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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.
Felix Danczak 0:00
If you're a small business, this is the most exciting time for 20 years to grow a business, in my opinion. I think it's the most dynamic moment in business for a generation, and that sounds, again, that sounds equally ridiculous to say, but I do believe it. The first time in 20 years, I think the playing field is being re-leveled, and 20 years ago it was re-leveled by by a huge injection of venture capital. Basically, suddenly it was like, oh, we'll give people loads of money to build stuff, and maybe they can challenge the incumbents who've been there forever, but this time it's not being, it's being re-leveled, not by capital, because we've already got the monoliths like out there, the Googles, the Meta, and so on, who have more money than God, but by distribution, by adaptability, right? The old incumbents, and I include Meta and Co. in this, in this group, are ultimately quite slow, right? They built businesses in the old industrial model, nice big hierarchies, they've got hundreds, they got 1000s and 1000s of people. The playbooks that they're running a stale, they're still thinking about PLG or SLG, as like the model, the go-to market, that's how I should think. And once I picked it, that's off I go. But I think if you, and they're not listening to the market as much, because they're used to a market where they can essentially generate demand rather than have to capture what is moving really quickly. So, if you can build a business that is listening to the market in real time, and is moving at the speed of the market. You will, I think, outrun anybody, however big they are, because you can't. It's no longer, at least right now, it's not pay to play for the first time in a while. You can't, like we said, you can't pay to be in an AI search, at least right now. So that means everyone's free, everyone's is an open field, and that is so exciting. At the same time, the thing that's scary has made it cheaper to test, faster to build, and easier to learn pretty much everything. You don't need a five year plan, and a, you know, you don't need a five, we're sorry, you don't need a five year plan. All you need is a five day feedback loop. Build something on replete, get it out there, see what happens, put an ad out there, see what happens. And within five days, you're going to get a reasonable signal back about whether or not you've, you're, you're on something in PMF terms or not. And I think if you can operate on that, the five day, the five day plan, not the, not the five year plan, you're going to thrive in this chaos, not not struggled at it.
Tom Rudnai 2:28
If I'm a leader now, what do I need to do to get towards that? It's obviously not going to be one step, but how do I need to change my org structure? What processes need to need to come into place? What technologies can help me cough, demand genius cough,
Felix Danczak 2:41
right. So, how long has been two? How long? How long ago? Let's start with the first principle, is and for me this is about decision making at the edge, and now that can mean that does mean something different in technology, but I mean it in terms of who in your organization is making the decisions at the coalface that will impact the customer that will appear on the website, that will, you know, that that you will mean that you sell or you don't sell, and typically those things tend to, the more important they are, the more they have to be centralized. Most businesses, if you're going to make a big change to your price, you know, it's going to go through some kind of pricing committee, or it's even going to go to the CEO, or it's going to go to the CFO, or whatever it is, positioning the same, you know, at Zora. I ran and own positioning, and no one was going to damn change it, unless I was part of that loop. That's going to have to change, like leaders today, who are by and large used to this model of, like, I'm mostly in control, even if I do distribute autonomy to my teams on a day-to-day level. Big changes are mine to make, right? You don't just change the vision of a company without telling anybody. It goes without saying, except it's going to have to stop going without saying, right. We're going to have to start allowing our teams to make changes when they see something happening in the market, giving the trust. It's a.. we always talk about leaders, often talk about, you know, I give to teams, I trust them, I give them total autonomy. We don't really.. we let them pick this event or that event. We let them publish blogs without me reading them, but that's not autonomy. Not really. Autonomy is saying you saw your competitors drop prices, we'll drop our prices. Why didn't you? Why are you even having this conversation with me? Yo, you've already dropped them. Great, fantastic. You saw that one of our competitors has launched a new feature. Oh, the product team's already building it. Great, what? Great, it didn't need to come to me. We didn't need a committee meeting. We didn't need a decision-making process beyond the teams at the edge. So, I think that's kind of almost principle one, principle two is it's going to have to be a lot more cross-functional. Inherent in what I've just said is you're going to need someone from product and someone from marketing and someone from sales all kind of connected together to be able to make those changes happen in real time, and I think we're going to see fewer silos and. Instead of marketing owning leads, sales owning pipeline product, owning the roadmap, we're going to see what I call a market pods, but you can call them maybe like small teams aligned to specific segments or use cases, so and each team, which comprises all of those functions, will own everything for that slice, whether it's discovery, positioning, execution, delivery like in each of these pods. Let's go back to that example around accountants in Yorkshire who work for mid-sized firms. You might have a team just focused on those people. You'll have a go-to market strategist thinking about what those people in Yorkshire need. Oh, it's snowy outside today. Let's change our ads to reference the local snow. I mean, like, look, that level, you're going to need a product or solution owner who can make meaningful changes to the roadmap in real time. You're probably going to need a sales or outbound or an outbound or an inbound motion owner, someone who's focused on what are we hearing in the Gong calls, what are we seeing in the ad changes, what do we, how do we, what do we need to enable our sales teams or marketing teams with, and then you probably need a data analyst to bring this all together, right. These teams typically today are all sitting really far apart.
