The Great Shift in B2B Marketing Ft. Doug Kessler

Doug Kessler:

The internet and all these new tools have made it way more efficient, and easy for us to find our ideal prospects, people who really should love what we have and not really value our weaknesses, they devalue that anyway, so their ideal prospect. It’s also made it way easier for them to find us. So, this is a whole new ballgame, this is the great ship.

Adam Kerpelman:

Hey, everybody, it’s the Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Doug Kessler:

I’m Doug.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thank you for joining us and thanks to our guest today—a repeat offender. You may be our first non-works for us and has to show up as a repeat guest.

Doug Kessler:

Cool, cool. I’m honored.

Adam Kerpelman:

Doug Kessler is the creative director and the co-founder at Velocity Partners and we did a kick-ass episode last season, we talked about all kinds of psychology and marketing mojo and a bunch of fun stuff. If you want the longer version of Doug’s bio, you can go there, but otherwise, do you, Doug, want to just introduce yourself really quickly, and then we’ll go from there?

Doug Kessler:

Sure, yeah. I’m one of the founders of Velocity Partners, which is a B2B tech marketing agency. We used to say content marketing agency, but we broadened it out and grew it up, and now it’s a lot more than that and specializing in just tech and just B2B and having a lot of fun doing it.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, as it happened, just this morning on LinkedIn, I bumped into a post that I ended up tagging you in, Doug. Although we both looked at it and said, “Oh, I don’t have an Adweek subscription so I can’t read this, but I’m pretty sure I know what they’re talking about,” which Brian, our other occasional co-host, would say, “Yeah, I read a headline recently that said,” he says that occasionally. A good way to admit the reality a lot, we mostly live in now which is-

Doug Kessler:

[inaudible 00:01:59] I shared a story recently. [inaudible 00:02:02], but I shared it.

Mark Richardson:

I shared it. I shared this thing I’m pretty sure I agree with.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

The headline though was that the Rogue Social Media Manager is an advertising strategy and then they talked about Twitter accounts. They have a picture of Wendy’s there so I assume they’re talking about the fact that Wendy’s has a generally pretty irreverent Twitter account.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

Well, they lean in hard, yeah. They go topical, they’ll go … Yeah, Wendy’s Twitter is undefeated. Arby’s is pretty great, too.

Doug Kessler:

I know. And you know what? It stands out so much and you think why aren’t more doing it, I know they’re starting to, but how long does it take to realize that this is free multiplication of your powers? Go for it.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, then, what you brought up, Doug, is what you were calling the significant shift in marketing. Do you want to take it from there?

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, this is the new one for me, this thing I’m going on. So, bear with me because it’s not perfectly formed or anything.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, it’s best. That’s what we’re here for.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah. Well, we’ve lived through, in just the last five years, make it 10 and it’s even more, there’s this fire hose of change, so many things have come along. The internet, digital marketing and, all right, that was more than 10 but just content marketing and account-based marketing and just analytics and data and everything and just the discipline is so transformed. And you could think it was all tech-driven, and in some ways it was, but what I’m thinking of as the great shift is that there’s this underlying mindset that is actually what has to change and has changed for the enlightened and the winning brands but hasn’t yet for every other brand.

Doug Kessler:

And it’s around this idea that, in the beginning of marketing, right up until very recently, it was really hard, expensive and inefficient to find your ideal prospects. You couldn’t find them and market to them and so, because that was so expensive and difficult, marketing and sales grew up to be this fake, broadcast bullshit based on a lie. There was this adversarial mindset because we had to trick people who were not ideal prospects into buying even though they weren’t ideal, they probably weren’t going to like it, it wasn’t really for them. But we had to because we couldn’t just filter out the people who were perfect because we were at print advertising, we were just broadcasting out there. Anyone who raised their hand, you had to try to sell to and market to. You couldn’t tell, it just wouldn’t work any other way.

Doug Kessler:

And so, the whole profession is built on that broken dynamic, the inefficiency of finding and reaching your ideal prospects, the people who are most likely to buy and most likely to love that they did buy. So, the whole discipline is built on pretending people are ideal prospects when they’re not which is actually quite a dishonest thing and I think it’s why marketing and sales got a bad reputation over the years, that people think of it as deception. They get defensive when it comes at them because they know this person’s agenda, this brand’s agenda is going to trump mine. They don’t care that much about me, they just want to sell.

