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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
00:02
Welcome to Demand Geniuses, the podcast for revenue-focused marketers. Each season we talk to geniuses of the B2B marketing world to reveal the secrets to their success that can help you grow your revenue and progress your career.
00:20
Hello everyone and welcome to episode two of the Demand Geniuses podcast. I feel super lucky that today's guest has agreed to come and join the podcast. He's been in and around the B2B marketing space for about 20 years now as the founder and then editor in chief of B2B marketing magazine. So Joel Harrison, thank you very much for coming on. So Tom, thanks so much for inviting me on the podcast. It's great to chat and you know, we always have a stimulating conversation.
00:49
My role is I'm one of the founders of btpmarketing.net and Propolis, which is a community which B2B Marketing launched about four or five years ago. And my role is really as an evangelist, an ambassador and an influencer around the B2B Marketing industry. Yeah, well, great to have you. Look, we'll just get straight into it. The way we like to do it here is I always like to ask a couple of questions up front just to get to know you a little bit. And then we're going to dig into the topic, which is kind of the role that marketing have in a modern go-to-market organization.
01:18
But first, guess, quick question. What is it that you love about your job that you're doing at the moment? Well, I'm a geek, so I really love exploring kind of topics in detail and getting on the skin of things. I've been doing that for 20 years and there's just so much left still to discover in B2B marketing. So I have to get your head around and it keeps changing, which is frustrating and exciting all at the same time. So I really love that. I love communicating and like whatever format with video, text, audio, some live presentations is great.
01:47
but also love producing products and content. is nothing satisfying than kind of having, starting with nothing and having something and then putting it out there. And when you get, if I ever get, which I do fairly often is get someone say, thank you, Charles, I really appreciate your thoughts and how you've helped, you've explained something, you've given me more insight into that. And that's a hugely satisfying thing. So all of those things and probably some more as well. Yeah, and I guess for you, it's been what 20 years or so at bdbmarketing.net. I'm sorry to do that to you live on air.
02:14
But it means it's been a very interesting time for you, right? You've seen the evolution of B2B marketing shifts towards digital, and then now we're just on the precipice of another pretty seismic shift, right? It must be interesting watching those changes. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think we're better equipped for it now than we were before. But it was such a cottage industry when we launched, and there was really nothing here. It was a few agencies and some clients, some of whom weren't particularly great at marketers, but now the whole industry has just changed, matured.
02:42
developed, there's so much passion involved in it. And yes, I love being involved, but like you say, maybe you use Edge rather than precipice sounds terrifying. Let's go with just exciting threshold maybe of something really great. It starts to make it feel like a cliff that we're about to fall off. Well, but I mean, that wasn't kind of where I was going to start, but maybe that is a good question to ask then. Like, how do you look at the shift that we're about to see? And particularly, I know you spend a lot of time
03:10
interviewing B2B marketers at the moment. Like what's the general pulse that you would take on how people perceive the change that we're starting to go down? Well, I feel like we've gone, there was a period where was all just terror, abject terror. And I think we've gone past that point now people are understanding the opportunities and the necessity to do something about it. And most people are embracing it to some degree or other. But there's a lot of reticence, there's a lot of concern and
03:39
Quite rightly, are lot of larger organizations, particularly members of our propolis community, which is a, I should explain, that's a closed community for B2B marketers and marketing teams and corporate teams can come be part of that and learn from all kinds of resources and great experts. Often those organizations, global organizations, they have kind of rules in place around how they can embrace stuff. They have guidelines and guardrails, which is good for some reasons, but also it can be kind of difficult. So mixture of trepidation and opportunity. But we're starting to see, particularly look at the B2B Marketing Awards, we're starting to see
04:08
those use cases really come through in terms of how people are demonstrating its use and how it's making a real impact on their businesses. So it's exciting times, but we just can't, don't know what you think about this Tom, but we can't, I don't think we can even get our heads around where it's gonna go. know, it's so potential, so enormous and so all pervasive that we can only see our little kind of role at the moment. you who knows what we've had this conversation in years time, who knows where it all got to. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm quite.
