Maximize B2B ROI with PR and ABM Tactics With Mike Maynard

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. And today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Mike Maynard. Now I'm gonna read his bio to make sure I get it right. Mike is the Managing Director and CEO of the Napier Group. Now they're a $7 million PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies, and we're gonna talk about how PR impacts marketing for B2B technology companies. He's a self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology. Mike offers a unique blend of technical and marketing expertise. He actually began his career as an electronics design engineer, developing products from complex radar systems to recording studio mixing desks. Mike believes that combining the measurement, accountability, and innovation that he learned as an engineer with a passion for communicating means his clients can achieve their marketing goals sooner. Mike and his team at Napier specialize in increasing the speed prospects travel through the client sales and marketing funnels. Generating opportunities more quickly. He's the leader of B2B Group in the Forbes Agency Council and has directed major PR and marketing campaigns for a wide range of global technology clients reaching over 30 European countries, North America, and beyond. So Mike, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Mark.

So I'm so interested to hear, you know, sort of your story of how you transitioned from being an engineer and, you know, putting together sound booths to working in marketing. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So it's the ultimate story of having absolutely no career plan, I think.

Okay.

So I started off, I was at university, you know, at university you get into all sorts of things. I got into lighting and sound as well as doing my electronics degree. So I decided I was gonna go off and design audio mixing desks for recording studios. Clearly, it's the illogical career path there. Did that for a little while. I kind of enjoyed it. Technically, from a design point of view, it wasn't, you know, perhaps as challenging as I hoped. You know, the audio technology is somewhat done. It's not very difficult electronically to do that. And so I moved to another design job where I got to, you know, mess around with 2,000-kilowatt lasers. Pretty cool, burn holes in bricks. making printing rollers. So that was kind of cool for a while. But very rapidly realized that I probably wasn't a great engineer. I was definitely better at talking about technology. So moved into a couple of technical sales roles. It's giving away the fact I'm quite old, isn't it? It's a long story. So I had a couple of sales roles, moved from sales into marketing, you know, as quite common in the industry, particularly if you wanna stay in Europe and Now, I was in the semiconductor industry, you know, a lot of opportunity in the States, but really in Europe, there were fewer opportunities. So marketing was great. Love the marketing. And then had an opportunity to buy the agency I was using. And I thought, hey, can't be hard, can it? I can tell you if you buy an agency that's 100% in tech and you do it 3 weeks before the dot-com crash, it's actually quite challenging. But we got through that. And so I've been at Napier now for over 20 years and really enjoying it.

Wow. Well, that's such an interesting sort of transition from, you know, sales into marketing and also bringing in that technology and then the agency background. It's sort of interesting and it kind of brings up a topic that you and I are both pretty passionate about, which is, you know, account-based marketing, which you know, probably when you started at the agency 20 years ago, you would have just called a good, well-aligned marketing and sales program that was focusing on, you know, sort of the same folks. But I know that's something where you spend a lot of, you know, sort of your time and working in account-based marketing. And one of the key things that I heard you— I've heard you talk about doing is the idea of pinpointing competitors' weak spots in the customer journey as a way of focusing your account-based marketing activities. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think you make a great point, Marc, when you say, you know, when I started, you know, certainly at Napier, it was just targeted marketing, but that was because there was a limit as to how much you could target. So you could target industries, you could target perhaps, you know, companies based on some vague firmographic stuff, but you really couldn't get down into the weeds and you certainly couldn't, you easily target a single company. That was really difficult. Maybe you could do some direct mail to them, but that was it. Today, it's very different. Today, you can send people targeted ads, you can approach them on LinkedIn, you know, you can retarget them. There's a whole range of different things you can do. You can build customized landing pages and these things weren't possible, you know, 20 years ago. So account-based marketing has become really exciting. And to me, You know, people talk about different sorts of account-based marketing. So one-to-many is basically an industry. I kind of don't think of that as account-based marketing. But when you get down to targeting, you know, literally a very small number of companies that are really gonna move the needle, then that's when account-based marketing gets powerful. And that's where you've really got to understand what's happening at that account and what you can do to get them to change from, you know, and generally speaking, it's their current supplier to you or to, in my case, a client. Sometimes it's to make sure that they stay with that clients. So it's to retain them and really diving deep is the secret to great account-based marketing at the moment.