Doug Kessler:

Well, the internet and all these new tools have made it way more efficient, easy for us to find our ideal prospects, people who really should love what we have and not really value our weaknesses, they devalue that anyway, so their ideal prospect. It’s also made it way easier for them to find us. So, this is a whole new ballgame, this is the great shift. When you have a room full, if we use a metaphor of a speaker at a conference, a room full of ideal prospects, your marketing and selling needs to be very different than if you’ve got a room full of people, one or two of whom might be your ideal prospects which is the old model. And the old model is, well, you just got to pretend that you’re for everybody and just throw it out there and hope this is a big net and just hope you can close some.

Doug Kessler:

But if you know, no, this room is full of people who we built this product for, we built this company for, this is going to be great for them. We know it and they’re going to love it. That’s a whole different ball game and it takes you out of the deception game and out of the bullshit game and into the help them make good decisions because you know that one of those good decisions is you. And so, that’s really where I think marketing has gone through this big, exciting, wonderful change and has made our discipline way more authentic and has a lot more integrity because what wins now is honesty and best practice. This is what wins, whereas, before, dishonesty won more than honesty. So, that feels like a big, big shift to me.

Adam Kerpelman:

For sure, when you put it that way. The reality, for sure, is that you’re speaking our language. Literally, our company does targeting data for B2B applications. Our whole point is you can actually find your audience now. The crazy thing is, it used to be so hard to do it that the existing institution and machinery and the playbook that everybody was taught up until ’95 or whatever, not even ’95 because how long did it take for us to dissect and actually figure out what you’re supposed to do on the web, probably more like 2005.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, more like 2005, or 2011.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s so different that when you go in and you start saying, “Well, we have this data product and here’s the thing that we can do and here’s how it can increase the efficiency of your campaigns because it looks this way and then here’s all the weird ways that this can maybe where to go with it eventually because it’s down the rabbit hole.” But my fascination is where that merges with the old stuff because there’s still the need to stand out in a crowd and so a lot of the old peacocking still needs to happen. At the same time, there’s this whole new skill and new thing that is really what we call the data-driven mentality where it’s you want to stand out but it’s through different avenues.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, absolutely. The stuff I love about creativity and telling great stories definitely still applies. But people think that what you guys do is, okay, it makes it cheaper and more efficient to find these people so we can hit them with the same stick we hit them with before we could do this.

Mark Richardson:

Right.

Doug Kessler:

No, no, no, you need a new stick.

Mark Richardson:

Yes.

Doug Kessler:

In fact, it’s not even a stick, it’s a pillow. But that’s the problem people are using that old playbook with this powerful new tool of targeting. It’s like, no, guys, leave that playbook, bring some of the goodies along with you, creativity and fun and mojo and all those things we talked about in the last one but remember you’re talking to people who now you know are way more likely to love what you’ve got. And so, it’s a different dynamic, you do not have to shove things at them. And I think what you guys do makes that possible but it has to be seized on. People have to decide to change and use that power.

Mark Richardson:

It seems like there’s a, what I like to think of as an authenticity quotient, we talk about the intelligence quotient. If the ability for brands to raise their enchantment and enjoyment level in whatever experience that is, I think, whether it’s a webinar or a community forum or just a single video ad, I think back, the old playbook was get your name out there by any means necessary. I think of the Bill Hicks joke which talks about the attractive lady running on the beach, drinking Coke.

Mark Richardson:

You don’t see a Coke can anywhere in the ad but it’s because sex sells, that’s that old playbook. Or if it bleeds, it leads, these old adages. Where now it’s like we don’t really have to lean on our basis, reflexive instincts and impulses to remember to form a connection with a brand. Like you said, you can actually provide an experience that’s really enjoyable that people want to return to and really rely on.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, and it lets the people come out from behind the brand and be people. That story that you shared about rogue social accounts or social accounts with a lot of voice and energy and you get the sense of human beings there. I think that’s part of this new playbook is to come on out from behind the packaged-up logo, you don’t need to be that slick now. So, I’m in B2B, and I know you guys serve B2B, it used to be the B2B voice came from authority. The old banks had these Greek pillars. In a town, your bank did. I did. I was in Ridgefield, Connecticut and the bank was like, you wouldn’t believe it’s like a Greek temple because that’s where trust came from.

