5 steps to beat boring B2B marketing with Patrick Ward, VP of Marketing at Rootstrap

By Jodi Norris 28 March, 2022

Patrick Ward’s ‘Marketing Transformation Mindset’ is one you should adopt if you’re looking to innovate your B2B tech marketing strategy. 

On this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Patrick outlines the 5 ways he boosts his B2B tech marketing through creative avenues, such as employee advocacy, company stories and adopting the language of the customer. 

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Listen to the full episode here: 

 

And check out more of the FINITE B2B marketing podcast here! 

Full Transcript

Alex (00:06):

Welcome back to the FINITE Podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about the marketing transformation mindset, which might mean nothing to you just right now, but by the end of the episode, you’ll have a proven route to B2B marketing success, as evident by the experience of our guest today, Patrick Ward. 

Patrick is currently the VP of marketing at Rootstrap and is the author of Marketing Transformation, why your marketing mindset is holding your organisation back. He’ll share a very clear, simple five-step process framework for innovation and ways to beat stale, boring B2B marketing.

 

Alex (00:40):

Before we start this episode, I want to let you know quickly about FINITE Fest, our virtual conference coming up on May 17th. Across the day we’ll have 10 sessions with B2B marketers from world leading tech and SaaS companies like meta and IBM and Finastra covering the most common challenges mentioned by our FINITE community members, from battling digital fatigue to choosing the right MarTech and breaking through the boring of B2B tech branding. 

Thanks to our sponsors, tickets are again this year completely free. So get yours through the link in the episode description or head to our website finite.community/finitefst2022.

 

FINITE (01:16):

The FINITE community is kindly supported by the marketing practice, a global integrated B2B marketing agency that brings together all the skills you need to design and run account based marketing demand, generation channel, and customer marketing programs. Head to themarketingpractice.com to learn more.

 

Alex (01:35):

Hello, Patrick, and welcome to the FINITE Podcast.

 

Patrick (01:38):

Thanks for having me, Alex.

 

Alex (01:40):

I’m looking forward to talking. We’ve got an interesting one coming up. I know that you have written about the subject and have an interesting perspective, which I’m looking forward to hearing you share more on, but before we do that, I’ll let you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and experience up until this point. And we’ll talk a bit about your current role and team as well.

 

About Patrick and his background in B2B tech marketing

Patrick (02:00):

Yeah, so my name’s Patrick Ward, and currently I’m the VP of marketing at Rootstrap, which is a custom software development agency. But that often doesn’t mean anything to anyone. So the thing that I tell people is we are the tech team behind Masterclass. 

So if you decided to learn a Gordon Ramsey recipe during the pandemic that was using our technology. I’ve been from many different places, starting in a humble ad agency in Sydney, in Australia, where I’m originally from, and then moved over to the US at the start of 2016, migrated my way through the finance industry. I was in ad tech for a while before finally settling in the space of software, and that’s where I am today.

 

Alex (02:44):

Nice. And tell us a bit more about the marketing function at Rootstrap and how everything works in terms of your role and your team.

 

Patrick (02:52):

Yeah, so it’s a pretty standard B2B marketing team. We obviously do a whole bunch of organic and paid sides of the house, all focused on brand building, customer acquisition, but also supporting the different team members. We have obviously a large engineering function. 

We have a large product function. We have a large design function. My team is very diverse across four different continents. And if you’d asked me this a couple of hours ago, I would’ve said it’s 10 people, but as of today, and as of recording, it is now 11, I just made a new offer to a director of paid search, I’m very excited. So that expands my team to officially 11.

 

Alex (03:32):

Nice, congratulations. It’s always exciting when someone new joins the team, but that’s a decent sized team. How big’s the Rootstrap business overall?

 

Patrick (03:40):

So the Rootstrap team overall is 260 at the moment. We’re spread across many different places, primarily our two headquarters, Los Angeles and Uruguay. We actually formed as the merger between two separate companies, a product studio and a development studio. We’ve also since expanded to Argentina, Columbia, and now we’re making our way through Mexico, Costa Rica and looking to explore Puerto Rico.

