In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, marketing leaders explore whether brand is becoming the last real source of competitive advantage as AI makes content, design, campaigns, and outbound increasingly accessible to everyone, and what it takes for B2B companies to stand out when execution alone is no longer enough. The conversation examines how AI is changing brand consistency and governance, why trust, recognition, and genuine customer relationships matter as marketing channels become increasingly saturated, and where brand truly lives beyond logos and campaigns. The panel also explores how marketers can demonstrate brand’s long-term value to the business through customer experience, reputation, and lasting differentiation.
Guests
Jenifer Weber, Head of Marketing at Cloverleaf AI
Lewis Goldman, Fractional CMO at TechCXO
Sabrina De Veylder, SVP Product Marketing and Revenue Enablement at Sinch
Jamie Bell, CMO at Workshop
Transcript
Joaquin D (00:00)
welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures, the podcast for B2B Marketers sponsored by Atzact. Today we are focusing on a question that more and more B2B teams are asking. Is brand the last mode? When every competitor can generate content, campaigns, and outbound at infinite scale, execution stops being a differentiator. So what's left when AI commoditizes everything else?
Sabrina De Veylder (00:00)
Okay. Okay. oh
Joaquin D (00:28)
We'll test the idea that brand and trust are the last defensible modes in B2B, with people who actually have to defend it to the boardroom. We'll talk about what makes a brand distinctive today, whether AI helps or hurts consistency and credibility,
Sabrina De Veylder (00:29)
Okay. Okay.
Joaquin D (00:47)
what happens as LinkedIn and the inbox fill up with AI generated content, and how you make the business case for a brand to a CFO who only looks
at
Sabrina De Veylder (00:50)
you. oh
Joaquin D (00:57)
pipeline. But before we jump into the conversation, I'd love for our guests to introduce themselves and share a bit about their background and current roles. So Jen, would you like to start?
Jen (01:11)
Sure. Yeah, thanks for having me. Jennifer Weber, I'm the head of marketing for Cloverleaf AI, based out of Denver. I've been in seat for about six months, and our platform is the leading B2G intelligence layer for frontline sellers selling into the government.
Joaquin D (01:25)
Awesome, welcome to Jamie, welcome.
Sabrina De Veylder (01:26)
Okay. uh
Jamie (01:28)
Hi, I'm Jamie Bell. I'm the CMO at Workshop. We are a modern internal communications platform and we are based out of Omaha, Nebraska.
Joaquin D (01:37)
Welcome, thank you so much. Lewis, welcome.
Lewis Goldman (01:39)
thank you for having me. Lewis Goldman. I'm a partner at TechCXO, a consulting company that provides fractional C-level executives to small to mid-sized businesses to help them grow or do a business pivot. So I'll work with multiple companies at the same time as their acting CMO. Been with TechCXO for about six years and very excited to be on the podcast. Thanks for inviting.
Sabrina De Veylder (01:59)
Thank you.
Lewis Goldman (02:00)
Forgot the location. Based in Manhattan.
Joaquin D (02:01)
So it's fine.
Sabrina De Veylder (02:02)
Thank
Joaquin D (02:04)
Thank you. Sabrina, welcome.
Sabrina De Veylder (02:07)
Thank you for having me Joaquin. I'm Sabrina de Valder. I'm the SVP of product marketing and revenue enablement at Cinch. We are a communication platform as a service company and we're all remote, but I'm based in Austin, Texas.
Joaquin D (02:22)
Great introductions. Thank you all. So let's start with the big picture. the premise of this episode is that when every competitor can use AI to generate content campaigns and outbound at scale, those things stop setting you apart, right? So I think Jamie, you said something that fits this perfectly. If every AI product ends up being in a chat box,
how do you differentiate your chat box from everyone else's? so maybe would you like to start like what do you mean by that?
Jamie (02:56)
Yeah, yeah, happy to. I think it's been obviously a wild ride watching all of these AI tools come out. And I think what's been interesting is like, well, what do we need? Like marketing, do we need branding anymore? Do we need design anymore? And like some of those questions that have come out of it. But I think it's very clear, you use Claude, Gemini, Chat GPT, any of those.
