Christian Klepp  00:00

The B2B landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, and markets are constantly fluctuating, leading to much uncertainty and unpredictability. This results in B2B marketers having to work with limited budgets, bandwidth resources, and collapsing time frames. So what can they do to deliver more with less? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Michael Clark, who will be answering this question. He is the CMO at Infrascale, who has more than 15 years of experience in developing marketing strategies, creating product roadmaps and increasing revenues and success for B2B companies. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:46

Mr. Michael Clark, welcome to the show, sir. 

Michael Clark  00:49

Thank you. Christian, happy to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:52

Great to have you on the show, Michael. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because I think, let’s be honest, it’s something that a lot of B2B marketers are thinking about. I’m not entirely sure if they’re losing sleep over it, but some of them might be. And I think this conversation is something that needs to be had. It’s really important. So, um I shall not keep the guests in suspense any longer. And uh we’ll just jump right in. Okay? 

Michael Clark  01:18

Sounds good. 

Christian Klepp  01:19

Great. So, Michael, you’re on a mission to help design innovative marketing strategies, develop product roadmaps, and conceptualize growth plans to increase revenues and ensure enterprisewide success. So, for today’s conversation, and for the benefit of the audience, of course, let’s focus on the topic of how can B2B marketing teams do more with less. So, before I start asking you all the um all the questions, I’m going to set this up a little bit, right? So I think we all know it’s quite clear that the B2B landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. Markets are constantly fluctuating and that ultimately leads to a lot of uncertainty which also results in marketers having to deliver something with limited budget, bandwidth, resources and collapsing time frames. A very tough combination if I do say so myself. But let’s kick off the conversation with two questions and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So the first one is why do you think it’s important for B2B marketing teams to be agile and given that where do you see a lot of these teams struggle? 

Michael Clark  02:31

Yeah, thanks, Christian, yeah. I think it’s there’s a lot of importance and agility that comes in a variety of ways. We’ll start with the fact that I think, as you said the markets themselves are evolving constantly, and that means we need to evolve constantly with them. And I think, you know, we’ve all had the experience where you come up with a great hook, a great campaign, a great email, whatever it might be, that works for a month or for a quarter and then tails off again. And you can expect what worked yesterday to keep working forever in the future, you need to be constantly testing and expanding to evolve that to a new, successful topic. And I think the agility we’re talking about allows marketing to make those quick changes, to adapt quickly based on two of my favorite things, real time, data and customer feedback. So when done properly, I think agility isn’t chaotic. It’s a structured iteration that’s grounded in data. It’s grounded in listening, and it’s that database that data driven decision of are we delivering results and are the changes that we’re making working, or how do we optimize them further?

Christian Klepp  03:40

Absolutely, absolutely. So where do you see? Where do you see a lot of these teams struggling like, do they struggle with dealing with the data and customer feedback? I imagine some of them don’t even do that.

Michael Clark  03:52

I think that’s one of the things that I agree with you. That is missing is marketing is often divorced from customers, might be partners, they might be end users. They you know, customer and B2B marketing is writ large, and even then, I’m looking at external customers. We’ll come back to that in a minute. But to me, the best insights don’t come off your dashboard. They don’t come out of your metrics. They come from the conversations you’re having, and I think that they come from conversations you have with customers who are using your product, and when you listen to them, even if you’re a fly on the wall, not driving the conversation, you hear what sales is saying that they’re responding to. You hear what questions they’re asking, where things aren’t clear, or they’re trying to drill into a specific point of interest, and that has been the gold mine that I’ve mined all my career for all of my best campaigns, is what is the customer telling me that they need, that they want, that they’re looking for, and how is it that then we get that message back into what we’re sending out on the marketing side?

Christian Klepp  04:58

Fantastic insight. I had a follow up question, just based on what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, why do all of these marketing teams skip that bit? Like, I mean, at least some of the marketers I’ve worked with, like, they don’t collect this feedback from customers. Is there some? Is it because of the disconnect between them and sales? Is it because they’ve never spoken to customers or over to you.

Michael Clark  05:24

I think it starts with the disconnect from sales that might be in some organizations. I’ve actually seen marketing and sales set up as competitive organizations, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. These are two people that need be completely aligned in what they’re doing, but I think marketing, I think in a lot of ways, the onus is on marketing to make this connection. And the reason is I mentioned a moment ago, we were talking about external customers before you have internal customers in your organization as well. And when it comes to marketing, sales is your biggest internal customer in almost every case. So ask sales what it is that they’re looking for, what data is important to them, what handoff point makes the most sense to them. And then that lets you start a aligning on what