How to overcome the biggest challenge in B2B tech PR, building a story, to #getnoticed.

Well, thank you very much to our audience today. Today I'm joined by Mike Maynard, who's joining me from Chichester in England, and he is the founder and owner of a B2B PR firm called the Napier Partnership. Mike, welcome to the studio.

Thanks very much for having me on the podcast, Jim.

You're more than welcome. So, so Mike, you help big companies get noticed, technical companies. Tell us, what can you share with an entrepreneur? who has got their own business and who can't afford an agency like Napier, but would love to know how to get noticed?

That's a great question, Jim. And I think one of the things I'd say to entrepreneurs or people, you know, who are running growing businesses is actually you have a fantastic opportunity. Once you get to the situation where you're in this large, you know, big global enterprise, it becomes very difficult to actually do things that get noticed. People become very conservative. You want to do things that basically you've done before because you know they've worked. It's easy to actually start producing campaigns and content that can actually be a little bit boring as you get bigger. And it's one of the challenges that a lot of our clients come to us is they want to do something new. They want to do something different. They want to do something creative, but because they're in such a large, and every larger organization tends to be a little bit more risk-averse, they actually tend to find that quite hard. And I think, you know, entrepreneurs who frankly own the business, run the business, they have a lot more freedom. And so to me, I would say it's almost not necessary that you've got to look up at big enterprises and say, wow, they're amazing. I've got to be as good as them. I think you can actually do things that are better and more attention grabbing.

Mike, that's actually a really positive, what a wonderful way to start really to not be afraid of being a big company, but enjoy the flexibility and the freedom you've got of being an entrepreneur. So where does an entrepreneur start, Mike? If you have a new client come to you saying, help, Mike, where do you start?

Again, this depends a little bit on where the entrepreneur is, but typically I think one of the things you need to do is sit down and have a bit of a thought about what you're trying to achieve and how you're going to achieve it. So at Napier, in our agency, we actually have this process, a 4-step process, which is designed to develop really good campaigns. And actually the secret of it is it makes people think before they do anything. And that's really why it's so effective. And I think with entrepreneurs, because you're, you know, typically so time pressed, you've got so many different demands, it's very easy to go rushing into a campaign and start on that doing stage. One of the things that I think enterprises do have a real advantage is they have large teams and they can sit and think about what they're doing and really plan it well. So To me, I think that the one risk entrepreneurs have got is just running like crazy into doing rather than actually thinking and planning. And so to me, the first step is to take a breath and actually think what you want to try and achieve.

Okay. That's wonderful. So, and great. So taking a pause. So someone's decided that they want to help, you know, build their business to grow 4 or 5 times, cross the chasm as it were in the Moore's terms. Where do you go next? Do you start with the message? Do you start with the audience? Do you start with the content? start, Mike?

That's a great question. And some people can start at different stages, but we tend to start just trying to understand the environment. So situation analysis. So you try and see, you know, where you are as a company, what your strengths are and what the competition are doing. So you try and understand how you position yourself in the market. And then the next place we go to is the audience. So once you understand what you're trying to achieve, and most entrepreneurs actually have a really clear vision of what they're trying to achieve. So normally this situation analysis is pretty quick. You know, because they're building a company because they believe in a particular thing. They want to achieve something. And they also have an idea that is different. So they have a huge advantage over the competition and they know what that is. So we can skip pretty quickly with the more entrepreneurial companies into looking at the messaging and the audience. And as I say, the first step is really to understand your audience. A friend of mine, somebody I actually employed ages ago, posted on LinkedIn. About audience and she was saying, you know, it's not about creating target audiences and doing analysis. It's about understanding who you want to talk to and working out how you can help them. And that very simply is what you've got to try to do. You need to understand who matters in terms of who's going to decide to buy your service or product and then how you can help them, which as marketing professionals, we'll say, well, that's messaging, isn't it? And we'll have some complex, you know, discussions around positioning and messaging, but Fundamentally, it's give them a clear reason why working with you is going to make their life better. And that is your message. That's what you want to say.