We can't possibly all be reduced to just a chat box in the middle of a screen, right? And if that is the case, then how do you differentiate your chat box from someone else's? And you just walk straight back into design, into branding, into the experience, into the voice and tone of it, all of that. so I think it's all gonna circle back my current
example is I have all of these claude reports now and charts and things like that I love. And I'm like, man, I just wish I could put them all on one screen. And now I'm just creating dashboards again. just in SA, right? Just like in saas So I do think it will all circle back around. And yeah, brand is just like one of those things where I feel like regardless of what the channel is,
I come from startups. So it's also the cheapest way to differentiate as well. if you just have that taste, that filter, that identity in whatever channel you're in.
Joaquin D (04:11)
That's great. at Workshop you've built a brand in a category of legacy providers. so
Jamie (04:16)
It's
Joaquin D (04:16)
do you want to to share what you've done?
Jamie (04:20)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. we do internal communications and we started straight out of COVID, which is probably the best example of when companies realized that they needed a lot of internal communications work. And most of the companies that were in this space had been there like 10-ish years, and really like sort of focused on, email and intranets and some of those things. and a lot of what
I always build brand almost as the first step. that's kind of my go-to. Again, because when you're a startup and you have no money, it's kind of like the way that you do things or like organic efforts are like kind of where you start. And so I think visually differentiating from others is like always my go to. so it was very clear to me like starting out that so many of the other companies in this space were either one monkey themed, I don't know what
that tie to email is, but it's all MailChimp or jungle mail or contact monkey or I don't know.
Lewis Goldman (05:16)
Yeah.
Jamie (05:16)
I can't explain banana tag was the other one. And I was like, okay, well we won't go that direction. Just yeah, maybe I don't anyway.
Jen (05:21)
Just don't go monkey and you're good. Yeah, that's great.
Lewis Goldman (05:24)
Yeah.
Jamie (05:25)
Someone got together and decided that. But lots of monkeys or a very sort of like
old school email, like clip art email, or like there weren't even people or like photos or like a warmth on the website. And you're talking about communicating with people. So that was a really sort of like easy place for me to kind of start. And usually like my first marketing hire is almost always going to be a designer if it's just me. It's something I always say I can commit Canva crimes, but
Nobody wants me doing that. So that only takes me so far. So the first time I get a marketer, usually like a designer is my go to there. And I think it's just because, it's such a visual way to differentiate. And it's worked well so far.
Joaquin D (06:10)
Great to hear. What about the rest? what do you think when everyone can produce content at scale, what actually makes a B2B brand extinctive today?
Jen (06:19)
I think that standing out in B2B has always been difficult. I think that there's a lot of companies that are selling, revenue outcomes, efficiency outcomes, time saved. And so how do you make all of those but then the software behind it could be so wildly different? so I think it's been an ever present challenge. And I think that
AI is only speed to market and maybe like cost of producing a campaign and getting it out there. but I think the challenge remains the same. And so I think that you see the market going in like two almost polar directions where cool, we've used AI to maybe speed up the production on still half baked or just flat CM C of sameness kind of positioning and messaging.
Or you've got the other side of it, which you're seeing these solopreneurs coming through and they're doing really wacky fun creative that would have never gone through maybe the several rungs of corporate brand police and legal approval. So I feel like you on the one hand see like just more of the same produced faster and then the totally fun and wacky wild side, maybe more Jamie of what you're seeing in your market it by the sounds of it with the monkey themes going on.
But
Jamie (07:31)
Okay.
Jen (07:32)
that's my perspective it's always been difficult to sound different and interesting in B2B. So at least from my perspective.
Lewis Goldman (07:39)
Yeah,
I'd agree with Jen on that one. I think that differentiating yourself, especially in the more commoditized B2B industries, certainly email servers and domains would be in that category. the same tools that you need to differentiate the brand, I think apply in a world of AI as they did, kind of pre-AI.
one of the things though I think that's probably more important than ever is trust and giving communications of trust through things like case studies, through testimonials. those are the types of things that I think become kind of more important because content is almost become sort of thought leadership has almost become somewhat commoditized, just because it can be generated so easily and so quickly.
Sabrina De Veylder (08:18)
So I agree with, I guess what Jen and Lewis were talking about. I think that at the end of the day, AI is not solving for your strategy or as a product marketer, obviously we care a lot about positioning and messaging. AI is helping you, like Jen was saying, accelerate the way you go to market and maybe repurpose your content in 15 different ways in five minutes.
