Christian Klepp  00:00

In a B2B landscape that has become increasingly competitive and inundated with digital noise, using play it safe tactics will result in your brand drowning in a sea of sameness. That said, the path to differentiation, innovation and standing out is not an easy one, as it requires a change in mindset. You need to have room for experiments to truly create something that is relevant to customers. So how can B2B marketers do this, and how can they get internal buy in for it? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Vincent Weberink, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder of pzaz.io who specializes in developing business growth through creative, structured data driven growth experimentation. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp  00:51

Vincent Weberink, welcome to the show. 

Vincent Weberink  00:54

Hello Christian. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:59

Absolutely I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. I think we’re going to have a great time. We’re going to have a great discussion also about topics, and a main topic in particular that I think is going to be so relevant to B2B marketers and their teams in general. So you know, without further ado, let’s not keep the audience in suspense for too long. Let’s just jump straight into it. All right. So Vincent, you’re on a mission to drive business growth through creative, structured and data driven growth experimentation. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, which is how B2B marketers can create a mindset and design experiments to understand what customers want. That kind of sounds like it’s very, I’m going to say pedestrian, but it’s incredible, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of case studies to show that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t follow this process, and then they get into trouble. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them all right? So the first question is, why do you think that design experiments are important for marketing teams? And based on that, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggle?

Vincent Weberink  02:09

I think they’re very important because as human beings, we’re emotional when we make decisions. Problems is that, therefore when we try to drive growth. We have this idea about something, and then we tend to completely jump into it, build everything. Spend a lot of time and money and resources on building that thing that we believe is going to be very, very successful, and that takes a lot of time. And the reality is that most of the time you’re actually wrong, even though you think that you know your customer, even though you think that you know this is the best trick or marketing tactic that you’re developing. And what this experimentation model does, it sort of forces you to go through a very structured, almost scientific process, because there are some steps in there that help you to remove that emotion from your decision making. 

Vincent Weberink  03:12

And an example of how decision making often is influenced is when you’re in a small team or a large team, you’re sitting around the table and you’re trying to brainstorm, say, oh, you know, we have this, this challenge. We’re launching a new product, or we’re changing something, and we need to communicate it, driving sales up. And then the people who are best sort of equipped with sales capabilities are the ones that you know will dominate the conversation, and what we tend to do is then listen to them, whereas there are other people around the table that you know, they might be more introverted, might say less, that also have really, really great ideas. So what happens is that you collect all these thoughts and ideas, and then the person that’s very good at selling is selling their idea to you, and you end up taking that one. But it has nothing to do with reality, whereas in the methodology that I’m sort of promoting, what you actually do is you try to capture as many ideas as possible, as quickly as possible, and then, in almost a democracy, you rank and rate them according to several criteria, and that will help you to make some of those ideas float. And the ones that pop up are the ones you should actually focus on, because now, within that democratic decision making process, you’ve tried to optimize the chances that one of those ideas will actually lead to much quicker success than any of the others. And you can also use it in the reverse, the ideas that completely sink because no one voted for them, maybe only just the person that was selling. You know that they go away. You just throw them away and forget. About them, because clearly they didn’t get enough support. And the other question you were asking, sorry focused on the first question. 

Christian Klepp  05:08

No problem, absolutely, absolutely no. Well, that was a great way to, like, set up the conversation. And I guess it segues to the question, where do you see, based on what you said, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggling?

Vincent Weberink  05:21

Well, I see them often struggling is that they tend to spend money and time on just the ordinary things that everyone sort of accustomed to, because depending on the type of company you work in, that’s the safe choice, and that ultimately doesn’t really help you grow. It’s typically the stuff that you would never expect to work. And I’ll give you a great example of this in a moment that might give you this amazing growth overnight or amazing success. It doesn’t necessarily have to be growth. It can be specific campaign where you just need people to sign up, because you’re trying to obtain information from them and to get those people to sign up. It could be a problem. You’re designing your funnel, and then something isn’t really working. 

Vincent Weberink  06:15

So in my experience, what happens is that people will say, Okay, let’s build a landing page. Let’s build a website, and let’s make it beautiful. Let’s make it perfect. But while you’re in this early stage, you have no clue if it’s going to work or not. You’re now wasting all of those resources where it’s so much better to very, very quickly, design experiments, run them as quickly as possible, see where something is happening, and then sort of iterate upon that specific experiment that you were running. And then slowly, over time, you get to a point where that e