI or whatever, but it's still not enough. Because the fundamental problem is the way people buy, the way you and I buy as business people, that's the problem. And the way that we are allowing marketing marketers to communicate our businesses is fundamentally wrong. I'm calling them all out. There's no point being nice about it. I'm calling them all out. But it's not quite their fault because it's how they have been taught for decades, but it's wrong. So I've got all these salespeople on my side saying, God, uh, go on Nigel, tell them it's not about that. Tell you too, because you haven't sat back or taken time out to work out what should be done. So both sales and marketing are wrong. And the person in the middle is you, the CEO. You pay for it, you take it on the chin, the company goes down. They don't just go and get another job. So it's a really serious problem. And the bottom line is that salespeople don't do marketing and marketing people don't sell. But they will tell each other they know everything about their jobs. Just nonsense, just typical nonsense. And people, you know, we, we have been wondering why is there all this friction between sales and marketing? Because it doesn't work and someone's got to be blamed. So, and that's, that's the critical fundamental issue to do with what Sales Exchange is about, is change. We've got to change this. So part and parcel of our system. If I show you this, um, this is, this is our, um, our infrastructure. And if, um, we, if you look at that, there's the kind of the, the pretty one, um, on a blue background. But the bottom line is, is that you have to have a method, a methodology and a mechanism that makes everything work together. And you, you, you can't, um, you can't, you can't throw money at this. People have tried that, people have tried to throw in loads and loads of money, uh, trying to make sales and marketing work. When people generate, not generate. When people look for investment, they go for investment. 50% plus goes on marketing. You think about that. 50% gets gifted, literally gifted to marketing. And it never moves. I was going to say something then. It never moves the bleep needle, not once. So you have to have a different way of understanding. So if I could just go back to this. So starting on 2 o', clock, we've got reach. That's how you, how, uh, you reach out to your total addressable market. Everything starts from There I'm not going to go through all of them, but everything starts from there. And I'm doing the next one which is live. But everything starts from reach. So this thing about reach is completely based and grounded in the fact that every single buyer, B2B wants to be anonymous. They want to be anonymous because they, we don't want to be pestered by anybody calling us up. Nobody likes cold calls. So therefore we have no alternative except to address the, the elephant in the room. The buyer wants to remain anonymous. That's it. So how'd you, how on earth, uh, is, are you, are we supposed to try and engage someone who wants to stay invisible? Impossible, Typically, unless you show them and present to them a different way of interacting with you and engaging with you. And the way of doing that is how I'm going to explain. Now, you have a website, we have a website and on the website we want people to come and find, uh, our websites. Yet when they arrive, not on ours, but on most websites, any information, juicy information, informative, educational information that would be there is gated. So you want to fill out your HubSpot Marketo par form, fill out the form and then allow them to read that information, which they're paid for with their contact details, which then duly gets passed over and sent over to your BDR to go and phone them up. But the telephone number or the details that they put on the form invariably end up being the generic company email. And you can't get through to the person that wanted that downloaded it in the first place. And so the problem is somewhere in the region of 500 to 1, 300 to 1, 500 to 1 for BDRs to try and make outbound and relate and uh, find people that might be interested. It's just how it is. Ah, so how can we change that, how can we change that process for the, for the anonymous buyer? Well, we've um, gone live with our, our uh, chatbot, you guys, chat bot. So what big deal. The chatbot is everything that I've written, the information that it's got, the core information it's got is everything I've written, spoken. So transcripts, training courses, everything has gone into the chatbot. And three nearly coming up for nearly four years now. But three and a half years of conversations with AI has all gone into it. So that become, has become. I know this figure. 11.2 million words in the chat bot. And the reason that this is important is because if you want to know some information from me, the likelihood is that you don't really want to phone me because then that starts the process going. So you want to do it anonymously. So you can go to our website right now, click on the button bottom right, ask any question, anything. It will recommend that you do the training. It will recommend. I'll come on to that bit later. And regarding costs, well, it recommends that you go to the um, self discovery section, um, and complete that because every single cost is different. So we can't, we can't do costs. But, but you can see that the whole point of this is that somebody, anybody can go on the website and ask a question of me anonymously. And it's got years and years. I mean the, it's the equivalent to something like um, I ah, did figure the other day it's like 200, I think circa 200 