So talk to us about what does that mean to really dive deep?

It's a great question. I mean, if we think about, you know, and we'll just think about trying to win business from someone else. Generally speaking, you know, if you're competing against a competitor and you know they're in a particular account, that gives you a huge advantage. Because number one, you know what the account's buying. So you're only competing against one other competitor. Whereas if you're doing, you know, a very broad marketing campaign, you compete against everyone in the market. So, you know, you can then focus down on, well, where am I better? Where's that competitor weak? But also you can understand with that particular customer, you know, what they're using a product for and maybe in that particular situation why that competitor might be weaker than you or where you might have a particular advantage. So, you know, we've run a whole range of campaigns. I mean, one example I can think of is we worked with a baggage handling firm and they were targeting airports and, you know, to install a baggage handling system in an airport, you need to build an airport terminal. So they're pretty small campaigns, you know who's buying, it's about one a year globally. And we built a campaign around the energy savings that our client could offer. Now, in reality, the energy consumed in the baggage handling system is tiny compared to the energy consumed by all the planes taking off and landing. You know, we know that. But what you, if you understand the situation, particularly where people are in the Western world and there's a big concern about the environment and, you know, even more particularly in Europe, Those airports wanna be seen to be doing anything they can because they're inherently seen as bad. You know, air travel is, you know, not great for the environment. Therefore, if they can do anything, it's good. So that was our in, and we could really push in on this energy-saving area. Our client had a unique benefit in terms of energy saving that lasted for probably about 3 years, and we really made hay during those 3 years because we understood what those accounts wanted. And we got to the people who really cared about it and talked about why they should pick our client's products. And so the client did really well, really happy, great campaign. And that was through understanding a real need and then going and targeting the people who are gonna make that decision.

So insightful. And you talked earlier about, you know, how it's evolved a lot over the last 15 years of, you know, in the before you could sort of generally target a company, most likely you were targeting an industry, whereas now you can target individual decision makers. And if you've done the work of really understanding what that company cares about, either through researching, you know, public statements or press releases, you understanding the industry really cares about sort of this, you know, conservation angle, and then understand how you're different from your competitors. Knowing that you've got this opportunity for energy savings that others can't offer, and then digging all the way into specific roles within the buying committee. So there's someone that, you know, cares about that energy savings that you can provide that's different from your competitors, and then send that specific messaging to that specific person. Like, that's where the real success comes from, and that's where that diving deeply Really sort of comes through.

Yeah, absolutely. And different people in that buying committee want different messages. But, you know, the example, you know, is clear. A lot of the baggage handling specialists probably didn't care that much about energy efficiency. It wasn't one of their key metrics. But you get to the senior people in the airport who are getting hammered on how air travel is environmentally unfriendly, they really care. And they can then exert pressure on that buying decision because buying the environmentally friendly choice makes their life a lot easier.

That's right. That's right. Well, and again, it gets to really defining that ICP because I'm sure there are some airports that just didn't care about that value proposition. And so by not focusing your marketing efforts on those and instead putting your, you know, somewhat limited resources—we don't have infinite checkbooks—on those that do care about it and that are making public statements about it, or that you know we're getting. you know, sort of challenging publicity around it. You can really sort of focus your efforts on the places you have the biggest opportunity. That's the real benefit of really diving deep and to really understand the ICP of the customer that cares about the specific benefit that you have. You can focus your, you know, potentially limited resources on those companies that are gonna resonate most strongly with your differentiated selling proposition rather than, you know, sort of trying to approach everyone with the same message, you can focus on the folks that are gonna care about the message that you have. And I think that's what you meant earlier when you talked about the benefits of really going deep with account-based marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, going deep means that you can really pick the best companies to target as well as getting the messaging right. You know, so in the example of the airports, you know, perhaps airports in China were less worried about environmental issues. than airports in Europe who certainly were very worried about it. So, you know, there's a clear tendency to focus the efforts around Europe because you've got a benefit that they care about. But also it's about, you know, making sure you get the messaging right because you've still got to pass that technical requirements check with the engineers who understand baggage handling systems. And if you don't, it doesn't matter how green you are, you're just not gonna win the business. So, you know, what we had to do was we had to produce different materials for different people, you know, and we've even for some customers, we've worked with clients where we've produced material that really is targeted to a single person in a single company. So if you've got a very big sale, so high-value sales, you might want to get through to the CFO of a particular customer and we produce customized content that, yes, we're targeting generally, at the financial decision makers in that company. But in practice, it's the CFO and it's been written entirely around that individual.