 

Alex (04:10):

Interesting. By complete chance, I got reached out to by some kind of Puerto Rican government, who set up a development team in Puerto Rico, a scheme campaign something like that. Is it the Puerto Rican president that’s a Bitcoin advocate?

 

Patrick (04:26):

Very much so. We’ve found quite a bit of a surge. Being in development, most of our work has been in app and web, and then suddenly over the last year we’ve seen an explosion in NFT related projects and blockchain projects.

 

How has the B2B tech marketing landscape shifted recently? 

Alex (04:40):

I can imagine, interesting. I think South America generally has been such a hidden hub of tech talent and design talent as well. I think there’s a real level of design skill there that often people don’t don’t assume they may find. So there’s a lot of talented people in that part of the world, which is great. 

Cool. Let’s dive in. So we’re talking about this marketing transformation mindset. We’re gonna set the scene by asking you a bit about recent shifts you’ve seen in the B2B marketing landscape and then we’ll go on to talk a little bit more about this mindset and some of this process and approach that you’ve developed. Tell us about what you’ve seen in the landscape shifting recently.

 

Patrick (05:25):

Yeah, absolutely. So let’s first set the scene where marketing has come from. When you ask many people who are still working in the industry today, several decade veterans of the industry, they’ll tell you over time, when marketing was viewed as either the party people, the people who made things look nice, a fairly under respected industry and B2B, funnily enough, was the real sector compared to B2C, that actually valued marketing in terms of what it could drive for business value. 

And this really saw the shift, correspondingly with the rise of growth hacking. And the concept of growth hacking, while it was certainly something that was necessary for us to engage with as marketers, we’re able to measure so many more aspects of our role, and we’re able to tie our role more effectively to how we were supporting the sales team, and more importantly, supporting revenue. 

And as anyone will tell you, no matter what your function is, if you are supporting the revenue of a business, you are going to have a better seat at the table. And more unfortunately, if we look at the last couple of years, this aggressive pursuit of technology, rather than being subservient to the strategy, has become the strategy. 

And this is really where I think we sit in the world of B2B today, just on one component alone. If you look at MarTech, marketing technology, there are over 8,000 software vendors within marketing technology, just within the United States alone, and many more when you multiply that across the entire globe. This is a real problem, because what happens is that with all these tools that promise all the results and all the types of components, tactics, strategies that you want to measure, suddenly, if you are a senior marketing executive, your judgement is being clouded, and it’s being clouded by these tools that are telling you they are the path to success, as opposed to relying on core fundamental marketing principles. 

And so I’d seen this multiple times in my career. I’d heard all the different ways that marketing had been bastardised by different senior marketing leaders that I respected. I’d seen C-suite executives, who had their own opinion on marketing, no other field in the world has more opinions on it than marketing, especially from non-marketers. And so I decided to hone back in on what were the core principles. 

I wanted to still respect the fact that technology allowed me to measure my success, but I also wanted to return to really what marketing is at the end of the day. It’s about effective communication that helps shape a message about a company, or a brand, and get that into the minds of consumers, of prospects, anyone who’s going to interact with your company. And if you can do that in the right way, you are going to succeed. 

And so when I packaged that experience, when I saw what I was doing at multiple different companies in multiple different stages, I realised I was running the same playbook. And that’s how I came to what I’m calling right now, the marketing transformation mindset. And that’s why I published this process into a book and the same reason we’re talking about it today, Alex.

 

How is growth hacking misshapen and inhuman? 

Alex (09:02):

Cool. That’s the perfect scene setter. I think we’ll come on to talk about that in some detail. One area that I know you have a perspective on, is this area of growth hacking. You mentioned it just then in your introduction, I guess growth hacking might be still growing in usage, it’s still widely used. 

I guess you get some people that are super cynical about it and they’re like, isn’t all marketing for growth? You don’t have marketing to deliver the opposite of growth, growth is always the goal. And I guess it’s become, maybe it’s had a bit of a like cliche image of being connected to that typical Silicon Valley tech startup way of doing things. 

But then to its merit, I guess there’s the perspective that this very test and learn iterative way of doing things is really valuable for lots of businesses, not just startups, but maybe there’s some positives for everyone to consider. What’s your perspective?

