B2B ain't boring any more. Now marketers are daring to create categories, precisely target entire industries, build niche media companies, and engage in multi-stakeholder, multi-channel, multi-touch madness.
In between our blizzard of acronyms and advice, how do you make sense of it all?
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Thank you. It's really exciting to be back at conferences. It's really exciting to be back at TuringFest. We're here to talk about B2B marketing, we've got a lot to say, so let's crack on. Hear me out. B2B marketing is the most exciting place to be right now.
With all the tech and all the innovation, all the cool stuff companies like yours are doing, we get to be the ones to tell the story. We get to be the ones who create new categories, build even buy media companies, do multi persona, multi channel, multi touch kind of marketing to target entire industries.
It's really exciting. Right? Right? Good. But it's also kind of confusing, and maybe from the outside in, it's kind of boring, and I kind of feel like it feels like this when we're presenting this kind of stuff. Do people really understand what we do at our companies, even at home, our partners?
Heck, when we're looking for a new job. So I've just joined Prime, but I've just gone through this whole process, how do we convince people what b to b marketing is? What is it that we do? So one of the first things I did with the new team is ask them, what is marketing really?
I put up a slide like this using a tool called Menti, m e n t I, where anyone could put in any answer to this question, it would come up in a tag cloud, and that suddenly presented in front of the whole company.
So nervously, I put that question to the team, and this is what they came back with. Branding, manipulation, selling dreams, storytelling, messaging. It's a one man marketing team right now, so marketing is ed, it's advertising, there's all kinds of puns on that. And some of these are sort of in the right direction, some of these are a bit painful to see as well.
So what is it that we do? What is it that we need to focus on? I can't remember when I saw this definition, but I really liked it. You hire marketing to drive the story and the revenue. The story, what is it that you're selling?
And the revenue, how do make selling it really, really easy? So over the next twenty, thirty minutes, we're going to dive into both of these sides, after the other, what are the frameworks which I've used at Primer and previous places, including all through job interviews, and that I hope you'll be able to grab onto and take and apply to your own companies.
I want to try and get through the whole thing without any acronyms. Forget maybe the B2B thing, maybe that was a slip, but I don't want to talk about MQLs, SQLs, all this kind of stuff, I don't want to talk about all that confusion, because I think we can do better than that.
I think we can do something much simpler. So if you hear any acronyms, if you hear anything that's confusing, wave, shout, heckle, I think we can do much better. So let's start with the story. What is the story? I think the story is how you present your company's strategy.
It's how you attract the right kinds of customers, the right kinds of partners, investors, even hires, and align them all in one direction behind your company's vision. And it's hard to talk about the story without talking about Apple. I think it's a master class in storytelling with their product launches.
Take the iPhone launch way back in two thousand seven, that first ten minutes is a master class. But also, it's a repeatable format. When you watch a lot of these, there's a common pattern, there's a common framework, and what I can encourage you guys to look at is what are these frameworks, how can you study them and apply them?
So what are narrative frameworks? Here's one. Here's one you've almost all come across before. Has anyone seen this before? This is the Pixar narrative framework. Every single Pixar film follows this format, whether that's Toy Story, whether that's Finding Nemo, whether that's Wally, all of them follow that format.
Now, for a bunch of you in the room, that might have just ruined every single Pixar film by showing how formulaic they might be, But for them, for a bunch of you in the room, it's maybe if it's that easy to make so many blockbuster films just by following a simple framework, then surely there's a framework we can use to apply in b to b, and you guys are going to love the next ten minutes.
So what can those frameworks look like? Now over my time, I've used a couple of different them. How do we explain what we're doing in b to b, what we're selling? And I really like this one. This is adapted from a chap called Andy Raskin.
It's five steps. It's simple. It's memorable, and it goes something like this. First, name the big, obvious, undeniable change in your space. Obvious. It's got to be something that's easy to understand, easy to agree with. You don't want something that's very intellectual. What is happening in your space?
Second, name the obstacles of the status quo. This isn't about competitors, this is about the prevailing way of thinking, and why that is going to be irrelevant given this change that's now right in front of you. So if you're going on this path, then what's the positive opposite to that?
What is this promised land, this perfect state? Then, and only then, do you introduce your product. Introduce how you're going to take people from this prevailing way of thinking through to this new promised land, and in the context of all that, show and tell in simple terms how you're going to move people there.