But the core of who you are and what you do and who you do it for, AI is not solving it for you. And if it is, then you have other problems, right? Because it shouldn't. The other piece is that Lewis talked about trust, which I very much agree with. I would also say that brand is built on consistency. And so for smaller startup, which I've also worked at, is less of an issue because the teams are smaller. So it's a lot easier to control your message.
But as you scale and you start having people developing their own content or their own thing, that's where you start having issues with, we all delivering the same message? And that's where AI becomes tricky and becomes actually somewhat of a risk. Because if you don't have a good data set that you know all the company is relying on and that's a single source of truth of how you positioned.
what your differentiators are, et cetera, et cetera, and everybody goes there to talk about creating a deck or whatever the case may be. That's where you start diluting your brand. So I think that yes, in terms of speed, AI can bring actually quite a bit of an additional risk to your brand if not done
well.
Joaquin D (09:48)
Yeah. Positioning and messaging probably are the most strategic things that you have in marketing, right? So yeah, you can definitely break things if you don't respect the messaging and start saying things that are not very aligned with your positioning.
I think Jen, you have an interesting point of view
Sabrina De Veylder (10:05)
Thank
Joaquin D (10:06)
here as well because you've been through a rebrand, new website, Series A, everything in a few And you describe yourself as the brand police because because of the same
Jen (10:16)
A new rule.
Joaquin D (10:18)
things
Jen (10:19)
all of the pretty much big test cases for a brand all at once in the first six months. So it's been fun learning trial by fire. I think going all the way back to the rebrand, I actually joined in the middle of a rebrand. So I gotta get my hands in there right in time before we started applying the brand system to kind of major initiatives like the website.
And what I thought was really cool, coming from a company that has AI in the name, we sell into the go-to-market, the unique position that we've taken, which is everyone's talking about go-to-market engineering right now and how you can just slash go-to-market teams and really not respecting the people behind the go to market. And so even though we're an AI forward go-to-market ourselves and we're
selling into folks that are obviously looking for AI tools, we celebrate the seller. And so the whole brand was designed around we looked at our competitors. So Jamie, similar to what you always tend to do, your playbook going in, look at your competitors. How can I visually differentiate myself? Well, I like to say that our brand colors are well dressed salesperson.
If you go and you look at our site, there's a lot of deep browns, dark
Lewis Goldman (11:26)
Yeah.
Jen (11:28)
blues. It looks like a nice suit that you might wear to a business lunch. And that was really important to us was to visualize the seller, the person behind this AI research tool that we're providing is just that. It's a tool to enhance your go-to-market motion. You're the one doing the research, you're the one personalizing. We don't believe in spray and pray.
And so that's honestly a really contrarian simple sentence these days with everyone trying to eliminate anyone who carries a bag and replace sellers with go-to-market engineers. So that was one thing. the other thing is kind of to the point, Sabrina, that you were saying, which is I went from a 1200 person company with a 50 to 80 person marketing team, and I had a corporate marketing team. I had someone to establish the brand, the foundation,
And actually, I was the one who was probably pushing it too far and maybe disrespecting some of those brand guidelines in the past and sending out an ad campaign that was just like slightly off base. And now sitting in this seat where I know each of my sellers by name plus Claude, I'm realizing I'm experiencing the opposite. I'm feeling like
It was so nice when you're in this big staffed organization that has a corporate, brand design team that can produce all the template decks and all the things that yes get like tweaked and modified. What I've had to do is come in and A, figure out very quickly where AI sits in my, campaign production process, what tools am I going to use, and when do I need to cut things off and just say you're spinning your wheels and you could just do it in Canva, instead of
Edit number 45 with a chat bot. but also like how much latitude do I give all the folks across market-facing teams to produce content on their own because I can't be the bottleneck for sales enablement. So I produced a bunch of Claude skills that, speak as our brand. We've got a positioning skill, we've got a copy editing skill, we've got a logo usage skill. So I'm trying to replicate all of the foundational elements of the brand in those skills. But what I've found six months in now.
the AI personalizes to you. So my outputs, even using those skills, are still very different than when my very technical CEO who helped build the product, he gets really good research output from using our MCP connection into our database. We use our own data to write our reports. It comes out so technical because it knows him and it knows that he is an engineer by trade. I'm a marketer by trade. So
Even with the same prompts, even with the same skills, there's still that next layer of there's gotta be a single editing layer there. And a recent learning, even as a couple weeks ago. so still figuring out how to standardize the output, the messaging, even with those kind of DIY tools, because I don't wanna be an enablement or content bottleneck. So and if I'm still learning.