 

Patrick (09:59):

So you’re absolutely right. There’s nothing wrong with the core fundamental of testing and learning. The problem is where growth hacking was misshapen and more importantly became inhuman. And what I mean by this is that when you look at the trajectory, like you said, it was very much tied to Silicon Valley. It was tied to almost an engineer’s mindset towards marketing. And that is not a bad thing in and of itself. 

Obviously many of these tech startups, in fact the one that I work for myself, all have a large body, 80 to 90% of our staff are engineers. And yet the irony here is if you make marketing too much like engineering, you lose that diversity. You lose that different perspective of how to reach out to people. 

Because the fact of the matter is, unless you are building a particular developer tool that is targeted towards a very technical audience, chances are your startup, particularly in the SaaS space, is probably talking to a non-technical audience. And so in that case, why would you apply a technical mindset to that? You can still use the bedrock of principles that are under growth hacking. 

And many of those principles have indeed been folded into what we see in the more general digital marketing sphere. However, what I saw particularly being here in Silicon Beach, Silicon Valley’s little sister if you will, I saw this relentless pursuit of growth that actually herded the entire customer base that these startups were proclaiming to help. 

And that’s the big thing that I want us to all acknowledge, is that when you decide to do a particular strategy, there is still a human on the other end of that. And you still need to reconcile with that, because when you just pursue growth at all costs, then you lead to the flame out stories. 

If you look at all the successful brands, you look particularly in our space of, we always look towards Apple and Steve Jobs. He understood first and foremost, it wasn’t even about the technology at the end of the day. It wasn’t about the product. It was how you were making people feel. Were you helping them achieve the next stage of their life? Were you helping them achieve a promotion? Were you helping them achieve satisfaction? Were you helping them achieve more health, wealth, happiness, all these aspects? 

And I think that’s something that needs to be remembered, that marketing can do that. Marketing has that power because it does have its roots based in psychology and how people think, as opposed to, can I optimise this one ad to get more conversions? Because we’ve seen the consequences when you do a growth hacking mindset at all costs.

 

Can brand marketing beat stale boring B2B tech marketing? 

Alex (13:04):

I think that’s a strong and maybe refreshing perspective. I feel like the B2B world is going through a good, and we’ve talked about it a bit on the podcast recently, but a good rebalancing of this growth/performance focus with brand. 

I think there’s a lot of good research and more insights around that side of things, it’s becoming more evidence based. Ironically, the data is showing that investing in brand in the right way can have the impact. But I guess the counter argument for performance-based marketing has been that things become pretty stale, pretty boring. You don’t take any risks. You don’t invest in bigger, bolder, more creative stuff that actually intrinsically can’t really be measured or is very difficult to measure. 

Because as I think I’ve said before, the marketer armed with the spreadsheet and the forecast of data is always going to beat the marketer armed with the crazy idea. Usually, in most C-suite environments, you go to a CEO, CFO and ask for money to do something. Do you think that’s still the challenge? That you just end up optimising towards optimising, and you end up just going down these tunnels of pretty dry, boring stuff?

 

Patrick (14:21):

Absolutely. And the problem there goes back to the measurement. As you said, you are looking to measure exactly why someone buys from you, and this is the same reason why Google Ads, Google organic, reviews and rating sites, anything online, even when you take it offline towards trade shows and other conferences. 

You can still more directly measure ROI from those efforts than you can from a big idea. One of those big bets, for example, that I am making this year is on video content. Now I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but I know that it’s important to make big bets in order to really level up the playing field in terms of where we are. 

We’re sitting at 15 million right now, so I’m thinking, sure, I can optimise these little levers here and there to get to 50 million, a hundred million, but how do I make our brand so big that one day we are competing with Amazon and Facebook? 

And you’re absolutely right. It takes time to build that trust with your C-suite team and in lieu of anything else, you end up falling back to the data. But let’s look at the data, the data isn’t even true when you think about it. And the challenge that I always have, and I pose this challenge to my C-suite executive team, my C-suite executive team are investors and they’re often big into real estate. 

