083. How to Target Key Decision Makers for B2B

Hello, welcome back to another episode of Boundify's DemandGen Studio. I'm Miranda Jenkins and I'm joined, as almost always, by Emilio Garcia. How's it going today, Emilio?

How are you, Miranda? Doing good. Great to be here again.

Awesome. So today's episode topic is about identifying and targeting key decision makers for B2B. So most buying decisions today, especially in B2B situations, involve multiple stakeholders, whether it's the end user, the department leader, an executive, finance teams, so on and so forth. Um, so we'll be talking today about how to make sure your paid media strategy is influencing the people who are actually driving the purchase decisions, as well as how buying committees have evolved, how marketers should think about their audience targeting in today's landscape, and then also what separates companies that consistently generate pipeline from their paid media campaigns. So to start out, let's start out on a high level, Emilio, and just talk us through why understanding and targeting the right decision makers is such an important topic for B2B marketers today.

Yeah, that's an awesome question, right? You know that I come to this topic time and again, and I think it's super, super important to keep reminding us that It is weird in B2B because in one side we are marketing and selling to companies. We are targeting accounts, which is different from B2C, but at the same time, we, at the end of the day, just like any other marketing effort, we are trying to establish relationship with individuals. And in that sense, when we say accounts, it cannot be the whole company, but it also cannot be this abstract entity that doesn't have a person behind it. And so there's always a person. And if you are doing marketing for B2B for— and your potential clients are smaller companies, then the company and the individual are one and the same.

Right?

The founder, usually the owner of the company. But as you go higher in the organizations, then that one person idea breaks down because you start to have more people involved for very different reasons. And that's in essence the buying committee. And there's nothing wrong with thinking that you can advertise, market, or talk to all of them in the same way. Is more of a— there is a competitive advantage in recognizing that there are different people, that they have different incentives and different reasons to engage with your company and to customize or personalize your approach, your go-to-market strategy based on who are you talking to, but not from— not only from a demographic perspective, because sometimes people say, okay, so you are talking about buying personas. Which is a little bit of that, but in B2B, more important than the demographics is the actual role of that person, the function that they are performing within the organization, because when they have the hat, their perspective about the products and services that the company should buy or retain changes.

Yeah. And just thinking about the consequences of not, you know, properly targeting key decision makers, you can— everything else down the line of creating excellent campaigns will be in vain if you're, you know, at the very beginning you're not showing your ads to the people who matter to be seeing them.

Yes.

So when you look at successful B2B deals, who typically influences the buying decision beyond maybe the executive who signs the contract.

Yeah, there are— again, here, this is another principle that is very important, is if you look at accounts and key decision makers from a sales perspective, most sales reps, SDRs, BDRs roles will try to identify what is called the decision maker, the person that is in smaller organizations happen to have control over budget and the go/no-go decision. In larger organizations, they might not be necessarily a person in finance, finance, but they are the ones that own P&L, right? They own profit and loss for a unit and therefore can make choices about what is it that's going to be spent or is going to be put on efforts. And usually from a sales perspective, That is the most important person to identify and initially, usually also to have conversations with, because if you are prospecting or qualifying and you don't have in front of you the decision maker, you run the risk of investing a ton of resources into someone that at the end of the day will have to take all that you have discussed with that person with someone else. Right. And especially if you're just progressing through the deal. And you don't have the decision maker, whatever objections they have will not surface because he or she is not present. So from a sales perspective, usually the role that matters the most is the decision maker. But from a marketing perspective, this is slightly different because if you make the assumption that only marketing to the decision maker is important, you will run into into the issue of those choices. While there's a person that makes a final choice, they are not made, they are not made in the, you know, in a vacuum on their own. They enlist the help of both good and bad, right, of in favor of and against, uh, to the solution from other people. And so you have these other roles that usually get involved and they have evolved into typical naming conventions like the champion, which is usually the person that is very excited about the change, the end user. Sometimes the champion and the end user are the same, right? The person or group of people that are ultimately going to enjoy or suffer the consequences of the change. And then you might have people that sponsor the initiative, that they contribute to it, but not necessarily make a choice on it. They might support the champion on implementation and people that will object or block the initiative, right? Usually because whatever you are exploring already has a solution inside the organization. And usually change is not just adopting something new, is to make it work with what we already have. And there are more agendas on that. So those are the typical roles, extra roles that you will have on top of the most important or popular or more recognized, which is the decision maker.

