Operating on the Wrong Channels & Spending Money in the Wrong Places | With Expert Oren Greenberg

So I imagine they probably worked with agencies in the past and they say, hey, we want to, you know, help us with our B2B LinkedIn or do our SEO. But you're saying, hold on, maybe that's not even the right approach. Let's look at— let's step back a minute and I'll actually help you and advise you, look at your whole business kind of holistically, and then we decide where to move. Whereas maybe they don't have that knowledge and experience to go speak to an agency, right?

Yeah, I think there's 2 aspects to it. I think some of it is the wrong channels, they're operating on the wrong channels. And the second is they're operating in the wrong way on those channels. And I tend to see more of the latter than the former because there's a relatively— there's only 28 channels to pick from. Really, that are meaningful. And in SaaS, there's only like 6 or 7 core strategies. So I think the main issue is really like execution is poor, but the problem is it's not integrated. And I see a lot of problems primarily with the marketing tech stack and how that's been integrated or mostly not integrated. Too many tools and the team don't know how to use them effectively. Spending the money in the wrong places, allocating the budget incorrectly. So, and then they're frustrated, they're not getting the right return. And I think there's like a lot of educational components with founders that there's foundations of marketing they don't really understand. Like a typical example is, okay, Oren, we need to go do Instagram. Like, okay, good morning, good morning, happy Monday. Why do we need to go do Instagram? Because someone, one of my investors said that they got a client because, you know, they reached out to them through Instagram. And I go, You know, there was a study done by HBR, Harvard Business Review, and they reviewed 200 businesses. And there was only one variable that they found was consistent across all the businesses that were successful. That one variable was they had a clear strategy.

Hmm.

Where does Instagram fit into the strategy we just defined last week? It doesn't. You're not gonna do it. And that's a very common issue. It's like the need to be everywhere, the need to build a brand by having exposure to as many people as possible. Now, B2B is not like B2C. SaaS in B2B is not like B2B. The way that you approach your marketing strategy can't be through the same lens as you as a consumer, you as a user. I think too many businesses, especially earlier stage, they're doing too much. Focus is king. A lot of the time, I just bring laser focus into what's most critical, but also foundations. In Japanese, they have a saying called ketsu ketsu, which is step by step, gradually. If you think of building a successful business like climbing a mountain, You don't get up to the mountain by making a jump of 1,000 feet. You do it step by step.

Yeah.

And the same thing is with the strategy, the marketing, the marketing and personal strategy. I think the only real value that I deliver to the founders is I help save a lot of time from taking the wrong path to get to the top of the mountain. And obviously they want to increase efficiency and they want to get there faster and more cost-effectively and they want to not fall off the edge of the cliff by mistake. So all I do is I kind of like help them do that, but only in the realm of marketing.

Got it. So you're looking at more of like a, they come in with shotgun approach, let's be everywhere. You're saying let's focus on one at a time and see what works. Specifically for B2B SaaS companies, what would you say is your preferred framework or favorite channel that you like to start with or that you'd normally set up for say generating qualified leads and start increasing sales?

Yeah, got it. So I think there's always, 2 types of SaaS businesses, broadly speaking. The first is kind of low volume, high value enterprise sales. And the second is, you know, low value, high volume. And they're different. They're different in how you approach— everything is different from the marketing tech stack to the resource deployment to the channel selection. So there's no broad answer. It depends on the 2. But within the 2, Mm-hmm. there is something that is consistent, which is Our people, our prospects, our customers of the SaaS business, do they have intent? Are they aware of the problem and are they aware of the solution? And it makes more sense to tap into people who have intent and people who are closest matched to the relevant audience rather than trying to do an awareness long-term content marketing strategy, which everyone's reading about because it's popularized by businesses like HubSpot. And they're like, we should be producing a lot of content. The biggest problem is a lot of businesses produce content but don't distribute it. So they're just producing a lot of blog posts, but no one's reading it. So obviously they're not getting leads. And then lots of the quality of the content they're producing is low quality because they have a junior writing it because it's a cost-effective resource. And then they're not, you know, it's not interesting to prospects because that doesn't deliver any value. So the whole problem here around volume, focusing on the wrong channels and leveraging non-specialized resources in order to try and get results. And so yeah, my favorite ones effectively is intent-based. So even if it's account-based marketing, but with intent, Mm-hmm. or it's going to be Google Ads because obviously Google, you know, 50% of digital marketing, the media spend in the UK goes to Google. So if there's intent, that's high value and definitely the first lowest hanging fruit. And then LinkedIn is obviously one of the key channels for B2B. But once again, it depends on the value. If the ACV, annual contract value, is less than $10K, I don't recommend LinkedIn. It needs to be a certain size prospect and business and the sales cycle, and it depends on what the solution is. But yeah, that's just like off the top of my head, just a couple of examples of how I think about it for SaaS businesses. Obviously there's cold outbound. I think cold outbound is needs to be done very well in order to get a result because conversion rates are very low.