Now, Mike, what you and I both know in B2B is that there's more than one customer, isn't there? And so different people on the buy side will have different roles and different, different requirements really. So take us through, how do you help an entrepreneur who probably is either an R&D person or a sales-focused person, how do you help them think about the different kinds of people on the other side of the buy cycle?

Yeah, that's a great question, Jim. And it gets to the heart of why I love B2B. So when you're selling to another business, very rarely are you selling to a person. If you're selling to consumers, you're almost certainly selling to a single person. You're almost certainly selling to women. They make most of the purchasing decisions in the consumer world. And it's a pretty direct, you know, you've got to try to convince one person. Who's got particular goals. If you look at B2B, there are a lot of people involved. And very simply, if you're asking someone to make a major investment, for example, in some IT infrastructure or other technology, you've obviously got a technical specialist you're selling to. And we do a lot of this work in terms of selling to technical people, but you've also got other people involved. You know, that technical person's got to go and get a budget. They might have to go to the CFO and get the money. The CEO might want to know if it's a lot of money being spent, they might want to be involved. And also you've got users who are going to the system. And so even the technical person needs to think about, you know, what could be relatively non-technical users. So, you know, very quickly, immediately, a simple technical sell. We've got 4 different groups of people and they've got 4 very different requirements. You know, the technical person probably cares a lot about the product, its functionality, its features, but probably the other 3 audiences don't care. They just want to know what's the benefit? How's it going to help us? The CFO very crudely is looking at how much money am I going to spend? What's the speed of return? How long's the lifetime of the asset? And that'll give me an ROI. And they're looking at the purchase from different perspectives. And I think one of the things entrepreneurs make the mistake of doing is they think that the person they talk to in a sales conversation is their only audience. And typically that's the technical person. And one of the things entrepreneurs could do much better is thinking about this decision-making unit, as it's called, and trying to understand, you know, how you not only talk to those people, so the messaging, the words you use, but also how you reach them as well, because they may be reading, for example, different publications or different websites to the technical person.

So there's a lot in there, Mike. How do you help that entrepreneur then to, if you like, sort of take different elements of their proposition and package them as being relevant to the different stakeholders in the, in the buying, in the buying team?

I mean, that's, that's a really good question. So the simple answer, and this is going to be a little bit of jargon that I'll explain, is that we create personas and we create buying journeys. And what a persona is, it's sometimes called an ideal customer profile. It's basically a description of the person you're trying to reach. So that could be a description of the technical person. It could be a description of the non-technical influencers. So if we look at that example I had for it, you know, we can look at the CFO. So the chief financial officer, in terms of a persona, he's probably not interested in the technology. He's probably very interested in return on investment. He's probably very interested in terms of the total initial cost and probably also understands things like operating costs. So any ongoing costs that are involved. So that CFO's got very specific interests. The CEO, you know, If he's signing off on it, probably one of the big things that the CEO might care about is they don't want it to go wrong. They don't want to have a situation where the CEO is seen as associated with a big technical investment, the technical investment goes wrong because that's embarrassing. And whether it's just the employees or the customers, or, you know, if they're a larger company, the shareholders get to know the CEO's made a bad decision. They can be very risk-averse. So we build these personas that describe What drives each individual that's involved, and in particular, what makes them look good, what makes them look bad within their organization. And that's interesting. That's very different from a consumer persona where consumers are much more about, you know, what motivates them, what interests them. Quite often in B2B, it's about what they're afraid of, what risks they need to mitigate. So, you know, that's really interesting. And then what we do is we look at the process they go through when they buy. And so that's called a buying journey. And we basically build a model of the kind of steps they might walk through. Before they agree to purchase a particular product.

Mike, do you use software for that or is it on Excel? Any tools that you can recommend?