And do you usually see that the, maybe the job title role of the person who's the decision maker, does that vary between SMBs, mid-market versus enterprise companies?

Yes, yes. What happens, it's a great question. What happens is usually that your, as you go into smaller and smaller organizations, all those roles, even when they exist, compress into one person.

Less people, right?

Compress into one person. Then in one person you have the decision maker and also the end user and you might have or not the champion, right? Sometimes you are dealing with someone that actually do not believe in the solution, but is the buyer, right? And so there's a lot of objection handling and some salespeople argue that it's not even worth the conversation, right? That you, and I agree that from a marketing perspective as well, a lot of the things that you're trying to do when you're trying to market your audience is to identify, or that people self-identify, that they agree with your point of view, and therefore they believe that your solution is the right approach to the problem that they're expressing or having. So yes, as you go smaller and smaller, all those roles compress. The only thing that I will say is important to recognize is that still, even in one person, you have all those things at the same time. It's just that they're going to progress over time during the sales process. Right? Maybe at the beginning, the owner of a very small, very small company will be your champion more than anything else. And as the sales progresses and potential risk starts to arise, that person transforms itself into the person that objects or that blocks the change itself because their perceived risk of changing goes up. As they get closer to making a decision. And so, and in a large organization that doesn't happen is the risk that you're running more often than not is that at the beginning you're having conversations with everyone that's in favor of the change and you do not identify the people that will object at the end, that shows up at the end or in the middle of the process. That's why kind of like turning back and how do you market You want to, as much as possible, to preempt to all those potential buyers the answers to their questions or how they think about the problem in your marketing material. So your sales process goes smoother because of the exposure that they had before.

So how important is it, you think, to break up your campaign messaging and camp— campaign targeting by those different roles and kind of like how does that look like? How do you recommend they be broken up into?

Yeah, here I want to, as you know, make a big caveat, right? And before we dive into all the ways that you can personalize something, and the caveat is if your resources are limited and especially if your buying community is small, I will privilege messaging the right people even with a generic non-buyer kind of message. It can be because you lack the technology or you lack the resources or a combination of both to create personalized messaging for advertising. I will privilege just being present. That will take you 80% of the path or 80% of the progress. And yes, you will miss maybe 20% of the better performance, better impact that you will have, you customize or personalize messaging by buyer persona. But it's super important that you don't get bubbled down into the, oh, well, I need to create all this before getting started. I think that's a big thing to highlight, right? That first step, just getting in front of the right accounts and the right people, the right buyers is the thing that is the most important. Once you have that, if you have the technology and we will talk about that, right? If you have the technology from the advertising perspective or from other channels that you manage, then becomes important to the first one. I think the most important one is what is the messages that are specific to the decision maker against either the champion or the end user, because those two roles are usually they usually agree on some key things, but they highly disagree on others, right? And the thing that they agree usually is that both of them want their work to be easier, faster, less painful, less frictionless. The only difference is that usually the champion will care less so about the return of that investment or will have less visibility into the total cost of change. And usually the decision maker will, will be more concerned about it because this particular product or service is one of many that are competing for the resources that they have access to or that they manage. And the champion will have a great incentive for the change. The decision maker has competing requests or resources or products or services where their, the capital they manage will result in improvements. And so that's where you have to make different messages, I think.

Yeah, they have different motivating factors. They both have factors motivating them, but they're very, you know, coming from different places. Correct. Awesome. Well, let's get into a little bit about audience strategy. So I'd love to hear your take on when marketers should rely on building CRM lists and audience lists within the CRM that are then synced to their ad accounts versus using the native targeting capabilities on the platform, whether it's LinkedIn or Meta or Google.

