Why Your B2B Marketing Keeps Resetting to Zero

Full transcript

Angus Robertson 00:04
Welcome to our inaugural outcome marketing live. I'm Angus Robertson here with my co-founder Neil Anderson. Today we're talking about how marketing resets to zero and why we created outcome marketing. But first, Neil, why don't you tell us about yourself and how's your week going?

Neil Anderson 00:27
Well, for sure. Such enthusiasm, Angus. I get all excited. Feeding off your excitement. But yeah, my name's Neil Anderson and I'm Angus's cohort in crime. And I've been kicking around the general business management and marketing industry on the tech space for about three decades or so. I've got some experience with startups, I've got some experience with mid-sized turnarounds, and I've worked for some large public companies, which is where I sort of got my experience with scale. But my passion has always been with the SMB space because you can turn the ship a little more quickly and you can focus on strategy and story and outcomes and make a difference more quickly. So I'm excited about getting this series kicked off and looking forward to the conversation. So Angus, what about you?

Angus Robertson 01:26
Yeah, I'm excited to be here as well, Neil. And similar to you, it's been over 25 years of B2B marketing. Time flies across public companies, private companies, private equity companies, VC backed companies. If you bump into me, feel free to ask me which I prefer. But I recently left my last full-time gig, a great gig, because I'm passionate about what me and Neil are building here with our community of practitioners across fractional CMOs, CXOs, agencies, and also freelancers. And because I knew I needed to rewire myself for AI, like I'm sure many of you are doing right now as well. So let's dive right on in. We're talking about how marketing resets to zero, but first I think we should frame things a bit. Neil, how did this all get started? What happened?

Neil Anderson 02:29
Well, there was something called COVID. And I remember getting a phone call from Angus saying, hey, you want to write a book? And I was like, that sounds like fun. Fun COVID project. Turned out to be a little bit more than a COVID project. But anyway, we wanted to take these decades of experience that we had in marketing and general business management and strategy and try to memorialize them in some kind of a playbook where you could do it DIY or you could do it with help or whatever. But we started assembling this book. As I said, it took a little bit more than we anticipated. None of us were professional book writers at the time. But we wanted to make a meaningful difference to a broader audience. So we had a bit of a vision that was a bit bigger than just the book itself. And we'll get a little bit more into how the ecosystem works and what surrounds it. But in terms of that vision, we just believed that every SMB deserves good marketing. And we sort of built the book around what good marketing means and how we could pair that up with a network or a marketplace of practitioners, and those practitioners also deserve a community of experts around them to support their execution. Being a fractional CMO or CXO, CRO, CTO, pick your alphabet soup — it can be a lonely place. COVID sort of taught us this, right? You can wake up and go to work in your pajamas, but you work all day and you're still in your pajamas and you're still by yourself. So it was important to us to set something up where we could create a community. And then of course, AI kind of came along as we were going through that process and changed the calculus on, well, everything, I guess you could say. So we made that part of our three-legged stool, if you will: the methodology, which is the book, the marketplace, which is the practitioners, and the AI tools which accelerate everything you do and improve the quality of the output. So Angus, maybe you could talk a little bit about the five patterns which kind of form the basis of why we do this for SMBs.

Angus Robertson 05:03
Sure. So Neil, you said this took a little bit longer than anticipated. How long did it take us to write that book?

Neil Anderson 05:13
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds I could incriminate my incompetence. No, it took a long time. Not being a professional book writer, at least for me — I'll speak for myself here — by the time you got to chapter thirteen, if it was so far away from when you wrote chapter two, you sort of forgot what you wrote in chapter two. So you wrote it again in chapter thirteen. So as you well know, Angus, we did I think three full rewrites before we went to press on this bad boy.

Angus Robertson 05:48
Yeah, it was about five years. And thank goodness we had Brad Whittington with us. He's a phenomenal writer and also kept the humor through all those years of ups and downs. I still remember the caffeinated flea. So just as Neil highlighted, over the decades of us doing marketing, we've noticed some patterns that have been pretty stubborn, pretty persistent. And it's hard to overcome those patterns. As we worked with a number of really smart people, some great companies, some great CEOs, and just got exposure to phenomenal methodologies, we found ways to overcome these patterns — methodologies and ideas from these really smart people that worked. And so as we collected those, they all went into the book. The five patterns that we see over and over again are the unaligned bets, random acts of marketing, agency churn and reset, sales and marketing finger pointing — I'm sure no one here has seen that before — and perhaps the most egregious and silent one, customer neglect. For us, the unaligned bets has been a big one just because it's so hard for us humans to pick a few things to focus on when we go to market in terms of our product or service, our market and our motion. It seems that we have this natural drift across the organization to try to please everyone and be everything to everybody. And as that drift happens, as that focus disappears, the whole organization becomes less effective. So Neil, we've had a lot of experience with this. What's the one that grabs you? What's the pattern that you've seen and frustrates you most?

Neil Anderson 07:46
Well, they're all equally fun and interesting. But my favorite, I think, is the random acts of marketing. In fact, it's so prevalent, one of our colleagues actually wrote an entire book on this. But I'll give you an example of a random act of marketing. And for you fractional CMOs out there, I think you'll find this resonates. And for you CEOs who are listening in, it'll be interesting to see if this resonates with you. My favorite one is when you spend all weekend thinking about your upcoming week and your go-to-market strategy that you've been developing with your team, and you've got a plan, you've got a timeline, you've got a budget, you've got an organization, and everything's set to go, and you know how things are going to go this week. You walk into the office, whether it's physical or virtual, on Monday morning, you grab your cup of coffee. And the CEO grabs you and says, "Hey, can I just chat with you for just a sec? I was reading this article this weekend in HBR, Harvard Business Review, and it's all about SEO or AEO or what have you. It was a great article. And I think we've got to do this. This is what we've got to do, and we've got to do it right now. So why don't you get the team together in the big conference room and let's put a plan together and see how we get our entire website optimized by Friday." And what makes this hard is it's not a bad idea. The problem is the website's not going to be done until two weeks from Friday. The content is not fully written. So marketing tends to be a set of processes and systems, and order really matters. And these random acts come at you orthogonally and often. So that would be an example of a random act of marketing.

Angus Robertson 09:43
It's a great one. Just as you went through that story, a feeling of dread just sort of percolated through my body and that pit formed in my stomach because I've been in that situation many a time. Your head's down, things just seem to be working. You're starting to see kind of the metrics you've been working on for so long start to pop, and then that CRO or CEO or board pops their head into your office or on a Teams or Slack message and says, "Hey, I got this great idea." And everybody's an expert in marketing, and nobody has that local expertise or perspective on all the other things that are going on. You're just like — first of all, you don't appreciate all the stuff that's been done and is working. And now you want us to go change all this. Boy, yeah, that's an enjoyable one.

Neil Anderson 10:38
So what's one of your favorite patterns, Angus, of the five?

Angus Robertson 10:44
So the one for me that frustrates me the most is customer neglect. And I've run across it pretty much every company I engage with to some degree. Some CEOs and some executive teams are a lot more focused on it than others, but it always seems to exist to some degree. And especially with the B2B SaaS companies I work with, there's so much focus on the new logos. It's new logos, new logos. Where are the campaigns for the new logos? The irony is, especially if you have a fairly strong brand and you have a great customer success team and a really good product or service, and your customers love it and are really happy with you, they're out there promoting you. They're out there getting you new logos. So I've worked with companies that have amazing brands where marketing represented more than half of the new business pipeline that comes in. And 80% of that came from the website, and 80% of that came from branded search. In other words, marketing's taking all the credit about all the leads that we're generating. But the reality is it's the great product, it's the great service, it's the happy customers that are generating all these referrals and positive conversations in the forums and at the events that they're at. And that's the best kind of flywheel to get going. But it's hard to track, it's hard to measure, it's hard to connect all those dots. There was a point where I was actually doing both digital marketing and sales. With my digital marketing hat on, I was saying, "Look at all these great leads coming in from Google Ads and Google Organic Search." But when I had conversations with the prospect, the prospect would say, "Yeah, I got to your website because I was talking to this other person who is using your product and said we should check you out." Or this other person said, "I went to an event and I saw you guys present about what you did, and so I went to your website." So that chain of events gets disrupted, and the real engine behind that growth — those new leads, which is those existing happy customers — is lost. And so you end up chasing ads with lots of money that's not getting good yield, as opposed to really delivering value to your customers.