That's right. Well, you bring up a really great story of, you know, in B2B where you can have one deal that can make or break a quarter, maybe even a year for a company. It makes sense to spend the time to understand the individual decision makers as individuals, as people, And we've actually done some things where, you know, we'll do a webinar for one where they don't know that we're just doing a webinar for them. They think that what a serendipitous moment that you happen to be doing a webinar that's focused on, you know, the decision or, you know, people running airports in, you know, Southeastern Europe that are focused on energy cost savings. And, you know, they just think that it happens to be a topic that they really care about that you're doing a webinar on. So they get the invitation. And they don't know that it's really, they're the only person that's there and you're actually getting a captive audience for, you know, what is essentially a sales pitch, but one where their guard is down because they don't know they're being pitched to.

I love that. I'm gonna steal that idea. That's a brilliant idea, a webinar for one.

So we've talked a lot about, you know, focusing efforts through account-based marketing and really understanding your target and your differentiation in order to maximize the return on investment. And one of the things that I thought was so interesting about sort of your background is around, you know, public relations and, you know, publicity, especially in the tech space. Oftentimes companies struggle with how to maximize that return on investment because, you know, for a long decision cycle, you may not see, you know, an immediate return on the investment. People don't often say, I saw this article and, you know, that's what brought me to you. Talk to us a little bit about the role of PR for early stage technology companies or really any stage company, but that has a real need for accountability of where they invest their limited resources. How do you ensure that you're getting that return on investment in with something like publicity and PR?

So it's a really difficult problem, Mark, because actually it may be that you don't just not see a return early on, you might never be able to tally a return from PR to specific sales because PR is inherently, it's branding, it's positioning. It's not something that's gonna drive anything close to that last touch. And we all know, you know, how bad last touch attribution is. But we all kind of do it because it's easy. And so it becomes very difficult the further away you move from that last touch. And PR arguably is probably about as far as you get because it's about building brand. It's about building reputation. I mean, the first thing I say when people start raising the question of ROI is, you know, I say, so when you're talking about ROI, you're talking about like real sort of, you know, tactical action-oriented things, you know, for example, like Google search ads and people go, yeah, absolutely, you know, they're great. I can measure their effectiveness. I know how well they work. I said, Google did some research actually and they said if you run PR, your Google ads will perform better than if you don't. So the PR is not necessarily in itself generating immediate results, but it's improving the performance of those sort of, you know, revenue-generated activities. So you've gotta, to some extent, and this is difficult and particularly in today's modern world where people want everything to be measurable, you've gotta somehow take a leap of faith. And the truth is unlimited resources. Yeah, absolutely. I can show you the studies that, you know, evidence that awareness has increased, brand preference has increased, mental availability is increasing, you're more likely to think of a supplier. You're gonna spend all your money on those studies. You're never gonna do any marketing in that situation. So you've gotta kind of somehow take it in a way at trust because most companies and particularly, you know, early stage and even, you know, later stage startups, they don't have the time, they don't have the money to actually show and test that PR is working better. There are things you can do. And you can run, you know, and sometimes in the States where people are very consumer-focused, they'll run PR campaigns in certain metros and not in others and kind of use that as an A/B test. That's kind of okay. But you are gonna find that, you know, even Phoenix and San Francisco, 2 relatively technically driven cities, actually have very different people. So the differences in the geography are probably bigger than the differences generated by PR. So it is really hard to test. We do recommend people do test things and we have different approaches to doing that. But it's hard to get that really factual evidence thing. My question is though, as a marketer, do you really believe that you can sit entirely at the bottom of the funnel and magically people will teleport from not knowing you to clicking on your ad and that will work really well all the time. And the answer is clearly no. So you've got to put some things in to drive people through that customer journey.

