Even before AI and Google SGE came gunning for everyone’s search traffic, B2B was struggling with SEO. Despite endless effort, lots of pages languish in SERPs while the cost of paid search keeps growing. It’s a problem.

Even the pages that get that sweet search love aren’t doing brands a lot of good — often because they’re not optimized for terms that matter to qualified buyers. (So what if you win big on “What is data architecture?” when you’re trying to sell to experienced IT leaders?) 

In perhaps the saddest cases, the pages that “win” SEO by effectively playing the system fail to elicit real interest. Content that lacks depth, credibility and a point of view is inherently unsticky. 

And the state of SEO affairs is about to get worse. Actually, our CEO Stan recently wrote an article on the B2B SEO malaise, and SGE is just a part of it.

AI — ChatGPT, Google SGE, all of it — is going to crack the internet wide open and scramble everyone’s SEO investments. 

But honestly: we think this might be a good thing in the long run. We’ll get to why after the scary stuff.

Will AI replace SEO? First, the bad news.

GenAI seems like a good thing, unless you’re a writer, designer or human. 

OK, we don’t think generative AI is all bad: there are certainly efficiencies to be gained by letting AI do the boring bits — and we all need to get smart about using them or we’re doing whoever pays our bills a disservice. 

But not everyone is exercising such restraint: “content at scale” is a certain type of marketer’s sickening rallying cry. Loooots of companies are chomping at the bit to use AI to flood the internet with search-optimized drivel. Sure, generative AI tools like ChatGPT can produce decent aggregations of other people’s knowledge — about as well as most junior writers or interns. Editing can take it home. 

But frankly, marketing humans have been producing that kind of content for a long time. There’s some user benefit in aggregation: to our users, who can see the topic digested quickly or through a certain lens — and to creators, who can use it to earn search traffic.

But that value is going away. Blame AI. Blame marketers. Blame Google. 

If your intern can produce content without any point of view — and without having any substantive knowledge on the matter — then it’s at risk because anyone can do it. ChatGPT can do it at scale (cue an existential ‘ick’). 

Search engines — and their users — are about to experience the Great Blanding. AI content averages out all the other content, smooths out the rough edges, siphons off any taste. It’s the equivalent of someone showing you their ‘Live, laugh, love’ sign when you try to get to know them. 

(But if we’re honest, B2B content already had a poor track record for telling stories with mojo and humanity and a real point of view). 

Users don’t like the AI-driven content that’s flooding us. Neither does our overlord, Google. 

But right now, that kind of content is effective, and at a scale that’s jeopardizing SEO investments. What took six months to build might be undone in a week’s worth of work by someone churning out GenAI content.

SGE’s impact on SEO: Google adds generative AI search and an algo update to the chaos

As the dominant search engine, Google can be a bit of a meanie sometimes. The dominant search engine is trying to cut the middleman out of searches altogether. They’ve already tested and are talking about rolling out Search Generative Experience (SGE). It’s like ChatGPT for the internet: you ask a question and get an answer. 

Without ever visiting a website.  

Of course, there will be problems: just like with ChatGPT, some of Google’s generative AI search answers are going to be hallucinations. Worse, they’ll sound right but be full-on bullshit. Sure, that was always a problem with internet content, but it’s easier to tell on a website how likely the answers are to be reliable. 

The implications are obvious: it’s going to steal your traffic the way rich snippets did, so Google can sell more ad space.

We think the good news is the flurry of helpful content guidance updates and the big algo change Google rolled out in 2023 to prioritize content that truly serves humans — not low-value, AI-generated shit. They’ve summarized the principles as Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). It’s a set of standards that will reward content that serves up the best user experience.

As with every algo change, SEOs are rushing to update their strategies. Which is just as Google would have it. Good SEOs are responsible for helping their brands play by Google’s rules — which Google loves — while bad ones try to game the system.

Google is also cagey about its ranking factors because it doesn’t want SEOs to game the system. But we (and some of our very advanced search clients) think Google looks for things like: 

• Named authors who are actually experts. Our client Tebra has gone very deep with this: their content site, The Intake, names every author and their medical proofreader if relevant. It’s as far from ChatGPT as you get — it’s content with a human endorsing it. And a human who knows what the hell they’re talking about. 
• Original research. You’re not just aggregating other’s content or making up thoughts. Google will reward you when you produce credible new information. Think surveys and other original data. (Also consider: digital experiences that produce survey data). 
• Content overall still needs to abide by SEO best practices: technical site performance, content that’s relevant to your brand and written with intent to match keywords, off-site endorsements (AKA backlinks) from authoritative domains and other ranking signals still matter. Quality indicators like grammar still matter, too, but what’s new is that sources should be cited and reputable. If it’s good enough for your professor, it’s good enough for Google. 
• Google wants to reward sites, content and experiences that best serve the user — in terms of finding what they need quickly and being a reliable source they can trust.

So the good news we promised several hundred words ago…

In the long run, the AI content apocalypse may prove a good thing. B2B buyers don’t want shallow answers; they want deep insight, credible information, and — hear us out — not to be bored. And they’re not going to get that from SGE or ChatGPT.

And the sheer scale of all that AI content is very likely to collapse under its own weight, with Google helping it along with some well-timed kicks to the shin. The just-for-search content — which was already a big problem, whether a content grindhouse, an intern or ChatGPT wrote it — should die.

So who’s going to win in this new world? One thing never changes about SEO: play the long game with integrity and commitment, and you have a good chance of coming out on top. In the end, the companies who really invest in original, expert-created, useful content that users want will win. 

That doesn’t mean you don’t need an SEO strategy. It just means your SEO strategy has to get smarter. As smart as your buyers.

Lower-volume, higher-quality content is likely to get outsized results because the scale of the content Google favors will actually go down. It can’t be scraped and repackaged from the internet; it needs something special. Heart, personality, an opinion, unimpeachable facts.

It’s not just search that’s changing

A lot of smart people in B2B are talking about the era of humans, too. For instance, Zapier’s very smart CMO predicted B2B will have its creator moment, taking a cue from influencers. 

Because it turns out, people trust people — not brands. (Or robots). Companies may start to put their best thinkers forward. 

Some other trends: 

• LinkedIn is testing a feature to allow brands to pay to promote their employees’ posts — and the beta test showed a 70% higher CTR and 60% increase in engagement (for thought leader promotions vs traditional static ads).
• Some people may make a living as B2B thought leaders and do paid collaborations with brands they trust. 
• Google isn’t the default search engine of choice for younger users. Huge numbers are going to TikTok or Instagram first. In B2B, there are other search engines: think Capterra, G2, YouTube, the AWS marketplace, forums and even Reddit.  
• Having a person own the content adds credibility for Google and trust for readers. People are already suspicious and bored by generic, unowned content. Having a point of view and a voice is gonna be stickier for Google and for your users.

Gear up for new battles

2024 is going to bring lots of changes. SGE’s impact on SEO and the content-at-scale-pocalypse are scary — but maybe a long overdue wakeup call for B2B SEO. We all need to get smarter and more sophisticated about how we reach and actually engage the prospects we want to talk to. 

What are you predicting? Does AI’s HAL 9000-like role in the B2B-SEO malaise have you horrified? Have your say in the comments.

A lot of B2B tech firms struggle with SEO. 

Everyone recognises that it should be a key weapon in the arsenal, but most tech firms’ organic SEO performance – despite lots of effort and investment – is plummeting (and very few get even a proportionate share of relevant traffic let alone the lion’s share). 

There are two main reasons, each with their own symptoms, why your SEO efforts are failing.

Siloed approaches

Too many businesses treat SEO as a separate function rather than building it into the overall marketing mix leading to:

• An over-reliance on branded or irrelevant search
  Organic traffic is driven via branded terms, meaning you’re only visible to those who know you already. Or worse, keywords that don’t matter altogether. It’s a disconnect with the strategy of the business.

• Content that doesn’t make an impact
  Your content lacks the depth and credibility needed to raise eyebrows, attract audiences and gain industry respect. It’s over-indexing (if you’ll pardon the pun) on traffic over user experience.

• SEO efforts drive traffic but no pipeline
  Over-reliance on top-of-funnel terms which aren’t mapped into a fluid user flow with a logical next step, so traffic drops off. It’s failing to join up marketing disciplines.
• Over-indexing on vanity metrics with unclear ROI
  Reporting on meaningless metrics like bounce rates and average ranking position, which don’t showcase the true impact organic search has on your business. It’s an analytical hole that could be filled.

The shifting Google relationship

The ongoing changes in SERPs has retrained many a marketer’s eye from organic to paid thanks to:

• Low organic results despite endless effort
  Languishing within the forgotten pages of Google means no impressions or traffic despite time and money spent. 95% of clicks happen at the top of Google but it’s harder to get there when the space is occupied.
  
• A focus on buying traffic rather than earning it
  Turning to paid search to drive pipeline has proven equally fruitless for many: paid costs are growing to the point where it’s hard to see returns on investment. That will worsen: Google is increasing the costs of ad spend and the space dedicated to PPC ad space, reducing SERP space for organic.

And, if these two reasons didn’t seem bad enough, there’s a new kid coming to town to shake things up even more.

AI and SEO

The introduction of AI will see Google work harder to make search results more accurate, personalized and efficient. 

If meeting, even anticipating, a user’s unique needs becomes the order of the day then the penalties for generic, low-quality and, let’s face it, dull search-driven content will simply multiply.

So all doom and gloom then? Well, no. If you work in the niche and rarefied industries of B2B then maybe it’s all about to go your way.

Don’t bring B2C search weapons to a B2B marketing gunfight

As we’ve more than hinted you need to stop treating SEO as a standalone department with a B2C-like mindset. B2B SEO is fundamentally different.

• Quality trumps volume: Where B2C focuses on high volume vanity keywords, B2B is more often about low volume (sometimes extremely low volume), high-value keywords. It’s quality before quantity.

