As global marketing director of Expleo – a technology, engineering and consulting service provider employing 18,000 people across 30 countries – Siobhán Smith’s customer base spans everything from aeroplane designers to mortgage lenders.
“We do the full spectrum, and we don’t have a product,” she explains. “We have intelligence, expertise, intellectual property and methodologies. So we partner with organisations to ensure the success of their programmes.”
Her role includes both business development and brand building. “There’s a lot of demands on quite a lean team but we definitely punch above our weight in the organisation,” she says.
That’s important because, in too many organisations, business to business (B2B) marketing is seen as something of a Cinderella. “In the marketing world, B2B marketing is like the poor relation to business to consumer (B2C),” she tells Winterlich. “Some of the most effective, strategically successful marketers out there are in B2B, and they are responsible for driving multi million-euro pipelines for businesses, and are responsible for the deals that sales people are closing, but a lot of that gets overlooked.”
That’s because success in the marketing industry is so skewed towards creativity, and key B2C metrics such as cut through, attention and originality.
“But actually, if you strip it back, B2B leaders probably hold the positions in organisations that B2C leaders want, because they are respected and recognised at board level, they have a seat at the senior leadership team and, if they are doing their job right, they are driving the business strategy forward,” she points out.
Despite their organisational heft, you don’t see them lionised at the Cannes d’Or, she adds. That’s because the buying journey of a B2B customer is different too.
“B2B journeys are typically very complex, with a target audience that might be quite small but is of really high value. So you’re typically investing in a lot of account-based marketing, to bring in short-term success,” she explains. “And I call it short-term because it’s not brand building outside of this cohort.”
Consequently, B2B marketers are more rational and often more practical about what the business needs and how they can support it, compared with their B2C peers.
What success looks like in B2B can also depend on your shareholders. If you’re owned by a private equity firm likely to sell within five years, long-term brand building may not be your primary focus. “But make no mistake,” she says, “it is the single most effective way to build trust, which is crucial in decision making.”
But the fact that their work may not be as visible as a consumer campaign presents challenges.
“In Coca Cola or Three or AIB, everybody in the organisation can point to the latest ad they’ve seen and say, the marketing team did that. It’s also easy for consumers to go into a shop and choose a particular brand as a result of that ad, which is why there is so much focus on differentiation for B2C marketing,” she explains. “On the other hand, in B2B, a lot of the work happens under the radar.”
Channels to success
Like all marketeers, to succeed B2B practitioners must first identify the channels that work for them. Coming out of the pandemic, the industry saw a “an overweighting of the effectiveness of digital channels” she says.
“The idea that you need to seed a campaign on every channel, works well for some industries, such as broadcast and media. But, in fact, studies from Gartner and McKinsey have shown that (in B2B) you are going to have a better impact if you focus on the channels that make sense for the objectives you are trying to achieve. According to McKinsey, you’ll get a 15 to 20 per cent boost in conversion rates if you focus on the effective channels.”
All a scatter gun approach demonstrates, by contrast, is that you have violated a core principle of marketing by forgetting the customer.
“It’s not that they dismiss the customer altogether but that they are getting their customer insights from people with existing biases, such as their own sales people, or their cohorts at an event, or their delivery people on the ground. So what happens is that instead of taking a customer view, B2B marketers can tend to take a service or product view instead,” she warns.
Even the term “product marketing” enervates her. “It’s an oxymoron, because marketing is about the customer. The product is what you are selling. If you’re a B2B marketer, you really need to ensure that you are the strong voice of the customer in every single room,” she adds.
Measuring effectiveness
The other challenge for B2B marketers is how to measure effectiveness. After all, not all leads turn into sales, so it’s vital to have a metric that works, given that being able to prove a return on investment is vital to securing budget increases.
“Personally I really only want to show a metric that has a ‘so what?’ factor to it. Vanity metrics are so common across the board in marketing. Trying to create a narrative and then finding the metrics to back it up is a hole that marketers fall into all the time. It’s human nature,” she says.
“Equally, if we look at the leads pipeline, there is loads of stuff we can do to get leads, and tactics we can take, but really if you don’t take a quality over quantity approach, you are setting yourself and your team up for a massive fall,” she says.
It’s something that causes enormous friction between sales and marketing teams.
Smith is an advocate of IBM’s BANT model, which assesses whether a potential lead has the budget, authority, need and timeline in order to determine how they are qualified and prioritised.
It helps ensure a smooth transition from marketing to sales.
“I can’t overstate the risk to business if sales and marketing aren’t aligned. It means that your CRM (customer relationship management) is not a true reflection of your pipeline and your business,” she points out. “That means you are missing out on opportunities due to a lack of trust. After all, your customer doesn’t care if your marketing and your sales teams don’t get on, all they want is a seamless experience.”
What they don’t want is snazzy marketing with cool content, “and then when it comes to the meeting, the sales person has not been properly briefed on the experience the person had, what campaigns the person touched or what the meeting is about. That can create massive damage for any organisation.”
But to avoid it, a strong marketing voice is required, and the higher up the organisation the better. She believes too many businesses, particularly at early stage, miss a trick by hiring mid-level rather than senior marketing leaders.
“When you miss that strong marketing voice, you are missing opportunity. What you need is someone who can input to a strategy, who can reflect the market and can get sales, marketing, product and service people all on board working towards the same goal,” she says.
“For a sales person to work with an immature marketing team is seriously counterproductive. Equally, if you incentivise the two departments to be in competition, you’ve lost. On the other hand, when it’s done right, it can be the difference between single and double digit growth.”
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