Joaquin D (14:10)
that's really
Lewis Goldman (14:11)
Yeah.
Joaquin D (14:11)
interesting.
Lewis Goldman (14:12)
yeah, that's fascinating about the individual feedback. So one of my clients has a enterprise version of Claude that we use, and it was really annoying me because the salespeople were putting inputs to create sales decks for specific clients. And initially it wasn't brand guidelines, and it was driving me crazy.
because it's an enterprise version and it's linked to the entire organization, I said, here are the branding guidelines for Bloom Credit. Please make sure everyone who creates any external facing materials follows these brand guidelines in terms of outputs. And it seems to have worked.
Because now the decks that they sometimes run by me, and they don't run them all by me, or at least in our font, are in our colors, have the right iconography, et cetera. so I found that that was a way to get a standardization by just putting a prompt in, if it's an enterprise level version. it's still gonna somewhat though create decks that are custom to that individual and kind of their style and the way they present. But that's something that I found.
Claude maybe six months ago, wasn't as good at. So part of it is also to be a tool to keep getting better.
Jamie (15:19)
Yeah. AI is really great with anything that feels like black and white, done or not done. especially a brand guidelines or something where you're like, yep, it's either right or it is wrong. this is the right blue or this is the wrong blue. There is not like an in between blue that you can make up. I think it's really great with those things. I agree with Jenna been super challenged especially when it comes to something like voice and tone.
Type skills or positioning or those kinds of things, where it's like our brand voice and brand tenants are warm, optimistic, genuine, generous, and practical. And AI doesn't know emotions, obviously. you always get in that trap. it's like if you make this funny and you're like, whatever you just said was so not funny. Or like, what do you mean by warm or optimistic?
Lewis Goldman (16:01)
Ha ha ha.
Jamie (16:03)
Those things I agree, what I see a lot of times is I'll try and I do the skills. And even in my own stuff, the way I've described it is like it feels like drift. it feels like the first output I get, I'll be like, you did it. And I'm thank you. And then it's sort of over time as I keep using that skill, and you've started straying. I have a bunch of them that are just like remove AI formatting.
I have a skill just remove AI formatting. Please stop framing everything with threes and saying it's not X, it's Y. And it'll still crawls back in. And like
Jen (16:34)
I can't help it. Yep.
Jamie (16:36)
and then you're like, I don't So it is hard, but it's I
Joaquin D (16:37)
It's so hard.
Jamie (16:40)
agree like with things like engineering, maybe some like design stuff, like things that have really clear cut like rules and guidelines. It's really good on the consistency side of that. But when it's more like
soft, I guess. I find it's way harder on the consistency side 'cause you'll just see something or hear something and you're like, that doesn't sound like us but
Joaquin D (17:01)
Yeah, I don't know why AI can do financial modeling
way
Jamie (17:05)
Yeah.
Joaquin D (17:05)
better than human and solve very complex problems, but writing as a human is something that's still lagging way, way, way behind.
and coming back, Sabrina, to messaging, right?
when you're training a sales team or even your marketing team about messaging, that's also really hard. Like convincing your team to speak in the same tone, voice and respecting your culture, your brand, that's also very hard.
Sabrina De Veylder (17:33)
So, thank
Joaquin D (17:34)
and I don't know if you've seen in your companies that
already solved that and they have a unified way of talking with customers are actually better
Sabrina De Veylder (17:42)
Thank you.
Joaquin D (17:45)
with AI and implementing those rules in house
Sabrina De Veylder (17:48)
Okay.
Joaquin D (17:49)
or or not so much?
Sabrina De Veylder (17:50)
So I'd say that this problem has always existed, right? At the end of the day, when you have a cell steam that is...
engaging with customers or prospects, you want those sellers to follow the values of your companies and what your company is standing for. Whether with AI or without AI, I think that has always been part of making sure that the company's culture is transmitted to everyone in the company. I think
that before when we were in office, it was a lot easier to make sure that people were behaving in a similar way behind the logo of your company, because we were all kind of working at the same place and there is a group effect there that is happening. Today when we're all remote, maybe it's a little bit more difficult to...
convey those values and to have people really embrace and live those values. But I think that the problem has already always existed with and without AI. I think that AI is enabling something where if we have a central place where we have all our repository of what product marketing delivers in terms of positioning, messaging, competitive positioning.
objection handling, you name it, internal and external facing type of content. And you grant access to that database in a way that sellers can ask questions just with, what we're saying a chat bot, then all of the sudden you do unlock the possibility of having access to what you consider is your single source of truth and a much easier and faster way from sellers.
Historically we would send them one pagers or we would ask them to attend a training or whichever the case may be which was not necessarily. Consumption friendly sellers want to be out there talking to their customers they don't want to be reading your one pager or attend the training but. If they have a question on the go they do want to chat and get that info at their fingertips right so.
From that perspective, think that AI is unlocking access to the true information of your company.
Jen (20:06)
I really like that because I've experienced, the product marketing department where it feels almost like they're the department of frameworks and then
Jamie (20:16)
Yeah.
Jen (20:16)
it's on everyone else to kind of like go and make that real. And so like however you
Jamie (20:20)
March.
Jen (20:22)
I'm sorry, however you interpret that framework can vary
Sabrina De Veylder (20:25)
Yes.
Jen (20:26)
quite a bit. So I do think that there's a lot of power in
the persona bots and the things that people are making to interact with, spar a bit with the information.
Sabrina De Veylder (20:34)
Yes.
Jen (20:34)
that's why I've always loved webinars and LinkedIn Lives and things like that. So you can do all of this mess like what you've translated into campaign material usually takes flight once you start practicing out loud. whether it's
Sabrina De Veylder (20:47)
Yes.
Jen (20:48)
prospect phone calls or a marketing event, whatever it is, I think that's usually when it starts to click.
But now we're accelerating that with testing it out a little bit before you go out into market.
Sabrina De Veylder (20:58)
Yeah, I really like
Lewis Goldman (20:59)
Yeah.
Sabrina De Veylder (20:59)
what you're saying and it's true that we use AI also in product marketing, obviously, but the example you provided, Jen, where now you can create a persona which represents one of your target audiences and that allows you to validate your new message, validate maybe your new product offering in a much faster way. Because in the past, maybe you had to meet customers, you had to
validate those things in a much more manual way. Today we can mimic that and it makes it quicker, it makes it faster. So going back to your initial question, Joaquin, maybe around brand and execution, that's where the speed comes in, but somewhat also the quality and the ability to be somewhat more accurate quicker.
Joaquin D (21:44)
Yeah, I like that. And I think probably many people listening are probably thinking that brand is great in theory, but then you need to demonstrate to finance where pipeline is, right? It's great like okay, yes, this can accelerate things, this can
Lewis Goldman (22:00)
Okay.
Joaquin D (22:01)
make things work faster. But how do you make a business case for brand to a CFO who only looks at pipeline?
And I know many of you works very related with pipeline. So I would love to hear like which brand metrics or whatever can predict revenue and you can tie to brand.
Lewis Goldman (22:19)
Yeah, I think we've had a interesting with one of my clients, we've had an interesting challenge in that we've launched a new product that's new. and we've actually looked at both the GEO searches for the terms related to it as well as SEO searches for it. And the volume is very low. So there's not a lot of low funnel activity for it.
and so the argument that we made to the you know the CFO in terms of invest in branding and specifically in terms of true thought leadership. So what we've done is we've engaged a very well-known third-party consulting company to do white papers. And we're actually publishing our next one on Tuesday. It's 33 pages long, and it is not something that could be generated by an AI engine. and
What it does is it creates a level of credibility that then creates awareness of what we're trying to do in the marketplace to drive uh upper funnel interest in the product or service. And the challenge in terms of making the case is that it's a long sales cycle product. And so making that direct connection can be a challenge. The metrics that we use are things like downloads.