Tom Rudnai 6:08
We've organized ourselves vertically, right, around,
Felix Danczak 6:10
well, we've organized ourselves around the model of an industrial revolution, where everyone was hyper-specialized and got really good at doing one thing: you guys grow wool, you guys pull the wool. You guys weave the wool. You guys make jumpers. You guys do marketing. You guys do sales. You guys do product. Doesn't work anymore. We have to get tighter because people don't just want one kind of jumper anymore and want it really cheap. What they want is a jumper that's fitted to them in the design that they want at the end at a price point that matches them, and if you're all siloed out, doesn't work. You have to be connected
Tom Rudnai 6:47
the way we need knowledge to disseminate has changed. Like previously, we wanted knowledge to disseminate vertically. You organize yourselves in these sales pods, because it allows sales expertise to filter down to the bottom. That's
Felix Danczak 6:58
a really nice way of putting it. Absolutely, is product engineering expertise to filter across the sales, so I think that's a really elegant way of putting it. We used to build ourselves for the dissemination of functional information, how to do marketing, whatever it was, how to do sale. Now the information that needs to be distributed is the market information what are my what is my market thinking now? What are they asking for now? It's why I turn this concept market led growth rather than product led growth or sales led growth or anything else, because you are you're radically focused, and this is goes well beyond customer centricity. This is all about what is the market saying right now. What is my prospect talking about today? And then reacting and dynamically altering to that, and so, as you said, you need a different organizational structure to fit that. We go further, by the way. I also think we need to change the way we think about budgeting, which is a skit, which is scary, like very common today to think about budgeting in kind of annual cycles or quarterly cycles. Well, usually an annual cycle, but quarterly deployed in a quarterly way, right? Probably going to need to, but if you don't know what's going to happen quarter by quarter, or even month by month, because you're going to have to change the way you deploy your capital to meet your market where they want to be met, then you can't necessarily predict or guarantee that you're going to spend a certain way,
Tom Rudnai 8:28
because as an organization you have to be able to expand and contract
Felix Danczak 8:31
exactly
Tom Rudnai 8:32
right, you've got this idea we're going to drop prices massively because it's just what the market needs, right,
Felix Danczak 8:37
needs so we can't keep spending on those really expensive events anymore, because we don't have the revenue to deliver it, or those accountants we had in Yorkshire, who were buying like hot cakes last quarter, are now all stuck in their homes, because I don't know, it's, it's snowy, these poor accountants in Yorkshire, so they're not buying, so we should move the money somewhere else and do something different with it, we don't want to buy ads in advance anymore, now we want to be doing events for the for the accountants in Tahiti, because suddenly, because the market signal is telling us that they're buying right now. Equally, if a campaign is working, you want to pour fuel on it now. You don't want to wait till next quarter when you've got some more budget, but if a campaign isn't landing, you don't want to let it run this quarter, because you kind of paid the ads, and, like, you know, it's all you've got to spend the money you've got this quarter anyway. Heal it now spend on something else, so I think we need to rethink the way we think about budgeting. When we talked about enablement, but I think the name is really important at giving people really meaningful control. But I think what's connected to that is what leadership does become. Leadership becomes not about making decisions but about encouraging psychological safety learnings and trapping outcomes. So, I came up with a model, the idea of Zora. I call it the failure yield ratio, which I don't really care whether or not this campaign is going to succeed or fail, right? We can't guarantee it. We can't in this market. But the one thing we can really control is how much did we learn from it, and then how much can we implement as a result, because the problem with a lot of this iteration, any iteration, is that people don't want to change things, because change might mean that they fail, and failure, by and large, means that we lose, and we don't like losing, and failure means I might lose my job, it might mean we haven't done a good one. It means I'm going to get told off. It means all sorts of failure is bad. However, it's fail fast. Don't worry about failure. We're not built to think that way. That's not how most people are wired. But if you start incentivizing people to fail, you get something different that happens at the back end. You say, okay, I want to know how many things we learned from this, whether or not this is either fail, and I'm going to give an equal score to whether or not it was a failure or success, and that's how I'm going to incentivize you. Then you start seeing more interesting results, but as a leader, it's your job to give people and to get them to trust you that you really mean it when they complete, when they spend half a million dollars on something and it just doesn't work, that as long as you will learn and you understand why, and you know how you're going to change the next time, that no one's in any trouble, no one's going to get fired, that's your job, that's the job of the leader,
Unknown Speaker 11:13
you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai