060. B2B vs B2C Marketing, Measuring ROI, & More with Harrison Han

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Hello everyone. This is Emilio Garcia from Demand Gen Studio. Welcome to another episode. I'm really excited to have today here with me as always, my co host, Miranda Jenkins. And today we are having another episode where we are bringing in some B2B marketing specialists, experts and professionals to share their journey. And that being the case, Harrison Hand is here with me. How are you, Harrison?

I'm doing well, how are you today?

Good, good. Thank you for joining the show. I've been wanting to do this for quite a while. I'm happy that we got some time to, to talk and yeah, this is going to be a very relaxed conversation. Harrison. We try in this show to share some of the insights and some of the trends that are happening on Demand generation that are relevant for B2B marketers. And basically I would like to learn a little bit more about you, what you do, what you do at your company, some of the interesting stories and things that happen at your, at your current position. Right. Any big wins that you can share and go from there.

Yeah, I'm excited. Let's get on it.

Right. So yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself. How do you, how do you got into the marketing industry? What have been your path, some of the, you know, challenges that you have faced along the way?

Yeah, so interesting story there. I actually did not graduate with any kind of business or marketing degree. My degree was actually in architectural design.

Okay.

Yeah. So I graduated with art in architectural design back in 2009, entered the workforce. The workforce wasn't looking particularly good for.

Architects at that time. Right.

So I actually transitioned into graphic design and that's sort of how I began my marketing journey. And then from there, you know, I went through various industries within B2C and B2B. You know, did services, was in the health and wellness industry, was in the hospitality industry, working with Distillers for a while and then we transitioned into more on the B2B side in the tech sector and now I'm in the industrial mining sector. So a lot of different experiences and it's been quite an interesting journey.

So I have so many things to unpack there. One is, it is incredible, right. As I don't want to say that I have a big, big sample, but I know a lot of marketers that we got into the industry, you know, from tangential areas, from unrelated areas, it's a common thing. The other one that is for me, very interesting. I don't know if you agree that is how we are, you know, blissfully ignorant. When we joined the job force of the things that are happening, you know, in the country, in the world. Just like you were saying about 2009. I was at the time in Barcelona recently, Web, and I had no idea what was happening around us. Something that you learn later. And finally I have a comment or a question here for you because you have that thing of being able to work both in B2C and B2B world, right from your experience. So you have experience with the more direct to consumer kind of marketing. And now in your current role, more of the B2B side, what is for you, you know, most of the, what are some of the most striking differences between the roles at those kind of industries.

So I would definitely say on the B2C side, things are a lot more hectic in terms of being able to market effectively and being able to target your audience effectively simply because there's so many different factors that come into play. Campaigns are always changing based on the industry you're in, based on whether they, you know, holidays are a big deal. So there's the cycles are much shorter, they're much quicker. And then you have to be really on top of how you set up your campaign throughout the year, otherwise you kind of risk, you know, losing out on targeting your audience. Whereas on the B2B side, the sales cycles are typically much longer. You know, you're talking about 6 to 12 month sales cycle. So I don't want to say it's slower necessarily, but it's much more even paced and cyclical nature. There is still a cyclical nature, but it's not as rapid as you would find it in B2C. So it's a little calmer. You get to take a little bit more time, think about how you're really setting up your strategies, how you're designing your assets and your content and, and you can really focus on making impact.

Yeah, I also, and I would 100% agree.

Yeah, B2B is a nice thing to pick for sure.

I also, I don't know if you agree guys, but I feel that again in hindsight you can see it that on the B2C side, typically the operation is so large from audience perspective that truly we marketers focus on. If you go back to that traditional format of the four Ps you are heavily square. You squarely focus on promotion. That's pretty much what's happening. Right? So that's why you feel so like fast paced because you are pretty much on the promotion side of the four P's and the other P's are typically out of Your control because you know, the organization has a whole department or a different person focused on the other things. Right. There's someone squarely focused on the product, for example, and, and that's out of your scope. So it feels like you are more into well, what's the next holiday and things like that. And I don't know if that's your case, arson. But unless you are working again on a B2B organization that in terms of their audience is incredibly big, an IBM or something like that, the marketer has more influence in these other aspects of the function, not just the promotion side. Maybe not controlling or giving direction on product, but at least maybe really understanding how, how the product features, the benefits influence what you're going to say on the marketplace. I don't know if you agree on that.