Neil Anderson 13:10
For sure. And you'll love this, Angus, because I know you'll remember this, but when I was responsible for customer service at Spirent Communications — which was my last corporate job and I think yours too, before we all went fractional — there was a very wise sales leader who used to say to me, "Neil, you know that the best customer is a customer." And I used to scratch my head and think about that before I finally figured out what he was talking about. But that's what you're saying. I mean, there's so much fertile ground right in your account database, and you need to pay attention to it and not neglect those customers.

Angus Robertson 14:05
Yeah, I completely agree. And I've learned more and more about just really providing that value, especially through marketing over the years. So that's been a learning experience for me as well. So Neil, we had these years of experience. We got to meet all these smart people and work with all these great companies. We wrote a book in a very short period of time. And we've created this marketplace, this community with some of the people that we've worked with. So why don't you tell me what outcome marketing is, how it's evolved, and how we got here?

Neil Anderson 14:45
Okay, so I talked a little bit about the Genesis earlier, but I'll actually show the book. This is it, right? So this is the first leg of the three-legged stool. And it is the methodology. The methodology is documented in the book. It might not be the book you want to take to Cape Cod on your summer vacation and have riveting reading at the beach. But it is the book that you might want to take to your budget meeting when you're preparing for next year's budget and reread the chapter on how to do the budget in this playbook as a resource. I will mention that we're sort of proud of the fact that we did not invent all the templates and frameworks and tools that are presented in this book. There are a lot of folks like Geoffrey Moore and his positioning framework and others that we just did the swipe, steal with integrity, pride, and enthusiasm. But we documented it in a way that was, I'd like to say, architecturally correct. And as I referenced earlier, it's a process, it's a system, and order matters. And while you don't have to put your hand on the Bible and swear that you'll do step 13C right after you do step 13B — it's not like that kind of a playbook — but it represents things in a strategic sort of sequence. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is really the marketplace. And the marketplace is really a curated network of individuals that Angus and I have worked with over the years, and/or come to know through other references and people that we're acquainted with, of people who are highly competent in their specific areas. And as you know, with marketing, it's very broad — from the product marketing way over on the left to all the customer experience and marketing work that Angus talked about earlier that's way over on the right, and everything in between. So marketing is big, and there are other ancillary aspects to the marketing machine with CRO and CTO and other experts, freelancers, agencies. So we've assembled this practitioner marketplace that supports, at least loosely, the philosophy of outcome marketing. And then the third thing — and I can let you address this a bit more, Angus, because you're closer to it — is as I mentioned before, the AI tools that assist this practitioner network in accelerating the marketing work that they're doing for clients and also increase the quality of the output.