04:37
bullish on it or quite optimistic on it. I think it makes it a really fantastic time to start a business because we are going to see a lot of disruption and the ability of smaller teams to compete with large organizations in a way that they just couldn't before. So I think we went for a walk about six months ago, didn't we? And I was kind of sitting, you were asking why I hadn't started this in the first place. And that was one of the huge reasons why is I think it presents an amazing opportunity for small groups of people to do a lot. think, and I think that's great, isn't it? I mean, the,
05:07
anything religious the barriers to entry of something is, well, most of the time it's a really good thing. And as well as that aspect of it, the bit I think is that I didn't really keep my head around until, know, till like the kind of middle of last year was around, you know, one of the barriers in B2B marketing, as well as from a kind of technology point of view, which you guys obviously doing great stuff in, was in terms of creative terms, you know, and obviously you can, obviously, you know, you can go into a AI platform and create images really easily. That's fine, we wouldn't understand that. But the problem has been in terms of
05:36
big broad brush creative campaigns. wasn't the budget to do really exciting dynamic things. Now people are only limited by their imagination. And that's incredibly exciting. know, that the challenge would be with B2B, it couldn't be as creative as B2C because there wasn't the budget. But it's not a problem anymore. And that's so, this just taking the shackles off what's creatively possible. And we're starting to see that coming through. Yeah. And you mentioned that you had the awards and it's a good chance to look at some of the use cases people are doing. my sense with AI still at the moment is that it
06:05
lives in the world of experimentation, right? It is something that people direct some budget towards so that they can get up on stage at a conference and talk about the cool thing they did that's very innovative. But it isn't yet bedded into many processes, particularly in larger businesses. I guess, like, would you agree with that? And where are you starting to see more examples of it genuinely replacing or altering significantly existing workflows? Yeah, we're starting to see a few. I mean, I'm not going to say to you that we have got a
06:35
kind of comprehensive viewpoint of all the AI deployments and organizations because there are many varied and often quite tactical. I think that's exactly to your point, but there are examples. And then there's a guy who works with Bidwell's called, gosh, I think his name is Ben Lee and he's a fantastic guy. He won actually won the category for the best use of AI at the B2B Awards in 2023. And he's just somebody who's, actually was a background in communications and PR. He just took it on and said, I can think of a use case around case studies.
07:04
This is really critical to our business. Bidwell's is a professional services firm operating in property era world. This is critical aspect of our business. It's time intensive, laborious. Surely we can improve productivity in terms of you just using AI. Relatively simple, but they did it and they demonstrated significant savings in terms of labor and time spent. And then he went on a journey and then he became the AI guru for the whole business. And then to the point where he actually had to kind of
07:33
turned himself into a bot to answer all these questions that coming in from across the organization. So on a personal journey, that's an example of someone who's benefited from it, but also that the organization has benefited and marketing has been at the driving seat of that, which is a great thing, right? Because you're marketing, want marketing to be an agent of change in the organization. You don't want it to be reactive to stuff that's being done to it from elsewhere, particularly the tech function within the business. So I think it's a great example. Yeah, no, that is cool. And it's cool seeing people kind of build that.
08:01
personal brand or build a career off the back of it, right? Okay, I'm going to change the subject a little bit because we've got sucked down the wall of AI, which I find it impossible not to direct every conversation towards at the moment. guess, so overall goal of what we're trying to look into here is the role of marketing, the role that marketing plays in today's go-to market. Would you agree that there's any different role for marketing these days? Are you seeing greater focus on commerciality and actual revenue as a goal?
08:27
So one of our messages at B2B Marketing is the need to be a commercial marketer, right? And we've really, really developed that through lots of different resources and commentary and activities, because ultimately marketing needs to be, for marketing taken seriously at board level, and this is, yes, and I completely agree with you, at SaaS businesses, you're closer to the sharp end, right? You're closer to kind of, you've got to be commercially orientated. Often marketing gets brought in at a certain point in its trajectory, doesn't it? Whereas often what happens in,
08:56
corporate entities as marketing gets disconnected from that commercial focus in some way or other, and marketers can start thinking that they are responsible for other things. And there's been this big push towards Brown recently, which is great because it's a sign of marketing growing up, but you can't just be building kind of grand edifices that may deliver something in the future. You've got to deliver something which is tangible and a tangible business timeframe business recognises and understands.
