Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
B2B leaders have a checkered relationship with marketing. They have historically treated it as a discretionary expense, to be tolerated and preferably minimized.
Until recently—by which I mean 2015 or so—most B2B companies were sales-led. That is, winning new business was something driven by outbound sales activities.
Rightly or wrongly, marketing was assigned to a subordinate role—often reporting to the head of sales—focused on “prettying things up” to equip the sales team with eye-catching collateral and branded giveaways.
Then the world began to change.
Slowly but inexorably, four factors intertwined to fundamentally alter the B2B marketplace:
The ubiquity of digital information.
Digitization of sales processes (first B2C, then later B2B)
Demographic (generational) change in B2B buyers.
A shift from centralized to decentralized buying functions.
The old way involved centralized groups of mostly Gen-X buyers interacting with salespeople—often in person at trade shows, outings, and site visits—to learn about new solutions and negotiate purchases.
The new way involves remote-working Millennial and Gen-Z buyers researching solutions online, with a preference for end-to-end digital transactions that minimize their interaction with salespeople.
The inherently online nature of this new way of working means that B2B revenue creation must be led by marketing.
If you’re not effectively showcasing your company, brand, and solutions online, your business wont be in your prospect’s initial consideration set, which leaves you with a less than 10-percent chance of winning their business.
This does not mean the sales team has become irrelevant. On the contrary, they have a vital role to play in helping buyers make the right purchase and in maintaining client relationships to foster loyalty and minimize churn.
However, B2B businesses that grew up before these changes gathered pace must transform themselves from sales-led to marketing-led organizations.
And, critically, B2B leaders who rose up through the ranks in sales-led organizations must recalibrate their understanding about the importance and role of marketing.
A leader’s underlying beliefs aren’t always on full display. Instead, they manifest themselves as biases and behaviors that favor sales and dismiss marketing—such as the “discretionary expense” attitude I mentioned in my opening remarks.
They also show up in disguise, framed as leading questions.
This week’s post on the Framework blog explores The Top 5 Questions B2B Leaders Ask About Content Marketing, exploring several common queries and the outmoded belief systems that often underpin them.
If you’re looking for ways to more effectively engage your CEO—or if you’re a CEO who feels disconnected from marketing—this post should help you spot where things are getting off track and help you work towards reconciliation.
The B2B Builders Community
The priority waitlist is still open for the B2B Builders community. If you’re interested in meeting leaders from other B2B companies to exchange ideas and experiences, read this prospectus, then click on the embedded link to complete a quick online application (to help us weed out bots and timewasters).
We’re also running a private beta to test the online experience. If you’d like to join the beta, sight-unseen, and collaborate on a content roadmap for the community, drop me a line at b2bbuilders@messageup.com.
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
Balancing spend between lead generation and brand awareness.
Choosing progress over perfection when deploying generative AI.
A simple marketing strategy—get famous.
LinkedIn allowing brands to sponsor non-employee content.
All of these are fascinating topics but, despite some initial skepticism, I’m really warming to Jason Ball’s article about getting famous. He doesn’t mean it literally or individually. Instead, he’s talking about making your brand memorable for something—the big question being, what is that something?
To round out this edition, my One Step actionable tip asks you to rate how your organization views its pathway to revenue generation, and to consider some potential corrective actions.
Have a safe and productive week. I’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Mar 27, 2024 - The Top 5 Questions B2B Leaders Ask About Content Marketing
Mar 20, 2024 - Goldisocks and the Three Bloggers (A Tale for B2B Marketers)
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
It’s Time to Fight the ‘Lead Gen Lie’ in B2B Marketing
Jenny Sagstrom, Founder and CEO of the B2B agency, Sköna, uses this opinion piece on the Drum Network to lament the disproportionate amount of marketing budget being directed toward lead generation compared to brand awareness. She advocates shifting more spend toward emotive, risk-taking creative that your audience will actually remember.
B2B Marketers: Choose Generative AI Progress Over Perfection
When things are moving fast, trying to keep up can feel like running in mud—or even running just to stand still. We hear a lot of people describing generative AI in those terms. This piece by Forrester published by Forbes, offers some timely advice on how to stay focused and make progress—recognizing that a wait-and-see approach is likely to mean getting left far behind.
B2B Marketing Strategies: It's Simple—Get Famous
This piece by Jason Ball, founder of Considered Content, written for CMS Wire, seemed a bit flippant at first, but it grew on us as we read further. He makes a strong case for his headline and provides helpful tips and examples.
LinkedIn Now Allows Brands to Sponsor any Organic Post
This post by Nicola Agius at MarTech provides a quick update on an important functionality enhancement being rolled out to LinkedIn users during 1Q24—the ability to sponsor content published by non-employees. What's more important than the news itself is the questions it raises for B2B content marketers, such as how to attract sponsorship from other companies and when to accept or decline inbound sponsor requests.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
This week’s One Step actionable tip asks you to consider how your organization views its pathway to revenue generation.
As I discussed in my introduction and within this week’s blog post, many B2B organizations are struggling to come to terms with new business development being marketing-led rather than sales-led.
I won’t repeat the case for doing so. You’re welcome to disagree but, as far as I’m concerned, that train has long since left the station.
So here is my 5-minute exercise for you this week:
On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 signifies “Completely Sales-Led” and 10 signifies “Completely Marketing-Led”, how do you score your organization’s approach to winning new business?
What score do you think would be most appropriate for your business, given the sector in which you operate and what you know about the buyers and sellers operating within in?
If there’s a delta between your reality (the first score) and the ideal case (the second score), what might some useful first steps be toward closing the gap?
Who else in the organization should you discuss this with to get the ball rolling?
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