Dummies books is the total amount of information and knowledge that's in there. So it's constructed with AI, but it's not from AI, it's from me. So the, the language bit, putting them together and, and, and so on is, is. It comes from, from AI, but it shows you all the references at the bottom where it's pulled that information from. Very clever, very useful. But there's more. So, so we've got this 11.2 million words of information. And someone goes on, goes on the site and says what is this? How do I do that? And um, provides us with questions. We don't know who they are. Yeah, it's not, we're not using IP addresses or anything like that. So we don't know who it is. So we're just having these questions. But those questions get put into database, bigQuery database. So it informs us about what's happening. Very clever. But the next part of it is special because we have the questions and because we have 11.2 million words already. The way we have it set up is that our posts that we send out, information that we send out to generate new business is informed based upon our 11.2 million words. So I could ask um, an Ann LLM because it doesn't matter which one it is. I could ask an LLM, write us a book. And it would write a book about whatever I wanted it to write about that relates to my history in business, to business, technology, new business development. Just like that. I said just like that. Uh, however long it takes to generate it would be word perfect. It would be spot on, as if I was, as if I wrote it. Probably the grammar might be a little bit better but you know, there you go. So that's one thing. But where it becomes kind of essential in this, in this mechanism is because we have these two things, these two elements. We have multiple tables which hold all the words, big, big group of 11.2 plus the questions. Now we already send out posts on social media every day and all of those posts are being monitored in terms of how many impressions and what was the engagement. So reactions and comments and so on and they come back so we know what's happening. Exactly. And that information goes back into BigQuery as well. So now BigQuery's got three lots of things. It's got 11.2, it's got the questions that are being asked and it's got the comments and responses from our posts. It then let's create this. It then adjusts the content. It adjusts the content before it's sent back out again. Does it once a month? We've got to give it some time to land but the end of a month or end of a quarter, huh? Does a review changes it. We don't touch it that I've been doing this long enough. That's just amazing. So now we have a genuinely autonomous social media methodology that is closed loop with our knowledge and understands the questions that come in and the comments that come in and redefines the information go back out again. Hands off. We put out something like between four, between four and 600 posts a month every month. I don't touch it. And now you know why that those arrows keep cycling around because every single thing we do is closed loop. So when we look at this part here, this is reach the bottom here if I go on to here. So at the top here we've got um, SX Reach and I just clicked on it. This is all interactive so you can click on it and see what it relates to. So within SX reach this is how you reach your total adjustable market. And in order to do that we have what we did. It's easy to give things labels. We call it the SX Scheduler. So it's for social um, uh, social posts, email posts, email posts, social emails and banners related back to your website. Now whilst at the moment we, we, we use um, ah, a Joomla. Website but we're in the process of building out a new website but I'm not doing it because there are connectors, the mcp these MCP connectors we have MCP M connector from our system into framer and so Claude will build system in framer and do the design and do uh, every single piece of written confirmation or uh, content. Sorry, sorry. Call to actions, everything, the lot. So now if you think we now have this methodology, this mechanism, complete closed loop. We know what, we know what we've said. That's here and that's in the center. Uh, okay, that's our bigquery information. We know what's happening within um, LinkedIn for example and what's being said to LinkedIn and how that's working. The information and comments that are made from the chatbot and from LinkedIn is informing us as to what we should be saying on the website and it changes it dynamically as closed loop. So we now have four things in our closed loop for our new business development. So we've got social, email, banner and website. When it comes to emails, I'll tell you what I'm doing, um, right now I haven't pressed go yet. There's two kind of concurrent projects. One is um, an email campaign. An email campaign is to communicate about our course. I'll come on to that in a second. But to communicate about our course. And the point is is that I can now say I want you to do a sequence of emails to um, list XYZ and I want it to go out every week and to promote different elements of information relating to the course to encourage people to do the course and run that for 12 weeks. Do the pictures as well, do the images as well. Relevant images. We've got some in our um, we've got some standard images but also you can, you can blend them with um, using Gemini, uh, Nano Banana, um, start it next week. That's it, that's it. Second, I'm going to start a new series, uh, a structured series and these ones I'm doing at the moment, in between me getting it sorted out and doing a variety of other things is I'm saying to Claude, write