by William Walsh | Jul 1, 2024 | 2024
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 3 Minutes
Want to take your ICP’s to the next level? Try using personality based marketing to understand corporate cultures.
Here’s why. Above are 2 SaaS companies in the martech industry. Our client is selling to the same buyer in each company. But the company situations are vastly different.
The first company is growing aggressively and has a corporate culture that is full of “Dominate” personalities.
The second company is under attack and has lost significant revenue and market share during the last two years. The corporate culture is skeptical, given the prevalence of “Consciences” personalities.
So what does all this mean?
First, it impacts the positioning of the value of your product.
Second, it helps you identify the right set of the sales and marketing assets.
In company 1, you position the value of the offering to help scale growth.
You communicate that through case studies with ROIs. Given their “dominant” culture, they are heads down operators so use relevant case studies that align, as closely as possible, to their situation.
In company 2, you position the value of the product on what it can do to drive efficiency.
This is a company fighting for its survival. It needs ideas on how to improve operations. As a result, use cases showing potential cost savings (business cases) are most important.
And given the culture, use data and research to support the use/business cases which is essential for building credibility in selling to an organization like this.
Before you even speak to a buyer you can understand the environment in which they operate. It allows you to create a connection — optimism for company 1, empathy in company 2.
ICP’s are not just an acronym, they’re people. Decisions are influenced by emotions. Motivations cause decisions, and personality dictates both.
The more you understand this the higher the likelihood of getting engagement, interest, and a decision. It’s a 1, 2 punch.
by William Walsh | Sep 20, 2023 | 2023
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 2 Minutes
Here’s an observation for my friends in tech marketing.
Above is an extract from research we recently conducted. Close to 500 C-Level IT buyers (CTO, CIO, CISO, etc.) were interviewed or surveyed.
The graph represents the top 4 purchase drivers. Each of the 4 categories include the platform and the people. Technical expertise includes not only the solution, but also, the people selling, integrating and supporting it.
The “people” component in the other categories is pretty obvious. The question is, how are you communicating the value of your people in your content and messaging? Are you?
In my observations, most organizations have shifted to almost exclusively focusing on the technology/platform. We’ve become very myopic in marketing our solution. It could be pressure coming from the product group or senior management. It’s pushed marketing too far in one direction.
People use technology to get an output. They don’t buy it because of what it is, they buy it because of what it does…oftentimes, for them specifically. How you sell and support your tool most often dictates whether or not you’ll get the renewal, add-on or even a referral.
People also buy from people. If you’re leaving the human piece out, you are doing the customer, company and your colleagues a disservice.
by scott.gillum | Feb 1, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 1/26/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Does the answer to improving B2B marketing success tie back to a problem discovered during World War II? Perhaps.
The B-17 plane was quick and inexpensive to build with a goal of “blackening the sky” over Europe. The problem with that strategy was because they were designed to be quickly built they ended up being easily shot down. In fact, soon after entering the war, the B17 was getting shot out of the sky faster than they could be built.
Recognizing that something had to be done to keep them in the air, the decision was made to assemble a group of engineers to study the returning planes, and assess where to add armour.
The team was about to submit their findings when Abraham Wald, a lead engineer on the project, pointed out that they were thinking about the problem the wrong way. Instead of putting armour on areas that were damaged by bullets, they should be thinking about adding armor to the areas where there were no bullet holes, because those areas were most vulnerable.
This phenomenon, known as “survivorship bias,” can be seen all over B2B marketing. Survival bias is a type of selection bias. It’s a logic error that occurs when focusing on things that survive rather than looking at things that didn’t. By selectively leaving data out of the analysis it can cause one to make the wrong conclusion, like putting armor on the bullet holes of returning planes.
In B2B marketing, there are signs of this bias in almost everything we do. We try to scale and “optimize” a 3% response rate or 10% open rate. Focusing on the “returning planes,” missing the opportunity to assess, and understand, how to improve on the 90%+ of our effort that didn’t return a result.
This myopic view on scaling the “3%” drives us to an endless cycle of investing in new technologies. Providing a momentary boost in performance which quickly dissipates. This stacking more tools on the “stack” has now put us at the top of the yield curve. Essentially, marketing tools are now being shot out of the sky faster than they can be built.
Scale has become the enemy of the good. Remember this for 2022. Volume will not necessarily get you to your goals. For example, according to Hubspot’s 2021 Industry Survey (over 100K companies) email performance dropped by 30% from the previous year, which was historically low. So what did companies do? They sent even more emails, increasing by over 120%. (I believe that is commonly referred to as the definition of insanity.)