So I’ll use a classic example. Say you’re buying a multi-family investment property. Tell me all the marketing touches you went through, tell me how you went from being a prospect all the way through to close and sales. And every single time they go through that exercise, I poke a hole where that wouldn’t have been measured, that wouldn’t have been measured. They’re going to misattribute, you came through organic, but actually you had a referral base and that’s why you already trusted this firm way more than the other firm that reached out to you.

And so it’s not that it’s wrong to measure. Giving measurement can give you a directional signal of whether you are succeeding or whether you are off course. But what we’ve seen in recent years is just a relentless focus on the data at all costs, without questioning if the data is actually accurate? 

And I would argue, unfortunately for marketing, there is always going to be a qualitative element. You cannot escape that, right? And so knowing that to be true, you still need to give your marketing team. And if you are an executive giving your senior marketer the room to experiment, I always talk about having a certain portion of your budget for big bets. 

Now, some people that I’ve spoken to only have five to 10%, well news flash, they’ll get linear growth. But if you want outsized growth, if you want incredible gains, you need to do something unexpected. Because if you do the things that are being measured, you’re doing the things just like everyone else. 

And that is never going to get you to unicorn status. It’s never gonna get you to an IPO. We see the playbook, we can see all of the biggest brands in the world took massive risks. But when you take those massive risks, you have the chance to make those massive rewards.

 

What are the five steps towards marketing transformation? 

Alex (18:02):

I like that explanation of how you describe it to the C-suite and investors. And I mean, I’ve covered this topic a few times on the podcast of like, how do you get the buy-in of the C-suite? And often the answer is to speak their language. 

And I think what you’ve described is definitely meeting them at their level, speaking in a language that they understand. So it makes a lot of sense. So tell us a bit more about this marketing transformation mindset. And I know we’ll dive into the process, and this is what your book that you’ve written revolves around.

 

Patrick (18:34):

Yeah. So it’s a pretty simple five step process, and I’m just gonna cover the five steps briefly. And I know we’re gonna dive a little deeper into them, but the great thing about these five steps is they’re something you can implement today. I will say the caveat is these generally work best for agencies, SaaS startups, and mid-market. 

If you’ve got the budget of Nike, you probably don’t want to be using my tactics, because I’m still being economical with your cash. If you’ve got billion dollar brand budgets, you can afford to sweep the floor, but at least for this audience, I think these five steps makes a lot of sense. So the first step is: the company’s story must be clearly articulated. 

The second step is that external communication must be in the language of the customer. The third step is that internal communication must enable the creation of employee advocates. The fourth is that consumers trust people faster than they trust companies. So lead with your humans first. 

And then the fifth is that you can experiment with new technologies, but you should only lean into them if your organisation seeks to master them. So we’ll dive in a little bit deeper, but those are the simple five steps. They seem very elementary, but when packaged together, I’ve seen incredible results. Everything from applying at a $1 million SaaS agency, all the way up to a $300 million company.

 

Why is a company story so important? 

Alex (20:04):

They make a lot of sense. I mean, I think a lot of the value of marketing comes from people being able to simplify it and distill it down into a way that people wouldn’t actually do something with, because otherwise it’s such a huge field. 

But let’s spend two minutes on each them. And we can just talk through them. I think stories and building that company story is so key and something that, I guess the cliche in the B2B tech world generally, is that companies like to talk a lot about what they do and how they do it and their product and their solutions, but very little about their story, their founders. 

You have to have to click through three, four pages of the website before you get to an about page that tells you that actually there’s a really interesting origin story of how this founder had this problem or came out of this research project at university. And there’s something really special there, but it’s tucked away. What’s your perspective on the company story side of things?

 

Patrick (20:57):

Exactly. So the fallacy here is that you don’t need to do a story, because if you’re in B2B, it’s a business decision. It’s a rational decision. And I think something that many people have been speaking about right now, but I’ll reiterate right here, is that at the end of the day, when you’re selling B2B, you’re still selling to a human. 

And we know that humans make decisions based on emotion first. And then they seek to justify that feeling rationally. And this happens across all B2B decision makers. I can list off countless client examples where I can tell it’s because we weren’t compelling enough to the person. We knew that we were going to solve their particular problem. Maybe we were gonna help them reach their goals. So they got their promotion. 