09:23
They don't tend to work in five year time cycles. They tend to work in kind of 18 months or less than that, particularly where we are right now. And then you also have the marketing person's tenure, the average CMO is so much in 18 months and three years, depending on where they are. you can demonstrate impact and that means money or opportunities, within a defined timeline, then you're going have a problem. Yeah. But it's interesting that you mentioned the resurgence of brands there, right? Because that seems at first glance to be a little bit of a step away from
09:54
demonstrating a tangible revenue impact. Brand activities are typically what we find very hard to prove ROI on. So it's interesting that that's having a resurgence. Well, yeah, it is. And this is kind of, and it's being propagated by the Zembroke Backers Institute in, I think, based out Australia and LinkedIn B2B Institute have funded lot of that research. And it's really good stuff, right? Don't get me wrong. They're pushing the envelope. They're focusing on, they're helping bring another voice into the conversation.
10:21
where I sit and the conversations I have with marketing leaders, they've got to show commercial returns, And you've got to show it in a way that is relevant and appropriate to what the CEO and the C-suite and the CFO think is meaningful to them. You can't say, I'm going to spend my six, seven figure marketing budget on something which will not tangibly impact on the business's financial and commercial targets. You can't do that, right? You're just going to that's a...
10:50
as writing your kind of suicide note. So that's where you have this kind of notion of like brand gen where actually you're building the brand in order to deliver kind of opportunities of some description or other. Whether the right opportunities or not, that's another conversation, but at least it's you're tangibly seeking to play that game. Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I think again, one thing that this all comes back to is having a slightly longer term perspective on revenue generation, right? Yeah. And I think that is one thing that...
11:17
potentially we're starting to see a little bit less focus on this quarter, next quarter, how do we hit our number? And actually thinking about, thinking more strategically about how we create demand that can support us on the journey that we want to go in over a three, five year time horizon. And that's a lot easier to have when the economy is in better shape than it currently is, right? know, that conversation can be challenging right now, but we live in hope that there'll be time when we can be a bit more progressive and horizons will go back a bit. Yeah, no, that makes sense. You mentioned, so you
11:47
One of the big things for you seems to be getting marketing out of that situation where they are a support function for sales. Are there some kind tangible things that you've seen marketers take control of that help to improve that relationship? So again, this notion of the commercial marketer kind of follows through all of this. there's ways of behaving that pertain to all aspects of what marketing does in terms of its relationships, other functions, in terms of its orientation, how it's positioned within the organization.
12:15
mean, the crux of it comes down to the marketing leader, whether that's a CMO or whatever, and their relationship with the board and their ability to speak the language of the board and to talk about the things which the board wants to know about and wants, and not to go to them with marketing challenges, because they don't have to understand. They think they can do marketing, they can't. They think, and they think it's easy. And they think marketing is about pretty pictures. So they've got to, so marketing is to earn credibility. That's the fundamental step. that's the, that is.
12:44
It's still a really, really big problem. You've got to make every single one of your team be able to have an elevator pitch around what value they're offering to the business. They've got to imagine that what happens is they'll get stuck in the left with the CEO and they want to know in 30 seconds what you do and what value you add. And if you say, I launched a couple of great campaigns last week, well, that's not really going to cut it or I just can go creative. They don't really care about that. It's not saying it's not important, but you've got to be able to whittle it down to something which is pithy and relevant and impactful.
13:14
Well, and there's a part of that which is adopting the mindset that sales reps have often taken, right? I mean, that's my background and they used to talk a lot about an entrepreneur mindset, right? So you are, if you have a territory or you have a book of business or an area that's yours, you are the founder in that area, right? That's your job and that's the mindset that you have to take. And you have to look at how am gonna make sure that if it's me and SDR and a solutions consultant going after this territory, I need to make sure that there's an ROI on that territory. And I think we are seeing more
13:43
focus on everyone in the organization starting to adopt a similar mindset. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's one of reasons why account-based marketing had impact because you really know tangibly who you're after. It doesn't work for every organization, but when you kind of go, well, our customers are these people, everyone can be very focused around that. It's one version of what can work for B2B organizations. You mentioned a second ago as well, credibility, which is kind of the core.