• Prospect journeys are complex: B2B customer journeys are rarely the one-dimensional, simple B2C approach. B2B sales are generally complex, multi-stage, multi-person journeys and SEO efforts have to be calibrated for that

• A long-term perspective wins: B2C is inevitably a short-term perspective (‘buy my thing, buy my thing, if I give you 20% off will you buy my thing?’) Most B2B sales are long-term plays involving buying groups with very different needs – line of business managers care about different things than the procurement department, CIOs value different things to CFOs.

• Crap content is a scourge: You can never deliver low-quality or mediocre content to a high-brow, expert audience that wants complex, difficult questions answered before they jump into your pipeline. (This is the biggest mistake B2B tech firms make.)

This B2B mindset is increasingly in line with the personalized vision for AI: a technology moving in line with our skill sets.

There’s no ‘I’ in team

You’ll find the winners looking at what their sweet spot customers care about. They develop the right content to match their prospects’ intent and answer all their questions accurately (and entertainingly) while promoting that content well off-site. 

The best organic teams attract an unfair share of the right, high intent traffic, balance it with paid budgets, and have successful sales activation efforts to build sustainable pipelines over the longer term. And make it seamless.

Successful B2B SEO is a team sport even though most B2B firms still see it as a standalone discipline designed solely to game the Google algorithm.

And being a team player means you must understand the balance between content and technical experience. A lot of great content goes unrewarded thanks to failing technical or off page experiences. But, no technical tweaks will compensate for low-quality content that fails to answer prospects’ questions well. 

The solution is always bringing it together. Getting out of your silos. Work with the best researchers, writers, developers, strategists, conversion rate optimisation, PR teams and data teams. Get the right traffic. And then galvanize it into action.

The right way to deliver best practice B2B SEO that works is by combining four disciplines into a single approach:

• Search Strategy: Building recommendations based on the ever-changing search landscape, a deep understanding of your brand and proposition, and most importantly, empathy for your clients and potential customers.

• Content Strategy: Producing pieces that can move markets and engage prospects on the right level.

• Technical SEO: Creating digital experiences that meet Google requirements and streamline UX – straight out of the box or tailored to specific needs.

• Off-Site Organic: campaigners who get your programs in front of the right people with the right message to boost E-E-A-T credentials.

Together, these teams work together to deliver the best part of B2B SEO.

The B2B search play 

So it’s not all doom and gloom after all. The organic opportunity is simply becoming more targeted and sophisticated. Just the way we like it.

But nobody said it was going to be easy. You need to excel at the one thing too many organizations just can’t seem to do: collaborate for success.

A great marketing team won’t struggle to see the value of search in meeting the needs of your users. And they’ll be working together to deliver end-to-end marketing solutions based on the experiences that start with an immediate or complicated need being expressed on Google.

And the more niche it becomes, then all the better for us.

Learn how to do B2B SEO the right way.

Jon Miller recently said that the B2B go-to-market playbook is kaput. That’s the same Jon Miller who practically invented that playbook at the dawn of inbound marketing. You know, Marketo and Engagio founder and CMO at Demandbase (and, it just so happens, serial Velocity client). That Jon Miller.

I agree with Jon that most (not all) B2B tech businesses are struggling to meet the pipeline needs of the business and the main reason is that they’ve either neglected performance brand strategy altogether or just found it too hard to mesh with their performance marketing efforts. Data driven branding efforts are like that empty town in westerns, filled with tumbleweed and lack of purpose.

Growth is harder than ever to deliver. Non-marketers – salespeople, senior executives and CFOs – were thrilled a decade ago when marketing claimed to be fully accountable for the money they were spending as a result of the marketing automation and data revolution. The excitement has turned to ashes for many B2B tech firms and CMO tenure is lower than ever. All those crappy eBooks, product-led campaign dross and ‘I just wanted to follow up my email last week’ carpet bombing have alienated most prospects. Few are paying attention.

The penalty of sugar rush

The sugar rush leads dilemma is largely at fault here. In the last decade, sales activation became the new religion. It’s understandable: non-marketing managers expect marketing to deliver on ambitious growth KPIs; the VC and PE tough guys often impose their own one-eyed marketing models centered on driving and converting leads quickly; public markets are obsessed with growth – and if you’re a SaaS company expanding less than 20% you’re a failure; and lead volume and pipeline ambition are the measure of a CMOs virility. 

But an obsession with sales activation strategies frequently bites B2B marketing teams on the backside. Some companies are really good at it, but most are building campaigns with a half-life shorter than popcorn. Initial results may look good, but longer-term, the meal tastes like air and cardboard and you get indigestible matter stuck in your teeth. The high disappears fast, leaving just an empty, hungry feeling that makes you angry and leaves your non-marketing colleagues rolling their eyes. Sales reps in most B2B tech firms ignore up to 70% of leads provided by marketing. Nearly three quarters of the content produced by marketers to power campaigns is never used by sales or read by customers. The result: four fifths of all marketing leads die in most companies’ funnels. 

A logical flaw

The obsession with sales activation has a logical flaw. The idea is that because B2B marketing is a precise science, you can pour content in at the top of the funnel and drive some leads (via programmatic, paid search or social), nurture, leave to simmer and hey presto you’ll generate a bunch of SQLs that you can pass on to sales. 

But some recent work by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute says that only one in twenty of your prospects are in the market to buy at any time. Even my rickety mathematics says that means  95% of potential buyers are not ready to buy. If that’s the case, two things become clear. The first is that you and all your competitors are in a bare knuckle street fight to convert one twentieth of the market. And second, the remaining 95% will probably not respond to hard sell product campaigns no matter how often you hit them over the head. No wonder B2B pipelines are so under pressure. 

Binet & Field have shown conclusively why brand building is so important in B2B.

Sales activation in its purest sense should be all about converting brand preference into immediate purchase responses. Brand building is all about driving brand preference among your best prospects, which in turn reduces their price sensitivity. Brand building, they conclude, is the main driver of long-term growth and profit. Your future pipeline comes from brand building. 

Ty Heath from LinkedIn agrees:

‘Most of your growth potential lies in reaching people who won’t buy from you today, but who will buy from you in future.’

Brand is performance

So, it turns out that brand is performance. Performance brands don’t just win more business, they shape the whole marketplace over many years. 

So if short-term sales activation strategies go together with branding like an electron cleaves to protons and neutrons, why do so few B2B tech firms abandon any thoughts of brand and focus on short-term one-off demand gen campaigns to drum up some MQLs? 

Well, one reason is that most B2B marketers believe that brand is a B2C thing; and it’s true B2C does brand better. We’re purportedly better at long, complex sales cycles, unwieldy buying teams and rational arguments. 

The other is that it’s hard to build a powerful, compelling story and marry that to your content and performance efforts when your team is siloed around a set of disparate disciplines. The evidence that people don’t care about brand is the flood of content effluent produced by the vast majority of B2B firms. This is content produced for content’s sake with very little focus on what’s needed to build relationships with buyers, particularly buyers not ready to buy. Prospects are not reading much of that content. It’s boring, it’s not relevant and its mediocrity signals that they shouldn’t work with this firm. If it’s true that brands struggle to get prospects to read boring, mediocre stuff, why do so many companies continue to produce exactly this? Getting people to engage is what everyone needs to plan to solve.

On top of that there’s a specious belief that B2B buyers don’t care about stories powered by emotion. Actually, B2B buyers are humans first and purchasing directors, CFOs and data analysts second. When B2B marketing makes people feel something as well as think something, that combination is lethal (emotions are intrinsic to brand). 

The I’m a Mac, I’m a PC campaign from Apple that showed Mac users were cool and PC users just weren’t is a classic. We worked with Calm Business to help them promote their app as an employee benefit. By making people happier and healthier, Calm clearly drives business benefits. We chose to focus less on these business benefits and more on an empathetic story: that the best companies don’t use Calm to make money, they do it to help people succeed.

We were evangelizing a new mindset: that the increasing uncertainty in the business world has created a perfect storm of stress that the best employers have recognised and are doing something about. They want to support employees to build the resilience to handle the epidemic of stress. Here’s some (non-designed) creative that drove our work:

Great brands have a distinct point of view about the world that’s based on some core beliefs. If you can express that confidently, people will buy your stuff. 

Galvanizing Story

We talked about Velocity’s approach to B2B Blueprints in the last article. Our blueprints start with what we call a Galvanizing Story which then is tightly integrated with the performance plan. The galvanizing story powers the blueprint and the blueprint powers everything else.

With a galvanizing story, everything – strategy, content, creative, website, channel marketing, sales calls and performance marketing – all have a shared focus. Without a galvanizing story, all of your marketing efforts are higgledy piggeldy, made up of separate tactics often springing from different tactical goals.

The result is marketing that costs too much and doesn’t work as well as it could. The galvanizing story unites all your marketing in one place and – with the blueprint it engenders – drives short-term lead gen success and long-term brand building. A galvanizing story is a narrative that explains why anyone should buy your product, why you brought it to market and why all that matters. 

Our process works for any B2B tech firm, though it’s optimized for ambitious middle-sized companies who want to move fast and who may not have the team that can deliver strategy and performance. We believe brand sits at the heart of all those dashboards and data and go-to-market plans and revenue expectations. Without it, B2B companies are stuck in a one dimensional performance world with diminishing returns. With it, their lead gen works more effectively and they build the future pipelines that deliver growth over the longer-term.

This is the second in a blog series about the new B2B marketing playbook. The first in the series is all about why pipelines are being strangled, organic performance is declining and the cost of paid media is out of control. This second one is about the new B2B marketing blueprint. You can check out the others in the series at the bottom of this piece.

When I recently stumbled upon Jon Miller’s insights on his new B2B Growth Playbook, I found myself nodding in agreement. If you haven’t come across it yet, it’s an insightful framework that challenges the outdated strategies we B2B marketers have relied on to spur growth over the last decade.

Jon’s views struck a chord with me. Not only because his proposed methodology mirrors almost perfectly our approach at Velocity when crafting digital marketing audits and blueprints (more on this later) but also because it echoed a feeling we’ve had for a while with our own clients. Coincidentally, we recently explored this very topic in this blog post.