Yeah, I would definitely say so. So just using my current company as an example, we do have a product management aspect do what we do and with this industry specifically, it runs a little bit slower. So there's opportunity for marketing, sales, engineering to all kind of stuff down together and talk where are we going to go next? These products, how do we want to push it out there? Do we believe the. The market is big enough for a product like this? So even the strategy development, you can take time and just make sure you're making impact. You can't take too much time. You know, at the end of the day, this is the stuff to move forward. But yeah, so it, it's much more phased out, strategic. You know, the steps to from start to finish is much clearer and much more coordinated.

Yeah, I think we, we talked about this in some of our conversations offline. Harrison. You know, never. I never truly had the opportunity to work beforehand before starting the agency on the B2C world. But one of the things that allow me, or at least confirmed for me that I wanted to focus on B2B is that nature, right. The nature of, if not evergreen, at least a strategy that lasts for a little bit longer than the next holiday. And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. Is that if you as a marketer feel more of the thrill of going into more of the promotion side or, or for, you know, agencies and firms out there that focus on that, there's a skill set that you need for that and is competitive. And this B2B side is also competitive, you said, right. It takes longer, but it can not take forever.

Right.

You have to deliver results as well. But definitely feels like a different, a different experience and other question that I have for you because I know that you recently changed. Right. From at least still B2B. But the industry that you work on, your take on, you know, how evolve or advanced or different, is working on different industries. For B2B. What is your take on that one?

Yeah, so a little bit of context. On my previous position I was in the tech sector and in this position, you know, I'm in the industrial mining sector. Definitely there are differences in terms of the technology that's used and how much technology is actually leveraged in order to conduct business. The mining sector has been around for a very long time. It's a very old sector and not much changes in this industry. But whereas in tech things are changing rapidly. So if you are not kind of staying up to date on how tech is used or, or what the audience kind of likes to see from tech companies, you know, you have a really good shot of being kind of aged out to a certain degree really quickly in tech. Whereas here in the mining industry, you know, I can breathe, I can, we can take time, we can experiment because like I said, not it moves a little bit slower, even slower than your typical B2B, you know, brand. So that has been the biggest difference is just the pace of business.

Yeah. Now that forces me to ask you this because I think that's a valid question. I, I don't directly have experience with mining, but we have worked with some companies in the manufacturing sector for example. And I believe that part of the reason current digital B2B strategies struggle with marketing is not necessarily just because Navy is an industry that moves a slower pace than B2B tech, but mostly because most manufacturing companies rely on different go to market motions that direct to their buyers. Right. They, they rely heavily on distribution and that changes how you market because the impact of what you're doing is going to be seen not by your direct buyer, but the buyer of the buyer. So the way that you approach is differently. But nonetheless I have seen this and I want your take on this one is I believe we are at the stage now where not even slower paced industries like maybe mining will question the benefits of having some presses on digital. Right. We are not in the those 10 years, maybe 20 years I work with people were asking well what will I get if I go into Google, into social media. I think everyone recognizes now that it's a permanent feature of our marketing landscape. But still, still I feel you will find some resistance on the more traditional ways, especially in industries like yours where I imagine that you have larger deals, complex sales that take very long time and leadership will Question how marketing, digital marketing will influence, if any, the outcome of those activities. So how you have, you have, what do you have done to kind of like open your way into some, some experiments, right?

So I think the key, especially in B2B, B2B settings, is to get leadership to understand that marketing is not really a siloed activity, strategic way of sort of reducing obstacles for the sales teams to go in and be effective. So when you present in like that, then you say, actually what we're really doing is we're putting a message out in front of the people at a much more scalable way and getting them to understand the features and benefits of our products or services and all the sort of upfront awareness type activities you would want. That way you're reducing business development pains on the sales team. Right? They're not having to use as much time and energy for business development. Theoretically, marketing should help with that a little bit.

Right?

