Real Talk: Beverley Russell. "AI Excites Me and Horrifies Me"

Ten years in, Beverley Russell has no plans to sell her agency, Resourceful Marketing, keeps her web development in house, and refuses to leave the coalface. She tells Rich Fitzmaurice why the founder who stops doing the work stops being worth listening to.

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Rich: A lot of being a founder is not fun. The corporate secretarial stuff, reconciling accounts. You don't wake up wanting to do that.

Beverley: No, no, no. Although I quite like it, because I've got a finance background. I did a degree in economics. But I do love just being involved with the latest marketing. And I think part of being a founder, or being a senior person in an agency, is that you become the flagship person for it. But then actually, if you do too much schmoozing, you end up not staying on the coalface of AI, of SEO and everything else.

Because I'm so practitioner driven with what I do, it means I can actually advise clients and know what I'm saying and doing, because I'm literally working every day using my best practices. I feel really confident in everything I consult and advise on because I'm in that world every day. Rather than going, I want new biz dev, I want a new lead. I'm actually walking the talk.

Rich: It's a balancing act. Whether you like it or not, you're the figurehead from a brand point of view. But you've got to know what you're talking about.

Beverley: I think because I'm the founder, I just care too much about my client work. I'm too down in it to do what's good for us. So, we're freeing up resources now, dedicating them to actually doing stuff on our own marketing.

"If you do too much schmoozing, you end up not staying on the coalface."

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Rich: You started Resourceful in 2016. How did that come about?

Beverley: Most of my career at that point was blue chip, large global electronics companies. Very much hardware. The heyday of Canon, broadcast and business at Sony. I learned a lot of amazing things there and we were using the best possible agencies.

But I sometimes found they didn't quite have the business sense. It was very much big, gilded, top global agencies. They would come up with really amazing concepts, but once you'd bought into the concept and you wanted it delivered into a commercial lead gen proposition, they couldn't take it any further. It just stalled. It would almost be the in-house team carrying it over the line.

So, I realised there was a gap for a very agile, campaign driven agency. And in the meantime I'd gone from hardware to software, and the early days of cloud and fintech. What I found is that when companies want to scale, one person who's worked in marketing for 20 years like me wasn't enough. It had to be a dedicated team of specialists. And if these scaling companies could just have a slightly different mix of my team every month, it worked really well.

Rich: And HubSpot within a month of founding. That's a very deliberate bet.

Beverley: I knew I needed a tool, because we were so small that we needed something that could add impact into a company. Otherwise, you're logging in and out of LinkedIn, you're sending an email, they're all very fragmented tools. HubSpot was a way to bring them together. But it was also a way for us to interface with the founders. If a fintech was trying to scale and we wanted to collaborate, a platform like HubSpot gave them a lot more gravitas and more intelligence about how they were working.

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Rich: You've been around about ten years. You haven't been bought. Is that a deliberate choice?

Beverley: We need to do a ten-year anniversary, actually. We're thinking about doing a trip.

But yes. We've got a real community, a really close-knit team, and we're not aggressively commercial on the scaling and exiting stuff. We live each day as it comes to serve our clients really well. Lots of our clients we've had since we were founded and we're watching them grow and scale, which is really nice. There's a lot of long-term serving team members and we're all looking to grow and benefit from the growth as a team. Everybody has a reward from it.

And if I did exit, you know, when you work in-house for a company, you can't dictate the direction. Whereas we get to direct our own direction as an organisation. And we get to help our clients. We almost get double job satisfaction from that, rather than being constrained by a strategy in a company that I might not necessarily agree with.

Rich: You like the flexibility. Where you or your team has a good idea, you can just do it. You can take the risk.

Beverley: We can introduce new services, we can be cutting edge, we can go and get whatever tech stack we want. With some clients you almost have a procurement problem just to buy something for a hundred dollars. We can go and do it.

"We're not aggressively commercial on the scaling and exiting stuff. We live each day as it comes."

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Rich: You were good for HubSpot and HubSpot was good for you. But you're more than HubSpot these days.

Beverley: My relationship with HubSpot has changed slightly. We're on top of the best practices for it. But what I don't want to do is be aggressively selling HubSpot to make sure I've got the right tier as a partner. What we do with each client is make sure they consume HubSpot in the right way. A lot of the time we're brought into HubSpot situations where people want to optimise, or the setup isn't quite right and isn't aligned to their business leads. We see a lot of that.

We're not obsessive about what colour partner we are. We love it as a tool, we keep abreast of the changes, but we are business and marketing consultants who want our clients to grow. HubSpot is one of the enabler tools. The rest is our consultancy and knowledge of the B2B mix.

Rich: If a prospect comes to you already sold on HubSpot, that's fantastic for you. What do you do when the honest answer is that HubSpot isn't right for them?

Beverley: We work across different platforms. And to be honest, if it's not right for them, it might be that the subscription is too much for them. Or they might need a more bespoke CRM. There are investment companies and industry associations where HubSpot might not be the right solution. A merger and acquisition company might not want HubSpot because of the way they configure deals.