Doug Kessler:

And now, look at the bank design, it’s like a living room. It’s like you come in and they give you a little hug and you sit there, cushy little thing in the corner and there’s no counters, there’s no glass between you and people and that’s an analog for the B2B voice. It’s not about authority anymore, it’s about authenticity. It’s about being real, being true, relaxing. Relaxing and taking a deep breath before you hit someone over the head with your story.

Adam Kerpelman:

Funny thing I was thinking, though, is that by the nature of the process to roll out what that living room looks like, in Bank of America, it’s always a little outdated probably from whatever a pop culture living room actually looks like.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, it’s your mom’s living room. It’s [inaudible 00:11:34].

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s, oh, it’s pretty mid-century in here.

Doug Kessler:

It’s a lot of lime green in here, guys.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, the way I see it, in terms of the great shift, the real thing that shifted, regardless of how it manifests on a different media channel, is that this interaction that used to be about broadcasting and fundamentally one way. We’re going to tell you about our product in potentially manipulative ways so that you feel like you need it to solve whatever made up problem that never actually existed. Deodorant or whatever. Before deodorant, we just stunk and everyone seemed to do just fine. Anyway. So, what changed is the two way street. We started getting data back from the audience regarding what they actually wanted and it creates a paradigm shift where there’s just a metal level.

Adam Kerpelman:

You can’t go on TikTok without being aware of the mechanism by which TikTok is made, it’s part of the platform. The big button is right there in the middle, they’re inviting you to make stuff, you have just as much capacity to make a thing as the next broadcaster. So, anyone watching TikToks knows that a brand has a team making Tiktoks and there’s people there.

Adam Kerpelman:

And so, even if Wendy’s is irreverent, they don’t even have to worry because you just fire the person and everyone will go, “Okay, well, we get it.” It’s not like they’re going to hold it against your brand. But even that part of it aside, it becomes, like we were saying, an authenticity thing because people are aware of that art of this. You don’t have to hide it and then you don’t have to hide the idea that, hey, this is just the marketing team, probably full of young people if it’s on TikTok, trying to do a thing to catch your attention.

Adam Kerpelman:

And ideally, if they put it in front of the right people, you’re catching exactly the right people to think it’s clever in exactly the right way that all of that stuff of does it fit this brand or that brand or whatever, it doesn’t matter in the same way.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah. And luckily, social media, you have to shoot from the hip. And one of the reasons that old B2B voice died was they couldn’t really contain it, you couldn’t send every tweet through the same process. You guys got yourself rings, fenced to do what you want, that’s because it makes sense. If everything you said had to go through legal, how could you do a podcast? Especially how could you guys do a podcast [inaudible 00:13:54] everything?

Adam Kerpelman:

A considerable lag is the answer.

Doug Kessler:

And I think social media is a big, big force for people just getting real, realizing the old brand police thing wasn’t really going to work and you’re going to have to loosen it up and let people be who they are and it includes making mistakes, right?

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, and sometimes you don’t know that you’re making a mistake, that’s our whole thing. Look, we have this assumption but you need a data set, you need testing, you need learnings. And even if it fails, if a test fails, that’s still a win, that’s learning.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah. And you know what? That touches on a really good part of this great shift, which I love, which is the feedback loop is truer. So, if you have that room full of ideal prospects, every interaction is giving you golden feedback because it’s ideal prospects giving it. Whereas in that noisy room full of everyone and two people, all that feedback, a whole lot of it is not only not useful, it’s unhelpful, it’s destructive because you’re going to be tuning to the wrong signal. And so, this is a huge part of why the great shift is so powerful. That feedback loop that you’re talking about is faster but it’s also truer.

Doug Kessler:

You’re going to shift your products and services in the right ways because you’re talking to the right people so you get better and better at that fit. It’s a really great virtuous circle of, well, the fit’s better now and we’re even better for our ideal prospect. And I just think this is the way to the kind of selling and marketing that we all wished we could have done all the time and now, really, not only can but have to.

Adam Kerpelman:

I love the idea of tuning to the right signal. That also was funny because it is via a one way. It’s a metaphor from a form of one way broadcast media, but-

Doug Kessler:

Well, it’s still two ways.