Yeah. Here again, I will just step back a little bit higher just to remind everybody, right? Is this is basic B2B marketing, but the thing that sometimes gets ignored and is super important is that you shouldn't start all of these questions without a clear understanding of some key elements of your buyer journey, right? The stages from your company's perspective of where your buyers are in the journey. That needs to be identified. And the reason is because once you have those steps, you will find where are the places or the channels where I will be the most effective to reach my buyers at each of those stages, right? So yes, you need a list, right? But not for the reasons that people imagine, because the first thing that I said almost religiously about CRMs, right? Nowadays, there's no reason why your CRM should be empty from the beginning, even if you're just doing marketing, even if you are not doing sales yet. Is you want to identify all the accounts and the buyers of those accounts that you want to target. However, having that information in the form of names and last names and emails and phone numbers doesn't give you the right or the access to talk with them or talk to them over email and phone because they probably have an opt-in for communications, right? So email and phone is a great channel usually for a stage where your buyer has already engaged with your company in some capacity, right? So that stage usually is more of a lead on the CRM that has filled a form or established communication. So it might be an MQL or something like that. For someone that is not at that level, then that information is helpful to go and try to use it to target advertising, organic platforms, and even to have an idea of what is the— what type of content would you create. I think that's the first thing that is super important, that most of this advice about advertising is because in theory you don't have access to direct communication with your buyers. If you already have it, then I will suggest that you leverage the channels that you have closer communication rather than the ones that are more massive where you have less control of who consumed your content, right? But given that idea, yes, start with a list, right? A list of companies and then start with a list of contacts. There's many tools and we talked about them all the time, right? Business intelligence tools that will help you identify We heavily use Apollo, but SumiInfo is another one, and there are many others. The key things are having the ICP information about the industries, the company sizes, the location or demographics of the company, as well as the technology, if this applies to you, that is important. Segment those lists and then find networks or platforms, but that information can be mapped against users. And the same as we discussed in other episodes, the network to go, the one that will have the highest match rate as of now is LinkedIn. But there's, it is possible with other tools to approximate a little bit of what LinkedIn is capable of in other platforms. That's a possibility for you as well, right? If you don't have access to tools that will help you translate that information into IDs on Meta or even Google properties, then LinkedIn is a great start from an advertising perspective. Mm-hmm.

So my next question then is twofold. So are there any situations where you wouldn't recommend a B2B marketer start with an account list? And if not, Then is the going to the native platform targeting the next step if the match rate on your account list isn't large enough?

Yeah, no, definitely. One, again, one simple one is lack of access to technology or resources to build the list because it's not free. You still need, even when you're building a list, you need a tool like Apollo. It will not be straightforward because the criteria that you will use is very similar to what you have on advertising. And you will quickly discover that even in some— if a company on paper matches your ICP, you still need to do a little bit of research to see if it truly matches someone that you will want to sell to. So again, there, having a list of industries, company sizes, like employee sizes criteria is better than nothing. It's even better if you can select one by one or at least use more detailed criteria. I know that more sophisticated companies and individuals are using tools like Clay and some other AI-enabled tools where you, you can select more criteria to pinpoint specifically what you want. But if not even that's an option, yeah, then you can start directly with LinkedIn on with industries, job function, seniority, just be mindful that as soon as you start running advertising and if you take a look at the reports that will allow you to see not only the quantity but the quality of your interactions, of your engagement, you will quickly discover that there are some companies that do not match your ICP even when they are in the industry and the job title and all that. And so you will have to run a lot of exclusions which will happen anyway, even if you had a list, it's part of the process. But yeah, it's an alternative that will help you get started for sure.

Yeah, definitely a lot of fruiting on the, on the backend though, once you get it launched, of reviewing irrelevant job functions and job titles and industries and all that. So when you look at companies who are consistently generating like high-quality pipeline from paid media, What would you say they're doing differently or doing well?