Something is shifting in the realm of B2B marketing

It’s hard to put your finger on it just yet, but it’s there, quietly brewing beneath the surface. Perhaps it’s the lingering disillusionment with data-driven marketing, once celebrated as the most groundbreaking trend since I started my journey in B2B marketing 15 years ago but now facing scrutiny (”Why are my leads not converting?!”). Or maybe it’s the rapid, mind-boggling, pace at which AI is reshaping our industry. The tech sector’s post-pandemic downturn and apparent recovery add another layer of complexity, contributing to what feels like a perfect storm of change to come. Things are about to get real.

The exact shape of this new digital marketing era is yet to be defined. But one thing is clear: The importance of revisiting the fundamentals that underpin truly exceptional marketing has never been more important.

In a landscape where marketing teams are grappling with cutting-edge concepts like generative AI, new search engines and LLM-driven content personalisation, those who fail to get the basics right will find themselves at a significant disadvantage. Very soon.

For the seasoned digital marketer, the foundations I mention may not seem particularly groundbreaking. However, for those of us deeply immersed in the day-to-day realities of managing B2B marketing audits & campaigns, the nuances between theory and practice are as profound as the gap between your MQL and SQL conversion rate (ouch).

I’m talking about mapping out your baselines to establish your team’s goals and priorities. Aligning those goals with the best channels and KPIs. Effectively running always-on, full-funnel campaigns. Understanding the role of each paid media channel in your GTM strategy. Honing SEO skills. Getting your cost per lead under control. Making that Looker Studio dashboard pull in the right data in real-time so you can go back and optimize what’s underperforming.

These topics are staple chatter around the marketing department’s water cooler or Zoom call. But despite their fundamental nature, they are also often undermined by the complexity of platforms and data sets, bloated tech stacks, poor lead conversion and outdated problems that have lingered for over a decade.

To me, defining the new B2B growth playbook sounds a lot like going back to basics. Meaning, Metrics and Mojo. Being great at the basics. Excelling at the fundamentals to prepare ourselves for the more complex challenges ahead.

So. Let me unpack the practicalities of how we guide clients through this process.

Enter the B2B marketing audit

Our initial step in any digital marketing audit is understanding where we stand. We call this the Audit Phase: Hardcore deep-dive fact-finding. This isn’t just a glance at what brands are up to with their marketing and sales efforts; it’s a thorough examination, season-one True-Detective-style delving deep into the nitty-gritty details of things.

Our approach here is multidisciplinary, diving deep into brand messaging, creative and performance elements. We bring together thoughts and ideas from folks on the client’s side, all backed up by rigorous data analysis which involves scrutinizing SEO metrics, delving into GA4 analytics, exploring HubSpot databases, reviewing past campaign performance and checking out what our competitors are up to.

To streamline this audit process and zero in on the essential details, we create tailored marketing performance questionnaires. These are designed to guide these initial conversations and extract the specific information we need to shape our upcoming strategy. They look like this.

Here are just some example areas we explore at the audit stage:

Moving from data to conclusions

What’s the payoff of this exhaustive audit?

Simply presenting pages upon pages of data and findings would not be particularly useful to anyone. So a crucial task is to distill and rationalize this information, searching for the underlying trends. By the end, once every team expert from each field has pooled their insights, the job is synthesizing all this often disparate data into a coherent whole that can serve a specific purpose.

The result is a comprehensive, practical overview that translates those fragmented data sets and platforms (e.g. your paid media accounts, your website analytics, your CRM or your SEO performance) into insights, questions and hypotheses to build upon with our new strategy.

This process doesn’t just shed light on the current state of affairs and underlying issues. It also sets the stage for us to establish baselines (we are quite particular about our baselines at Velocity) for future performance and develop hypotheses for how to address existing gaps. Take a couple of examples:

• Say this company doesn’t have a paid search campaign live for branded terms, but we can see that they’re in a competitive space, with multiple competitors bidding on their name. This might be a sign to consider building a branded campaign separately, monitoring CTRs from SERPs to see the impact of such a tactic.
• Or maybe the company is suffering from a lead quality issue, where only a small percentage of marketing leads are making it to the later stages of their funnel. This might point us to evaluating different aspects of their lead qualification process, such as their scoring model, lead assignment process or Marketing & Sales alignment.

There are countless other examples of insights and questions that can be uncovered through a digital marketing audit, but the key principle is to establish those connections and patterns between platforms early on. This gives us the raw material to build upon as we craft the plan:

• Why does it matter that your bounce is above 55%? → Let’s dive deeper into page-level analytics to identify which pages are underperforming and why. Should we consider A/B testing different content approaches or refining the user experience to keep visitors engaged longer?
  
• Why should you care that your site visibility is way below your competitors’? → Let’s analyse our competitors’ content more deeply and look into gaps in your approach. How do we increase the quality and relevance of our content or optimize our site structure and backlink profile?
  
• Why are only 2% of our LinkedIn Ads leads making it to the MQL stage of our funnel? → This suggests a disconnect between the ad content and our audience’s expectations. Do we need to review our buyer personas to refine our targeting? Let’s experiment with different ad formats, messaging, and landing pages.

You get the point.

A comment we frequently hear from clients at this point is the immense value of having all information meticulously documented for straightforward reference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, internal teams are quite often in the dark about the activities and insights of their peers in different departments. So having a neutral party like your beloved agency connect these dots and systematically organize those information silos proves to be exceptionally useful.

Drafting the master plan

With a wealth of data in hand and hypotheses ready for exploration, the stage is set for the real ‘heavy lifting’ in this process – writing the plan. Each blueprint at Velocity springs to life under the guidance of a marketing campaign strategist and a team of specialists. The strategist charts the course for the blueprint, in close partnership with a dedicated team of account and project managers whose role is essential in orchestrating the collaboration among individual experts and contributors to the plan.

Here are the essential elements every blueprint should address (if you read Jon Miller’s post at the beginning, you’ll spot the similarities with our process):

1. Context: The campaign brief, shaped by our audit and research phase.
2. Goals and KPIs: Our objectives and the criteria for success.
3. Audience: Our target demographic and their defining characteristics.
4. Creative Platform: The messaging strategy to address audience issues and the necessary content.
5. Channels: Where to engage our audience and the strategy for each tactic.
6. Alignment: Necessary improvements in other areas, like sales and marketing alignment, impacting the campaign.
7. Technical Considerations: Technical adjustments or implementations required.
8. Reporting: The mechanisms to track effectiveness based on defined KPIs.
9. Next Steps and Owners: Clarifying ownership and detailing the next actions for all team members.

The real challenge of any blueprint, and perhaps the most critical aspect, is ensuring cohesion throughout the plan so that every piece of the puzzle, whether that’s aligning web analytics to SEO projections or lead generation goals to the right Paid Media budget, not only fits seamlessly into place but provides value to the whole of the plan.

Why blueprints are the central hub of our strategies

We see campaign blueprints as our go-to-market guidebooks. Think of a blueprint as a detailed manual that compiles all the insights and inputs from various specialists—from creative directors and SEO experts to paid media strategists and analytics pros, creating a cohesive plan everyone signs off and is happy to follow.

It’s like having a roadmap that answers all your questions about the campaign at hand. Need to review the challenges and demographics that define the campaign’s audience? It’s all there, in the blueprint, clear as day. Need the nitty-gritty on our paid media approach, budget and forecast? Look no further–that’s in the blueprint, too. But what about the keywords our writers need for crafting those engaging blog posts? You’ve probably guessed it–they’re all neatly laid out, practically jumping off the page, in the blueprint.

The beauty of a Velocity blueprint lies in its depth. They act as a prism, transforming abstract concepts into a concrete, actionable marketing plan. Without a blueprint, you might find yourself with just a (likely impressive) sketch of ideas that may or may not be ready for execution.

Want to see a Velocity blueprint in action — or maybe orchestrate your own? Follow this link to download your free copy of The Big, Beautiful, B2B Blueprint now.

Dear B2B,

Has it been five years already? How time flies.

I’m going to start with a bit of a confession…

Five years ago I fancied your cousin.

(Stay with me, I promise I’ll bring it around).

In truth, B2C has been eyeing me my whole life. I still can’t turn a corner without seeing them. On every building, down every supermarket aisle, in-between reruns of Friends, after every swipe of my phone…

They were flashy, exciting, vibrant, hopeful, beautiful, clever, funny, happy and burst into my life (even when I didn’t want them to). It was all I knew.

But then I met you.

And I’ll admit, it wasn’t the smoothest of starts:

We didn’t lock gazes longingly across a smoky dive in Paris; I didn’t climb a sparklingly-lit ferris wheel and force you to say yes to a first date (The Notebook is a stupid, stupid film).

No, it started by mistake. And I sort of hated you. Plus, I still fancied your cousin.

Looking back, I wasn’t so attractive myself. A not-so-fresh-faced, hungover know-it-all straight out of an English Literature degree with unfathomable debt unknowingly accumulated.

I had very quickly realized that an in-depth knowledge of Wildeian set design and Spanish cinema weren’t exactly gold dust when it came to getting a real job.

Being turned down from every B2C marketing role I applied for, I stumbled into a B2B agency without really knowing what happened, or what I was doing.

And then, BAM.

TECH. COMPLEXITY. STRESS. AHHHH.

My young mind felt like it only had short gasps of time to wonder what the hell it had gotten itself into.

But then…

Something happened.

You started to grow on me.

Not like a horrible growth. A nice one. A lovely one, in fact.

Because you’re actually really fucking interesting. In a way your cousin just isn’t.

With you, I got challenged every day to learn something outside my comfort zone. Really interesting stuff about some mad technology that makes the world go round.

Our conversations were intricate and nuanced – and I’ll admit that I felt out of my depth at first. But then I got good at explaining the complex things I wanted to say simply, and with a bit of mojo too.