But then we talk the language to the rest of the company, we’ll increase your growth here, we’ll get you more revenue here, we’ll achieve your ROI here. Nevertheless, if we didn’t have that story in place, we wouldn’t have ever got to that conversation. And I think it’s really important to think about in terms of holistically, what a story can do. 

And I want to give you a concrete example. So from my current company, Rootstrap, we spend a lot of time talking about Uruguay. Uruguay is a country that not many people know about, certainly a lot of our clients. And we wanted to tell a story about Uruguay showing why it was a really interesting place for us to source our tech talent and even have our headquarters. 

So we talk a lot about its transition from an agricultural economy, all the way through to a tech sector. We talk a lot about its laptops in cribs policy that helped give every child a chance at a technology backed education. And all the way through to where, when you get a developer out of a Uruguay university, even though they’ve done the same amount of years as an American graduate, they have got the equivalent of a master’s level of education. 

Now telling all of those stories in and of itself is not going to close a deal. But what it does is it gives you a foundation. It gives you a foundation where suddenly when you are being compared to 3, 4, 5 different vendors, you have something interesting. You have something unique, you have something that’s worth exploring further because the fact of the matter is every company will tell you that it is really bad to be compared on price. 

As soon as you are compared on price, you are just getting into a commodification war. And what a story can do is get you out of that, because in lieu of providing any story or any additional emotional attachment for your prospect, they’re just gonna compare you on what they can measure. And more often than not, it’s the dollar value at the end of the day.

 

Alex (23:56):

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

 

FINITE (23:59):

The FINITE community and podcast are kindly supported by Clarity Performance, the digital marketing agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies. Visit clarityperformance.global to find out how they partner with marketing teams in B2B technology companies to drive growth.

 

How can you understand the language of a customer?

Alex (24:18):

What about this, under point number two, understanding the language of the customer and meeting them in their own language.

 

Patrick (24:25):

Yeah. So this one, I have a particular hack that I want to share with people, because it all sounds straightforward, right? Obviously all communication should be in the language of the customer. But what you’ll find is when your marketing team spends their effort drafting this idea of what that language should be, they’re coming from their own perspective. 

And they’re coming from the ego of the company they represent. Now, this is not a bad thing. It’s just their mindset. And so what they’ll end up creating is a figment of a customer communication tool rather than actually being in the voice of that customer. So the thing that I like to use is going to reviews, so most in the SaaS or services world in technology are likely to deal with many of these review sites. You can talk about Capterra, G2, there’s a whole bunch of them. 

Whichever one you use doesn’t matter, go through, try and get as many reviews as you can from as many good clients as you can. And then what I like to do is I harvest those reviews through using a virtual assistant. I get them put into a single document. And then I run that document through a word cloud tool. 

And by doing that, what I’m going to get is those key words that keep cropping up over and over again. Now they might sound very similar. They might sound almost identical to what your marketing team already comes up with, but by using the language that others describe you as, you’re getting closer to the truth, you’re getting closer to why a prospect chooses you and not anyone else.

And so by using that language, by identifying that language to use in your messaging, suddenly what you are able to transform is making sure that your message actually starts to yield those results. Because suddenly a prospect looks at your website, they see that language and go that’s what I would think too. That’s the same problem I’m facing. 

So yes, find that common language. Again, it’s not too hard to get those tools with a word cloud or some other word association tool, there’s a whole bunch of them that you can find online. But those are the real key ways that you are harvesting from those reviews directly from your client’s mouths. How would they describe you? Not how you would describe yourself.

 

How does employee advocacy work in B2B tech marketing? 

Alex (27:00):

Nice. I like that. Nice and tangible. Good advice. What about this employee advocacy piece? I think it’s often overlooked as a piece of the puzzle in marketing. I think maybe more valuable for larger companies and larger teams, but what do you think?

 

Patrick (27:14):

So the fact of the matter is if you are relying on your marketing team to do all your marketing for you, you’re going to fail. Let’s just once again take my current company Rootstrap as an example, a team of 11, but there’s 260 people. That’s 260 potential advocates for our brand, as opposed to my marketing team of 11. 