Yeah, that, well, and I'm sure you've seen this research too that looks at, you know, where do high-performing companies spend their marketing budget versus low-performing companies. And there's always very clearly a difference of low-performing companies just harvest the demand created by the market leaders. And so they sit at the bottom and they compete on price or they compete on, you know, speed or some other kind of commodity type aspect of it versus high-performing companies shape the market through things like publicity and public relations. And that's what sort of drives them to that market leadership position because they're shaping the market's perceptions of what they should be looking for when they go to market to look for a solution. One of the things that we see to be powerful that sort of works well is just as you, we were talking earlier around really understanding your ICP, your ideal client profile, and really understanding your differentiation from the competitive landscape so that you're not just putting out, you know, sort of publicity that's like we exist or, you know, be aware of us. But instead, it's really a differentiated positioning message that is creating demand while generating awareness. So it's not just the sort of we exist and we have the same benefits of everyone else in our category, but instead it's we have a unique benefit for a unique type of customer. And so that makes a big difference in how you approach that publicity and PR.

Yeah. And I think, you know, what we do in terms of approach is we talk to companies and we say, look, You've got to think about PR as people buying the company, not buying a product.

Yeah.

And certainly historically, if you look at some of the industrial engineering companies, you know, that produce sensors or semiconductors or something like that, you know, it's all about, we've got this new product, it does this, we've got this new product that does that. And in the days where it was hard to find out what was new, that kind of worked because people actively sought out what was new. And literally, I can remember when I was an electronics engineer, you know, you were given like magazines that were 100 pages and it was just like pages full of these new product announcements just so you could keep up to date with what was available. That's gone now and nobody's trying to do that. Everybody's searching when they need. So trying to have that product-driven stuff is pointless. And I would argue even SaaS companies where they go, oh no, we don't do that because we only got one product. And actually you do it all the time because you're like, hey, do you know what? We can't just export in CSV. We've now got Excel and direct to Google Sheets. Trust me, there is no product in the world where people have gone, Wow, direct export to Google Sheets. I'm gonna buy that. So you've got to tell the story. You've got to explain what your company stands for, what the products do that are unique and, you know, really build the reason why they should choose you as a company rather than choose the individual products. And that's what makes good PR today.

Yeah, that's so interesting. And you've actually got my wheels spinning on a a press release that I have to do for someone else. But it also sort of leads to another topic that, you know, we were talking about earlier, which is the idea of not just waiting till the end of a campaign to say, was it a success? Yes or no? But instead to build in, you know, sort of early metrics and talk to us a little bit about how you do that with your clients and with the campaigns that you run.

Yeah, I mean, we have a whole process around how we build campaigns and the last stage is called enhance. We don't call it report. We don't call it evaluate. you know, we call it enhanced. And my belief is that metrics are not desperately useful for reporting because what happens is that there's a target set at the start of the campaign. It's like we're gonna achieve, you know, in B2B, 50 leads, doesn't matter, you know, 10 opportunities, whatever the number is. Where did that come from? Who knows? What if we achieve 9? Is that terrible or just disappointing or Okay, you know, is 11 fantastic, change the world, but, you know, the company's gonna take off. Or maybe what if we achieve just 1, but that 1 is worth, you know, 50 times the average deal size?

Right.