We're very much looking to get involved and get under the body of our clients, and not even go straight into HubSpot, but actually give them what they need. Sometimes that's a brand. Sometimes it's a new website.

A lot of my joy now is looking at websites and how we can really shift a company's website up. People we work with might have the most beautiful website, but there might not be the words on it. Or there might be too many words and the right business model, and the website looks terrible. We're really good at getting the balance, especially in the SaaS space. We deep dive into the technology, we look at the audiences, and then we make sure it's got the right lead generation sequences and the right optimisation for AI or SEO. That's where I get the most job satisfaction.

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"It excites me and horrifies me"

Rich: Every agency has a take on AI. Very few are putting it to one side. What's yours?

Beverley: AI excites me and horrifies me.

I think there are two extremes. It's almost producing too many documents now. Content has to be seen as original and exciting, and where it's so easy with Claude to knock out a white paper, it can actually devalue a lot of what five years ago were perceived as lead magnets.

What that makes a marketing owner like me think is: how do I make that content more exciting? Do I use an app like ScoreApp to make it a more interactive experience, so the people participating get real bespoke feedback? Do I use video more to show that the ebook I'm writing is super original and based on real research?

But AI can also be amazing in the way it cuts down analysis and reporting. The most successful agencies and companies using AI are the ones using it intelligently to speed up menial tasks, without losing any of the marketing magic.

Rich: My summary is that it can make good marketers even better and poor marketers even worse. There are no shortcuts to really good, effective marketing. It's easy to build AI slop, and it's hard to differentiate. And that's what marketing is. If a high volume of people are using it for generic stuff, the ones who can do something different become even more valuable.

Beverley: I'm really proud of my team on this. If a client shows some AI generated ideas and I look at those ideas, that's not a wireframe. I'm going to build a wireframe. There's still a real role for gifted web designers and developers, because you can't lose the human and the feeling and the padding and the imagery. You need talent.

Rich: I see a lot of AI generated websites and wireframes, and the way I feel about it is that if you're an amateur using those tools, yes, you can build something very quickly, but it resembles Microsoft Publisher. If you're old enough to remember Microsoft Publisher and the templates, that's what it looks like. To get it looking excellent, with the UX working and no bugs, you still need the experience. You still need to know the basics. JSON, robots.txt, LLMs.txt, accessibility, ARIA. If you don't know they exist, it doesn't matter what tool you're using.

"It's so easy with Claude to knock out a white paper now. It devalues a lot of what five years ago were lead magnets."

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Beverley: The thing I feel sad about is all the marketing graduates. I don't think I've known a time where so many graduates have been looking for a job and deserve a job. I do feel like AI has stripped out a bit of what they might have done, the project management and things.

With us, we're counteracting that in a positive way. We really make sure we have a graduate programme, and we've had two people in for work experience this summer. It's really important for people going into marketing at the moment that they bank as much experience as they can, to stand out.

Rich: I try to take an optimistic view. Through the generations, marketers have had to deal with the internet, email, marketing automation, social media, SaaS, influencers. I'm yet to meet anyone who learned those things in a meaningful way at university. The generations coped before. But I still worry about my nephews entering the workforce, and who's going to give them their first shot. And who's educating them on the context, because the very nature of these chatbots is that they use everything that's been created before to tell you an answer. But the best marketing has always come from being different.

Beverley: AI has really pushed me to think differently. If we were launching a really cool ebook, the credibility of it is almost reduced just because of the perception across the whole B2B sector that it might not have been written by a human. Whereas in fact it definitely was. Nobody can really tell.

There are some really cool content creation and journalist agencies out there that I think people need to keep using. And that's another point for AI actually, because with all the LLMs, I think PR and content have been given another light to shine.

Rich: A second life. Six months to a year ago everyone was saying content roles are dead, PR roles are dead. Now everyone's saying we need to rank in AI platforms, we need authority sources like newspapers and big websites linking to us and writing about us. How do we do that? Funnily enough, you need to invest in content and PR.

Beverley: I really try to influence clients to think like that. We're not a comms agency, we're B2B lead generation and growth. But I really enjoy collaborating with pure PR agencies. It's a really nice blend.

Rich: What would be your advice to a 21-year-old marketing graduate who really wants a career in this?

Beverley: Stay creative. Have business sense, commercial sense, and a bit of your own sprinkles on things. Anyone can push out emails and sequences and say here's the latest thing. You've got to really know what you're talking about. You've got to understand the technology and the audiences. It's not just looking at marketing, it's having that business mind as well.

I always remember when I was at Sony doing projectors. Projectors were quite a boring thing, but how could we make them exciting? Put them in the Champions League. It's trying to think outside the box on every campaign.

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Rich: Crystal ball. Where's the B2B marketing industry going?

Beverley: Brand differentiation and creativity will become key. And originality. It'll be about how you create those standout moments. I think we've just got to shake up the formats of B2B marketing and energise it.

I've always been more drawn to B2B than consumer, because the decision making processes are so exciting. But what we've got to avoid is falling into the trap of over analysing everything. We're at a point now where we have so many tools at our disposal that we can almost lose sight of marketing, because we're analysing this metric, that metric, that metric. I'd really like us to look at the goals, look at the performance, be proud of what we're producing, and not go down that rabbit hole.

Rich: What metrics actually matter? If a CEO brought you in and said, judge my marketing team, what would you look for?

Beverley: Engagement. There are so many engagement metrics across web, social, AI and everything else, and that's what enthuses me. How long do people watch a video, a webinar? What are the web engagement metrics? You can tell engagement through emails too.

If there's not much engagement, then something isn't right. It might be that your message is wrong. In the world of tech, people can develop a lot of products that aren't aligned to what people actually need. Engagement tells you whether it resonates.

"We can almost lose sight of marketing because we're analysing this metric, that metric, that metric."

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Rich: We obsess over pipeline, but as a founder your inbox and your LinkedIn are inundated with salespeople. What actually works on you?

Beverley: I do engage. But I hate email sequences. I hate "this is the last time" or "did you see my founder's message". All of that is cringe marketing. I like engagement where people are just genuine and it's actually a service I might need. Then I'd respond. A one-to-one human interaction that hasn't gone to 500 people, where they've got my name right.

Rich: You're valuing relevance. Someone's made the effort to do it properly, rather than spray and pray. What formats work?

Beverley: It's interesting you ask, because I'm not even ruling out phone calls. If it was the right phone call, I'd take it, I'd respond and I'd book up. Adobe called me to consolidate our licences, and I did it on the spot. That converted me.

The thing I get annoyed with is the sheer number of web development companies. At Resourceful, we don't outsource web development. There are too many risks. Everybody we have is in house. There's so much technology and so many projects being built offshore, and we can see it. If I was the recipient of a website built like that I would not be very happy, because it's all hard coded. Same with HubSpot. So much offshore on that.

I like to be proud of the services we're doing and to be able to say, these are the people delivering for you, and most of them are local, in our team. I probably get three developers a day writing to me on LinkedIn.

Rich: I hate the ones that say we've audited your website, when they haven't. I know you haven't. You're starting a relationship on the basis of a lie. There's a theme to your opinions, Beverley, which is that marketing is cyclical. Cold calls are starting to become effective again, if you can tell it's a real human being.

Beverley: The area I'm intrigued by, that I'd like to spend more time on, is intent tools. Seeing how clients can benefit and how genuinely converting they could be. Mixing the intent of a buyer with a nice person who might call you. I think that's quite a good mix. But there are tools out there that say they do that which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

Rich: What tools have impressed you recently?

Beverley: There are some very good video tools at the moment doing high quality recordings and transcripts. I like ZoomInfo, we've been a partner for years and they're very personable. HubSpot is bringing out some cool things with Breeze. And sometimes, you know, I like good old Microsoft. I worked for a Microsoft distributor, and I think they're switching back into a good position with tools to help with workflows.

Rich: What's your approach with your team and AI tools? Are you happy for them to go and play, or does it need signing off?

Beverley: We have governance and diligence about what they're doing, especially where it involves clients. But we've all had to play with quite a few tools. The PowerPoint related ones, none of us has a good opinion of any of them.

We really do collaborate and share ideas in the office. To be honest, my team are more obsessed with the latest web tools. We're a WP Engine partner and we're looking a lot at security and bot prevention, as well as workflow tools. It's whatever our subject experts are experts on. And because we're part of a marketing community, we're always swapping ideas with clients, and we work with a lot of fractional CMOs who've always got ideas as well.

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Rich: So, what's next for Resourceful?

Beverley: We're going into the public sector more, which I've found really interesting. We're working with an NHS trust at the moment and going a lot more into deep messaging and brand identity in that sector.

When you work in the public sector, everything can look quite similar. NHS branding and so on. It's been really nice to inject some strong B2B brand design into that and make things look different and human.

And I'd love to do more in the net zero space. We've got some really cool clients there. My daughter has just done an engineering placement at a net zero company, and I feel like it really makes a difference. So net zero and healthcare, straight public sector, is where we're heading. And we're really enjoying the brand come digital work.

Rich: You mentioned apps earlier.

Beverley: We're doing some in the carbon capture space, which is really interesting, and pushing the limits on some AI modelling. Where I love our development is that we can create really cool development programmes or apps, but because we're a small, agile company with a very good technical manager, we can get to those results in months rather than six- or twelve-month development cycles with lots of offshoring. We keep it neat, compact, and make sure it looks good.

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Beverley Russell is the founder and Managing Partner of Resourceful Marketing, a B2B digital agency based in Winchester. She spent most of her career client side in B2B technology, including Sony Electronics, before founding Resourceful in 2016.