me 12 scripts over a 12 week period. Once those scripts are completed, I want you to write 12 emails communicating to our um, email list and stagger them so they're sent out before I do the actual live show and send and communicate that. Also um, produce the banners and post the banners to LinkedIn and um, post social posts to LinkedIn as well. With the call to action being the link to watch the show. Process all of that and um, display it on the review and it gives me a review page, HTML review page of every single image, every single piece of text, every single call to action. Yeah, that's fine, go ahead with that. I don't know about you, I think that's that's mind blowing, jaw dropping. So one person with this, because you've got 11 million words. So these are our words, this is our intelligence. Not, um, hallucinating or whatever. The hallucinatory. Hallucin. Hallucinate, whatever. We haven't gotten a hallucinating AI writing stuff for us. It's coming from me. And you know, we're looking at some, some new modules for the course. We've got 20 modules. I want some new modules written about the new development. For example, like the rag. We only went live with the rag this week. I want a new module written for a, uh, training module for the rag, how it works, how it benefits, and so on and so on. Yep. Okay. And it writes the whole thing word for word, with timing, with images, with the presentation. I missed a comment. This is great. This is what. So what I'm getting at is the point here is this marketing mechanism that we have all been used to for the past 20, 30 years, it doesn't work. Something else has to take. It has to replace it in its entirety. It must. And what does it look like? Well, it's got to align to how people buy. But we already know that because you and I buy stuff. We buy stuff all the time. So we know exactly how people buy. And when you compare and contrast that against how you are selling, your marketing team is saying, this is how we're supposed to start the relationship. Off you go, wait a second, I wouldn't buy it, I don't do that. So it's a big, It's a quantum shift, it's a change, it requires different thinking. And that's the point of our course, it requires different thinking. You know, it's not a course, it's not a replacement SIM qualification or for some novice to go, you know, I fancy doing a bit of marketing. No, it's about reevaluation and reevaluating what's been happening in marketing so that people will start to rethink how they approach it. So it's a retraining course, not training course. And if you think about it, um, every college, university, everywhere that marketing training happens, every cv, every job description asks for the same thing. If you do what you've always done, you get what you've always got. And when they. And those job descriptions, I mean, and bearing in mind, if you think about, um, recruitment, recruitment aren't there to help you, they're just there to place people with who you say we want. So you tell them what you want, they go out and find it. So therefore it's very easy to find thousands of job descriptions that say exactly the same thing. Demand gen lead gen abn pay per click. What a waste of time, effort and money. But that's what's being asked and therefore supply and demand. If you keep asking for it, they'll keep training for it. And these people keep coming in, yet you still keep, we still keep going bust. The B2B's keep going bust. And considering if you look at the numbers, you know that there might be ah, 212,000 businesses in the UK that have between um, 10 and 50 employees. Between 50 to 250 there are 38,000. And um, between 250 and above there are 8,000. So 212, 38 and 8. So 250 million businesses above 10 employees pretty much split down the middle with B2B2C and every single. And fancy that if you think about that, there's no separate training course for B2B. B2C doesn't exist. It's just marketing, everything thrown into the same pot and people wonder why it doesn't work. And so that's why it's so fundamental, it needs to change. And if you think every single business in B2B, so get rid of B2C for now, every single business in B2B has got the same demand gen Leon, ABM and pay per click SaaS that it's had for the past 20 years. So how on earth is anybody supposed to define their own USP when you're not even competing, you're, you're emulating, you're copying. Everybody's doing exactly, exactly, exactly the same thing, same tools, same problems. Everybody's struggling to generate new business because it's a complete and utter mismatch which has only served martech. So now it's time to change. And that's why we've got that, we've got this, this, this in this integrated, um, it's script based, it's jaw dropping really. Um, it brings together everything that the businesses need purely, purely, purely to generate new business. I don't care about market, I'm not interested in marketing teams, people as such. But you know, I'm not kind of, I am having a go, but I'm not having a go because it's kind of not marketing people's fault, it's not their fault. But if you take that, um, that recent uh, news, bit of news from ikea, they said that when they introduced their um, their own AI, they realized that they could have got rid of thousands of jobs. I think it was eight and a half thousand jobs. But they didn't, they retrained them to align with what the AI had told them. And because they did that, they increased their turnover by 1.4 billion. Happy days. So this is about taking a different, you know, we've all been kind of going headlong into this and doing the same old, same old day in, day out, do the same