So that's really interesting. There are tools to build personas and HubSpot has actually quite a good persona tool. It's a little bit skewed towards consumer. And there are tools for buying journeys, but typically we tend to use things like Word for the persona creation and then PowerPoint to kind of show a buying journey. And the reason is, is we can then build it specifically around our particular client. So some clients may have special problems that are involved. So for example, we work with clients that make sensors that go into food manufacture. And clearly there, there's a lot of issues around. And so safety might be a key issue for that particular client. For other clients, you know, the product really isn't safety critical. So that's not, that's not the case. So actually just building that persona in Word works really well. I have to be honest, using the tools is great if you're looking for inspiration. because they can give you some ideas of things like the questions to ask.

Yeah, they give some structure, don't they? And in some of them, like these avatar creators, they, they output nice images that you could then put, but it's kind of a, an additional expense maybe for people that's not necessary. So Mike, what about the kinds of outreach to media and the challenge that most sort of SMEs have is that they're not really big enough yet. to attract the attention of the, of the publisher. And maybe they don't have a PR firm to have those relationships in place already. How do you help clients? I know you work with bigger ones, but how do you suggest that entrepreneurs manage to get noticed without necessarily having the relationships in place with the big media?

So the interesting thing is even the big clients struggle to get into the publications they want to get into. They still get told that their story isn't interesting enough. And so I think the important thing to understand is whatever you're doing, you've got to think about who you're trying to reach and why that's going to be interesting to the readers of a particular publication or viewers of a TV show or whatever it is. And so what you need to try and avoid doing is thinking about the people you talk to day to day, because when you're an entrepreneur, you're typically talking to people that are about to buy. And you're trying to close that deal and make them buy. Now they've been through this, and I mentioned it before, this buying journey where they started, they've never heard of you. They may not even have known they need a product like the product you bought. They may not have even known they had a problem and they moved through this buying journey. And typically, if you look at things like PR, PR is about reaching people at the top of that journey. So it's about reaching people who maybe don't have a problem. And so Generally, I would say the secret is to build stories that are interesting to people at the start of that journey. So it's explaining, you know, where there are problems that perhaps people don't realize. You could almost say, I guess, the unnoticed problem. It's about, you know, talking about how people have used a product to actually become more successful. So that would be a case study. Those sorts of stories work really well. The stories around, I've got a product, it's amazing. It's 25% faster than anything else in the world. That's typically fairly boring when you read that in a, you know, in a publication or see it on, on a news broadcast. So what you want to do is really think about the type of content you create and understand that you're not talking to your potential customers who are ready to buy. You're talking to the potential customers who haven't heard of you. That's really key.

Very, very interesting. And also frankly reassuring for the entrepreneur to know, and I completely concur that we've had as much trouble getting big companies in. to the media, it's really about the quality of the story, isn't it? But coming, coming to the concept of stories, Mike, you know, in America now there's a lot of emphasis on, on story and storytelling for business. Can you give any examples of how you're building stories for clients and any tips on how to do that for the entrepreneur?

Well, I think again, the entrepreneur has a major advantage over large enterprises here because the entrepreneur typically has a story. They started that business for a reason. And it could be because they had a problem and nobody fixed it so that they built the solution. And it could be that they actually really cared about something or they're really interested in something. And I think the entrepreneur has that advantage to have a story. It's much harder to build a story if you're a large company. And some of our companies have like, they've been running for 100 years. They've got hundreds of thousands of employees. It's really hard to come up with a clear cohesive story, particularly when that company could have a huge number of different business divisions. When you're focused and clear, I think you've got this benefit that you know what the story is. And to me, there's a couple of things that entrepreneurs do that kind of hold them back. I think one is probably failing to be completely honest about what the story is and frankly trying to be too corporate. So I would say that entrepreneurs really need to be very direct and open about why they started the business, the reason for the business to be there. And what it's doing with customers. And then the second thing is that I think entrepreneurs try to go into sales. And we talked about this earlier. PR really is not the thing you do when you're trying to necessarily close a deal. It's very much trying to get people to start being interested in your company, perhaps go to the website, perhaps start making inquiries. And so it's that top of the funnel kind of interest as we talked about. So tell the story to the people who aren't like wondering whether to buy your product or your competitors. Tell it to the story, the story to the people who perhaps know they've got a problem, but can't quite say exactly what that problem is. Or they know what the problem is, but they're not quite sure how to solve it. And talk about these kinds of more generic problems and solutions rather than trying to get specifically into your product. And if you start doing that, you'll be seen as being the expert in your field. And that will be great PR because people want to come to you because they believe you understand them.