These metrics that they're set to be arbitrary and I think having something to aim for is a good thing. But actually waiting to the end is a really bad thing. What you need to do is be going, we're aiming to maximize, for example, the number of leads that get qualified by sales. So number of SQLs, classic kind of metric for campaigns. campaigns. So what you need to be doing is right from day one of that campaign, is this campaign moving towards maximizing that number? And to some extent, it kind of doesn't matter what the target is. You know, if your trajectory is for 3 and the target is 300, that, you know, you've got a problem and that might be a terrible target. It might be a poor campaign. It's probably both. But, you know, what you've got to do is look at that going, well, we're heading towards 3. How do we get it to turn towards, head towards 300? How do we move that up? And the more you run the campaign, the more data you get on what's working. And then the more likely you are to be able to get insights to improve the performance. So it always amazes me that, you know, some people set campaigns, they let them run a month and they go and have a look and go, yeah, it was great. No, it wasn't. Move on to the next campaign. Actually, 2 weeks in, you're at the better position to decide what the ad copy should be, what images to use, what, you know, whatever the content is, what keywords to bid on than you were at the start. But people are not doing that. Because, you know, they don't like going back to things they consider they've already done. And there is frankly amongst marketers a bit of a dislike about really measuring what they thought at the start because quite often we're wrong. And we're not normally terribly wrong, but quite often we don't quite get it right. We don't wanna admit that to ourselves. So we'd rather just, you know, push it under the carpet and then hope at the end of the day we hit somewhere near the target and then everyone's okay. you know, wipe your brow, move on, hope that the next target's a bit easier. So it really, I think thinking about metrics and thinking about why you have metrics is important.

Yeah. Well, for sure. And one of the things that we try to do is to bring teams together around the metrics as a way of creating collaboration. And so that we'll set up, you know, what we call a revenue scorecard and it's got some KPIs that are a little more lean towards marketing, like the volume of leads, but also the quality of leads that are coming in, others that are a little more geared towards sales, like how quickly it moved through the pipeline and the size of it. But that is inherently connected to the leads that are coming in. And then also some that are connected to, you know, customer success, like did they renew? Did they renew for more? Did they provide referrals? But again, that's inherently connected to did sales promise something that could never be delivered? And so, you know, sort of guaranteed that they would churn out. But bringing together teams around these shared scorecards creates a lot more collaboration and a lot more creativity. And looking at it on a regular cadence means that they're all, you know, sort of taking the insight from each team to improve everything all the way through.

And I love the way you're bringing in sales as well. You know, I mean, a classic thing is seeing a room of marketers scratching their head as to why they're not generating enough SQLs. It's like, there's no point doing that. You need the sales team in telling you why the contacts you're generating are not becoming And, you know, the classic one is, well, you know, we know this particular company, they're never gonna move. We've worked on it for 5 years. You know, this guy is the key decision maker and he, you know, is married to someone from a competitor, whatever the reason is. I just go, well, why don't you tell us that? We'll take it out of the account-based marketing campaign.

That's right.

Problem solved. I could spend more money, but until you have that honest discussion and you really dig deep as to where the problems are, you know, you're almost left You know, shooting in the dark and just assuming that the direction you started has to be right. And actually, generally speaking, the direction you started is close, but it's not quite right. You need to make those corrections to get the best possible results.

Right. That's well, and you need that feedback so that you can narrow in on the target instead of just, you know, what's the old joke? You know, I was 30% to the left and then I was 30% to the right. So statistically speaking, I hit 2 bullseyes. Something like that. Well, look, we're obviously both really passionate about these topics and could talk about them all day, but I gotta be mindful of your time. Tell us though, what's something that's on the horizon for Napier Group or you that you're really excited about?

And so there's a couple of things really around building the team. So at Napier Group, we're putting more effort into bringing younger people in, which is really exciting. And actually, we worked out that we spend about $15,000 a year training everybody. So each person within the agency, putting a lot of time, putting a lot of effort in and that's worked really well. We've had a lot of people develop. So we're getting really excited about our academy in Napier and that's going really well. And then the other area is we've always worked with American companies. And so that's always been a big part of our business, helping American companies crack Europe and we're starting to grow very rapidly in the States. So we're actually beginning to expand our operations in the States. So 2 areas there where I think, you know, we see a lot of positivity and a lot of opportunity going forward.

That's exciting. So if there's a technology company that's listening and liking what they hear, how can they get in touch with you, Mike?

Yeah, I mean, if there's a technology company listening and, you know, is interested, email me direct, mike@napierb2b.com. Always interested to hear from, you know, potential clients. If people are just interested in what I say, I mean, feel free to email me, contact me on LinkedIn. You know, it'd be great to hear from people. I love hearing questions from podcasts.

Awesome. Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our time.

Thanks a lot for having me on the show, Marc.

All right. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, And share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.