You showed me that to feel truly rewarded, I needed the invitation to explore, grow and understand – only then would my writing truly make me smile.

No shade on your cousin, but they never offered me that.

Being creative with you isn’t about big and broad flamboyant gestures, it‘s about solving puzzles, about telling layered and intricate stories from multiple perspectives that build into industry-sized change.

Speaking not just to the mind, but to the very heart of people’s challenges and aspirations.

If liking that makes me a nerd, shoot me (please don’t).

And then I got to know about the stuff that makes you tick: Performance, SEO, lead generation.

Welp.

At first, the accountability scared me. But you taught me that great creative work is only as good as its results.

Suddenly, I was delving into keywords, user journeys, conversion rate optimization and A/B testing to help experts find and choose your solution for their problem — it was invigorating.

You always wore the trousers in the relationship but I didn’t mind. You demanded not just intelligence but a kind of smart that was adaptive and resourceful.

Your allure isn’t the hot-shit, one-and-done transactions of your cousin, but the meaningful relationships you forge. You’re more than just quick wins or flashy ideas. You’re grounded in the real world, intent on addressing real needs.

No manipulating; just helping smart people solve complex problems and do better work.

WOW.

Sorry, that all came gushing out a little.

Basically, you’re alright. And if I could go back five years and tell past me that it was the OTHER cousin I should be idolizing, I would.

So here’s to ten years, and maybe even twenty (if my series of Spanish-inspired films never takes off).

With love always,

Me x

Subsequent articles will be about setting up demand gen blueprints, the relationship between strategy and performance and SEO.

15 years ago, just after Doug and I founded Velocity, we wrote a piece called the B2B Marketing Manifesto. 

It was written when B2B tech was still dominated by direct sales. But B2B marketing was actually on the cusp of becoming a key part of every company’s revenue engine, of becoming accountable to the rest of the business for the first time. (Before, its job was pretty much limited to being the Sales department’s PowerPoint lackey, deciding what color the logo should be or spending months designing the exhibition stand). The Manifesto was a call to action and a plea for ambition. It prefigured the evolution of B2B marketing and has been downloaded millions of times since publication.

Since then, lots of companies have put their marketing tech stacks to work, driving revenue. But lots haven’t. Often the ones that struggle are the smaller, ambitious companies with limited marketing teams. It’s time to do something about that.

The inbound era: a (very) brief history

The transparency of the Internet encouraged prospects to conduct their own research unencumbered by a vendor’s sales teams. An almost mythical stat emerged that summed up the whole inbound marketing era: buyers apparently spent 67% of their time on independent research before contacting sales. Content marketing exploded and we built our business on the back of it. At Velocity, we likened the shift from sales-led to data-led marketing to the moment in the Wizard of Oz when the film moves from black and white to color. Marketing departments were not in Kansas anymore and we challenged them to respond. 

Back then, the inbound marketing world was linear and sequential: first the marketing happened, then the sales. Marketing’s job was to create ‘leads’, nurture them so they became qualified opportunities that could be handed off to sales reps to close. A bit like a relay race. 

The changing face of B2B marketing

Quite a bit has changed since those days. How customers buy has outrun how most vendors sell. And beyond the companies that are clearly getting their data orchestration right, the majority of B2B marketing departments have little idea whether the right people from the right accounts are interacting at the right time with the things marketing produces. 

At Velocity, we see a lot of companies struggling in critical areas:

• Pipeline meets cliff: They continue to struggle to create enough pipeline. And metrics are generally worsening. Most companies are spending a fortune on their paid channels and the CPL is astronomic, somewhere between terrifyingly bad and catastrophic. Organic performance is in the toilet.
• Sugar-rush or dopamine leads: Teams are set up to measure campaign touches, calling them leads and failing to link those into long-term demand gen outcomes. ‘Leads’ come from a series of unconnected campaigns and are generally rejected by sales teams. You know the sugar rush is bad for you but you don’t know what else to do.
• Talk to the hand: Your sales team is taking chunks of marketing into their own hands, sending more emails than marketing to ‘prospects’ at the top of the funnel using tools like Outreach and other sales prospecting platforms – and they’re not using your expensively produced content at all. They hate the leads you generate. The old ‘we’ll control the top of the funnel and you handle the bottom’ truism is long gone.
• The ancient mariner conundrum: You know: data, data everywhere but not one drop of useful insight driving long-term, robust pipeline. You can’t make sense of your marketing data because it’s so fragmented and contradictory. And you can’t connect it to the journeys your prospects are taking today.

Together these things add up to a low level despondency and collective loss of mojo among senior B2B marketers. Yes, there are lots of companies out there doing a great job, but many have failed significantly to reap the benefits of the accountable marketing world. 

So why is this all happening and what are the implications?

From the work we do with clients, one of the main reasons for this malaise is that, while buyers no longer buy linearly, many B2B firms continue to be set up for a ‘first marketing, then sales’ world.

Sales today is just one channel to customers and probably not even the most important one.  Gartner reckons that only 17% of a prospect’s time is spent interacting directly with sales reps. That’s not 17% with each vendor; it’s 17% of all the time they spend in research regardless of how many vendors are in the process. You may be running the linear marketing and sales relay race but your prospects are competing in a completely different team sport altogether. Closer to a rowing eight, pulling and applying the power together when necessary to win.

Buyers have become channel agnostic. They use all of them – web, paid, social, reps, third parties, email – simultaneously and expect you to be able to orchestrate that effectively. While everyone has become familiar with all the disciplines and tech that make up the modern marketing department, they’ve found it hard to transition towards managing today’s multi-channel information orchestration challenge. (Many have also failed to realize the implications of that for their SEO efforts too, and we’ll write about that in a later article in this series).

Most marketing teams are still siloed, often around disciplines, and produce siloed data that’s hard to connect to other data sources and glean insight from. Marketing teams do not map to modern customer journeys or the number of people that take different roles across problem identification, solution evaluation, from requirements building and selection, from negotiation to post sale value creation.

According to Forbes, tech CMO turnover rates are higher than in any other industry: a CMO in a tech firm is lucky if they last longer than two years in the job. In lots of firms the C-Suite is increasingly disillusioned about the performance of their marketing teams. While marketing is telling the rest of the team it needs a seat at the top table because it’s the company’s growth engine, everyone else is talking about them behind their backs. Increasingly, marketing is seen as a department that promises and costs a lot but nearly always under-delivers.

The new B2B marketing malaise

Marketing departments and their leaders need to shift from their linear, relay race mindset or CMOs will continue to get fired, pipelines will continue to erode and customers will look elsewhere for solutions.

We believe that marketing departments need to think about the B2B opportunity as less like a relay race and more like being in a rowing eight: where sales and marketing really work together rather than roll their eyes once they’ve passed each other in the corridor; and where teams stop making individual channel and marketing disciplines their key KPIs. One reason this is so hard to do is that platform and data complexity gets in the way. Orchestration of different data sets is tough and getting insight isn’t easy. This excuse is weak. At Velocity, we’ve developed a blueprint process that helps clients make the transition to rowing – and we’ll expose that blueprint process in the next few articles in this series.  

The focus for our blueprint process are what we call ambitious, middle-sized tech firms struggling with the pipeline challenge. In the series, we’ll show you how to:

• Map your marketing data to today’s B2B customer journeys. That involves embracing new KPIs and better channel orchestration.
• Use SEO to drive down paid costs and turn organic into a demand gen powerhouse.
• Understand how to use strategy and brand to drive marketing performance.
• Deploy AI to orchestrate all your channels simultaneously.

Read the next article in this series called The Universal Digital Marketing Audit. In it, we’ll show you how to navigate the evolving landscape of B2B marketing, starting with a thorough audit process. This is the first stage of Velocity blueprints, our strategic go-to-market guidebooks.

Spotify Wrapped is one of the biggest marketing success stories in recent history. For a few weeks every year, Spotify’s marketing team grows by tens of millions. 

There are hundreds of posts about how Spotify Wrapped has nailed personalization. But, at Velocity HQ, we see it as a perfect case for the value of data-generative content. 

In a post-cookie world, brands are looking for new ways to learn more about their customers. First-party data is the answer. 

Third-party data is collected — or more realistically, bought — but Spotify earns first-party data (i.e. information collected from their subscribers when they interact with the app). And users, like me, are only too happy to volunteer it. Why? Because we’re completely engaged with what Spotify offers.

But the challenge for B2B brands is: you aren’t Spotify. You haven’t got millions of people voluntarily opening the app on the tube every morning to check what their Daylist says about them. 

That means:

1. People aren’t already voluntarily engaging with your brand: The value exchange for Spotify users is incredibly obvious. You give up your data but you get to listen to the music you love whenever and wherever you want.
   
2. You may not have any real user data to start working with: If you capture any utilization data at all, it’s hard to draw playful personality-quiz conclusions from the way customers use your billing software.

So, what do you have to offer? And what can B2B marketers like you steal from Spotify Wrapped? 

Let’s get into it.

Earning the data you want 

Users are only going to volunteer their data if there’s a clear benefit in doing so. To earn their data, you need to offer them something they want.

Alex Bodman, vice president and global executive creative director at Spotify, reveals what makes Spotify Wrapped feel valuable. He says: “We weren’t just talking about ourselves. We were giving people an interesting way to talk about themselves.”

Comparing yourself to peers is a deeply ingrained human instinct. Spotify Wrapped taps into this instinct and frames it around self-expression and social capital.

The good news is B2B companies deal in something way more tangible: actual capital. You might not have the brand pull of Spotify, but your customers would be fascinated to learn how they’re performing relative to their peers (and crucially, what they could do to improve). 

The thing B2B companies can steal from Spotify Wrapped is to build an experience that triggers the same social comparison instinct, but leverages it towards a commercial outcome.

We regularly build experiences like that for clients. We call them graders. 

Let’s take a look at one up close.

Why graders are a killer value exchange

A grader is a short survey that asks users 8-12 questions about their performance or behaviors in a certain area.