This isn't a feature list. And of course, who else has gone on this journey? Showcase your best social proof. Showcase who, like me, has done this journey from this old way of thinking to the new piece elsewhere. So that's the five steps, and it's kind of abstract on its own.
So apologies for that, maybe this is part of that b to b marketing nonsense that we've put on the slide earlier. So how do we bring this to life? What's an example? So here's an example I've been working through recently. The way we pay is changing.
If you look at the past two decades of how we buy things, e commerce, there are whole new consumer trends and technologies coming into market. PayPal introduced digital wallets, Amazon introduced one click checkout, the likes of Clarner introduced buy now pay later, there's crypto, there's mobile, there's open banking, all of these trends and technologies are exploding.
And that's amazing for the technology space. Right? There are more payment technologies than ever before, and this space is only getting bigger, all very exciting, unless you're trying to sell something. Because all of a sudden, card is not enough. You need to have PayPal as well, and people want to buy something mobile, you need Google Pay, you need Apple Pay, maybe you need something else for a different region, maybe you need a fraud tool, maybe this, maybe you need that.
As a merchant, you've got to start to think how to tie that all together. And the reality, there is no one provider which can tie it all together. There is no one payment solution that can keep up. So you go to any company, any company in your credit card statements, they are all having to tie together a whole bunch of different tools, they're having to build a whole different thing underneath.
An underlying infrastructure, they're having to build, engineer, maintain just to manage payments in this day and age. But what if they didn't have to engineer anything? What if they could just have a platform they could plug into? Instead of engineering, it would be an automation platform.
Now every merchant needs payments automation, and that's what we're building at Primer, the world's first automation platform for payments. Now any payment service you can connect to in one click, you can service that to your customers through one universal checkout, and build your ideal end to end payment flows in a drag and drop workflow editor.
With Primal, we built that overarching complete framework that any payment service could connect into, and any merchant can take full advantage of with two lines of code. And it works. Take any merchant here, take Voy, one of the fastest growing e scooter rides hire companies in Europe, they're able to go into new markets, they're able to win new city licenses, they're able to fulfill their mission to make cities a much better place.
And it's not just merchants, it's payment services as well, who are able to bring their innovations to market in one click. That's the narrative. That's the hard pitch. I'll stop there. But you see how this comes together. You see how with a framework, becomes very straightforward to start to put together an undeniable change.
What is the status quo? What is the promised land? How do you show and tell your best features? And how do you bring forward your social proof? This is also cool for building out your content strategy. What is the news in your space?
How do you surface your use cases, your how to? How do you develop your category? How do you showcase your product messaging? How do you showcase your customer stories? This is the framework I encourage you all to think about in in telling the story behind your b to b products.
Now, that took a bit of research and to understand a bit of the space. I'd encourage you to think about research as well, but maybe there's an example that we could work on together right now, something like TuringFest. What is the undeniable change here?
Maybe that tech is moving faster than ever, the expectations on us, people working in tech, are bigger than ever, and yet we're more remote, more isolated, maybe professionally lonely than ever before. And perhaps, you know, we're not going to see the answers from our peers, we're not going see the answers on Slack, we're not going to see the answers in our current worlds.
So what would the promised land be? Maybe if we could clear our calendars, all come together with our peers, put a few people up on stage, maybe in a beautiful city like Edinburgh. That's Turingfest. Build, grow, lead, we're going to put on multiple tracks.
You want social proof? There are more people here that come back than any other conference I've been to. Something like that, whatever you can ground in your customer and your customer research, this framework starts to become very straightforward to build out. So that's the story. Let's talk about the revenue.
Marketing needs to be accountable to revenue. If you're in consumer, if you're in e commerce or travel or something like that, you are accountable for revenue. Somehow in b to b we can get detached from that because we have a sales team there, maybe.
But our job is to make sales easy, and we don't do that in a one to one like a sales rep, we do that by building scalable systems. So what can those systems look like? Now you have to bear with me whilst I show one diagram, but this is my high level mental model for how to think about b to b marketing here.
It starts with your customer insights. Why does a message work? Who are you selling to? What pains are you solving? Where and when can you engage them? This starts to inform your data and your content. Your data, who is that messaging for? What is that targeting that's gonna really matter?