So why do you want to drive those employee advocates? Because as you expand their networks, as you expand their reach, suddenly you expand the entire brand’s reach. Unfortunately, employee advocacy I would say, has been another thing that has been bastardised to old hell by a number of different SaaS products. 

They talk about produce content for your teams to share. And it’s all done through this vein of social media. And so what you get is these regurgitated posts that all they really end up doing is just looking the same over and over again. You’ve got an army of clones and that’s not employee advocacy. It’s not actually making a meaningful difference for your brand. So what do I mean? 

The key here is for it to be employee driven and not executive driven, because when executives drive this employee advocacy, most employees will do it. Begrudgingly they’ll do it. Oh great. Like I guess, my CEO told me to do this, so I’ll give it a share, but I’m not gonna go above and beyond for this. I’m not gonna be telling my friends, my former coworkers, I’m not gonna be telling people at that industry meet up how amazing my company is. 

And so we have one strategy that we’ve applied that works really well for this. And it’s called the world cafe. It is a complete democratisation of the creation of initiatives. We create 16 initiatives. We run them on quarterly cycles. And those initiatives that get chosen are voted on by every person, one employee, one vote. And by doing that, we are able to identify what are the areas that our employees care about? And then tap into those for true aspects of advocacy. 

We’re able to create true thought leadership around it because suddenly we can go, hey blockchain initiative, I see you guys have been exploring some new, exciting stuff in the NFT space. Let’s publish stuff about it. Let’s get that out into the ecosystem. Suddenly you are meeting people where they care about. And so it is harder to do, I will admit that. It means that your marketing team has to be having regular conversations with different members of your engineering team, different members of your design team to pull these out. 

So what happens? We do this in terms of conferences. We look at who do we have on staff that are different experts that we could pitch for certain technical conferences. We look at meetups, is there certain people who need resources, need support running their own product, women in technology meetups that we run. And then also you go through to things like social, you go through to, based in Uruguay, how many of our staff like football? 

For example, rather than just letting them do that independent of us. We provide them equipment. We provide them jerseys. We provide them boots. And obviously all well branded with Rootstrap so that when they’re playing suddenly that’s a conversation starter. It is harder to do when you want to create true employee advocacy. 

But if you can, and if you can really get your marketing team focused on how they can leverage the other team members within their organisation, suddenly you don’t have just 10, you don’t just have 20, you can have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of employees sending really positive messages out into the world that increases your brand. And more importantly, attract the prospects to you that will give you money. And we all like more revenue.

 

What does brand really mean for a B2B tech company? 

Alex (31:39):

And great for the employee brand as well, or an employer brand. So where were we? Point number three.

 

Patrick (31:48):

Yeah. So this comes back to consumers trusting people quicker than they trust companies. And this is where I, once again said that caveat at the start, if you are apple or Nike and you have multi-million dollar brand budgets, totally. You can spend on that and you can really get your brand out there. 

But when you are in a SaaS startup, when you are in an agency or mid-market company, chances are a lot of people don’t know your brand. And the fact of the matter is, I often say that to me that isn’t even a brand. My hypothesis is that most brands don’t actually exist. People talk a lot about brand, but if you asked your average person, even your average person in your industry, who you are, if most people would say, I don’t know who you are, then you don’t really have a brand. 

And so this is where it needs to lead from humans. First, eventually you might reach a scale that your brand can stand on its own, but you really do need to tap into those strong employees, whether they’re executives. You need to be leaning on them for thought leadership. Now there’s a right and a wrong way to do this. 

A lot of people, when they think of this type of world, they think of influencer marketing. And when they think of influencer marketing, they think of virality. The problem with the thought of virality is you can do that, even as the B2B marketer or a B2B influencer, you can get viral traction. 

The problem is by getting viral traction, you by definition need to have mass market appeal. And that often means that you are cannibalising your message to the point that it’s not even related to your company. And you’re not actually influencing the true people that matter. 

So when we did this ourselves, we originally certainly had a viral focus and it brought us nothing in new business, brought us millions of views for several of our co-founders. And that was great, but it didn’t bring us any new business. 