Adam Kerpelman:

But I get what you mean. Yeah, the idea of-

Doug Kessler:

You send out a thing and the response is the ping [inaudible 00:15:47] like a radar. So, it is, it’s always two way and then you’ll send something else out there and you’ll hear back and we’ve all had feedback. Let’s say you do a piece of creative in a marketing team and you show it to the wrong people, non-ideal prospects and they give you this harsh feedback and everyone reacts, “Eeh, oh, they don’t like you. They think this.” “Yeah, but guys, they’re never going to buy us. Why are we listening to them?” It’s one thing to hear them out but don’t overreact to it, they’re not your ideal prospect so that feedback needs to be devalued. We’ve all been there where great ideas were killed by people who weren’t even in the target audience.

Adam Kerpelman:

It happens internally all the time if you have the wrong incentive structures inside of your … Even just trying to get a piece of media approved. I’m very cognizant always of trying to fix that piece where it’s like, right, but this person’s motivation is tied to this other thing inside of this corporate megalith. Nothing personal, they’re always going to decide against my interest. We have to either fix this or the marketing department is never going to run.

Mark Richardson:

There’s almost always an element of individual or group ego of either the way things had been done in resisting, I think, resisting the need to shift or resisting the void, the unknown space.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, definitely. And the funny thing about this is it’s often the senior folks. They got senior doing it the old way and so they’re pretty tied to that and it’s harder to shift that. So, stakeholders internally often still want to be all things to all people and that’s a hard one. And I always think, if you can get that on the table early and say, “Look, our ideal prospect, we’re tightly defining that together and we’re going to agree on that together,” and very, very tight focus there. Who aren’t we going to sell to, who are we happy to alienate which is a concept that senior marketers hate.

Mark Richardson:

That’s really interesting. Who are we happy to alienate? I love that.

Doug Kessler:

How happy to alienate.

Mark Richardson:

Who can we-

Doug Kessler:

Go out of your way to alienate. Because if you do, you’ll be attracting your like-minded people so much more.

Mark Richardson:

It’s so funny, you almost-

Adam Kerpelman:

I think that way a lot. I think that way because, in my pitches, I want to be able to say, “Yes, Facebook will hate us but that is okay right now for where we need to be as a brand in the world of data,” for example. If somebody’s still going, “Yeah, but it’d be good to be friends,” then you’re, then you’re watering down your narrative in a way that’s not going to win the race you’re trying to win.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, for me, marketing is a filter, not just a magnet. The old playbook is it’s a magnet. Bring them all in, we’ll sort it out later. Now, marketing needs to be a filter. It’s no, we need to keep out people who are going to hate this or there’s a better option for them somewhere. Velocity, we decided early we were going to let swearing stay in our marketing and we knew that it wasn’t a perfect filter, it’s not great because we do alienate some people who we’d actually work quite well with, they just don’t like sweary people so there is a loss to it. But there’s not a bad match to the people who realize that swearing is a powerful part of language and would like the kind of marketing we do.

Doug Kessler:

And I don’t mean that we’re going to swear for them on their brand, it’s rare that we do. We have done some but it’s the kind of people who are like, “You know what? There’s a like-minded resonance that goes on there because we’re passionate about what we do. We just happen to be sweary so it’s honest.”

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Doug Kessler:

And so, we took up the hit that we might alienate some to attract more the kind of people that we know we’re going to have fun with.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’m obsessed with that, kind of. Maybe this is far afield from marketing but it fits with what we’re talking about now.

Mark Richardson:

It’s what we’re here for.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah, I’m a member of a creative guild in my crypto world. I maybe talked about this in the last podcast but I don’t care, either way, it’s compelling. Yeah, I work on a bunch of blockchain projects on the weekend and stuff and I’m in a guild that’s all made up of all the traditional roles that you would have at an agency for software dev and design and stuff.

Doug Kessler:

Neat, cool.

Adam Kerpelman:

But one of their things from the outset was, look, if we’re going to hold together as a collectively owned project of trying to push this work through the door and keep everybody happy and stuff like that, we get to completely remap the rules, that’s the idea of the whole crypto economic thing. And so, in there, I don’t help with business affairs, I’m a rogue and it all aligns with role playing game memes. So, I’m a rogue, a bard and a scribe because I do marketing, I write and I help with business affairs matters. And I occasionally talk to people that are just like, “That’s stupid.” I’m like, “Great. That’s a welcome opinion, you don’t have to be part of it.”