They earn fantastic first-party data for clients because they represent a very compelling value exchange for users:

• Users get a dynamic report that scores their performance – both on its own terms and against industry benchmarks – as well as tailored advice and follow-up recommendations
  
• Clients get a variety of insights (tied to a real prospect) far richer than the traditional demographic information of a form (or anonymized third-party cookies)

We recently made a grader for a client that sells automation software to independent healthcare providers. It’s a noisy market, and many prospects have already been burned by clunky, practice management solutions that overpromise and underdeliver. 

The client wanted to cut through the noise with an experience that demonstrated a provable link between practice automation and overall efficiency and performance. 

It’s an interesting idea by itself — but to really dial up the FOMO (and activate the social comparison instinct) we paired it with a competitive benchmark. 

We sent a sample survey to a few hundred respondents and built up a bank of lookalike data to provide users with a mechanism to compare their performance against the market.

Suddenly the whole thing looks like a party in motion — users are far more likely to answer 10 questions about themselves if there’s the promise of some competitive insight at the other end.

(There’s an obvious drawback with this approach: it costs money to build up quality benchmark data. But earning data should cost you something – if it doesn’t, it’s probably a good sign the value exchange isn’t real).

Say hello to data generative content 

For years marketers have treated personal data as the cost of entry for content and experiences that users are (at best) passingly interested in.

Graders are different. Instead of treating personal data as a commodity, they treat it as a source of information, and promise to enlighten users with new insights about themselves.

When the value exchange is self-evident, the marketing defense barriers fall. You can smuggle one or two carefully worded questions into the survey to capture sales insights that would set off deafening alarm bells in a traditional form. 

Things like:

• What are your top priorities this year?
• What’s your software budget?
• How far through your upgrade cycle are you?
• Who’s involved in technology buying decisions in your team?

The best graders are data generative — instead of giving Sales a list of “MQLs” (i.e. people who begrudgingly parted with their email address to access an underwhelming ebook), you can pass them a list of piping hot leads with tailored talking points sent straight to the CRM (and disqualify the people who aren’t a good fit).

Some parting advice

The last few years have spawned dozens of Spotify Wrapped copycats (from companies like YouTube, Apple, Reddit and Steam). 

And none of them succeed in the same way — because they’ve stolen the format (i.e. a utilization report) instead of the substance (here’s why that makes you unique). 

Spotify Wrapped succeeds because it’s not about Spotify. It’s about users. And if there’s anything for B2B marketers to steal, maybe it’s that in a post-cookie world, the only way you’ll learn anything about your customers is through experiences that directly serve them.

That’s what data generative experiences like graders are designed to do: create a path to first-party data that earns the information it asks for (and delivers much richer insights as a result).

Want to introduce more data generative data experiences in your brand? Get in touch.

It was strange to read in Bloomberg and the Financial Times that 2023 wasn’t a good year for mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

Because personally, we helped out with a ton of them last year. And we’re expecting more to come – Datasite’s Mark Williams said M&A is “poised for a resurgence in 2024” in this article for Nasdaq. 

Roll-up positionings are gnarly – particularly for marketers. Because if (though often when) the shit hits the fan during M&A, it’s up to marketers to scrape it off the walls and make sense of it all.

And with roll-up positioning that’s a particularly messy activity. Because, like all positioning projects, a company roll-up requires you to find a single unifying positioning story and brand to take to market. But how do you…

• Find the ‘real heart’ of a newly formed entity?
• Stop your unified story getting watered-down to the point of failure as it garners feedback from multiple stakeholders?
• Avoid becoming the referee of a company culture cage-fight between those stakeholders?
• Create something that genuinely excites the market and the newly formed business (so they’ll actually use it)?

In this blog we explore four steps to help you scale these obstacles.

But before we jump in, it’s worth noting that a company roll-up can take many forms: the cannibalisation of one product to strengthen another, or the hoovering up of a lot of small businesses to streamline operations etc. 

For this blog post, we’re focusing on the “category leader play”. This is when private equity investors bring together multiple smaller (but promising) businesses with complementary capabilities — in order to create a full-service business that owns the space.  

OK, let’s dive in.

Step one: Lay the foundations

A roll-up is a unique beast with unique positioning challenges.

Whilst you should stick to your usual positioning methods and principles, to accommodate these idiosyncrasies, you’ll need to adapt your approach in some key areas. 

First you’ll need to create a decision-making group.

The biggest risk to a roll-up positioning is a lack of clear hierarchy. 

M&A processes are scary. You’ll have a wide group of stakeholders who want to know what’s going on. Partly because they care about the project, and partly because proximity to these decisions can feel like job security.

It’s a charged situation with a lot of opinions flying around. This makes it vital to set expectations around who will be involved in the decision-making. 

Doing this won’t eradicate tension entirely. The tough calls and difficult “No’s” you’re going to deliver mean there’s going to be friction at times. But setting expectations will settle a lot of minds – and stop you from diluting your message by trying to please everyone. 

A good decision-making unit is a small and focused group which includes representatives from each of the businesses in the merger. All too often, a roll-up will be attempted by working with a ‘focus group’ of people who ultimately have no authority when it comes to the direction. Then the work hits the big wigs and everything shuts down. 

Don’t fall into this trap. 

Make sure your decision-making unit is an empowered group of the representatives we mentioned above. This unit will be responsible for reassuring the wider stakeholder group that they’ll be listened to — but also for making it clear who gets the final say. 

You’ll also need to hold on tight to your authority.

Roll-ups aren’t purely a marketing exercise. But they should be a marketing-led exercise. 

Because despite the all-encompassing change that roll-ups imply (across your strategy, offering, sales processes, business operations, org chart, customer relationships and more) it ultimately falls to marketing to synthesize all that change into clarity – both for the (new) business and for the market. 

The trouble is that in a crisis, everyone becomes a marketing expert. You need to advocate for your own expertise in order not to get sidelined in the fray – as a passive bystander to the process, rather than as a strategic advisor.

It’s also important you know that the marketer or agency team can’t be the sole decision-making unit either. Why? Because you’ll fail to get the level of buy-in necessary for the new positioning to work. 

And finally, you’ll need to adapt your timelines.

This may seem simple — but you’re going to have way more conversations and opinions to consider than with a ‘normal’ positioning. So plan accordingly. Failing to understand this and its cost ramifications can quickly sour the process.

Step two: Set direction

Once the decision-making unit has been established, it’s time to start making actual decisions. 

The first part of that is finding your why.

Any positioning process is ultimately about articulating what a business does, why it’s important, and why this business’ solution is the right one.Then you’ve got to lay that out in a compelling narrative structure. At Velocity we call this the Galvanizing Story. 

But with roll-up positioning, you’ll first need to get everyone on board with the ‘why’ of the merger itself. 

• Why did the Private Equity (PE) investors bring the brands together? Because you share a customer base? Because your offerings are complementary? 
• What’s the potential gain here? 
• What’s the risk? 
• How do all of the above translate into a story that’s more than just market share?

This’s not only going to help you create a compelling angle for your outward marketing, it’s also going to help you galvanize internal folks around the project too.

Once again, it’s not an easy process. 

The next thing on your list is to gauge the appetite for change.

This is a vital stage, where you as a marketer need to get the answers to a couple of big questions:

Are the stakeholders ready to push for a transformative and bold story that will let them own the category (as most PE folks will want them to)? 

Or are they really looking for a light-touch narrative thread to wrap around the stories they already have (because the imperative is to not spook the major customers their business models are built around)? 
Knowing this before you get into actual positioning work will allow you to understand the task ahead – and save you a lot of uphill-idea-pushing later.

Step three: Setting expectations

Just as you’re having to adjust your process as a marketer, so will the businesses you’re working with — and it’ll be your responsibility to explain that. 

The first part of that is explaining there’s no silver bullet.

There’s no one story, one new brand name, one new tagline that will unite everyone. As our CEO puts it, “there are no great names, only great companies.”

Which means people outside of the decision-making unit need to know they’ll be asked for validation, not permission. 

At times, that might mean changing the conversation from whether or not people like it or not, to whether it works in achieving the goals we want it to.

The next bit is communicating that you can’t include everything. 

This means you can’t give every key feature of all the multiple products you’re synthesizing equal priority. 

This is not about creating a Swiss Army Knife positioning. It’s about finding the sharpest, most compelling throughline. In fact, roll-up positionings are a great opportunity for simplification — to jettison parts of the story or the offer that are old, unclear, or underperforming.

You’ll also need to get everyone on board with the idea that customer input will be vital for this to work. 

Customer input is important in any positioning process — but with a roll-up it’s absolutely fundamental. 

This is where you can reveal the kinds of common obstacles, needs, wants, and hopes that will unite the disparate offerings you’re trying to bring together. 

Finally, you need to set expectations that this is a journey. 

Roll-ups are complex and multi-faceted and you won’t nail every element of it in the first push. 

Finding an authentic, compelling, and outside-in angle that connects the newly-merged businesses — requires iteration. You need to explain that to everyone involved and make sure they get it. 

Of course you can reassure them that the end result will be a shared story they can circle their wagons around. But make sure all sides know that something this complex doesn’t just happen overnight.

Step four: Push the envelope 

Here’s where the hardest and most fun bit starts — forging the new positioning. 

The reasons it’s fun are clear (breaking new ground, getting creative etc.) but it’s also where it gets very difficult because you’ll need to hold your nerve as tightly as you can. 

Put your hierarchy to work.

If you want to create the kind of story that’s bold enough to genuinely say something new, stand out, own a category, and inspire customers — you’re going to have to make some tough calls. 

At this stage of the process, that often means reiterating and reaffirming the decision-making hierarchy you laid out at the beginning. And your position as the strategic advisor. 

If you don’t, you’ll lose your authority here and could end up with:

• A story that delights and offends no one — because it’s had all its sharp edges taken out through a slow process of blandification (AKA wave after wave of notes). 
• A story is choked with complexity because it’s an amalgam of every idea from every stakeholder. 

As a wise man once said: “a camel is a horse decided by committee.” 