And then also, you know, playing a real key part in pipeline acceleration, you know, are we able to capture information, capture leads and so on to the sales team with good notes and good context? So then they can be much more effective and impactful when reaching out to that customer. So it's really about getting them to understand these are not siloed activities. Marketing and sales strategically work together. They're two sides of the same coin. And it's really just getting them to understand that we're playing almost the front part of that pipeline and then sales team is just taking the roof.

Yeah, I love that. I definitely agree. Some comments that I have here is I'm engineer by trade, so physics is one thing that I appreciate a ton. And I have heard this from vendors like HubSpot, this metaphor that they use for, for the buying processes of Flywheel. And I like it because Flywheels, you know, the way that you influence flywheels is either you use more force, right? You apply more people, apply, apply more effort, or you reduce friction, right? And then your impact will increase, your momentum will increase. Even if you continue to push at the same pace and that momentum keeps itself, you don't have to constantly be pushing the flywheel. So I love that. I think, yeah, I agree with you that marketing works building trust with the buyer so your sales process flows quicker and easier and that the impact that you will see is maybe not directly on the attribution, rather on the impact that those deals will have. They will close at higher rates, they will close faster and maybe some larger opportunities because you, you're in a better position, right? To command a higher price due to the perception of the brand. They have to be back it out, obviously for, for good products and good experiences, but a sale. So I love that one. One other thing that you, you made me think about is I think we agree on that. But I still. That management will say, well, how do we prove that tangibly? Right. With numbers. So what are some of the things that you have tried out to, you know, say, look, this is how I can prove or at least guide you into this is the impact that we're having. Yeah.

The ROI question is always a sort of a delicate dance. Right. Because you don't want to give them expectations because on ROI that aren't actually repeatable, you know, and you don't want to give them expectations on ROI that isn't necessarily going to accelerate the pipeline. Right. So we can talk about getting leads all the time, filling out web forms, but you know, if you're getting contact information, but the asset that they're interacting with is just they're mainly downloading for their own benefit. They have no intention of buying. And this is kind of the where, how, how, how much quality is a marketing lead. Really love it. So we want to be careful about conversations like that where you're just going to say, well, you know what, I can get you a bunch of leads by doing. Running these campaigns. I think it's really trying to get them to understand what engagement with the brand really looks like and being able to prove, okay, before, based on these ads that we're putting out either in social media or how people have been interacting on our website, we can kind of tell the interest hasn't been really there. That's why your sales team has been having a time sort of making those sales and getting the customers to move along. But then when you make your changes, you implement different content strategies, maybe you revamp your messaging, and you can really see those engagement metrics start to tick up. Then you have kind of some proof saying, hey, actually what we're seeing is working and we can continue to push this message even with our sales team, and then we're going to see further improvements that way. Now, I think that's only part of it, if I'm gonna be honest, because at the end of the day, you know, leadership will still probably be interested in seeing some sort of dollar amount.

Yeah.

Or maybe something to equate to a dollar. One of the ways you can actually prove that is to kind of compare, okay, last year here was our overall revenue brought in some new services or new products. And then this year, here's the uptick and we can kind of see in conjunction with marketing activity, that's another way you can compare. But if you have your marketing funnels kind of locked in and you do have your lead capture points really locked in, you can also add in, hey, in conjunction with these two other metrics, we're also seeing an uptick in form fill outs. Maybe it's budgetary request, maybe it's an uptick in consultation request. So in. I think it really does require sort of three primary areas of focus. But yeah, so it's hard for me to say there's a singular thing that could be.

And I agree. I think sometimes we markers are afraid of not being able to prove costs. Right. We, we want to have metrics that prove as much as possible cost and we should not shy away from correlation. There's nothing wrong with it. Not everything that you would do will have a clear cost, but it will show correlation and sometimes that's good enough technology will evolve to the point that maybe we will be able to get causation, some activities that we do. But it's a great start because if not, you are losing yourself from some, you know, data points that will help you to support your case. The other thing that you mentioned that I love is there's quality and quantity. Right. There's not all the traffic is the same. Right, Right. You, you go and explore where is it coming from. Right. Where are the pages that they visit or their intentions and the time they spend. There's quality on that traffic, there's quality on leads. Right. As you were saying, it's not the same that you're offering a piece of content that is very generic and people sharing, you know, generic emails that they use for never hear of you again. Right.