Press pickups, other types of things. And then we do a lot of events because this is an industry where with a lot of BB industries, events can be a very important opportunity to find prospects and interact with prospects. how much interaction are we getting? how much buzz is there at these events? And so we're able to actually quantify some of those metrics, lease generated at an event, downloads.
inquiries for demos, contact us inquiries, and use that as a proxy for top funnel demand and are able to sort of make the argument that way. it's tricky though.
it's definitely tricky, but it's something that in the case of sort of if you're doing something that's truly sort of new to market, you need to create awareness that this is a solution that can solve a problem that maybe you weren't really aware of or it was a problem you're just willing to live with and now all of a sudden there's a solution for it. Does that make sense?
Jen (24:15)
Very similarly what you mentioned going into let's start with results on the, search and the SERPs, if you will, and then looking at search volume and keyword difficulty and everything like that. I tend to usually start with speaking with marketers and getting that dialed in, like, yeah, like where is our non-branded category?
Term sitting, is there search volume? Are people category aware? Let's start there. But if I'm talking with finance,
Lewis Goldman (24:41)
Yeah, we
Jen (24:42)
I usually want to do like two things. One is have a really non-technical, very just like logical conversation of like, do we all understand where the market is? Do we all have a mutual understanding of we are creating a category or we are educating on a pain point?
or are we on seating incumbents and is this a take out and replace situation? And like kind of just going back to like the original serious decisions demand types and saying, like, is the education and therefore thought leadership moves are gonna be important? Are we capitalizing on latent demand? Are we capitalizing on active demand, competitive?
That helps orient like what tactics are necessary for moving people down the funnel. And just starting with simple conversation. Do you think people have heard of us? Right. Like let's start there. Well, if people haven't, and we all know that, and we're saying we're the ankle biter challenger in the market and we're chasing the hundred-pound gorilla, let's start with the obvious. Wouldn't it be better if people had seen our name before having deeper conversation? Okay, cool. We all agree on that.
And then moving down, and then we start talking about investment. I think that ABM's made it a couple trends have made it easier. One, moving towards target account lists in all possible advertising lanes so that we can at least control which companies we're going after. And then I think people become a lot more comfortable with like impression engagement metrics because, well, at least you know that you're targeting the right company and the right persona. But I do think we owe it as marketers to then come back with
The more mature results, which is what's the correlation of when we run brand awareness versus not? And when we know that there is a positive correlation to ramping up paid media spend in certain, brand awareness engagement metrics, and traffic, organic traffic on the site starts to have a positive correlation and volume. When you turn it down and all of a sudden website traffic goes down, what do you think happened? So it's not.
just this linear, you click an ad, you go to the site, and then you convert on the first one, we're getting that first wave of traffic. And so I think those are all important phases of the conversation, to have, but but ultimately you need to visualize that. You need to visualize the positive correlation in those brand investments and the lift effect that it has. Usually it's maybe not going to go much deeper than MQL if you're still doing kind of like a
traditional linear funnel and an ABM funnel. but you still need to show that and say, like all of this builds on top of each other. And if and if it doesn't have that correlation, then you do need to actually consider the investments you're making. if you can't measure that lift, buy yourself the time, set the right, you know, expectations. But yeah.
Joaquin D (27:18)
Yeah, 100%. I
think showing that correlation between the number of impressions, irrespective of the channel the correlation of closing a deal with accounts and if you show more impressions and if you have more touch points with that account
Sabrina De Veylder (27:32)
Thank you.
Joaquin D (27:35)
then they are closer faster and you are closing better deals. I think that's irresistive for any CO or CFO, right? yeah, I don't know if you, Jamie and Sabrina or Louis, if you are also showing that to your syswit.
Jamie (27:53)
Yeah, I I will either I have been very lucky in the CFOs that I work with or I'm like the CFO's favorite. I don't know which one it is. I do work in a lot of startups. So most of my strategies start organic first and then if they work, I use paid to amplify them. it's tough to get me to carve off a lot of money for a display campaign or even a video campaign sometimes because
It's just not close enough, and so a lot of times, I am looking at things that feel like it's very easy for me to explain. And I'm also a huge advocate of like inbound in general. And that's for a few reasons. But I think one is that like to me, I just talk to the sales team and the CFO and be like, when sales picks up the phone and they say, Hey, it's Susan from Workshop.