Next, you’re going to have to stick to your guns.

With a roll-up positioning you’re going beyond what people know — because this is new — and that’s going to challenge them at times. But it’s vital that you stay the course and keep the goal in mind (even when that gets tough). Because otherwise you can easily end up with a roll-up positioning that’s the one thing it should never be — a mish-mash of pre-existing marketing components. 

Marketing is at its best when it simplifies and inspires — so be brave, guide your stakeholders to that realization, and be really wary of letting legacy or heritage strangle new ideas. 

Some moves you can make here to help this process:

• Romance the problem:  Identify a unified issue that the customer-base is struggling with — name it — and find a compelling angle for why this is such a big problem for the market (whether they know about it or not).
• Name the solution: Once you have identified a new obstacle — find your unique solution to that problem. What is the antidote to the issues you’ve created?
• Create a category: In some situations, you can name an entirely new category within your market and own that.

At this point of the process, lean on your customers. 

Once you start naming things, you’re going to get stakeholder pushback. 

But if you can validate your choices with customer input, you’ll be able to show two things. 

1. That your new story is not only grounded in research.
2. That it’s made up of elements that exist in the market already…ones that are waiting to be named.

Another perhaps unexpected source of reinforcement will come from the Private Equity folks. These are often the people leading the charge for something new, dynamic, and bold. 

In many cases, they don’t have the sentimental attachment to legacy marketing – which means you can use their input to help you push the envelope.

Finally, be bold and set a target for launch. 

Once there is a date set, you have a target. 

This will help you keep momentum. If the process is open ended, stakeholders are more inclined to believe that the silver bullet does exist – and that you just haven’t looked hard enough yet. 

So you’ll need to strike the balance. Fast enough to stop doubt creeping in. Slow enough to avoid spooking stakeholders.

And that’s it. 

Roll-up positionings are gnarly (but rewarding) processes, full of tricky decisions. 

If you want yours to succeed, it’s vital that you start off by creating a clear hierarchy for how those decisions will be made. That you find the why for the roll-up itself. And that you get everyone onboard with the fact that it’s a journey. 

Remember, you as a marketer need to ensure the process is seen as a marketing exercise and protect your authority as the expert in the room. That’s the key to creating a story that really knocks down doors. One that genuinely gets your brand remembered and allows you to own a category.  

As author Patrick Ness puts it… ‘Stories are wild creatures… When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?’

Most ABM campaigns are too narrow. Not in their focus, but in their ambition. 

Let me explain.

If you have an ABM strategy, I’d bet my last stinkin’ dollar you made it in one of two ways. You either:

• Adapted your core story, messaging and tactics for a narrower Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Or you:

• Made up new messaging and tactics for a narrower ICP – totally distinct from your core story.

Both approaches make the same mistake – they treat ABM as a second-class citizen – either as an entirely separate discipline or as an isolated offshoot from your everyday marketing activities.

The trouble is, when you treat ABM like an add-on to your existing marketing, you tacitly base your entire marketing strategy around people less likely to buy from you.

Conversely, when you flip the script and treat ABM as your foundation, your best-fit customers become your baseline, instead of the exception. Every decision you make (about focus, budget, campaigns, metrics etc.) is optimized for the people defined in your Ideal Customer Profile.

You can obviously adapt your approach for segments outside of that group – but this perspective makes your best prospects your default focus. (It seems crazy most companies do things the other way around, doesn’t it?) 

This approach yields better engagement for less spend, with more sustainable results. Let’s explore it up close to see how you can put ABM-thinking at the heart of all your marketing.

Stop wasting your marketing budget

When ABM is an add-on instead of your baseline, your everyday marketing activity — i.e. the stuff you spend most of your money on — isn’t built for your best prospects. 

Think about what a crazy double whammy that results in. 

Not only are you plowing serious bucks into crafting content and ads to woo people who — for the most part — don’t give a shit about you. You’re also strangling funding to your best prospects. 

We get it, you have to build demand. But budgets aren’t getting bigger. And when both ABM and everyday marketing activities demand time and funding, isn’t it better to prioritize your best-fitting personas first? To spend those precious Benjamins reaching out to the people most ready to buy your stuff, rather than convincing a less interested group?

Obviously, yes. The only caveat is that your ABM machine has to be working effectively.

Why most ABM campaigns fail

The truth is, typical ABM campaigns fail more than they succeed. And that failure almost always boils down to a lack of research about what the right accounts should look like. 

The Cs in most default ICPs aren’t well defined enough, so accounts deemed ‘best fits’ aren’t that at all. And that happens because of the following prejudices:

• Existing commercial relationships
  Long-standing client relationships aren’t a bad thing. But using them as the muse for qualifying your ICP, just because you’ve done business with them previously, or go for coffee with their CMO, doesn’t mean they should be the centerpiece of your ABM strategy going forward. 
• Hand-me-down-sales-lists
  This is especially relevant for marketing teams who’ve just started in a new organization. So-and-so-from-sales was working on your now mothballed list of prospects before they left (two years ago). It went to their sales partner, who forwarded it to your marketing team, who now use it as a ready-made list of ABM targets without having scrutinized who’s on it, or why.
  
• The brand is famous 
  Marketers use ABM campaigns to hunt down brands they like the look of, simply because they’re famous (‘but it’s so-and-so!’), despite the fact they might have only a tangential connection with their market (a project management SaaS tool going after a Fintech provider, say).

When you default to qualifying your ICP based on any of these examples, you miss out on the true substance that makes an organization a good fit for your business. Which brings us to…

Sharpening your ICP

Effective ABM campaigns start with you figuring out who your real VIP accounts are. That means getting your hands dirty with some research about what truly connects your greatest opportunities. 

Choose attributes carefully here – it’s no good creating an ICP that’s perfect on paper but doesn’t exist in the real world. 

Don’t just think about the customers that’ve spent the most money with you in the last few years. Think about the mix of hard and soft factors that lead to your best relationships:

Firmographics

Think carefully about the characteristics of the companies most likely to benefit from your services. Nailing down things like size, industry, revenue and location will help you trim a lot of fat.

Growth potential

You can view this in two dimensions: their growth, and yours. For instance, are they likely to spend more with you as they grow? Are they in a booming industry? Or conversely, will they use key features that support your product strategy? Do they have complementary elements in their tech stack that tend to unlock more value from your solution?

Decision makers and gatekeepers

Who holds the purse strings? Who wields indirect buying influence? Account for everyone and treat them accordingly. 

Once you’ve thrashed out your thinking on each of the above, your ICP will be a much better reflection of the companies you do your best business with. Maybe you’re a startup providing SaaS-based B2B cloud data security. In which case your ICP might include something like:

• A B2B SaaS buyer in Western Europe with a DevOps team of 8+ people led by one, clear decision maker; with an ARR of $25M – $30M, and a customer base of SMBs.

Or maybe you’re an enterprise-sized specialist widget manufacturer. In which case your ICP might include something like: 

• An enterprise-size player in the automotive industry with a budget of $500M and an insatiable hunger for specialist widget design, led by a buying committee of executive sponsor, department head and procurement team.

Psychographics

Relatedly, are your best buyers confident and growth-focused? Are they early adopters with a challenger mindset? Are they proof-oriented and risk averse? What do they believe? How much value do they place in your solution? 

You won’t always have the answers to these questions when assessing new business – but if you know that, say, a new opportunity views your solution as transactional rather than strategic, you shouldn’t waste time treating them like an ideal customer. 

Behavioral data

A good way to know whether customers might like the cut of your jib is to see how they engage with brands similar to yours. Are they looking for solutions like yours? Are they showing up on adjacent webinars?

Pain points and challenges

An obvious one, but often the victim of assumptions. If you’ve established they’re a growing business that’s looking to scale — think about all the reasons why it might be hard to scale with existing systems: 

• Are they using a competitor with a known deficiency? 
• Are they struggling against an industry-wide skills shortage?
• Are they juggling too many software applications and struggling to integrate them as a result?
  

Reverse engineer your ICP for broader success

Now here’s the juice…

Once you’ve whipped your ICP into the shape of its life, the story you build around it should become the North Star for everything else your marketing team puts out.

This approach puts an ABM lens at the core of your marketing decisions. The further you are from that core, the colder your prospects become – so you’ll need to figure out how your story adapts to more generalized audiences.

This isn’t a silver bullet. But it’s a neat way to get the most bang from your marketing bucks. So, to recap:

1. Quit isolating your ABM efforts
2. Spend time checking that they’re based on the right ICPs for your business
3. Use that ICP to inform your entire marketing strategy
4. Achieve better, more sustainable results, for less effort

So let’s say, hypothetically of course, that it’s late 2023, your revenue is down and there’s mounting pressure on you to increase sales. Just, y’know, for instance. 

For complex B2B businesses, one common move is to try and make it easier for customers to buy by simplifying your offering.

But if (like so many B2B companies) you offer a mix of platform and point solutions, this problem quickly gets really hard to solve really fast. Do you consolidate? Re-prioritize? Simplify?

Every move is a double-edged sword. 

• Consolidate and you risk over-bundling beyond the market’s appetite or budget

• Re-prioritize and you risk backing the wrong horse and alienating your best customers

• Oversimplify and you risk losing your mojo and actually lengthening your sales cycle

In our experience, simplification is often the shortest route to giving buyers clarity that actually accelerates sales. But it’s also the hardest to pull off — you need one clear story that wraps its arms around your platform and your point solutions and signals to customers: “the problem we solve is real, clearly defined, and we’re experts in it.”

It’s also cheaper and easier to market platforms and products within one narrative thrust than to tell a bunch of different stories on different fronts. In the same way it’s easier to serve one big client than it is ten small ones.

This blog outlines what can go wrong when companies with multiple offerings try to simplify — and then how you can get it right. Let’s go.

1. When simplification gets boring

The first thing you might want to do when consolidating your messaging is to find the common denominator that links your platform and point solutions together.

But this common denominator often risks being very over-generalized.