Yeah.

Their, their extra Gmail account and definitely there's quality and opportunities and revenue. Right. If, if you get revenue for the wrong reasons, you will get clients that will not stay with you, that will not be the best, that will not be as profitable. So there's definitely, even in dollars, there's quality. Right. So I think we have to, as you said, strike a balance between yes, we want to prove quantity, we want to see those numbers going up, but at the same time we want to make sure that we are bringing in quality. If not, we're just pushing the problem down the road on the funnel.

Exactly. And interestingly enough, I, for me, the biggest sort of perpetrators are. I see this a lot with marketing agencies. Actually. The marketing agencies tend to put out A lot of campaigns talking about hey, here are five ways you can improve your social media metrics or all these different kind of guidebooks and handbooks. And I'm always on there downloading all of these things and with zero intention of really reaching out, you know, to the marketing agencies for services. Right. So yeah, we want to be very careful about leveraging vanity metrics almost.

Yeah.

As a way to prove roi.

Yeah, I agree. Every industry and obviously especially marketing agencies will you know, take a tactic tactic and take it to the ground. Right. Is that make it, make it super bland and we have to be careful with the intention of it. Even, even how you define marketing, qualify leads. Right. That really matches what sales is expecting. Because if you are just assigning points to actions that yes, this account is engaged but clearly doesn't have intent yet because if they had intent they would have just reached out and they are not. Right. So gotta be careful on those. And that's why I mentioned that quality aspect. For us as marketing agencies, that's our responsibility. We discuss this all the time about telling clients, you know, not just look at for example in the case of Google Ads. That's a great example. Don't look at the keywords and the cost per click, only look at the queries. It's what people actually typing in their, in their search engines is what you want is what you care for. Because if the answer is no, it doesn't matter how inexpensive it is. Right. It doesn't matter that you're getting a very low cost. Even if you get leads out of that, they will not transform, they will not become businesses. New, new business. I agree with that is super important. I want to touch on something else Harrison, that you mentioned before. I tell people that if, for in a completely non related example, if you want to know what's good for your health, look at the questionnaire from insurance companies. Right. Because they cannot get it wrong. Whatever you think about the medical body in the world, about what they promote or not promote, what your insurance company asks you about your habits, it's a great indicator of what's good for your health because they are, they are charging that, that premium based on those answers. So a similar thing is that I feel that for us if you want to look how intertwined marketing and sales are or should be, look at the finance, you know, line items of a financial state. For a corporation there's no marketing spend or expense. And sales expense is marketing and sales expense. Right. For, for CFOs, one or the other are contributing to the Same thing which is bringing up revenue. The only difference, only is what you are describing. Right. You sales for me is more of that power source. Right. You add humans to the effort to cover more area and marketing is either an amplifier of their work or a source of friction reduction for the effort. But they go together. So sales and marketing alignment therefore is something really, really important or I think something that most marketers, especially B2B struggle with. What is your take on that? How will you. What have you experienced, how you have overcome maybe some of the misalignments?

So I think the, the biggest experience for me is really. So I have had experience where marketing and sales have been completely, almost completely separate. Right. And that's really tough because, you know, as if that's the situation. I, as a marketer don't really have insight into what are the products or services that are kind of in demand with the customers. Right. Are you starting to see a shift? I also think it reduces visibility into customer pain points, which, you know, typically we talk about sale pain points as sort of a sales kind of a thing where sales will need to go. They need to identify what the customer pain points are, you know, in order to be able to address and make a sale. But you know, the. Those same pain points are kind of what you need to be speaking through in your marketing content as well. So in my last position, yes, there was kind of a sort of a division between the two and I think it was mainly driven by. There wasn't that one individual at the top that was sort of driving the unification between the two.

Yeah.