And your content, what is your messaging saying? How are you gonna convince and compel people to choose your solution? These come together in your channels and campaigns, where and when you engage prospects, all the way from not knowing about your brand right through to buying and revenue, And that stream of insights should feed back into the system of insights around your customer, but also your revenue.
So this is the mental model, hopefully I haven't lost anyone so far, but what we're going to do over the next minutes is dig into some of the areas I've seen b to b marketers either not do or significantly under invest in in each of these areas.
So let's start with insights. If you're an early stage startup, often your founders become that oracle of knowledge. They know every single prospect, they know every single customer, and somehow it's all locked in their brains. But as soon as you try and scale beyond that, as soon as you try and hire sales teams, marketing teams, etcetera, it doesn't all stay in one brain, it's in so many different brains.
So you need a system to update that gathering and updating of customer insights, and this is why you need a database of every customer call. So how do you do this? Firstly, record all external customer calls. Make this a default. In some jurisdictions, do need to ask, but it should be the default that you're asking and making sure that stuff is recorded.
Second, you need to get transcripts of all your customer calls. It's much easier to go through written transcripts than is through hours and hours of audio. Once you have all those audio and transcripts put together, you need to put into folders, you need to put tag it up, you need to make it searchable, you want to grab cool snippets of particular topics and particular things that have come up.
You then want to use this for training, you then want to surface this to your entire team. One of the coolest things we did for onboarding people at Paddle, this is my previous company, is our BDR manager would say to new reps, here's our library of discovery calls.
Discovery calls are being our first call with a prospect, we're learning about them, we're looking to qualify them and find out if there's intent to move forward. Here's our library of discovery calls. Go through every call and write down every question we ask and every question they ask, and they'd go away, they spend a couple of days, come back with all this list of questions, and they curate and put it together.
And then we say, great. Now go find the answer to all those, and they go back into the calls, and within a week or so, these brand new reps would have a really solid understanding of what customers cared about, of our response and our point of view there, and that wasn't coming second hand, that was coming straight from the customers, that was coming straight from the source.
If you've got dollars to spend, it's really, really valuable to tie this in with your CRM and sales processes. You want to make all of this systemized and by default, and that's where services like Gong, like Chorus, like Jiminy can be really helpful.
Expensive? Yes. But the alternative is flying blind. In b to b, most of the insights are locked up in those conversations. They're not being recorded, they're not being organized, then you don't actually have an understanding of what's going on with your customers. Let's talk about data targeting.
Now, all businesses have a footprint. They need to be registered somewhere. They might have an office, they might have employees, they probably have a website. All this has a footprint. All of this is detectable, and because it's all detectable, there's no reason why you couldn't build a complete unified database of every single ideal customer that you wish you had to map your entire market, and then direct all your sales and marketing effort towards that.
This is one of the most effective things we did at Paddle, it's one of my top priorities in my new role at Primer, is to build this total database and map our market. So how do you do that? Firstly, don't start by buying data.
There's a lot of data providers out there who may have a certain set of data scraping abilities, or certain data points which they're good at grabbing, which I'll then gather and sell to businesses, who then need to find a use for. I'd advocate start the other way around.
What data sources do you need, which you will find a use for, and then go back and find the right sources for them. So how do you start with that? Start with words. Define your ideal customer profile. Your perfect fit looks like what?
If you could have a hundred customers who just look like this, what would that be? Now you might end up with a definition there, I'd recommend you do this in a group with people across your company, but then you might have a quite fluffy definition.
Make sure it's subjective, use just nouns and verbs, lose the adjectives, lose the adverbs, it becomes much easier to tie to data sources down the line. So with that definition, maybe pull that into a table, map out the types of data you need to match to each bit of that definition.
Maybe there's certain geographies that matter, technologies, company sizes, etcetera. Maybe there's some more abstract ideas like growth rate, where maybe something like open head count could be helpful proxy there. Then and only then, start to think about where you can start to source that data from, where might that be available, how could you detect open head count, where could you figure out where they're based, where their offices are, etcetera.
That feeds into a data acquisition strategy. When you're going to vendors where you're figuring out where to scrape from, where you're figuring out maybe you're gonna hire a bunch of people to go and research this stuff for you, that's the list, that's the spec which you're gonna be running off.