Do you want them to know what workshop is to your point? Do they know your name? Cause they're gonna hang up,
But they might hang out stay on the phone if they've been to our webinars or downloaded our content or they know us a bit more, right? They won't just be like, Well, what's workshop? I'm sick of getting spam calls, right? There's a reason we're all talking. And then also anytime you pull the data on inbound or outbound, or
Here's the demo submissions from the website versus the people that we cold call booked. They close faster. they close more. it's very obvious. So then again, to Jen's point, it's kind of just how are people going to get to the website? They're gonna hear about you. They're gonna see the content. it's been something that's felt pretty easy for me to explain. But
I won't spend more than maybe 10, 15% of the budget on things where I'm just like, it's an experiment, it's impressions, it's reach, I don't really know how to measure it. I don't let that kind of take over the budget as a whole. So then as a result, I don't usually get questions on that 10% all that often. And I just refocus their energy on the 90% that's getting results.
Sabrina De Veylder (29:49)
At previous companies, I also think that it's important to put things in context. Your ACV, your sales cycle, your competitors, everything has an impact also on what you can do and maybe even what you should do, right? I used to work for a company where our ACV was $5,000 and it was a more of a PLG motion.
What is very different than if you have a million dollar in ACV and a 18 month sale cycle and you have 25 people involved in that decision making process. So I think all this is also to take into consideration and how you break down to everyone's point your different initiatives and tactics to engage with your buyers and people who are making decisions for you. At the end of the day, I think that
You all have said, rightfully so, that everything is part of what marketing does. And to me, marketing should be responsible for the entirety of the funnel, not just, this is tied also to this attribution concept. At the end of the day, attribution is a myth and it's so difficult to do and it's useless. if brand is done correctly, it does not matter whether
It's come through a marketing channel or not the salespeople maybe engaging and maybe driving a specific lead. guess what marketing is influencing that deal as well because they may have seen your brand. may have read your case study, whatever the case may be. So in talking to CFOs, about them, if you talk to them about this is my entire marketing budget, brand dimension, everything under the sun. And this is,
what the funnel looks like close won that's really your return on investment everything is part of it it becomes a little too messy i think just try to differentiate between things because everything is complimentary especially if we have long sale cycle and we have big buying committees and then you later on the gartner. Data point you need seventeen
Jamie (31:51)
That's true.
Sabrina De Veylder (31:52)
touches or twenty or twenty five i don't even know what that
Lewis Goldman (31:54)
Ha ha
Sabrina De Veylder (31:55)
is.
yeah, everything is part of marketing.
Lewis Goldman (31:59)
and there are some proxy metrics you can still use. I think Jen touched on the things like web traffic engagement level, at time on site, especially for kind of B2B sales and complex B2B sales leads. So I do look at followers for LinkedIn.
we send out a newsletter and and those types of things to keep that engagement up because it is a long sales cycle. Sabrina brings up a great point about sort of multi-touch attribution, which, 15 years ago we thought we had the solution and you could tell exactly what was driving your sales and you had percentages assigned to each one. And I was at MetLife at the time, we were spending $100 million and we thought we had it optimized, and then we basically found it was all BS.
And they were trying to argue that the MetLife blimp over a golf tournament was driving,
Jamie (32:43)
Yeah.
Lewis Goldman (32:44)
sales of life insurance policies. And when we actually tried to quantify it was challenging. So there is a bit of that sort of holistic approach. and paid media, I also am a bit cynical on as well, especially for for B2B. I think you have to protect your keyword, your branded terms.
I do think that's important, but beyond that I think it's challenging to acquire customers for B2B businesses.
Joaquin D (33:05)
thank you so much for sharing all those great insights. We've covered a lot today from what makes a B2B brand distinctive when AI can produce everything to consistency, to channel saturation, and providing the value of brand to the people who control the budget. Jamie, Jen, Louis, Sabrina.
Thank you so much for joining us today and for all the ones listening, please don't forget to subscribe and share this with a colleague if you like our content. And until next time, thank you so much.
Lewis Goldman (33:40)
Thank you.
Jen (33:41)
Thank you.
Sabrina De Veylder (33:41)
Thank
you.