thing, get the same results. Time for a change, got a change. And that's. And so we've built the website, we've got this, we've got this information, there's this copious amounts of information data on there to learn and understand this. And when you get to that point you go, do you know what this is? This is a little bit more than just interesting. We've got self discovery, um, mechanism on here called SX Connect. Go on there, fill out the document, fill out the form. Is that form, if you're talking about forms. But this is kind of a reflective form because it helps you understand exactly what you're paying. You send that to us and you book a meeting when it suits you and we have a meeting and uh, we do this, do exactly this. And this is what we are recommending. Every business does exactly this. Whether you're doing a live show, whether you're doing a meeting. Same same methodology, same kit, same same approach. So it doesn't matter where your salespeople are, they are delivering the most professional looking approach to every meeting that they do. But before they do the meeting, once you finish that um, self service discovery, the system does what it does, it does the research, generates a slide deck, generates the proposal, delivers everything to the salesperson before the meeting so the salesperson doesn't have to do anything except it's one thing they got to do when they confirm the cost, they just put it into the system, just confirm the cost. And uh, now you've got complete and total cradle to grave reporting and operations. So you can see how much or how many impressions you get from a social post to tracking that through UTM codes, right the way through to a closed deal. And the best of best thing about this, I love this bit more probably more than anything else. If you can think it, you can have it, you can do it. So it goes way beyond sas, goes way beyond. And um, what we'll do is we'll send some people in to train you how to use the screens and which one to click on it. It's gone, finished. What do you want to do? I want to tell our market that we Exist. Fine. We do some tests, do some social posts. Yeah, yeah, we do some social posts and you tell it. Do the social posts. For um, do a track. One track equals 30 posts. You can have 20 tracks a day on LinkedIn if you wanted to. Uh, 600 posts a month on repeat, don't touch it. Self monitoring. So there is no typical training as such. The training comes from rethinking, rethinking what's going wrong. How do we change this? And it's fundamental, it starts right at the bottom, right at the beginning. Rather it's foundational because it starts with how you communicate with people and what the recipient's expectation is of you. Not the other way around. Not. Let's get out there, let's get amongst it. Unless you know, let's get on the phones, let's spam everybody. It's not about that. It's got to be looked at from the other perspective. And you as a CEO, uh, you're the person that can do that because you're the one that buys. Or if you're a buyer, yeah, you're the one that buys. You know how, how you go about things. That essential information needs to be fed into marketing. Tell them to stop doing what they're doing. Doesn't work. But that's it for today. Short and sweet. I think it's short and sweet. What time have we got here? Look at that, 35 minutes. It's got to be a record. I could talk for England, but that's it. What I would urge, uh, what you, I would recommend you do is to go on the website, check out the um, the uh, the, the rag system that we've got. And on the, there's, there's one particular section which we have which is under, it's four CEOs and as you can see there, there's knowledge base that answers your questions directly. That's it. Have a great week. I will be here same time, same place next week and to give you more updates, see where we're at and um, share with you where we are with these um, voice led instructions to communicate to a total addressable market. And it's a bit like um, you have the, have employees and you say go and do something and they forget or they do, they don't do exactly what you want or they don't report or they don't or something gets missed. Whatever it is, this is all defined in advance. Go and do that. Do as you're told. 24 7. Never, never off sick, no holiday to pay, nothing and you can say, we want to communicate to our total addressable market. And if, if you perceive or understand that in your particular market, whatever it is, you will be potentially the first. Unless you've got. Unless there are thousands of people listening to this. Um, but we don't relate, we don't communicate to thousands of people. We couldn't. We wanted. We're taking this nice and nice and conservatively slow because that's the only way that I want to work. But you have to think about it. You have to think about it. Where's the rest of your competition? You are doing exactly the same as your competition and vice versa. So it doesn't matter whether you. You've got 10,000 employees or 10, you are doing exactly the same as your competition. Do what you've always done. Get what you've always got. Have a great week. Weekend's up soon. Football's on. Enjoy Ya see you've been listening to

Speaker A: the GTM Reset podcast, the audio edition of the Sales Exchange live show. If this episode reflects what you are seeing in your own business, the next step is to explore the model properly. Use the links in the description to watch the full video version, work through the foundational documents and request a private strategy call if you want to see how this would apply inside your organization. Thanks for listening.