B2B Marketing Needs To Learn To Hold Its Nerve

B2B marketing has come a long way. Next week marks the five year anniversary of Boring2Brave’s publication.

When Boring2Brave’s (objectively horrible) luminous yellow and pink cover hit the shelves I thought it would merely be the first book I’d write in the years that followed.

But then 2020 and 2021 were extraordinary years. 

A global pandemic had us all stuck at home. My kids were small and angelic as opposed to the scary, utterly baffling almost-teenagers they are now. I had time on my hands. Time to think and to write. 

So for now Boring2Brave remains my only book (although I currently have an even more ambitious project on the go; one of which I’ll share details of later this year; one which is more annoying to my wife than me disappearing behind a closed door each evening to write chapters of a marketing book). 

Anyway: the point is B2B marketing has moved on. 

Look at us now. Look at the sort of shit we’re doing. 

AI man. Jesus Christ.

I think back to me sweating over my transcript in the final weeks of my 2021 publishing deadline (we were experiencing a heatwave back then too). 

If AI had jumped into our professional toolkit and started to refashion absolutely everything back then, like it has in the past 18 months, just as I was putting the finishing touches to the book…well, I daresay I’d have given up and retired to join the kids in their paddling pool in the back garden. 

And AI isn’t the only progress point on B2B marketing’s five year scorecard.

We’re pretty much all there now on the theory (if not yet the practice) that campaigns incorporating creativity and emotion do the important work of brand-building to underpin and fuel our bottom-of-funnel performance marketing efforts: thank you Messrs Binet and Field. 

But all is not right. We’re still not there yet. 

In today’s strange business environment, I don’t believe we can afford to be B2B marketers doing B2B marketing. 

Regardless of your job title, seniority or level of influence, we need to be leaders. All of us. True business leaders.

And that means showing leadership which I believe is scarce in three key areas of our working day. These are the three conversations in which B2B marketing still flinches when we need to lead:

1. Technology

AI isn’t a threat: our addiction to new stuff is the threat.

There was a time everyone was worried AI would only replace marketers. That’s not my worry. My concern is what we’re doing to ourselves in the unseemly scramble to prove to leadership that we’re all over AI; that we’re the rare marketer who ‘really gets it’: the ‘all-hand’s rush to bolt AI onto every workflow because a competitor mentioned it on LinkedIn, or because Gary Vee woke up this morning and said once again that ‘standing still means you’re falling behind’. Most other functions think marketers have a weakness for shiny objects. We don’t need to keep proving them right. 

Leaders are doing less talking and more protecting space to allow their teams to experiment deliberately; trying a few things to see if they can unearth a use case they hadn’t planned for. But there's discipline and restraint to their activity. 

2. Measurement

This has come up at various events I’ve attended recently so I know we’re facing in the right direction but we need to stop celebrating the wrong metrics. Right now.

For years, B2B marketing has patted itself on the back for handing sales batches of MQLs. Then we watch as half of them go nowhere: not nurtured properly, not actually a fit, or simply never converted into anything resembling revenue.

MQLs were never the point. They were always a proxy for the point, and a weak one at that. Over time we’ve embedded them so deeply into our GTM workflows that ditching them will feel like weaning ourselves off a terribly addictive drug. The number we now need to hard-associate ourselves with; the only one that now actually matters, is ICP-qualified pipeline: leads that fit your ideal customer profile, moving through to closed-won revenue. It’s a number that can't be gamed, dressed up, or misread in a board meeting. And because of that it’s a number that will place us right at the beating heart of the growth engines of our businesses; a position others will rely on, trust in and respect.

For exactly this reason, ICP-qualified pipeline is the north star metric we hold ourselves to at OrbitalX where I'm chief creative officer. We work with many clients that still need to count MQLs and I don’t think that will change overnight. Yes we can deliver, and while we deliver, we can also gently educate, but we know that a switch to focusing on qualified pipeline means measuring actual marketing and not just activity. 

3. Bravery:

Surprise, surprise. I’m still banging this drum. Maybe it’s the one I care about most, but, after going on about it for five years, it still bears repeating. We've not fully learned what it means to be ‘brave’.

The single most expensive and destructive habit in B2B marketing isn't a bad campaign but the reflex to kill a good one too early.

Maybe you’ll recognise this scenario: you work hard with colleagues over several weeks to agree on a marketing strategy, a campaign narrative and a route to market. You build the collateral, brief the campaign to all the right stakeholders and get sign-off. 

Campaign launches. It looks great. You show it off at your all-hands meeting and feel the glow of your colleagues’ applause and congratulations.

Thirty to 45 days later, when you get asked about progress in a leadership meeting, the tone has changed. Someone observes that the numbers "simply aren't there yet". Without an ounce of hesitation or analysis, someone powerful says “pull it”. The campaign disappears from view and you head back to your agency to start again. Maybe that 45 days is more like 60. Maybe you don’t return to your agency for a new idea - maybe you part ways with them entirely to give yourself an easy scapegoat to talk about. 

Either way, the mistake is that changing direction works; that starting again is cheaper than waiting. It isn’t. Ever. 

A Dreamdata report on B2B ads recently suggested average customer buying journeys have stretched from 211 days to 272 days. That's around nine months. When did you last invest consistent commitment, budget and resources to a campaign for nine months? That same report also revealed the evermore complex buying journey in B2B straddles more stakeholders, more touches, more interactions and more channels than the equivalent journey last year. 

So. We’re ‘supporting’ sales cycles measured over the better part of a year, with campaigns measured in weeks. If your buying cycle takes nine months and your best campaigns don't survive nine weeks, nothing you build will ever be given the chance to work. Agreeing to quit an idea and go again is not, as I was told recently, ‘testing strategies’. It’s failing on a loop.

Marketing is the business of putting credibility, trust and appeal into the minds of people - prospects - who don't know you yet. That takes time; obvious when you say it out loud. But we don't act like we believe it. We agree with leadership to start over every sixty days, and then wonder why nothing ever compounds.

Bravery, in this context, is less a personality trait as I described in Boring2Brave and more a specific, repeatable act: standing in front of your leadership team and saying, "no”. 

No, we're not changing. We're optimizing but then, we’re waiting; waiting for this to play out; to take hold; to be recognised and remembered; to compound." It might feel like the least comfortable sentence in B2B marketing but it’s how marketing works and every great practitioner knows it.

The thread underneath all three

Restraint with technology, discipline with measurement and courage over time. You can’t fake these things like you can with a framework or a template. They all rest on the same foundation: marketing expertise deep enough to know which tool is worth adopting, which number is worth reporting, and which strategy is worth defending when under fire.

It’s the leadership skill that’s absent from many of our job descriptions but that decides whether the other three ever get the chance to work.