I was heads down in company launch planning last week.
I love the blocking and tackling of every day early stage marketing for a pre-launch company.
The conversations, content production, and creativity fuel me and I get to see incremental gains from this activity every week. Consistency is key and I understand the work that I am doing is a process.
What’s that mean?
It means that the expectation of B2B marketing is that hardly anything happens overnight.
It’s business to business marketing, but the lines are blurring and it’s more human to human marketing now than ever before.
It’s about relationships and building value for who I am as a person and what I represent and then what my company does to help you solve your problems. It’s 2021 and this is how B2B marketing works these days.
Relationships between people bloom in Twitter DMs, Slack groups, and on other people’s podcasts. When I joined The Juice almost a half a year ago this was the biggest thing that I noticed. Although the shift has moved towards a more relationship driven way of operating it’s still not perfect. We all need to have a little more self awareness (myself included) that even though we might be developing a relationship, the people we are marketing to don’t care about our priorities or KPIs.
So much of B2B marketing is about the marketer.
Let me provide some examples:
- Tools that we buy are built for us and not the people we should be serving
- Workflows are created to fit the needs of our KPIs and not the experience of our audience
- Lead qualification and pass offs are executed for our intent and not those going through the process
- Rigid, cookie-cutter sales follow ups are all too familiar and lack the required personalization to make a positive impact on your brand
I’m sure that I could continue to provide examples until we all meet up at the first big MarTech conference where we get our badges scanned and receive batch emails from the 72 sponsors individually.
Unfortunately I can see it now:
Hi Brettmcgrath,
Thanks for attending our sessions at Super SaaS 2021.
Do you want to talk to us about how we put your marketing pipeline in hyperdrive?
Thanks,
Johnny
Unfortunately, it’s sad but true. These experiences are all too normal. I’ve said this in copy, in the newsletter, and on the podcast; I’m guilty of these activities, too. I’ve been a part of this problem and now I’m working my ass off to try to do my part to correct it. That’s a big reason why I joined The Juice and why I’m excited to help this company and product launch.
I blocked off an entire day last week to focus on The Juice launch planning. I knew there would be interruptions, but tried to limit Slack exchanges in favor of some deep work that would push this initiative forward.
I started to think about what we had done as a pre-launch company, conversations that we have had with the market, and what I saw us building from a product perspective. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. We want to go to war with forms. We want to help push B2B marketing forward. We want to flush the B2B marketing playbook that everyone else is running down the toilet. All of these things, but I was struggling with our positioning statement.
I got up from my desk. I went for a walk and started to think about B2C positioning and things that have hit more over time. That’s when I immediately started to think about Volvo.
Volvo, really?
When my wife and I got reconnected a decade ago she was driving a Volvo. When we got married and went down to one car I started to drive the Volvo. I’m not much of a car guy, but it did a good job of taking me from point A to point B without any problem.
The 2005 Volvo was a graduation gift from her Mom after college. After a few months of driving the car I asked my wife why did your Mom decide on a Volvo?
Because it’s safe
I had not thought about that statement until going through this positioning exercise with The Juice. A car company like Volvo was differentiating itself from its competition not because of bells and whistles, but because of safety. It all hit me like a ton of bricks.
I started to think about what we were building at The Juice and then immediately started to reflect on what was our “safe”?
I reflected. I debated.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I pulled myself out of Slack timeout and shot this message over to Jonathan:
He responded back with this:
After getting his response I knew that it was time to hit him with the next jab:
Trust. That’s our safety.
Building and developing trust is the foundation of marketing, but gets lost amongst all of the hooks, traps, and roadblocks that we put in front of our future customers.
Everything that we are building and developing at The Juice is a fluid process. I’ve learned that it’s important to have pillars that you fall back on when decisions are being made.
Trust seems unstoppable to me and represents what we are about.
It’s why we publish two podcast episodes each week.
It’s why we prioritize transparency with our audience.
It’s why we are building a platform to create a more frictionless content experience.
The Juice is here to restore trust in B2B marketing.
I can’t wait to share more details on our launch with you.