Yeah, it's, um, it's a hard question because most, most of the efforts where you are driving a ton of pipeline from marketing efforts that are not geared toward intent, like Google Ads or any other intent-based format, usually they're accompanied by a very strong brand, but more importantly, they're accompanied by a very strong business development process or effort, right? So marketing becomes— marketing social media platform like LinkedIn becomes a complement rather than the sole provider of impact. So the companies that usually will have the greatest return that is visible and easy to prove, not easy to prove, but easier to prove will be the ones that have the list that they are advertising or having some presence in that social media network, but that they have a strong business development process that is constantly reaching out to those prospects as well, not just waiting for the marketing side. And usually there's a technology component where you can track the all the multiple interactions that the buying committee over time has initially on the platform, eventually on the website, and eventually over email or through outreach efforts with the business development team. So you can start saying, okay, yeah, I can see now that there's a strong pipeline coming out of this, but it's the result of a combined effort rather than from one channel. That's another big caveat, right, is if you're going to do this and, and you just have that one channel, then either you want to be very patient or do a little bit of leap of faith if you lack the tools that will allow you to see the impact on attribution, which is hard.

We have to just say sales and marketing alignment just to add another episode. Yes, that topic included.

And I, I, I was— there's another agency here in Greenville that I know the owner now. Better Than Before, the agency is, is wonders in the B2B space as well. And Jamie had an event. It was yesterday actually, where he was talking about in general B2B sales process and he was pointing out something very relevant, which is usually companies will focus on the sales function on the people side, right?

Yeah.

Just how are we managing proposals and contracts and things like that? And they will focus on lead gen on the marketing side, right? On the system side, on the process side. How are we— how do we get more leads, right? And so we only— we tend to say on the people side, I need sales reps. On the marketing process side, or one-to-many side, I need a consistent engine for lead gen. And we ignore the rest of the little things that contribute to bridge the gap because— and the bridging the gap is business development, as you were saying, Miranda. The alignment comes there because first, for the leads are not coming from marketing, you need biz dev. But more importantly, for the leads are coming from marketing, you still need qualification. If you don't do qualification, establish a process and alignment, then most of those leads generated will not translate into sales because the sales process and the sales team is not prepared to qualify, right? Or to handle leads that are coming inbound to you rather than the ones that are current clients or previous convers— previous engagements or conversations. And obviously all the brand building, brand awareness part is usually considered a vanity activity or a non-required activity. Right? It's like, yeah, we want lead gen, we don't want branding, or we don't need branding. When we ignore that in order for lead gen to work, you have to build awareness and to have a pool that you can, you can get leads from. So that align, at the end of the day, as you were saying, is that is the misalignment between marketing and sales that, that they have different ways to go to address or get in front of buyers, and their respective ways of doing it are usually not appreciated, right?

Yeah. All right, well, in closing, if a B2B marketing leader listening to this episode wants to improve how they're reaching their decision makers, specifically through paid media, what are your like takeaway insights for how they should start, where they should start?

Yeah, I will layer in, in priorities, right? As you're saying, is your B2B marketing thinking about paid media. The first thing, as you said, is you need a list of accounts, whatever you source it. If you cannot define a list, at least you need to have the principles of it, right? Is the industries and the companies that you would like to target. That needs— always needs to be translated into people, right? So when we think about you need the buying committee, don't focus too much on the broad— like, I'm not talking about 5, 6, 7 people necessarily, even when in enterprise that's the case. It's just that you cannot— once you start with accounts, you still need to translate to people, right? And usually that's function and role. And once you have a clarity on this, on that one, then leverage the platforms where you can get the most out of that definition. Usually from a brand awareness perspective, something like LinkedIn will be the best, but there's technology behind it that will help you to do that in other places.

Yeah.

And finally, recognize that either you trust the process of brand awareness and brand building and how that impact lead gen, and you also recognize that getting a lead will not transform immediately into pipeline. And therefore you need to, you need to have the business development function. If you're very small, that function will rely on the same person that does the sales and maybe the owner, but that in order to bridge a gap between the two, that idea has to exist because if not, then it will just leak out. In the form of unqualified leads or leads that are not being taken care of in the right amount of time and therefore will not impact pipeline. So I think those are the key things that I will take away with.

Thank you as always for your time and your insights, and hopefully to our listeners that this was helpful and you have some tools in your tool belt for identifying your key decision makers. And we will see you next time. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure. Bye-bye. Bye.