That's right. Now, that piece you talked about of creating content and the other battle is actually promoting it. So you can maybe have high-quality content. How much of your time would you say, is this like a 50/50? You should be investing half your time on creating, half the other half on promoting, or what's your kind of number you like to use?

So average would be 85% content production, 15% distribution. Good would probably be 50/50, and genius would be 15% production, 85% distribution.

So kind of diving into the CMO role a little bit more with the team that you're working with, are you normally working with the existing marketing team there that they already have, or are you involved in, say, hiring, managing the marketing team for these startups that you're working with?

Yes, I've done both. So effectively, I either— I've screened and vetted about 130 candidates for businesses to build growth teams in the last couple of years. So I'm heavily involved with helping build that internal team and that competence if that's what's needed. And some businesses, they require specialists. So there's always almost going to be some sort of agency or freelancer that's involved with deployment. So generally, you know, I'll bring in different specialists I've worked with over the years for different areas. For example, Facebook ads are very strong in Google Ads, so more performance-based channels. And then Yeah, I guess there's like, for some, one of the businesses I was doing work for Canon, I headed up about a team of 8 people and they were all part-time fractional experts. They were all different freelancers and agencies and I was managing one of the media spend level for them. There was a SaaS business and that was a very innovative approach, you know, a business that is invested in a, you know, an entire outsourced marketing arm.

Mm-hmm.

And the founders of the CEOs of the business, the original founders that were bought out through M&A, they were like product specialists. So they didn't really know much about marketing. And then it worked really well. And they had the whole tech team and the product, and then they had marketing as a core support function. I think the question of whether or not you need to outsource marketing or have it in-house really comes down to how core is it to your USP? How core is it to your business and your differentiation? But what I do see very often is that juniors are managing marketing, people on $30K, $40K salaries, very young, very smart, very ambitious, and very industrious. But the problem is they're very inexperienced. And they make a lot of mistakes. And the founders just don't really understand the value of a more experienced hand. It's like, it's not that because they've had poor experiences or because I think it's down to the remuneration model where it's like time-based or cost-based rather than actually aligned with the objectives. So I think there's like a few core issues there that I see, but I usually, sometimes I'm parachuted in to resolve specific projects. So it's like a specific initiative and they don't have enough resource and then I'll just own that project and deliver on it. So it's very varied as to the different types of missions that I undertake as like a marketing CMO ninja.

Yeah, it makes sense. I can see if you are hiring a junior, if you're willing to kind of invest the time in training them and working through them and reviewing their work, which I think a lot of these people just don't have the time or the experience on how to review it, it makes sense to hire more experienced people.

But it's not only about that. It's also, there's 2 elements. One of them is speed. If you wanna be moving quickly and scaling quickly, with your junior talent, then you're going to be constricted by how fast you can move because it takes time to nurture. Then the second is, it takes time to nurture. If I've been doing it for 17 years and this person has 2 years' experience, how far are they from their 2 years' experience to my 17? That's 15 years. Do you have 15 years to wait until they reach a CMO level? Even if they do, at that point in their career when they're like 17 years of experience in, what salary would they command? They would have to reflect. The reason I came up with the on-demand CMO model is I saw businesses require some of my senior priority, but they can't afford to pay for full-time. In my head, coming in and doing fractional work and giving them strategic time and support helps really save them a lot of money in the long term. So far, that's proven correct in my hypothesis.