Say you are a company who primarily sells a CRM platform, but also has a cybersecurity module. One common denominator might be: “Streamline Operations with Maximum Efficiency.”

Sure, it sounds promising, but it’s extremely generic. It doesn’t touch upon the personalized customer management benefits of the CRM or the robust security features of the cybersecurity software. So you end up spreading all your services too thin.

Platforms and point solutions work at different altitudes. A platform is something that you build on to create a bespoke foundation, whereas point solutions are pre-made pieces of software made for specific purposes.

It’s really hard to tell one story that delivers at both altitudes without sacrificing the nuance that signals credibility, expertise and experience in the different problems you solve.

If the thing that your platform and point solutions have in common isn’t specific enough to each customer’s unique problems, any story you try to tell around it will probably be bland and unrelatable, flattening out all your best bits.

If your offering is complex, you might serve your customers (and your business) more effectively by leaning into that complexity.

2. When simplification sacrifices relevance to your ideal customers

It can be natural to lean your unifying story towards either your platform or point solutions in the name of simplicity. But both choices inevitably alienate the other half of your customer base. 

Lean too hard towards your point solution use cases and you risk losing the platform champions that can turn into long-lasting and profitable relationships.

But if you lean too heavily on your platform as the big sell, it may put off larger companies looking for use-case based point solutions to fix specific problems. 

Imagine you sell financial planning software that has a separate (and really popular) project management module. You might find yourself naturally angling your story to show your project management chops, and unintentionally deposition yourself as a financial platform.

But if you double down on a story for the hardcore finance audience to find high-revenue customers, it could torpedo your project management module awareness. Poof — there go your PM buyers.

Simplifying doesn’t mean picking one thing over another. It might mean creating a new thing that reframes what you do under a different umbrella.

3. When simplification slows your sales cycle

If your unifying story is too simplified, you’ll end up attracting the wrong kind of leads.

It’s like hanging up a big sign that says “We Solve Your Problems”. Prospects will wander into the wrong shop by mistake — meaning you’ll waste valuable sales time working out whether they are in the market for your solutions, and they’ll be frustrated at your lack of specificity.

The art to unifying your story without alienating anyone:

Despite its complexities, B2B decision-making is just as emotional as in B2C. A good unified story doesn’t just bring coherence to your platform and point solutions – it builds trust and confidence by signaling broader domain expertise that individual solution providers can’t match. 

And this confidence counts for double right now.

When markets are up and customers are eagerly spending, a slightly dispersed narrative might go unnoticed – clients will navigate their way to your offerings. 

However, in challenging times, it’s vital to concentrate your offering around a clear and pressing problem that customers are poised to invest in solving. And herein lies the true essence of unification – matching the right kind of urgency for the  present context.

Here’s how to find that relevance and craft a story that’s truly compelling:

1. Find something that both your audiences want. Focus on what both sets of your audiences want and need urgently. This is the foundation of your narrative — a mutual pain point or aspiration that resonates across your audience spectrum.
2. Introduce a fresh spin. Create a distinct angle or perspective that not only differentiates your solutions but invites a crystal-clear choice between your platform and products.
3. Highlight your unique outcomes. Move away from generic promises like “Boost revenue.” Instead, underscore the results that only YOU can bring about. So rather than stating “Sell more in every channel”, a more tailored promise could be “Personalize each touchpoint for optimized revenue across all channels.”
4. Signpost your target audience. It’s essential to signal who your solution is meant for — and who it isn’t. By stating something like “Achieve personalized interactions, whether you operate with a CRM or not”, you’re clearly indicating the broad range of businesses you cater to, while subtly segmenting your audience.

Ultimately, your narrative should be sharply focused on present-day needs, uniquely anchored to what only your brand can offer, and explicitly tailored for a specified audience. 

When done effectively, it doesn’t just resonate; it assures prospects of the value they’ll receive in exchange for their attention and investment.

The next step: Segmenting your audiences smoothly

If your unifying message is the first thing your customers see, the second thing should be a fork in the road – between your platform and your point solutions.

Both kinds of buyer need different things – and the sooner you can send them on a journey built to serve their specific needs, the better.

Point solutions buyers:

Larger enterprises looking for point solutions usually want to know upfront whether you integrate with their tech stack, whether you solve their specific pain point and whether they can purchase your solution separately to your platform.

So you should guide these customers to use cases, tech specs and demos for relevant point solutions.

Platform buyers:

Companies looking for a whole platform need a more considered buying journey. Committing to a platform is a big, risky and time-consuming investment — and one they don’t want to have to do again in a few years.

They need to know you’re going to keep innovating, continue to support and expand the integrations you offer, and help them stay agile for whatever comes next.

Your job is to convince them that the vision of your company aligns with these needs. The sales process will be longer, more consultative and include more stakeholders across areas like procurement, IT, executive sponsors, and more.

Putting it all together

So you’ve figured out the unifying story that houses your platform and point solutions, and mapped out the individual user journeys for each kind of buyer. How does it all fit together?

The simplest way is to lead with your unifying story on your homepage and present users with a choice to self-select down a platform path and a point solution path. 

This can be as straightforward as laying the options out in front of them. For example, an option if they want to “Build their foundation from scratch” or to “Add value to your existing foundation”.

Here’ are two examples:

Fig. 1 – For Plinc, a customer data marketing platform with a bunch of cool add-on solutions.

Fig. 2 – For CID, a software development company with a popular asset and wealth management arm.

If you’re feeling more ambitious, you could also do this through creative brand awareness content.

Like when our client Salesforce needed to create two stories – one for prospects that already had a CRM platform and one for prospects who didn’t.

Prospects with a platform needed a story about Salesforce’s many add-on solutions (and we could maybe sell them the whole platform once they’d bought in.)

Prospects without a platform needed a story about the importance of having a CRM in the first place.

To segment the right prospect into the right journey, we created one of our favorite things — a grader.

Graders are survey-like experiences that benchmark users against a metric they care about (and earn a shitload of sales insights and first party data in the process). They’re great because you can also use the answers to inform future content (like “Only 24% of CMOs are happy with their average lead quality”).

In this instance, we asked leads about their CRM maturity, and recommended different next steps depending on their answers, which included recommended content and email nurture campaigns.

It was crucial to keep these journeys separate. If a lead who already has a CRM gets an email promoting content about the importance of having a CRM, at best it confuses them, but it’s much more likely to alienate them from your offering – and make them decide you’re not for them.

So, do you need a unifying story?

When the going gets tough and you urgently need more revenue it’s tempting to consolidate and simplify.

But simplification is nuanced – and the more complex your offering, the harder it is. It’s certainly not a guaranteed path to speed up the sales cycle. So before you make any sudden moves, ask yourself:

Some of the highest-impact disruptors in the last few decades haven’t really been technology innovations. They’ve been business model innovations.

Think about it: Uber, Airbnb, Peloton, Netflix, Salesforce. Did they actually invent any new tech that didn’t already exist?

We already had smartphones, apps, maps, GPS, messaging, booking, ratings/reviews, CRM and content merchandising software. And we already had taxis and hotels and movies and bicycles.

Uber, Airnbnb (et al) just combined them into new businesses. Into new kinds of businesses.

So marketing these new things wasn’t just about selling a cool way to get around town or discover places to stay—it was about evangelizing the new model. The new way to create value (and make money).

The brief is clear: once prospects understand the new model, they get the essence of the brand narrative. So laser-focusing on that job is the thing to do.

Brands whose disruption is based on business model innovation benefit from some powerful advantages—and a few pitfalls too. If your company has a new model (not just new products or services), it really pays to understand the marketing implications. First, the pretty big upside:

The New Model dividends

If you’re a business model innovator, you’ve got some real advantages:

A curiosity-arouser

To a lot of people (like me), new models are inherently interesting. They make people slow down and ask, “What’s going on here? What are these guys doing differently?”. Yes, a tech breakthrough can give you a similar effect but new tech claims are over-claimed, noisy and bullshit-bound (The Boswellox Barrier). New models are pretty transparent: you can see what’s new about it or you can’t.

Source of value that no one else has

New models unlock new value. That’s the whole point. And it’s often value that other companies can’t get to—their old models don’t let them. In tech, that kind of ‘moat’ is rare. You’d be crazy not to jump in and swim around.

A built-in reason to believe your claims

Most marketing just throws their benefits in people’s faces—as if simply claiming them was somehow proving them. A new business model is a reason to believe all those great benefits.

Once people get your new model, they can see how you’re able to deliver the new value. Having a clear ‘how’ makes claims way more credible. (“They’re cheaper than cabs because they exploit the fuck out of drivers! Where do I sign?”).

A new competitive frame

This one is huge. If people get that this is a new model, and they understand it, you’re on a very short shortlist (a list that may only have one vendor on it). And, even if there are other vendors with a similar model, the brand that educates them on it usually moves to the top of that shortlist.

But if they don‘t get that you have a new model—or don’t understand it—you’ll be compared to all the wrong vendors, using yardsticks that are unfavourable to you.

The New Model penalties

Having a new business model isn’t all roses and… cream cheese. There’s a downside too:

An education challenge

New models can be hard to understand. The boxes that already exist in people’s minds have labels on them, like “Bagel Shop” or “Supply Chain Management Software”.

To sell your Home Bagel Kit Subscription or Supply Chain Management Blockchain, you need to show them what you’re not before you can show them how you’re different. That’s an extra layer of work for you and your prospects. (The alternative, though—trying to sell advantages without a ‘how’ attached—is even more work).

A budgeting challenge

New models often need to seek new budgets and different buying teams in an organisation. Sometimes that works in your favour (when you can skip around a blocking stakeholder type); but it can also slow down buying cycles and make you over-dependent on finding motivated champions with capes and, like, Change Management as a superpower.

A perceived risk challenge

In buying journeys, every Unknown triggers a whole cluster of anxieties. A new business model could awaken the neurotics, skeptics and cynics in every company—the folks who are 100% sure that the new model is flawed and will fail (“CRM in the Cloud? Yeah right. Security much?”). They’re hard to argue with because the model is new (also because they’re jerks).