Whereas at Polydig, the company I'm in right now, we actually just recently were able to align the visions of sales and marketing. Um, and it's been quite interesting because now sales, the sales team will lean heavily on us for things like designing presentations for their conversations that they're having with sales or with potential customers or if they're getting a talk somewhere or at trade shows especially. And that alignment really helps not only land the sale, create that engagement, but it also actually helps plan out campaigns for marketing as well. You know, we're doing a big push for what's called a sag mill, a sag mill deck. And I'm working with a couple of guys, sales team, sales members on the mining theme with that. And we're going to be doing a big ABM push to get into mining companies leading up to this trade show that we have in September where all the mining customers will be. That really helps flesh out really holistic campaign where you're starting digitally probably, but then transitioning into in person events and it, and efforts like that, I think really help drive the engagement, really help drive sales, really helps the sales team out a lot in getting their message across. Customers.

Yeah, love it. I, I, I strongly believe that most of the opportunities for organizations where, you know, marketing and sales are not working together are tied to their incentives. Right. I strongly believe that societies. Right. And without going philosophical here, but that incentives drive behavior. And so what I've seen is that if you, even if you have an organization where the marketing head and the sales head are different persons, as long as you have some common metrics, things that you strive for, they are measured and compensated for to some extent. I'm not saying that you have to make commissions for salespeople. And, and the other thing I want to really make clear, I tell people all the time is marketing is not sales. It's a different function, it's a different activity. But if for example, your, your core metric is, you know, we were saying what you, whatever you could call marketing. Qualified leads.

Yeah.

And you toggle with that definition without feedback from sales, then you game the system. Right. Because it's a metric that can be disconnected from the impact that you will have on, on the business and for sales, obviously it's very hard to get a metric that is not revenue, as you said, just the dollars.

Right.

But as long as you have a way of connecting those incentives, I think things like what you're describing will happen. Obviously. I think this is another question that I have for you. You want to be mindful of the balance that you do between the short term and the long term, which is I think where marketing and sales really differentiate themselves. Right. Some of the more things are apart from sales are the work that sales marketing does for building the brand, which has impact not in weeks or even months, maybe years. And so you have to balance those activities in the short term or the, versus the ones on the long term. What is your take on that? Right. On how do you strike a balance on that or, or even on activities like do we focus, how much do we focus on performance or demand capture versus how much do we performance on brand awareness and you know, or demand creation. How do you have you find the way to balance out the, those activities?

Oh man, that is a tough question because when you're in it, it's kind of hectic and you just sort of feel like you have to do everything at the same time all day. I think a lot of it really.

Is.

I don't really know how well this take is going to be taken.

But I think it's controversy.

Yeah, yeah. So I think your content strategy actually will drive a lot, and your content development strategy will actually drive a lot, you know, because there are definitely certain types of content that work as bringing in awareness on an ongoing basis.

Right.

For the brand. But then you also have to think about the content that drives. That helps drive sort of that last conversion into pipeline acceleration, which typically looks a little different. Right. You're talking about content that's a little different with, um, people who maybe are aware of your product but not sure if they can trust you as a company yet.

Right.

So I think really prioritizing, number one, which stage of business are you in? If you're just starting out, then you probably do need to build a lot of brand awareness. And we're probably going to prioritize a lot of brand awareness content.

Right.

I think for Polydex specifically, we're not in the awareness stage. You know, we're not having to do tons and tons of work bringing about awareness to our product, but we are having to do a lot of work convincing them that our products will outperform competitors and that we're a company that's trustworthy. So just based on that phase of the business, a lot of the content production is focused on things like case studies, development of value propositions, and really advertising the benefits of leveraging polydeck as a brand and partner, versus tons of time being put toward, you know, awareness type of content. Like, oh, we have this type of product or we have this type of service, and it allows us, and it frees us some time to focus more on campaigns for specific things. Like if, let's say, we have a product that's not performing as well and we want to be able to push that a little bit more. So that's the phase of your business is going to be an aspect. And I also think the resources you have available you is going to be another a huge aspect. I'm lucky enough to be a part of a team here, but I know plenty of marketers who are just that one man, one woman department, you know, so how do you prioritize that? Right. So I think there's a balance that needs to be struck between the phase of business, like phase of life your brand is in, and then the resources you have available to you, and then you just sort of have to identify, okay, what area do I need to place focus on in order to make the most amount of impact? It's more of that foot wide, mile deep approach.