Suddenly when we shifted to actually leaning into technical thought leadership, when we were really focusing in on how can we show that we can help people with managing their cloud costs, for example, or how can we show people how to create innovation when inside a large enterprise, those sort of processes, needless to say, and that content maybe got a couple of thousand views, certainly nothing to write home about. 

But suddenly by doing that shift in the course of one year, we managed to get a third of our new business from pure thought leadership alone. And you see it when it comes all the way through to the inbound leads, suddenly people are saying, I read your CTO’s piece about X. I was really interested in it because it solves a problem that I’ve been thinking about. Can we talk? 

And that’s the key when you are thinking about leading with people, you want to do true thought leadership, not just get a nice publication logo, get a nice viral post on LinkedIn. You want to truly think about, are you putting something out into the world that is so meaningful to your prospect? That they are so compelled to reach out to you?

 

What challenges does a flooded MarTech landscape pose? 

Alex (35:21):

We’re nearly out of time, but I’m gonna ask you to wrap up on this final point around MarTech. Because I think it’s a good one and you kind of mentioned it. We made reference to it earlier in terms of how complicated the MarTech landscape is. But if you’re gonna commit to investing in these tools, then I guess do it properly was the message. But I’ll let you put it in more eloquent terms.

 

Patrick (35:39):

It comes back to you can experiment with new technologies and you always should be able to do that, you always want to reserve a certain portion of your budget for those experiments. But you only lean into them if your organisation seeks to master them. What do I mean by that? We talk in the classic example here of social media, there are a whole bunch of different platforms. 

And every single year there seems to be a new platform that people jump in on. Recently, obviously it was TikTok, you had Clubhouse, which was there for a hot minute and then wasn’t, and what happens here is there’s such a strong FOMO that marketers spread themselves way too thin and suddenly don’t get those outsized results. And I go back to a story of earlier in my career, when I was first tasked with this, I was told, you need to post across everything. 

At the time it was Facebook, it was Twitter. It was LinkedIn. There was a bit of Tumblr, there was a bit of Instagram and I cut all of them, except for LinkedIn. It was a very scary thing because my CEO felt that I was probably doing the wrong thing. He was convinced that if you just put more messages out in more places, it’ll be more impactful. 

Suddenly again, in the of six months I yielded $650,000 in pipeline. Now that might not sound like much, but the agency at the time only did 1 million in revenue. And so those are the types of things you can achieve when you focus on a technology and truly master it, because more often than not people try a piece of technology doesn’t work for them because they didn’t persist long enough. And then they give up on it.

And this constant headless chicken jumping from technology tool to tool. Again, the same thing happens when you think of email prospecting tools. I’ve got people telling me have you tried Lucia from the product team. And I say, well we’ve already got that particular prospecting tool in this that we use, something like hunter.io. 

So why am I chasing another one? If that’s just going to spend more budget, if it’s going waste more of my team’s time trying to get up to speed, it’s much better to do the absolute best with the tools that you have available rather than try and constantly find what’s the next hot thing. 

 

Alex (38:07):

That is I think a great piece of advice to wrap up on. I know we’re pretty much out of time I’m afraid. But there’s a lot there. And I’ll let you finish up by telling people where they can find more or maybe find a copy of the book that you’ve written.

 

Patrick (38:21):

So you can find a copy of the book at amazon.com. It’s amazon.com/author/patrickjward. Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward, all one word.

 

Alex (38:36):

Cool. Hopefully a few people will link in with you. Thank you, Patrick, for sharing everything. I really enjoy episodes where things are tangible and people can feel like they can get their hands on something and actually go away and apply some of what you’ve you’ve talked about, which I think is definitely the case here. So thanks again.

 

Patrick (38:51):

Appreciate it, Alex.

 

FINITE (38:53):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at finite building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, learn, and grow. Along with our podcast, we host monthly online events, run interview series, share curated content and have an active Slack community with members from London, New York, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Melbourne, and many more to strengthen your marketing knowledge and connect with ambitious B2B tech marketers across the globe. Head to finite.community and apply for a free membership.

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