And whatever happens, you don't wanna pull all that data back into one database. That might be your CRM, it might be Google Sheets, it might be a big set of tables in a data warehouse. It's important that it's all in one place, so you can use all of it to segment and target accounts across your ecosystem.
Now for some businesses here, that's going be relatively straightforward. Your ICP is going to be quite simple, but for a couple of businesses like Paddle or like Primal, where there's a lot more complexity involved, this can become quite a big project, scraping and normalizing data from multiple different data sources.
If that's you, there's an Edinburgh based company called Goodfit, which Alex just over here, I'd recommend you have a talk with later, but that's exactly what they specialize in and becomes a really, really critical part of our go to market. Market. So let's move on. Let's talk about the content.
Now if you're in ecommerce or other consumer facing worlds, if you're Wise, if you are in travel, you tend to have quite large websites. In fact, two thousand eighteen, think one of the team from Wise came and talked about how they built out the website, they built up multiple product pages to build out their search footprint.
They're big, big websites. Yet, for some reason in b to b, we tend to have much smaller websites, maybe lots of support pages or a long blog, but we don't have the same effect. And maybe that's because we all have different industries, we need to figure out what our catalog is in our industry, and maybe it's because people want us to talk to sales reps first, but that's not I'm not convinced that's how people buy.
People want to be able to understand, learn, and evaluate what your product is self serve, maybe before they want to talk to a rep. And so building out your catalog is really, really important. I did this at Hull, so two companies back, I did this at Paddle, this was the thing which turned marketing from one of the smallest drivers of revenue to the primary source of pipeline and revenue, because we could capture all the demand that was that was out there, and we could educate people on what we were doing.
So when I joined Paddle, our catalog, the bits of our website looked something like this. We had a features page, which is defining what it is that we do, and solutions page, what are the types of problems we can solve? So one of the first things we did is build out those sets of feature pages, each feature which we had, and then each solution which we could service, whether that might be use cases, verticals, geographies, etc.
Now if you're in software or something technical, this becomes a really good opportunity to tie in with your technical documentation. One of the analysis we did at Paddle was looking at what content correlated strongly with revenue, and it was no surprise really that developer documentation was way up there.
So how are you connecting that content, how are connecting that experience into this catalog? Your feature page is going into your API reference, basically what is it, I want to learn in the deepest detail as technical person, up through your how to, maybe here's how you can integrate your checkout, up to a use case, here's how we can localize your checkout for different markets, and map mapping across the different solutions.
One of the things which I'm seeing more and more is people starting to pull more of that long form content into this catalog kind of context. If you think like an Argos catalog or some of the online shops, etcetera, you tend to have content to inform and educate and sort of bias towards your your solution within this world.
So something we were doing more and more of was building out buyer's guides. These were very good for competitor pages, these were very good for going after people searching around the categories, more so than an isolated blog post over here, or maybe a direct response landing page.
These could rank really quickly, really strongly, and will be wildly effective for driving demand. So the challenge with b to b is often most of our market is not in market right now, So the catalog is really effective, but how do we go after the people who may might even not be aware of an issue they have an issue just yet?
And this is where relevance comes in and building these segmented funnels that can go and generate demand, not just capture it. And the challenge is b to b products can be quite complex to sell. I was watching Nylan's talk just before this, where I'd able to point to one slide and suddenly people get the value all of a sudden.
We don't have quite the same joy, there's quite the same ease in B2B all the time. We ain't selling pizza, as a friend used to say. So there's a guy called Greg at Cloud Kettle who makes this case, we have to make three sales, and I really like this model.
Before we get to that one call, one tap pizza sale, you've got to make these three sales before. First, you've got to go and find these people wherever they are, whatever platform they're on, maybe that's social, maybe that's an event like this, maybe it's podcast, maybe it's Slack communities, wherever they may be, and convince them they got a problem.
They might be aware of pain points, but convince them they got a problem. Second, now they're aware of that problem, how could they even solve it? The worst thing that can happen is they just accept it's a problem, it's one of the worst things about their industry, and they do nothing about it.
So you've got to convince them that there are solutions that help to educate them around solving for that. And now they're aware of different solutions, why should they pick you? Why should they pick you who they might not have heard of before, and you're gonna charge them fifty k, and you're gonna do all this kind of stuff?
Why should they pick you? So you need to get them to engage with you and ultimately prefer your product. Then and only then do you get to the nice easy pizza sale. So this lays out a set of content, a less set of objection needs that we to build against.
Now the challenge we have is across each of the different verticals we have, that messaging, that set of content, all those objections and so on and so forth are gonna be different for different segments. So if we're gonna focus on relevance, how are we gonna build out these funnels?
What's the priority order we care about there? So I'd encourage you to think, where is your messaging gonna be most different? If you're on a sales call with a person in this vertical versus a person in this vertical, or this geography versus another geography, would the messaging be substantially different?
Which segmentation dimension matters most? And if you're in the position where that's not clear, or you have a lot of different segmentation dimensions which matter, I'd encourage you to look at, do the analysis, where's the widest spread in conversions? Where are you seeing better win rates and worse win rates?
Where you have better win rates and worse win rates and a wide spread in that, it tends to indicate messaging works much better with one group, with one segment, than another, which means you have an opportunity to double down on that segment with more refined messaging to have the other catch up.
So finally, insights. I'm really keen on this, marketing should be drivers of revenue, but in b to b and longer deal cycles where sales are involved, there's multiple people involved, we don't necessarily get to influence that on a week to week directly, so we need to find metrics upstream of all that.
So it's really important we talk about leading indicators of revenue. So how do you set something up which is a really useful leading indicator of revenue? Firstly, forget leads, forget stuff around internal processes and vanity metrics. When it becomes all about internal processes and vanity metrics, you tend to not optimize for the prospect and the prospect's experience.
It tends to become a little more detached even from what's driving revenue. So I encourage you to flip it around, measure the behaviors from your prospects that correlate to revenue. A couple of ideas that we found on this, website analytics. One of the most powerful things we did at Paddle was build a segment of weekly evaluators.
When we had we'd done the analysis on what pages, what page types correlated strongest with revenue, we then whitelisted these as a segment inside Google Analytics. If they spent more than thirty seconds in a session, they'd enter this this segment that we could that we track week over week.
And with the week over week performance with different campaigns with different activities, we saw a very, very strong correlation with the number of live chats, conversations we had on the sites, we had a very strong correlation with the number of demo requests on the site, and how that would all track through to revenue.
So we can start making weekly evaluators the key metric to align a lot of our digital marketing activities around. You can do the same thing with product analytics. What are the moments in your products? What are the events? What are the critical actions people are taking that correlate to revenue?
This can be a little bit complex depending on your product, depending on your tracking. It's where tools like MadQDU can be really helpful for identifying and bringing into a go to market stack. And then finally, in terms of your sales process, you want to flip your CRM stages to become about behaviors from the prospect side, measuring things like meetings booked and so on.
At Paddle, we were selling a multi stakeholder sale, so one meeting booked on its own didn't tend to correlate with revenue so so much, so it became about how do we find intent, how do we find when a conversation was moving forward. To that end, we created a new stage in our CRM called conversations.
This was a manual stage reps had to update, and it's when we had two or more replies coming in with positive intent, I. E. People wanted to move forward. We started to track this as a leading indicator, we used to align our sales and marketing programs around this, we even put quotas against conversations, and these tend to, after a while, converted to opportunities about forty percent in about two weeks, and became a predictor of revenue and prediction performance.
Whatever leading indicators you come up with, it's important you educate your wider team. That includes finance who are funding you, your leadership, and your board. This is why it's important to have a small number of leading indicators and not confuse people with all kinds of different metrics.
A small number, ideally one, if your business can be that simple, of leading indicators. So we had a bit more time, there's more bits of this ingredients list I'd want to go through, but unfortunately we only have half an hour today. Again, this is the high level mental model.
What are your customer insights? Why does your message work? That informs your data you're targeting, your content you're messaging. These come together in your channels campaigns, where and when you engage prospects, the way from not knowing about you through to revenue, this feedback to your insights.
You hire marketing to drive the story, and you hire marketing to drive the revenue. If this way of thinking about B2B marketing is exciting, we're hiring a primer in all roles, including all of marketing, it's an entirely remote company, we are solving the biggest problem in payments, as mentioned we just raised our series B, and it's a twenty month old company, it's a very, very exciting time, so if that excites you, grab me afterwards or check out primer.
Iocareers. And that's it. Thank you for listening. I'd love to connect with you all on LinkedIn, and if you've got any other questions, reach out there. We'll be doing the q and a afterwards. Thank you.
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