Adam Kerpelman:

But the people that don’t care about that shift versus what they’re used to in a world valuating the idea that I’m an account manager, not a cleric, the real thing is, who cares? It’s all made up. It’s all stupid and made up so that the humans can work together. Somebody made up the word account manager, doesn’t really-

Mark Richardson:

Because-

Adam Kerpelman:

But it’s a great organic filter. I love working in there, I love everybody that works there because there’s this baseline filter right at the door that’s just like the rough equivalent. If you care that Gary Vee swears, you weren’t going to like him anyway.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, it’s good that you were alienated, right?

Doug Kessler:

And I like to do that exercise with clients. Who do we want to alienate? And you may not be comfortable going out of your way to alienate them, it’s a lot more fun than people think, but think about who you would if you could and what you might do. Generally, the things that you would do that would alienate someone are very close to the things you would do that would attract your ideals. They’re going to like that you were bold enough to do that.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, this gets us back to the mojo thing and the standing out thing. It’s a thing that I just have to repeat over and over again because I guess it’s counterintuitive if you’re not in the space where you think about advertising this way. And maybe it’s just where my head’s been because we’re currently planning for a live event situation where it’s like, okay, how do I stand out on a conference floor and the answer is just cooler than everybody else. And they’re like, “Yeah, but we’re not talking about the product,” doesn’t matter. This is more like the LeBron commercials right now than it is proper product marketing with the value proposition answered for blah, blah, blah. It’s like-

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, it’s the Nike ad. As you said, it’s that LeBron where he plays five roles and it’s great, funny versus Steve Jobs.

Adam Kerpelman:

A single shot of the shoes.

Mark Richardson:

Versus Apple iOS with Steve Jobs rolling out the new iPhone telling you it can do X, Y and Z. I think, like you said, there’s an audience for both. There are people who appreciate a detailed keynote with product features and here’s the problem we’re helping you solve and here’s the thing we approved upon the old model and there’s that there’s that side of it. And I think there are people who appreciate the more disruptive event-based experiential, weird, more weird forms of brand awareness where you’re just, “I’m just here watching this aerialist or some jugglers and gymnasts and this brand is really cool.” Like you say, it’s being willing to be different, being willing to be visible doing something that no one else is doing. I think there’s great value simply in that.

Doug Kessler:

Absolutely. And part of it is there’s this panic that we’re not going to have another shot at these people. We got one shot. They’re walking by in the aisle, we got one shot. They answer our email, we got one shot. Well, you used to have one shot in that old world because they stumbled past. You stumbled on them, they stumbled on you, they’re not your prospects, this is your one shot, it’s true. It’s a very low percentage shot but it is your one shot. So, they want to shove the whole story into everyone’s face. They’re walking by in the stand, it’s like, “We’re scalable and we’re secure,” and you just want to throw everything out that you can because you …

Doug Kessler:

But in the new world and when you know they’re an ideal prospect, you can sit back, you can relax a little bit, take a breath because you’re going to have more time with these people. They’re going to like your early signals, they’re going to come back for some more signals because you’re not shoving your whole story down their throat. You have this confidence that they’re going to like you as they move closer, they’re going to like it and you can take your time with that. You don’t have to grab them in headlock, shout everything you know into their ear then hope that they enjoy the experience.

Mark Richardson:

Right.

Adam Kerpelman:

And in part we know that because of the two way street now. And so, we tried the old playbook and people are going, “I don’t like it when you do that. I don’t like it when you shout at my ear like that, man.”

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. There’s a funny place where this emerges as tension in terms of trying to make that shift with the sales department because sales is culturally way even heavier unlike the go, go, go mentality. And so, I’m constantly maddening people or breaking hearts in various meetings involving sales where they say, “If we could just do this and this and this then we would have an answer for these people.” And I say, “Well, we can make some stuff to get in sequence as soon as possible but the reality of the shift that you’re talking about is I’m going to need nine to 12 months.” And then they’re like, “Well, I need to make numbers at the end of the quarter.” And it’s like, “Well, then you needed to talk to me a year ago.”