14:08
job of a marketer, right? I was looking through your LinkedIn just before this. I noticed you'd been in a really good article recently about a bit of a trust crisis that we're in in SaaS. So I was quite interested to pick your brain on that as well. I mean, to me, that's at the absolute core of every, of the challenges we have from a greater market efficiency standpoint, There's a stat I saw from G2, which is 94 % of buyers don't trust sellers, which is pretty shocking, like 94%.
14:35
But it's easy to see why, right? What have we done over the last 10 years? We built an industry off the back of dodgy data acquisition, cold calling, and what 16 touch point sequences and things like that. Like that, are not the actions. And I've always had this attitude a little bit towards aggressive cold calling, right? What are the industries that rely on aggressive cold calling? If you list the ones outside of SaaS, it's not something you probably want your brand to be associated with.
15:04
Absolutely not. don't, the whole cold calling, new generation space, I know some really lovely people who work in that space. I just don't understand why it still attracts the kind of sums that it does. I think it's had a bit of a torrid time in the last few couple of years or so, but yeah, I don't get it at all. mean, the question, the stat from TrustPilot is a really interesting one. mean, but are they saying they don't trust the salesman or they don't trust the brand of the organization?
15:34
I was reading that as the seller. So that was writing as the salesperson. Is that right? think it was don't trust claims that the sales rep makes. Right, right. Okay. So, that actually plays back to, so I'm, you asked me about this before we started recording Tom, but I'm writing a book on thought leadership because I'm, know, in this capacity as founder of BT Marketing, I now have some latitude or lots of latitude to go and just pursue the things that interest me. And this is something that just seemed really fascinating already now. And you look at the results of
16:02
top level, look at Edelman's trust barometer, which just shows there's a fundamental lack of trust in society, which is a bit worrying really. then, actually, ironically, you talk about the four areas they cover, they cover the media, government, NGOs, and then they cover business. Actually, people are less distrusting of business than they are of the other three, which is bizarre. Alarming in itself, isn't it? It is alarming in itself. removing the alarm from that for us for a moment.
16:31
And you bear in mind it's a global study and there's obviously peaks and troughs of that in different territories. There was some great research by an agency called Man Bites Dog, who a thought leadership agency, I know very well. And they were talking about actually businesses really, they want people's sellings and they want the brands that they try. They want to have trustworthy relationships and content exchanges with.
16:58
leading brands in their field, right? And they want you to tell them what the challenges are and they want to be informed by you. And they're looking for good content from the brands that matter in those areas of concern that they have, or maybe if they don't even know their concerns yet. So there is an opportunity and there's a necessity for brands to focus on thought leadership and to raise their game now, because it's because to a point about AI, one of the impacts we can see in AI is it's removing cost to entry for content creation. And so any man is dog can
17:28
create what looks on the outset from being a reasonably good bit of content, but actually you can pretty quickly spot what's not very good or not. So actually the cream rises to the surface. And what it also then does is actually provides the credibility to the salespeople as well, because you've got, if you do thought of the ship right, you've got a really, really credible, robustly argued, well-expressed, broad, deep set of argument and positioning based on genuine research, which then can be deployed by the salesperson.
17:57
And so therefore it's not about that gives them ammunition and means of talking to the prospects, gives a long way to addressing that trust concern. If not addressed, it the order completely. Yeah. I that's what we're trying to help with at Demand Genius, right? It's how do we use content more intelligently during the sales process to move deals along faster? People don't want to engage with a sales rep every step of the way, but they do want access to
18:25
good, credible thought leadership and they want guidance through a complex buying journey. The problem that go-to-market organizations face at the moment with the way we've organized ourselves is we are built around sales reps getting on calls and talking from authority to guide them. But if people aren't joining you every step of the way, then that's where it becomes a really revenue critical role for marketers and content marketers to do a.
18:53
to do a better job of supporting sales rep in doing that without always having to be on a call. A very interesting Gartner study I read talking about two types of sales reps, information connectors and information authorities. And one shift has taken place is that information connectors actually do a much better job of persuading buyers. So people who don't necessarily puff their chest out and...