For years, I searched for an answer for why marketing performance continued to be poor, despite advancement in new technologies. Stumbling upon survival and selection bias helped to explain some things but what I’ve concluded is that at the core, it’s a motivational issue. Confusing activity for performance is convenient. Searching for, assessing and acquiring new tools offers hope and can feel like you’re making progress.
It’s time to stop looking external for a solution and turn our efforts internally. The answer to improving performance lies in the insight from the missing data.
To win the war on poor performance will require a commitment to thinking differently, like Wald. Not everyone will be willing, or able, to make this journey, but as another WWII hero, Winston Churchill once said; “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Onward soldier!
by scott.gillum | Nov 5, 2021 | 2021, Marketing, Sales
As previously published on 11/4/21 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Business-to-business (B2B) sales can be tricky, but not if you envision your brand like a sandwich. More importantly, don’t forget to focus on the often forgotten middle part of your brand where all of the tasty connections are. Here’s what you need to know.
Think of your brand in three pieces, or because it’s almost lunch time as I write this, think of it as a brand sandwich.
The top layer is what you would commonly think of as corporate branding – brand attributes, value, positioning. The middle piece, or meat of the sandwich, is the connection between your brand and your products or services. The bottom layer is the customer experience – sales, product and service.
As a customer, you experience these three brand experiences at various points in the buyer’s journey – before, during and after the purchase decision. Metaphorically, customers are taking a bite out of the brand sandwich and getting a flavor of each level.
In order to move a prospective customer along this journey, the brand sandwich needs to be cohesive to provide a consistent experience and taste. For many B2B organizations, the breakdown occurs in the middle of the sandwich – the meat.
Why? For one, the corporate brand is highly visible and warrants the attention it receives. It’s for your employees, investors and customers. Given the energy and effort dedicated to getting the brand positioning, messaging and campaign correct and launched, most feel the job is over.
The problem is that the middle meat of the brand, which connects the brand direction and the company’s offerings, is often forgotten or missed. Part of the gap exists because of the way marketing is organized. Corporate marketing owns and is responsible for the brand. The middle brand often lacks an owner.
A few years ago, Cisco created a beautifully aspirational brand campaign for its internet of things (IoT) offering. Called ‘Tomorrow Starts Here,’ the positioning was so good that chief exec John Chambers said he could see them using it for the next 10 years. Except for one thing – sales, business partners in their case, didn’t know what to sell.
The brand message was so high level and futuristic that the partners didn’t know which Cisco solutions would enable the IoT future. Eventually, the company was able to connect the campaign by organizing their partners into three roles aligned to envisioning, enabling and expanding the IoT solutions:
Cisco’s envision group included large consulting firms that could articulate the solutions and sell the concepts – e.g. what is a ‘connected transportation system.’
The enablers were industry-focused value-added resellers (VARS) that could design and build a specific solution once designed, such as ‘a digital healthcare system.’
And finally, the expanders that were mostly distributors that supplied the IoT solution builders with products and solutions once they were being adopted.
For each group, they built specific sales and marketing materials using the new branding and positioning but, most importantly, the connective tissue built by mapping the current set of products, solutions and services into this new future vision. The bottom-up approach gave partners a roadmap. It connected products they were selling currently with a realistic view of a new solution to come.
The lessons learned, a good brand positioning and message should be aspirational and challenge the organization to fulfill its promise. The shelf life of a rebranding effort should be at least three to five years, and, in the Cisco example, 10 years.
To realize the return on the significant investment in the new branding, organizations have to connect it to the products and services currently being sold. If you have ever led a successful rebranding project, only to hear negative feedback from the sales organization, know that you have missed addressing the middle brand.
Making customers hungry for your new brand sandwich is critical, but if you don’t connect it to your current solution set, it’s going to taste a little bland, and sales will be asking, “where’s the beef?”
by scott.gillum | Oct 1, 2021 | 2021, Marketing, Sales
Scott was a guest speaker at the WVU Marketing Horizon podcast, a sub-series of WVU Marketing Communications.
Marketing Horizons is forward-thinking, looking ahead, through the front windshield and beyond, into the marketing future. Hosted by Cyndi Greenglass and Ruth Stevens, Horizons is a podcast dedicated to looking ahead to the new ideas, technologies, tools and strategies that are emerging to help marketers navigate over the marketing horizon.
Listen here. https://bit.ly/2ZNfYpC