Doug Kessler:

Yeah. Well, you do understand that pressure, too. And I think part of the reason sales went the way it went and we get this hard sell thing and the resistance is because marketing wasn’t sending it ideal prospects. And so, if what marketing is sending you is still pretty undifferentiated like bipeds who walk upright, then you’re going to have to do some hard work. Whereas, if they’re sending you a pretty steady stream of close-to-ideal prospects that you’ve agreed on together, wow, your job changes and I’ve noticed it now. I get sold to a lot as we all do and the new salespeople are great, the good ones are unbelievable and I feel like they are listening, they know exactly what they’re bringing to the table, they’re there to find that fit. If it isn’t there, they’re the first ones to say to move on because they don’t want to waste their time either.

Doug Kessler:

And so, there’s a new breed of salespeople who are so on this, and the more we can feed them ideal prospects, the more that wins. The people who can listen, listen, listen, before they even speak, ask those right questions, then they’re really into a relationship.

Adam Kerpelman:

And a lot of that is, I think, and why it’s such a hard shift because it comes down to really human difficulties with cyclical behavior, essentially. We’re used to seasons, we’re used to stuff that cycles and we adapt to cadence around what we’re supposed to be getting done at work or whatever. And the shift that’s happening that’s exciting to the marketers is we can do what you’re talking about, we can target really effectively, we can make sure we’re tagging the ideal people, ideal prospects but then it also means introducing what sometimes we call the nurture mindset.

Adam Kerpelman:

Everybody’s heard of nurture campaigns at this point but really getting into the idea of what it means to nurture something. It’s become a buzz term but it is a specifically chosen term because it’s more like growing a tree or a little baby lamb. It’s about finding the right person but then, also, we need nine months to make sure that right person has bought into the right aspects of how the thing works here, how it’ll integrate with their stuff, learned a few new things they need to know to understand a complicated product like ours. It’s hard to teach people things-

Mark Richardson:

A lot like dating.

Adam Kerpelman:

… especially if they’re grownups already.

Doug Kessler:

That’s right.

Adam Kerpelman:

And so, if we’re trying to teach you about a whole new thing you can do with data, we can get you these leads where they are already psyched about everything you need. It just took nine months because I got to assess and react and behave on some level more like a teacher. You deliver your lesson and if the room isn’t following you, you adapt the lesson. You can’t just keep shouting the same thing and that … You can, that’s what a bad teacher would do. So, it creates attention that, I think, really, in a room, when you’re trying to talk about it, the lockup you feel sometimes is on that level of habit changing, right?

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:28:19]-

Adam Kerpelman:

Imagine suddenly deciding you’re going to be a morning person, it’s not easy. That’s going to take years maybe.

Mark Richardson:

I feel like there’s always an apprehension, too, when we talk about the ideal prospect. I think the hardest thing, at least for us as ABM marketers, is determining what price point what’s your budget. Is this person even able? Can their team afford our product? Are they scoped? Are they funded? All of those things, for us, is one of those big unknowns in determining what you would call an ideal client profile if you will. We’re looking for someone who can spend 100K, 200K a year or whatever on our SaaS product or our data licensing. That’s hard to ascertain digitally.

Mark Richardson:

With Google, you can dial in the individual’s median income, and net worth kind of, sort of. But when you’re looking at a team or a company, you really have to do a lot of research; you got to do a lot of homework, whether that’s an STR or that’s marketing, teeing up a cohort of just recently funded accounts, but you really have to assemble many data points to understand that side of it. At Velocity, how do you go about having those conversations?

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, that budget level and things for a known product is one of the things that go into ideal prospect. You can be qualified out, you simply don’t have the budget. And sometimes that’s left for the sales guys to determine or the early business development guys but I think there are ways, just targeting a specific size of company might help you there. The thing is with a lot of tech selling, just because they’re ideal prospects doesn’t mean they know that yet.

Doug Kessler:

And so, they may not have the budget for this because they don’t value it yet, they don’t get it, they haven’t thought about their problems this way yet. So, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of hard work to do, it isn’t this magic dust that you target them properly and they’ll run into your arms because they’ve been waiting for just you to walk along. There’s still, obviously, and often is quite a lot of real work of educating and nurturing and the things you’re talking about and finding out is this prospect really, can they afford us and things like that.