19:18
enlighten everyone with their knowledge, but actually they sell the content and the content sells the idea. mean, that makes sense that, you know, there's leveraging and relying on the great stuff that your brand's great using is the right way to go. that sales relationship's evolving. think sales is probably more challenged than marketing is in the current environment. But marketing needs to support sales and be doing the right things. And alignment, the alignment is...
19:46
absolutely fundamental to why B2B is different to B2C. It's the nature of that complex proposition and that complex buying cycle and often complex decision-making unit. marketing can't sit in ivory tower. It's got to have a collaborative relationship from the word go, from the very, very start with sales and however you're kind of set up, whether it's whatever sales model you're using. Yeah, so marketers out there, you need to support sales, but you shouldn't be a support function. Yeah, okay. I see
20:16
I see your challenge there. Supportive without being subordinate to, I think that's what I'd say. I think that's right because it's how can you like there's being a support function where I always think I think in terms of content marketers a lot and how you build a roadmap, right? You can build a roadmap which is super reactive and basically you're getting content requests from lots of different people and you kind of weigh them based on some combination of what we have and haven't covered, what I like writing about and political capital of the requester.
20:45
That's not a very effective way. That's a support function. Supportive is starting to think a lot more like an actual product manager would and have a framework that takes all of those different inputs, all of those requests and builds a roadmap out of that that is going to maximize the revenue impact of what you're doing. that your job ultimately, if the point of transaction is not on site, you're not a PLG company, your job is to support.
21:12
but you can do that in a proactive kind of firm way. Absolutely. It's about an ongoing relationship. You know, it's about being in, having them in the room at the beginning of the conversation, regular, regular aligned metrics. You know, having said, thought that was, I I'd question about that, about that earlier on, but I think that alignment of metrics is great. Just alignment of processes, regular feedback, but marketing should be taking feedback and...
21:38
using data from elsewhere as well. It's not just sales, but sales has a great voice and smart markets get this, but it's not universal and we've got to keep working at it. The other thing you said that I thought was really interesting, again, it comes back to the trust point a little bit, but I think it's, so we talk a lot about thought leadership and the impact it can have on credibility and trust. Yeah, but also a bit of a tipping point where there's a lot of focus on efficiency and I'm going to come back to AI again. How do you balance those slightly contradictory things of how do we,
22:08
get the benefits of AI when it comes to efficiency and output, but not further erode trust.
22:17
I if I had the answer to that one, I'd be a very rich man. I don't think there's a simple answer to it. It's a very valid, very, very spot on question. think authenticity is what plays into that. one of those things is, why, and I appreciate thought leadership is harder to do for SaaS businesses because of the nature of the marketing function and the nature of the setup and also a nature of the transaction that's being had.
22:47
But where you're talking about kind of higher ticket B2B items where you've got, where you can really double down the authenticity and you can base your content around research and you can also deploy, can utilize internal thought leaders to have that humanization of the content so it's not just autonomous, get it written well and produced well and designed well, and also then use third party influencers as well. So there's lots of ways that you can address that authenticity trust piece.
23:17
AI for me, for example, what it's allowed me to do in the last year, we couldn't have done as a business, to, we get hundreds of entries to the B2B Marketing Awards. And so to be able to input that data into a platform and slice and dice it multiple different ways, and then be able to then extract value from that is extraordinary. But then I can then use that as a, so we have the of the award of ourself, and then me as a kind of a communicator of that.
23:46
is tremendously powerful. yeah, think it's just a constant iterative process of looking at how we can improve things. I'll change the topic again a little bit. So one thing I know, so first of all, actually, you're writing a book at the moment. Do want to tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, well, so thank you. It's great to talk about it. So as I said, I have the opportunity now that I'm not operation involved in B2B marketing. And my skill set kind of sits outside the mainstream of what
24:15
between marketing ears and propolis ears. So I have the freqs to do this. I was looking around for what could I write about and a lot of activities, particularly some work with Cognaclic during the course of the last year or so who are moving more and more into that area. And it just seems like a really fascinating topic. And so many of things we talked about now, I appreciate I primed the pump a little bit in terms of my conversation, but we're trying to work out how we can deliver really coherent, compelling messages in an atmosphere of trust is...
24:44
challenged, but also then have the ability of those messages to impact all the way through the funnel, certainly into demand generation and also, and it should go right through to the bottom of the funnel as well. Thought leadership is absolutely the number one tool to deploy, I would suggest. and it's something which has, know, it's heartlanders in professional services for kind of reasons because they're actually kind of selling their knowledge. So it kind of plays out best in that. And technology having always been the
25:12
the kind of forefront of B2B marketing is a little bit behind the curve on this, but they are catching up now. So, I think there is a misconception about a lot of stuff gets called thought leadership. Is it actually technically thought leadership? If you were a full-time thought leadership practitioner, and I know a few of those, they're quite picky about what they would say is thought leadership. And what's just good content marketing? Or what's just bad content marketing? Where would you draw the line then between good content marketing and thought leadership? Well, think it's about having something
25:42
If not unique, then certainly differentiated for you to say and genuinely moving the conversation on. And it's a good storytelling. think content marketing can take lots of different forms and some of it can be quite tactical and quite technical and that's good. plays a job. does a job. not saying it's not relevant, but I think if particularly when you're in a place where you're trying to sell very, very high ticket, um, items, know, multi-million pound, six figure or six figure sums.
26:10
You've got to, there's a high burden of proof on you to get someone to invest in it or even to understand there's actually a problem. Because sometimes your thought is about convincing somebody that actually there is an issue and they didn't realize it. So it's very, it's much more cerebral and it, whereas thought leadership can be more tactical, easy to approach. And it doesn't tend to be that as joined up holistically with a lot of other things.
26:39
that as proper thought leadership can be. Yeah, okay. And I mean, I know it's a big problem that a lot of Marxists face today. Everyone's trying to activate more thought leaderships within the business, right? Whether it's particularly on social, getting sales reps, everyone around the business to be doing as much public facing content and engagement as they possibly can. So where, guess, what have you seen have the most success in doing that? are there particular...
27:09
strategies that have worked when it comes to helping to cultivate more internal thought leaders? Well, I would, there is a subtle distinction between thought leaders and thought leadership, and they are definitely to, they're definitely connected and joined together or operate the same kind of sphere. mean, I mean, what I think represents the best practice in BTP marketing is when there is a
27:37
certainly at least one, potentially a number of or handful of thought leadership themes that are very, very well built out, backed by research. They're properly quantifiable. It's not just me and my important thoughts. It's actually, you've really, really, you can stand this out by itself and they can then be delivered or communicated by different individuals within the organization and is then supported by an integrated marketing campaign. Whereas, you could have
28:04
individual thought leaders who are doing their own, who are kind of acting, you can have random acts of thought leadership. So, you know, I'm writing a blog about this. I guess probably that's kind of what I've been doing, right? I've just been randomly like, oh, today I've had a meeting with such and such and I'm going to do a bit of content on that. I haven't had a coherent thing to talk about. It doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be completely structured. I suspect that you can still have room for somebody within an organization with an agreed theme.
28:32
and agreed kind of set of landmark activities where somebody can just be kind of iterating, know, just doing stuff on the fly to a certain extent, as long as it's contributing to the bigger thing. if it's, if it's, if all you've got is somebody doing, you know, less structured stuff, I'm not sure that you, that I would call that thought leadership strategy. It inevitably be a little bit more ad hoc because you are waiting on people having thoughts, having ideas, and that's not going to be consistent enough.
29:02
And I suspect Tom, like me, you'll do a great post, you'll be thinking, I've really got that one. And then you'll go, okay, and you'll move on to something else. And you won't, you won't probably, you might not think about that, follow that train of thought again, ever, or even indeed next week or tomorrow, because you're an entrepreneurial mindset and loads of things are going, are firing off in your brain and you just want to get them down and turn them into something useful.
29:26
Yeah, yeah, well, it relies on you going down a particular rabbit hole, right? But some weeks you don't end up down a rabbit hole, you end up down one that is completely professionally useless to me. That's the joys of my mind. I've done that. But I guess what's interesting then, it sounds like the difference between a thought leadership program and random acts of thought leadership is building a structure which manages to extract consistent insights.
29:55
right and finding a way to almost productize that. what are the pillars? Have I understood that right in terms of what you're saying and what are the pillars of that structure? Well, I think it's about having a really, if you look at, you look at, so we have about 30 entries in the the thought leadership category, the B2B Marketing Awards. So they're best in class thought leadership, right? And 90 % of them rely on data, right? So data is pretty fundamental to that. So it's a big theme that's been worked out in advance, that's properly quantified and explored.
30:24
and expressed and then the implications can then come by opinion-based, what does this mean? So I think it has to be something which is structured around something long-term. You're seeking to do, it's not something you're do once and then move on to something else. You're seeking to develop this theme over a period of time. You're probably gonna try and explore different dimensions of it. There's probably an element of, there should be pre-planned, pre-structured.
30:52
using different supporting mechanisms, using influencers, using PR, backed up with advertising, with email campaigns, with events. But there's room in there for some iteration. There's room in there for some responsive stuff as well. So I think that for me, what good thought leadership looks like. And I'm not saying that carrying on blogging in the way that I've been doing for the last 20 years and that you're, it sounds like you're doing now is bad. I'm not saying that at all.
31:22
I just think it's playing a different role. It's not at the strategic level which these better resourced, better planned programs can deliver. They require you to be structured and to commit and to stick to it, which doesn't suit everybody. Certainly hasn't suited me in the past. Yeah, and I suppose it requires some organisational resource behind you as well.
31:50
I guess there's a couple of questions I'm really interested in that, is there, when you look at those, was it 40, you said, container? No, about 30. About 30. Was there a trend between the type of organization that were able to produce that in terms of the size or the resources that went behind it? I mean, I don't, I actually haven't done the analysis on the size, but they tend to be, by definition, they tend to be a bit larger, right, made them to largest companies. And I appreciate it. that, that again, it's a, it is a,
32:17
a marketing tactic that lends itself to that side of type of organization. terms of the, appreciate may not be quite so much where your interest is, Tom, but I think it's a very legitimate part of B2B marketing. It's the mainstay probably of it. But also in terms of the type of categories, mean, again, professional services is very, very strong in this area because it just suits their style of business they have, where they have.
32:42
They're basically full of subject matter experts. They're full of thought leaders and it's about deploying that in the right way. if you look at the three winners, we're consulting firms or firms with consulting arms and they all have large data pools as well. So that again helps them. They're starting from an advantageous position. Yeah. Okay. And I guess the other thing, so I guess I'm thinking of our listeners who potentially some of them are sat there thinking, okay,
33:12
I need to do data-driven thought leadership, but I'm not lucky enough to be at one of these companies that's sitting on a treasure trove of benchmark data. I always think there's a gong I've always admired for their thought leadership and some of the content that they put out. I just think it's amazing and it's so genuinely insightful. But you are also, you're a conversational intelligence platform with access to recordings of millions of sales conversations happening all over the world. It's not fair. It's not a fair fight.
33:43
What are some of the roots for someone who's maybe sitting there thinking, I want to do this, I want us to build a great thought leadership program, but we don't naturally have that treasure trove? Are there ways that you can punch above your weight? It might be that you can partner with someone, it might be you can do a partnership with a media organization in your space, they might have data that you can use. So, every is going to differ for different people. I mean, if you can't, if you're not, I'm not saying so,
34:12
thought it might be right for everybody, but I do think that I'm a content person. I love content. think great content is fantastic and it builds your brand when it can and it should be delivering you leads and opportunities at the same time. So I think the more, the more we can be strategic about the content to whatever degree is reasonable, the more value we'll get from it. Yeah. I mean, it's what everyone is trying to do, right? Is how do we produce better content? And the great thing about content is it feeds every other channel and everything else that you do.
34:40
So there's such a long tail, if it's one of the things we're trying to work on here at Demand Genius is actually quantifying the long tail benefit that content has, because it's not just the white paper you publish, it's the 10 blog posts that came off the back of it. It's the event that was all pivoted or the keynote speech that was all pivoted around that piece of content. It's such an impactful thing across an organization.
35:03
If it's okay with you, what I normally like to do at the end of these podcasts is just hit you with a couple of quickfire questions. What skill or trait has been the biggest needle mover for you in your own personal career? Public speaking. No doubt about it. Someone who classed herself as an introvert, who has more comfortable writing, the ability to stand up on stage and be coherent is so powerful in so many ways. Nice. Love that. I completely get that.