Right, yeah. There's a great insight that you mentioned there that, yeah, you have to be really knowledgeable about the level of awareness of your own audience for the company.

That you work for.

Right. Because there are industries and products and services where a ton of the work is even just making people aware of the problem. They might just experiencing the symptoms and, or they're aware of the problem but not really aware of potential solutions. And you have to invest heavily on that. Right. Especially when you're replacing something. But in more mature industries where the buyers really understand the problem and even understand the solutions, then you have to work hard on what makes you different, what makes you trustworthy, rather than re explaining the problem itself. So yeah, that's a great insight there, Harrison. So yeah, I don't have more questions. I think you have shared with us great insights. I do however, have some questions for you, quick things that you can tell us. So if you had a magic wand to change anything on, you know, your current company in terms of what you do, what it will be.

Oh, our tech stack. Thousand years time. Yeah, so. So yeah, that's an easy, that's an easy answer. Well, if your company has been around for a while. So our company has been around since 19, since the 1970s. Typically what happens is as time progresses, it's one band aid solution after another band aid solution in terms of making things work and making your processes work. And then over time you kind of have like a bloated, convoluted system that's inefficient. Right. And you're doing more work to make the technology work versus having the technology work for you.

Yeah, yeah.

So that if I could just immediately point at something, I'd say fix that and that would solve a lot of issues.

Well, that's a tough, that's a tough cookie for it in general. Right? It is. Those tech stacks, they have so many requests, especially for most marketers. All right, and the last one, the final one is if you had any advice for younger self, a younger Harrison, starting out in what you do now, what, what advice that will be.

I would say always kind of audit yourself from time to time. And what I really mean by that is, is really ask yourself the question, do I actually know what I'm talking about? Right. And then just. And not in a negative way. Right. Not in a put yourself down kind of a way, but just sort of opening up the possibility, hey, there may be things I don't know, I'm not aware and especially in A changing landscape like marketing, I think it's really important that you do that on a consistent basis, even if it's just to stay on top of tactics or strategies or tools are out there, but also just your insight and perspective and just always making sure that's changing. And, you know, because consumer perspectives are always changing as well.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I would probably say, hey, you probably got that one wrong. Recent git. Right. And just ask yourself the question, you know, all right, what do I not know?

Yeah.

And just be open to.

I. I recently heard of. I think it was Jeff Bezos that commented that, you know, most of us, now that you're saying, you know, what's changing, most of us will focus on, you know, how this change will impact what I do. Right. And he challenged people to think about. It's better to focus on the things that will not change. Right. So you don't go with the. With the waves of, oh, now we have this new shiny thing. Right. Like I'm thinking right now about AI, for example. Right. Challenges. Whatever you, as you said, is, how much do I know? His thinking was, for example, in 10 years, people will not want to buy more expensive stuff that they want, you know, and they will not want to take more time than they should. They will want experience, you know, speedy experiences. And so as long as we provide, you know, fast experiences on purchasing and lower prices, we will be okay. And so I love that idea of how I translate it is that we really need to nail down our fundamentals. And I don't know if it happens to you, Harrison, again, coming not from marketing, one of the things that I find that we struggle with is that because we do mostly digital marketing, we focus a ton on the digital aspect of it and not the human aspect of it. The psychological part of it saying, well, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's now with AI, we are dealing with humans, and we have our, you know, psychological traits and our biases. And if we understand those fundamentals, the medium will change. But, you know, we still will be dealing with the core principle of, you know, influencing humans.

Right, Right.

It's.

It's not giving a certain. It's not worrying about giving a certain perception. It's really just about understanding perspectives. Right? Yes. And I think that's really the fundamental key to marketing success.

This has been fantastic. Harrison. One last thing that I want to say. If, you know, people want to connect with you, learn more about you, and just engage, what would be a good place to reach out and connect with.

You, come find me on LinkedIn. It's always going to be the best place.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So there you go, listeners. Right. If you want to connect with Harrison, go to LinkedIn and look for him, and we will put some notes there and ways to find you and some of the insight that you have shared. I just have to say thank you, and I hope this is not the last time that we do something like this in the. In the show.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on. It's been a. It's been a great time, so thankfully, appreciate it.

Bye. Bye.

All right.