Doug Kessler:

So, all those things still have to happen. It’s just, when you know that you’re in the business of finding those ideal prospects, then starting to tune to them, it’s a different game than trying to do the same thing for someone who really, at the end of the day, probably shouldn’t buy your stuff which I know is really hard for some, both sales and marketers, to ever conceive of someone who actually shouldn’t. But I think it’s a good exercise is to make a list of people who legitimately make the good decisions that do not lead to you. It’s okay, that’s just life.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, to tie it back to the tuning and the signal thing and the idea of data that we were talking about up top and the big shift, part of the new skillset that really is what we’re here to talk about in this show is understanding how to use that incoming signal properly because you can misuse data like crazy. And so, an example that I like to use all the time is you see a lot of startups that might do 100 million in business a year with two-person marketing departments because that’s the nature of their market and they’re not necessarily heavy on marketing. They might have just raised another round of another 200 million to continue growing out what they’re doing.

Adam Kerpelman:

The fact of the size of that company or the amount of money that they just raised could mislead me into thinking, “Okay, you might be willing to pay a quarter million dollars a year for a data product for your obviously large marketing team.” And it’s like, “No, actually, there’s only three people there and their budget’s $1 million a year, they’re not going to put a quarter of it into this product that you’re pitching them,” and it’s a version of fine tuning, right?

Doug Kessler:

Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

That’s hard to do with the data but it’s also there. You’re not necessarily looking in the traditional places that we think of in B2B because we’re starting to look more at personnel and the people and the structure of the organization and stuff which is part of what we do. Versus the traditional stuff which is like, “Hey, we know from the headlines that you just raised $100 million, we’re going to start hammering you with marketing material that’s irrelevant to you because your marketing department is two people and you run lean and effective.”

Doug Kessler:

Yeah. So, it’s just really clunky targeting of you are this size, therefore, you must have this. I like sometimes leading with problems and issues like, “Are you hitting this?” And if it’s like, “No, I’m not hitting that problem,” well, you’re probably not one of our ideal prospects, our ideal prospects are hitting this issue now. And it might be, for you guys, wasting money in channels and getting really low conversion of the leads they’re generating, let’s say. Well, sounds like that’s a targeting problem, we can help with that. And so, sometimes, you may not have known your problem was this but you are hitting a wall somewhere, you need some help with it. We’ve seen that wall before and we can help you over that wall and it’s a thing called targeting and let’s talk about it.

Mark Richardson:

I love that. And there’s so many conversations that we’ll see, sales conversations will come up and go, “Our ID graph merges B2B data points with B2C.” And so, so many times people go like, “We’ve been talking about this. Somebody’s got to have this service.” And it’s this thing that people find us and they’re like, “Yeah, this is what we’ve all been dreaming of, you guys,” it’s cool.

Doug Kessler:

Ideal prospect.

Mark Richardson:

You’re the ideal prospect. We’re not for everybody but for people who want to get off cookies, get off the ad platforms.

Doug Kessler:

Yeah, so they hit the problem of we want to be able to use, yeah, this personal side of their lives and their business side. We know it’s one human being, we’d like to be able to merge that and they hit that. So, they’re at a certain maturity level where they want that. And so, maturity level might be the invisible dimension there, which is hard to pick out of a LinkedIn filter, but is real. And so, it’s like, well, how can we send out a signal that the right people will respond to that thing and issues is one of the ways to do that. And I think attitude and energy and mojo can be, too. Sometimes, you know you’re marketing to a confident change driver in a company, well, they like different stuff than safe, safe corporate type who doesn’t want to rock the boat.

Doug Kessler:

And so, that’s targeting. You may not have that in your data yet but, if that’s who you’re looking for, send out those pheromones and the things that come flocking towards you, they’re the right people.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. The cool thing is, once you get that signal and if you get it right and broad enough, then you can test that against these audiences. And so, it’s not even just that you have to imagine this ideal customer which I think a lot of times people think, “Oh, we need an analyst. We need to do an exercise.” You do but only really to find your top 15 ideas of what your best customer is and then you run it against all of those audiences and you see what works. And then, to some of the earlier points, maybe check your tests for bias because maybe the signal’s not right and you’re pulling in the wrong people which you’ll learn eventually.

Adam Kerpelman:

But that’s one of the cool things about the digital space to me as well is it makes the world of … People imagine the boardroom pitch from the advertising agency about here are all the things you should do, your modern digital agency should probably be coming to you with 15 different ideas, they’re going to test it in market and then will pick the top five and cut the other ones off and then will cut that down to the top two and organize a push to the finish line for your launch, blah, blah, blah. It’s weird nuanced in a fun way.

