Most B2B marketing relies on tying products blandly to speed, cost, quality, etc...

That is fluff speak to your prospects, and it costs you more money than you might think.

But, in marketing, you can’t just pull in a sales engineer if the conversation gets too complex.

The messaging primarily goes one way. You to them. 

Every message on every channel to your prospects is like a tiny little bridge, so that those prospects can each, in their own time, make their way to your product… and if you’re messaging is not landing (which it rarely will if your marketing leader doesn’t put in the effort required to truly get into the shoes of your buyers), that you might as well be burning each bridge just as each bridge is built, because the trust is burnt. Trust is hard to earn back, too. 

The point is, a vendor that can speak to prospects on a mass scale with all of your persona’s knowledge is going to run circles around one that is speaking in surface-level marketer lingo.

So, ask yourself, is your current b2b marketing leader…

  • Behind the screen?

  • Not talking to customers?

  • Not consuming your products?

  • Unaware of critical industry developments?

  • Lacking deep domain expertise of your ideal customer profile?

  • Not remotely representative of the customers who purchase your products?



This Also Leads to Ill-Informed 'Buyer Persona'.

Sure, anyone can establish 'buyer persona' segments, but they are almost always either:

  • Completely fictitious.

  • Rooted in very-likely-misleading CRM-available quantitative data.

Your marketing leader can’t create buyer personas because they can’t get the real qualitative intel on your actual buyers because he or she is NOT in your actual buyer’s shoes.

Therefore, your marketing leader also doesn’t know your target audience’s:

  • Core principles.

  • Nuanced pains.

  • Specific skills.

  • Daily jargon.

  • Insider jokes.

  • Goals & aspirations.

  • Timelines & priorities.

  • Workflows & processes.

  • Department structures.

  • Vendors and stacks.

… AND IT SHOWS.



Example: Blandness vs. OMG Exactly!

A poor understanding of a market leads marketers to lean on the 'proven' surface-level marketing lingo they know, which then becomes the bland messaging that results in truly meaningless, untrustworthy, invisible messaging for your ICP to gloss over.

In other words, there's no resonation with them at all. They won't trust or like your brand.

Now contrast that with someone putting together messaging that understands all the intricacies of the customer. This person coud then pull together a combination of something like the 'insider jokes' and 'nuanced pains' from the list above to form a message that results in exact pain resonation, laughter, and an immediate interest in digging into your website. 

While it may seem unimportant at first, but you just wait until you run an ad that elegantly weaves together highly-resonating humor, a detailed, tangible aspect of an awful pain point, and your solution. Trust is earned because you 'get it'. They might even like you now. Same thing we experience on sales calls with sales reps that can talk shop with clients instead of giving a blank stare whilst slacking their sales engineer to join the zoom call.

Come time to solve the problem your product solves, when they see your brand, the recall connects, a true shortcut to the short-list.



Why Are Unknowledgeable B2B Marketers Common? 

While your marketing leader might excel at optimizing conversion rates, creating shareable content, reducing CAC, or bumping up LTV, they have huge blind spots when it comes to your prospects.

It’s not their fault. 

Reason 1: Incentive issue. Their profession is marketing, but they ought to build a second profession in whomever their customer is going to be. The problem is, for marketers, there is no guarantee that they’ll stay in the same industry forever, so while they might even agree with what I’ve written above, they’d need a strong incentive to deeply learn the industry, such as a supported education path and/or a meaningful slice of the pie of shares.

Reason 2: Schooling issue. No where in formal marketing education do you find a significant emphasis in learning the industry that you dive into. Yet, in b2b, while these additional understandings are valuable, they are no simple feat to acquire. For instance, chemical engineers and endocrinologists are going to take tremendous effort to deeply understand.

Reason 3: Product ownership issue. Most marketing execs climb the ranks in an environment that strips away the foundational elements they learned in school, especially regarding product development. The '4 P’s of Marketing' (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) they’d studied in school ended up being almost purely just 2 P’s (Promotion and Place). The lack of control on the actual product (and the 24/7 demand to improve ROI, yesterday) means they spend all of their time optimizing for short-term growth goals, which are never going to stem from a deep, longer-term investment into deeply learning product, customers, and the industry.



Your Marketing Leader Needs Extremely Deep Domain Understanding.

Think about it: you earned your position by knowing your industry’s inner workings, risking everything to solve painful, deeply felt problems. That’s how most entrepreneurs start. Yet, you shouldn’t carry the entire product intuition forever. Your workload grows exponentially as your organization grows and becomes far more complex, and your risk exposure for missing market shifts or new competitive threats can get downright scary for your revenue, margins, & ebitda.

What you really need is a marketing leader who:

  1. Is exceptionally talented at marketing.

  2. Is representative of your customers.

Unfortunately, most marketing leaders 'fail up', meaning you often get:

  • Someone great at marketing but clueless about the actual industry and product, or

  • Someone who fits the audience (maybe they worked in that space) but lacks strong marketing skills.

And no, just because a marketing leader worked in your industry somewhere else doesn’t guarantee they picked up anything of real value about your specific audience.



So, What Can You Do?

My suggestion? 

Hire for marketing talent, FIRST. 

Then, give them the very difficult assignment of acquiring all of the knowledge that your customers have about the industry and landscape, inclusive of some format of formal education, tools of the trade, even real 'time on the job' and so on.

Tedious? Time-consuming? Won’t payback shortly? Risk of them leaving? 

Yes.

Yet, incentivized well, they’ll seldom leave, and the rewards to your gross profit margin are undeniably worth it. Tremendous growth often comes from this set up, I’ve seen it.

Or, you can shuffle through 10 steakless-sizzling marketing leaders in 10 years, leaving your business on a slow (or fast) decline with no growth in sight.

You decide!