Angus Robertson 17:43
Yeah, Neil, I think you said something important about how we put this marketplace together. It was very deliberate. We thought about this for a while, and it's not kind of on one side of the spectrum where it's just a listing site, like a marketing hire or that kind of thing. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have the management consultancies with the W-2s and that sort of thing. So we're in the middle of that spectrum. And we're in the middle because everybody on the marketplace has their own businesses, right? But they're curated. So we're very deliberate. We don't have hundreds of people on the marketplace. We're at 32 right now. I believe our goal this year is really just to get to 40 or 50 sort of hand-picked, curated agencies, fractional CMOs, fractional CXOs, and freelancers on the marketplace that match what the SMB CEO needs in terms of where they are in their maturity, where they are with specific pain points or needs — whether it's a new website or branding or some kind of capability when it comes to events. And really architecting and thinking through that has been something that we've thought about quite a lot. And to Neil's point, it's not just the methodology that is sort of a methodology of methodologies, those best practices that Neil and I have collected over the years. And it's not just the marketplace, all these great organizations that are on the outcome marketing marketplace. It's the AI tooling. So as Neil highlighted earlier, it's just changed how we all think and how we all operate. And it's humbling. It's humbling, it's exciting, it's scary, there's a lot of uncertainty. But we know we can't put our heads in the sand. We have to dive into the fast moving, turgid water and see what happens. So at this point, what I've experienced moving from ChatGPT — I was a ChatGPT loyalist. Now I've become obsessed with Claude, and of course, on the Max plan and diving into Claude Code and working on websites, working on apps, working on agents — it's just really kind of incredible what you can do. And the learning loop has never been faster. There's some amazing stuff on YouTube as well. But my key takeaways are: not only are my best practices — Claude makes them better. Claude makes them better, but helps me do the work much faster. So I have better work, and much faster. I get it done faster. But also, there are things that you can connect that you couldn't connect before because there are too many systems and too many manual pieces in between. So this idea of a living loop or of a go-to-market loop is something that Neil and I are really focused on and believe is integral to the next phase of great marketing. And what we're doing is taking a combination of a digital competitive landscape — so how do you show up relative to your competitors? And then what's good, what's bad, where's the white space? And then looking at what's traditionally like a style guide or a brand book, but filling it in more. It's not just your look-feel, it's not just colors and fonts and logos and typography. It's also your conversations to own at the top of the funnel. What is your market talking about? Where is their need? And how can you sustainably differentiate and meet that need over time? So those are the conversations to own. And then what are your go-to-market bets? How are you going to make money between your products or services, the target markets you're going after, and how are you going after those markets? Is it direct? Is it indirect? Are you landing? Are you expanding? Are you using digital? So being able to capture that competitive landscape, also all that information in a guide — you have this living document that can be a reference for AI and a reference for your go-to-market. So we built that. We built it for outcome marketing. You can find the full guide — no, it's not gated — on our website. And you use that guide to build the website. And I've been able to build — well, outcome marketing took nine days, Neil. But I built another website in four days. It's kind of incredible how fast you can go if you have that alignment on the bets and you have all that information in one place. What's interesting is then you have your discipline around voice of customer. So you conduct regular, ideally monthly, NPS calls, net promoter survey calls, or win-loss calls. You capture that customer information, what's working, what's not working, you feed that back in — not just to your executive team for alignment and update, but into that brand book or style guide. We call it a go-to-market blueprint. And that go-to-market blueprint, once it's updated, automatically updates your website. If there's a tone change, if there's a bet change, it's just so powerful to connect that life cycle between your strategy, your execution digitally with your website — which is your digital source of truth — and then connecting in your voice of customer and completing that loop. So that's where Neil and I are focused now with what AI has — Claude is into my brain. So I'm going to use a Claude word, and that word is "unlocked." So everybody here who uses AI a lot will notice that there are some terms they like to use, like "canonical" and "unlocked," and there are a few philosophers that they refer to all the time. So they're programming us humans just as much as we're programming them. But Neil, I talked a little bit there — any thoughts on what we've gone through so far?

Neil Anderson 23:56
No, I love the passion, Angus, and thank you for that. And thank you for building this go-to-market blueprint tool, which now alleviates my requirement to go to 16 different Google Drive documents and sheets every time one little change to the strategy or the conversation to own is made. It's just a delight, really, using AI in this way. And maybe in one of these future LinkedIn lives we can have my agent talk to your agent, because these things are all machine readable as well as readable by humans. But anyway, maybe we'd just sort of wind it down a little bit here. I want to just mention what I think the key takeaway is, especially for CEOs and founders that might be listening today. And I should mention that the website is outcome.marketing. So it's not terribly cryptic or hard to remember. But it's all about how the methodology endures. You might have a fractional CMO who comes in, builds the team, builds the plan, builds the go-to-market, and starts executing on it. But then when he walks out the door, the methodology doesn't walk out with him. It stays. The systems, the AI tools stay. The cadences for the meetings, the OKRs, they all stay. So it's about how the methodology actually endures so that — and this is the kicker, this is the key — the outcomes can compound. They don't reset to zero every year and start over. The methodology endures and the outcomes compound. Angus, feel free to add anything to that that you like.

Angus Robertson 25:50
No, I think you summarized that perfectly, Neil. And it's a real pleasure being on this journey with you over 25 years or so. And thank you, all of you, for joining or listening to this podcast, our first one. This is not going to be the only one. We're going to be doing this every month, and we're going to be inviting our practitioners from the outcome marketing marketplace to tell their stories, why they're amazing at what they do. We'll also be inviting some of our customers to talk about their journeys in terms of how they grow the business, some of the challenges they've dealt with and how they overcame those challenges. So thanks again for joining. Thanks again for watching, and we look forward to seeing you next time.

Neil Anderson 26:38
Thank you.