Right. That's really wonderful. Really lots of interesting points in there. One of them that I'd just take on with you there is just about The content types, because you've talked about narrative and stories, fantastic. A lot of people also focus on text and they're on writing a press release. Any guidance, Mike, on formats, content types for the entrepreneur?

I love that question, Jim, because normally it's the go-to for PR, isn't it? People want to do some media relations campaigns, they write a press release. And what I think most entrepreneurs don't realize is that The press release isn't the end. The press release actually is the beginning of our challenge because we've then got to sell that into the media. And a release is merely a tool or a framework to sell a story into the media. It's not the thing that actually does it. So I would say to entrepreneurs, don't get hung up on writing press releases. And actually, if you look, you know, we work in the engineering sector, it's very technical. We tend to have quite long, detailed press releases. If you go and look at the press releases for EasyJet, for example, They look nothing like a formal press release. So I think the first place to start is a story. How you communicate that, I think is less important. When we talk to clients, you know, whether they're smaller companies or whether they're big enterprises, we actually don't really talk about tactics particularly. So we're not really talking about, you know, oh, we're going to do a press release. We're going to do a case study. We're talking more about content generation and content distribution. And so I think for an entrepreneur, What you've got to think about is what can you say that's interesting to someone and particularly interesting to that person at the top of the funnel who doesn't know you and maybe doesn't know they've got a problem. What are you going to say? What's that thing you want to tell them to help them? And then from that, you should look at, well, what's the best way to tell it? And that could be a press release. It could be an article. It could be an interview. It could be a video. It could be an infographic. But you should really drive that from what you're trying to achieve rather than say, I need PR because PR is going to grow my business. So I'm going to do a press release and that will solve all my problems because that really won't work.

No, but this sort of multi-content Monday format, and presumably from what you say, Mike, entrepreneurs don't have to worry about it all being super high polish either, which is the other challenge often that entrepreneurs say, I haven't got the money to make good content. What would you say to that?

Yeah. And I think good content doesn't necessarily cost money. Flashy content might cost money. But good content doesn't. And so one of the amazing things about PR for entrepreneurs is that you can have a press release that is frankly substandard, but if you've got a great story, the journalist is going to cover that. And the journalist is going to make it look every bit as good as the competitor that's 1,000 times bigger than you. So I would say, you know, trying to be too constricted by preconceived ideas of how you write a press release, what should be in a press release, what's the structure, what's the layout. That's actually a bad thing. That's going to take away from the story. And the most important thing you want to do in PR is to communicate a story to people who could be your customers through a journalist. I mean, that's all you're trying to do. So you're not trying to create the world's best press release. You're not trying to, you know, have a particular format or get the world's greatest boilerplate. Nobody reads boilerplates anyway, so that doesn't matter. It's really about the story. And I would say to entrepreneurs, again, focus on the story.

Mike, thank you so much for sharing your insights today on how PR can work and a little bit about your story, which is also great. If you want to find out more about you, how can they do that?

So if people want to find out about me, they can obviously find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Mike Maynard at Napier. They can visit our website, which is napierb2b.com. Or if anybody's got any questions, want to ask me anything, I love talking to people about marketing, as you've probably gathered. So just send me an email. I'm just mike@napierb2b.com.

Mike Maynard, thank you so much for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur today. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Jim.