David van Schaick’s Post

This is just very good. A few here which I could see sticking.

Great day yesterday at the B2B Leaders Forum with Propolis and B2B Marketing. A feast of B2B chat from which I’d pick out four ‘provocations’: 🙋♂️ The favourite in the room. Inbox Insight shared some research into buyer behaviour that reinforces much of what we’re hearing. The headline was that being the “favourite" in the metaphorical room containing the buying committee was the key to success. And that means engaging early and widely with the whole committee. To my previous posts, it’s also about being ‘culturally relevant’ as well as a known brand. 💱 Revenue quality matters as much as quantity. Great session on speaking the language of the CFO with an actual CFO. A good jumping off point for collective strategizing is to ask about what makes good, disproportionately valuable revenue. 👂 Spend time with customers! More important than ever to be voice of the customer but very few marketers and their teams have regular direct access to customers. Speaking to them is where you learn the all-important tacit insights about what matters (you can't hear the tension in their voice in a survey!). 📉 Marketing strategy is about resilience as well as growth, easy to lose that in the clamour. The venue (Royal Society of Arts House) was also extraordinary with wall paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds among others! Thanks to Joel Harrison, Richard O'Connor, Sarah Casswell (née Biggins), Ahmed Elkady and the team for hosting!

My most recent column for Marketing Week looked at consensus in the buying group. In it I make a case that buying groups cohere not only around a brand but also around an idea of what they 'should' be investing in right now. To be clear, I don't think this is the same thing as the (dubious) trend for category creation. Rather it's about understanding that stories and anecdotes help us share and assimilate ideas and that's an important part of being high enough on both the buyer's to-do list and the perhaps even more important easy-enough-to-get-sign-off list. Someone recently told me about Robert Schiller's "Narrative Economics", which might be a good comparison. Schiller argues that narratives both help us make sense of the world and in doing so shape it, in this case macro economic trends. I'm saying the same applies at the micro scale of a buying process. I often talk about a concept that 'travels well'. Lee Wardell dubbed it "stories that can be retold"; he has a way of making it all sound simple. You could say this is just 'why PR works' but I think it's a useful insight when you're looking at influencing the RFP/sales/buying process too. Deals can be swung with a well-placed anecdote. Link in comments.

An interesting piece of research this from Dentsu B2B. The approach they’ve taken is a bit different. They’ve asked B2B buyers about recent buying experiences, getting them to score the brands they looked at against 30 ‘decision drivers’ (14k interviews over four years, so an ambitious scope). They’ve then looked at which of these drivers has the biggest impact on whether a brand wins or comes second/third (ie, loses). The results are self-declared so there’s some caveats to make there (buyers don’t always have access to their real motivations, etc). But when you look at the findings in the context of other research, it generally tallies. Headlines I took from it: 💡 Personal outweighs professional. They claim that for the first time in the four years they’ve been running the research, personal decision drivers based around trust, values, etc outweigh ‘professional’ considerations like price, features and so on. I’m slightly surprised that we hadn’t reached this threshold earlier, but the trend is clear 💡 (Yet more) evidence of the prominence of brand and trust as it influences buying groups. The top decision driver for the last two years is “I feel safe signing a contract with them” which apparently reflects statements like it’s “easy to convince my colleagues on the brands credentials”. 💡 Some signs of overconfidence. A big gap between buyers perception of different-ness in brands and marketers’, with marketers rating themselves as performing well at “communicating a distinct brand proposition” 💡 Your employer reputation is important. This is a new twist I think: the second most important decision driver was “Is known as being a good employer” which I can only take as something buyers are using as a proxy for a brand’s general trustworthiness. 💡 B2B buying experiences are not keeping up. Overall satisfaction across the journey seems to hover around 40% and has dipped markedly since 2021, I suspect because expectations have risen faster than brands have been able to adapt. I’ve spoken before about the changing B2B buyer; others argue that what humans want is largely immutable. I think this report shows this tension playing out. Technologies change, expectations change, channels change, the way buying gets done evolves.  In that shifting context, B2B marketers must deliver on the same, unchanging, fundamental buyer needs: trust, clarity, convenience. Link in comments.

It's time for the final round judging for the Effie UK awards this week. My third year judging the awards and I'm v. much looking forward to another booster-shot of marketing inspiration. Previous years have been an energising reminder of the varied forms great marketing takes and just what an impact we can have when we get it right. Good luck to all the finalists!

The quote in the middle of this post, attributed to Salesforce's CFO Amy Weaver, struck me as a particularly pithy summary of an endemic challenge facing B2B marketers, particularly in tech right now. She describes buying conditions as being characterised by “…measured buying behavior, elongated deal cycles, deal compression, high levels of budget scrutiny, and budgets that prioritize AI.” I particularly like the adjective used to describe buying behaviour - "measured". It implies a response. If your buyer is measured, I would suggest you want to be grounded not hyperbolic, supportive not pressurising, trustworthy not fadish.... The quote struck me as a good soundbite for our times, the era of the measured buyer.

Probably the thing I’m most proud of in my work life to date is supporting the education of those people I’ve worked with, trying to give people shortcuts to insights that I’ve hoovered up from various places that I think will help them be better marketers. And perhaps the most memorable way I’ve done this is through the workshop I describe in my latest column for Marketing Week (link in comments), in which I used to do an exercise on buying groups to help people understand why they were so important in enterprise B2B. For the exercise, we would make up back stories for each member of a fictitious buying group for a CRM purchase. The task was ultimately to decide who was a ‘driver’ of the decision and who an ‘influencer’ or ‘gatekeeper’. But the real point was to get people to understand how context affects decision making. Participants would have fun with the backstories, conjuring up  nefarious schemes and scandals. But they would also ‘get’ two things: firstly, that a buying group is a peculiar way to make a decision, subject to its own characteristics that need to be understood, and secondly just how important the individual circumstances were in any decision. I don’t want the insight to be reduced to the trite “it’s human to human”. Yes, partly the point is that people are still people at work, and therefore spiteful, hopelessly optimistic, overly cautious and generally behave in all sorts of other odd or irrational ways. But the more important point is that the context in which a decision is made is of overriding importance – that’s the interesting bit because it’s also the bit which is most malleable. Buying groups are complex environments with lots of hidden motives; we may never know really why any one decision was made one way or another. But recognising that context is of prime importance to how decisions are made invites us to always try to dig further: to understand as best we can, in any given market, the nuances of the customer’s world as deeply as possible, so that we can figure out the best way to influence the context as favourably as possible. This is the danger with playbooks, laws and rules, they can divert attention from understanding customers in their context and that’s where real effectiveness stems from.

"The ninth iteration of the model completed a Wikipedia-style article about English church towers with a treatise on the many colours of jackrabbit tails." Interesting study here in Nature about the dangers of training AI models on synthetic data and content it has created itself. Training AI models on AI generated text will lead to it churning out nonsense, what they call "model collapse". (Happens to the best of us sometimes) https://lnkd.in/e-vvqCpH

Hi B2B folk - wanted to draw your attention to this 👇 Marketing Week are doing a survey on the state of B2B. I've just been through it, interesting set of questions. Please fill it in and help make it as representative as possible (should the emphasis be on 'state' or 'B2B' for example?). Link in the comments.

Brand diagnosis questions courtesy of Rachel Fairley and Sarah Robb at B2B Ignite this morning. Simple, straightforward language, no brand onions here. Intriguing the use of words like 'shopping' in the B2B context to help with the mental model we have of the problem we are trying to solve. And good to see the link to how it helps people behave. Good stuff.