Mark Richardson:

Just because you don’t have something as part of your tech stack doesn’t mean that you are necessarily right for it at the time. It may be part of a three-year plan, it might be part of a five-year plan. Things like standing up a CDP or data lake, data warehouse, you can see those signals like, “Okay, I saw you just got funded. Let me sell you on this keyword research tool and all these things that a functioning marketing department should have,” but it’s really about asking the right questions and understanding where are you on the journey.

Mark Richardson:

Are you at the point of optimizing a bunch of content at scale? Are you doing a website migration? Are you looking to do a rebrand or roll out a different product and that’s going to carry a whole different set of keywords or are you just at the point of figuring out, okay, who are we, what’s the best thing about this product and how can we make it appealing? How can we focus on this one thing in our messaging?

Mark Richardson:

I think that’s what I get. I get a lot of emails and cold emails for all sorts of things that I would go, “Yeah, that’s something down the road maybe once we’ve built out a team and I have someone who can manage these.”

Adam Kerpelman:

If you keep reminding me effectively for nine months, I might be ready to purchase your products.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Doug Kessler:

It’s funny because maturity of the target prospect is, for tech, often a really critical dimension. And people think of the low end as ruling people out, they’re just not ready for us, which is true, and a lot aren’t. But there’s a high end too, there’s some people who are beyond you. Not you as a company, you guys, but any company. It’s like, “Wait, those are too sophisticated, they’re too mature. Those guys are building their own CDP, they’ve got a data lake that they put in themselves and they’ve got a whole team running it. They don’t want to plug and play thing.” We need to realize our sweet spot is not everyone above a certain maturity level, there’s often a ceiling, too. And I think when you establish that, you can start freeing yourself from stories that are wasting time and aren’t going to resonate and just go for, look, there is a sweet spot here of people who are ready for it and really can or haven’t built it themselves and so, wow, we got a match here, we can be there next big jump in maturity.

Mark Richardson:

I love that.

Adam Kerpelman:

It feels like a pretty good place to wrap it up mainly because the clock is ticking and we’re out of time. This is great, thanks for coming back.

Doug Kessler:

Thanks for having me back. I’m honored and always enjoy talking to you guys.

Adam Kerpelman:

If people want to find you across the interwebs, where should they look you up?

Doug Kessler:

I got in early at Twitter, I got my own name. I’m not one of these Doug Kessler six, four, eight guys, I’m Doug Kessler. That is my name, that is my Twitter handle, I’m an OG. And also, velocitypartners.com is where I apply my trade and can’t do a lot badly going there.

Mark Richardson:

It’s a good follow, highly recommend.

Adam Kerpelman:

I follow a podcaster who is basically only internet level famous but he is, I would say famous, who has the Twitter handle @willsmith. They did a really funny episode after the Oscars where he was just like, “People keep tagging me.”

Doug Kessler:

Oh, see, this is the problem.

Adam Kerpelman:

And then he told the whole story of his whole life of having that Twitter handle because he got in early and Will Smith’s people reach out to him every once in a while. And, anyway.

Doug Kessler:

It sell. This happened to my brother, it was worse though. His name is Jason Kessler and one of the horrible, horrible-

Mark Richardson:

Oh, wow.

Adam Kerpelman:

Oh, geez. Yeah.

Doug Kessler:

[inaudible 00:39:35]

Mark Richardson:

He was Unite the Right in Charlottesville. It’s that guy.

Adam Kerpelman:

Oh, no.

Doug Kessler:

That guy.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, that’s the guy.

Doug Kessler:

He hijacked my brother’s name. My brother’s a sweetie, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly and people hated on him.

Mark Richardson:

I bet. Wow. Is he gone to just Jay? Maybe to just Jay period for a while until people forget about that douchebag?

Doug Kessler:

He’s not flinching, he’s not flinching. He’s hanging out and it’s proving that that guy is getting marginalized. He’s got his name back, I think, over time.

Adam Kerpelman:

That’s good. Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, thanks, Doug. We’ll have to have you back next season to do this again.

Doug Kessler:

All right.

Adam Kerpelman:

Thanks, everybody, for listening. This is the Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Doug Kessler:

I was Doug.

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy, everybody.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for listening to the Data-Driven Marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan Celsius. This episode was edited by Steve Kush. The Data-Driven Marketer is sponsored by NetWise, a Dun & Bradstreet company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of NetWise or Dun & Bradstreet.