35:31
I introverted myself and actually at the end of last year was doing improv classes to try and get myself out of that habit and basically be able to stand on a stage without shitting myself. It's good for you. That sounds like a really great creative way to get beyond, get over that bit. So yeah, good for you. It was, it was fun. It was good fun as well. Have you ever, have you seen the office, the US office? Not, I found the UK one so cringy where I couldn't watch it. It was so awful, but awfully brilliant if you know what I mean.
36:01
Okay, yeah, I'm the same. Watching the UK one is a bit painful. The US one's a bit more of a sitcom, but there's the kind of Ricky Gervais character, Michael Scott. He does improv classes and that. So when I told my friends that that's what I was doing, they were all laughing at me because I'm basically just Michael Scott now, or Ricky Gervais, David Brent. Cool. So second question. If you are a B2B marketer in a SaaS company right now, and you were given carte blanche to kind of follow a particular strategy, do you?
36:30
kind of go after your dream big bet, what would you do? Well, you I, so I had written, you'd given me previewed these questions and I had written it from a thought leadership perspective, but I don't think that's the right answer for this audience. So given it's that, so I'm going to say influencer marketing. I go after influencer marketing. I don't think you need to, also, I don't think it needs to be, it should be a big bet. It should be a tactical experimentation bet at this point. I think it's got, I think it's,
36:53
It's a technique, a discipline, time has come. I think you've got, it's been productized now. And it's a great way of building trust and authenticity with people without having to necessarily invest in some of those much, much richer things. So definitely have a look at influencer marketing, understand who influencers are. And if you don't know who they are, then go and find some. Yeah, love that. think it's something we've not utilized in B2B nearly as much as in B2C. I am going to keep calling it a big bet though, rather than a tactical experimentation bet, because it just sounds so much better for socials. But great.
37:22
Spend all your money on influencers definitely. Yeah, okay good like it and then last one So one recommendation from you could be a book podcast a thought leader That you recommend all listeners go and check out Well, I think you should there's a guy you should follow There's loads of people I know follow but one still occurs to me that I'm always impressed by a called Scott Stockwell who? worked for IBM for a While let's put it that way. He's about my age and he but he left there last year and he's
37:51
One of the smartest guys I met, he's as well as being a tremendously nice man, he is tremendously nice. He's always got a fascinating perspective on things. He's the best meeting facilitator, works with us, I've ever met. Like he'd like to bring Lego to meetings and get you to build Lego models and stuff like that. But, and some of the things, some of his kind of anecdotes and his ways of looking at things make your mind.
38:19
bend but they are always fascinating. You don't understand they are fascinating. He's a lovely man full of interesting thoughts and ideas. So follow Scott Stockwell. Great guy. Okay. I've not come across him before so I'm going to reach out to Scott straight after this and follow him and tell him that he owes Joel Harrison a pint for the free publicity. Sounds good to me. Cool. Joel, before we finish, anything else that you want to say? Give you a quick moment to plug anything that you want to plug.
38:47
Well, two things, if you're interested in what commercial marketer looks like, we've got some great resources there at B2B Marketing and perhaps I'll give you a link after as you can share that with the episode if that's possible. And also, if you are interested in thought leadership, I appreciate if you're in SaaS, it may not be the right thing for you, but I'm launching a podcast. So I've got a book, I'm launching a book, but I'm to turn the research process into a product, I'm doing that as a podcast. So it's good, she's going to launch in a couple of weeks, probably very soon when this comes out. So please check that out and follow.
39:16
Lots of great conversations I'll be having on the other end of the interview or other than interviewee. Love that. No, I've said like one of my goals for this podcast is to help SAS, SAS marketers see slightly outside of the SAS myopia. So I think definitely, definitely worth, definitely worth a follow. Fantastic. Thank you. Awesome. There we go. Everyone. That was the godfather of B2B marketing. Joel, thank you very much. I made you a podcast you couldn't refuse. Is that what you're supposed to say at this point?
39:45
Exactly, Thanks so much for me on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye bye.
39:54
If you're a B2B marketer and you want to understand exactly how your content connects to revenue and how you can use it to close deals faster, head to www.demand-genius.com. Thanks for listening.