Cool examples of B2B business model innovation

Not sure why, but we’ve had a lot of clients whose differentiation comes down to a new business model. A few examples:

Paddle isn’t just a payments platform, it’s a Merchant of Record

We love Paddle, the fast-growing innovator taking on the payments giants by thinking different(ly).

Instead of just giving their SaaS company customers some software to help them sell globally, they become the Merchant of Record. They’ve already tax-registered in a bunch of countries and they understand the compliance regimes—so Paddle customers can just say “Let us sell in Latvia, please” and it’s done.

The MoR model creates the advantages.

Spreetail isn’t a warehouse or agency play, it’s an Ecommerce Marketplace Partner.

Spreetail is SUCH a great story and the awesomest company you never heard of. Instead of just helping manufacturers sell their products on Amazon, they BUY THE PRODUCTS IN BULK, put them in their own warehouses, then optimise them for sale them across 15+ e-marketplaces (like Amazon, Walmart, Target…). So you can be a Prime retailer on Amazon (with one- or two-day delivery) without having to warehouse yourself.

There’s a hundred other things to admire about Spreetail but the innovative model is the killer. So they lead with it in their marketing. The home page’s main job is to explain the model. Once you get that, you want it.

Deazy isn’t a freelance marketplace, it’s a… whole new thing.

Deazy is a great UK success story that’s changing the way companies overcome one of the biggest obstacles to growth: finding the right tech talent.

They’re not a freelance marketplace. They’re not an agency or consultant. They’re not recruiters. Instead, they’ve built deep relationships with over 85 nearshore delivery partners packed with talent. And they manage their engagements actively instead of just plugging bodies in and running away. That simple difference—working with partner companies, not freelancers—leads to a whole raft of advantages.

BetterUp isn’t just a coaching app, it’s a Human Transformation Platform™

BetterUp is a brilliant, creative, ambitious company with a whole new way of helping companies create high-performance cultures. If buyers just think of it as an app or a health benefits provider, they miss the point. The point is the model: a combination of assessment, coaching, content, services and consulting that all works together to create value.

How to market your unique model

In our work with B2B model-innovators, we’ve learned stuff. Hope these help:

Name your model

Before you can explain your unique model, you need buyers to know that you have one. Using generic language does not make that any easier. So name the model, then define it. If a name already exists for your model, use that name but tell people how it’s optimised for them—Paddle didn’t invent the Merchant of Record model, but they were the first to bring it to the SaaS payments world. They chose to keep that name—Merchant of Record—and explain why it’s such a cool thing for SaaS payments.

Explain how your model is different

Remember: if buyers get your model, they get how you’re different. So make it as simple as possible to understand. Dedicate a page on your website to defining and explaining the model and its advantages.

Play with metaphors

Even new models are rarely completely new. They’re often ported over from some other category. Metaphors can help buyers get there faster. So you might be “The Netflix of Skin Disease Content” (hope not). Or “The iPhone of Zimmer Frames” (I’m in). Make sure the metaphor works though. Nobody wants “The Uber of Potatoes”.

Connect your new model directly to buyer benefits

Different is cool. But better is better. Make it super-clear how your model does things for buyers that no one else can do. For Paddle, it’s, “We’re already set up in Latvia so you can start selling there in minutes.” (As you build bridges between aspects of your new model and the things buyers want, the killer word to use is “so”).

Keep explaining and evangelising the model

Do it in content, ebooks, videos, white papers, blog posts, emails, TikTok dances… Do it till you’re blue in the face, then do it more. Give talks on it. Do webinars. Crash panels at conferences. Teach executives to talk the talk. Cram the “Our Model” story down the throats of the sales team.

Pick off key stakeholders and explain the model to them

Your model might bring the Blockers out of the woodwork. Target them specifically and address their concerns. Like Paddle does in this Merchant of Record: A Guide for CFOs.

Answer all their questions before they ask them

New models will always trigger lots of questions. You know exactly what these questions are, so answer them in advance. By all means, bust out the FAQs, but you also need to get your answers in people’s faces throughout the buying journey. And drive people to your question-preempting content.

Use customer stories early and often

Few buyers want to be the lab rat for some founder’s business school dissertation. Even the earliest of adopters will want to see you’ve done this before—for companies a lot like theirs—and it worked. If it really is your first rodeo, you’d better have really shiny boots and a big-ass hat. If it isn’t, squeeze your current customers till they sing their ROI song.

Play to your strengths, people!

Sometimes we meet companies with unique business models who are kind of hiding from it. They fear that it’s too much to explain. Too ‘in the weeds’. Or that no one will care.

That’s a shame, because a new business model can be just as powerful as a patented technology advantage—maybe more so. The key is to dig down to the WHY, then trace all the ways that the new model leads to new value for buyers.

Name the new approach. Define what makes it different. Explain why that’s better for customers. Prove it with case stories and data and stuff.

When you do, you’ll be playing your best card instead of bluffing.

Speaking to subject matter experts is one of the toughest parts of being a B2B marketer. My (unsubstantiated) theory is that it really comes down to a deep seated fear that you don’t have “a real adult job”. And now, you’re forced to face someone who actually does. Someone who’s good at math or physics or whatever else made you feel intellectually inferior in 8th grade. 

Unfortunately, speaking to someone with 15+ years in traffic management or B2B telecoms or cross-cultural communication is the only way we can come up with any honest marketing for those markets. So, why does the thought of having a one-on-one conversation with an SME make your palms sweat? 

In this blog, we’re letting you in on what we do to prepare for and conduct SME interviews so we can get the most out of them.

The delicate balance of preparation and improvisation

At Velocity, we start every interview with a lie. We reassure our SMEs: “This is just an informal conversation.” But it isn’t. It’s a careful balance of preparation and improvisation. The best interviewers come in knowing just enough to be trusted with more wisdom but open up opportunities for some surprising insights.

How to prepare for interviews

Sean Evans, the host of the YouTube show Hot Ones, is famous for conducting thoughtful, in-depth interviews with his guests. When Vanity Fair asked him how he’s able to cover so much ground during a single 10-wing interview, he said: 

“I saw an opportunity because most interview shows don’t do this level of research. They confuse their proximity with celebrity for actual celebrity and they don’t do the actual work. It almost sounds sad to say, but by virtue of taking it seriously and working really, really hard, we’ve kind of set ourselves apart from the pack.”

It’s not a new piece of advice for interviewing. Every guide to interviewing talks about good preparation and research. But I think Sean’s point here about “taking it seriously” is the important part. In B2B marketing, taking the research seriously means looking beyond the company’s website and blog (or your SME’s LinkedIn profile). It means looking at competitor and analyst perspectives, scouring academic journals, and delving into subreddits and forums. It means coming into the interview with a hypothesis. 
Thought-provoking questions help SMEs think about what they do on a deeper level. It unearths exactly why they’re excited about doing what they do because they’re no longer talking about the surface level concepts that you’ve already researched. The value of coming in with a viewpoint isn’t to prove your credibility. It’s to signal that you can skip to the good stuff because you’ve got the basics down.

How to get to the good stuff

Ziwe, the host of Showtime’s late-night talk show Ziwe, is both a talk show host and comedienne. So, her interview style is all about being in the moment. She says: 

“I may have prepared a list of 100 questions, and if they answer one and it goes in some sort of a direction I didn’t expect, it’s up to me as an interviewer to follow that direction. That’s where you get really honest reactions from not only my guests but from me because I’m not expecting it. I don’t know what they’re going to say. I don’t know what I’m going to say but it seems like the conversation’s happening in real life.”

The B2B version of being in the moment is a little different. Ziwe is listening out for unexpected threads to pull on. Those moments tend not to arrive organically in B2B SME interviews — you need to create them. The best way to elicit surprising responses from your SMEs is by asking follow up questions that drill into their personal experience. 

For example, I recently interviewed some employees for a client blog series on employer branding. Someone said that their company supported personal growth. When you’ve seen as many job ads as I have in my career, your brain instantly responds, “who doesn’t?”. So, I asked “What do those moments of support in your personal growth look like?”. The SME told me that it was how her coworkers workshopped the concept in the office kitchen one day and how a colleague on the dev team in the company took the time to beta test her idea. 

Asking people to dig a little deeper forces them out of general platitudes and into original thought. Even if it’s hard/annoying at first, they’ll wind up enjoying the interview process more too. 

Brandon Stanton, the Humans of New York blogger, does this everyday. He stops grumpy New Yorkers on the street in the middle of an errand or on the way to something to ask them deeply personal questions and somehow comes away with the most touching insight into their lives. How does he do it? He said:

“I think for a lot of people there is something “honoring” about being interviewed. You feel like you have something to say, that there’s something interesting about your experience. A lot of times people are annoyed when they’re first stopped, and then they get into it. People like to feel like they have a story worth telling. When you have someone who’s super interested in your story … It makes you feel important.”

Now, all you have to do is listen.

How to balance preparation and improvisation

No matter who you’re interviewing or what the subject matter is, there are some basic rules for every interview.

Before you ask a single question, set the stage. Tell your interviewee what you’re here to do. It could be as simple as: “We’re here to pick your brain about the emerging IT trends in South Africa for our upcoming quarterly report. Your insight will help us explain to readers why these changes matter and how they can stay ahead in their industry. Shall we get started?”.  

Halfway through the meeting, share a quick recap. Mention what you’ve covered and what you’re hoping to achieve by the end. It’ll keep everyone focused. 

Ask if there’s more. Finally, once you’re at the end of the interview, ask: “What should I have asked you today that I didn’t?”. That will leave you and your interviewee the reassurance that you’ve covered every important aspect of your story.

Your role in an interview with an SME

The good news is that marketing becomes “a real adult job” once you start taking it seriously. Most SMEs expect marketers to skate along the surface because every marketer they’ve ever met has. You can break that cycle. Because once you’ve proven you’re interested in their world, they’ll become interested in yours.