There’s no such thing as B2B and B2C with David Fallarme, Former Head of Marketing, Asia at HubSpot

It’s long been discussed how B2C influences B2B marketing. But this guest thinks there shouldn’t be a distinction at all! 

On this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Alex talks to David Fallarme, who believes there are much better ways to break down the different types of marketing. 

At the time of recording, David was Head of Marketing, Asia at HubSpot, and is now Director of Marketing at On Deck. 

This episode covers: 

• About David’s background in ‘B2B’ marketing 
• Why there is no divide between B2B and B2C marketing 
• What the gap between B2B and B2C looks like within the marketing space 
• Whether B2B decisions are just as emotional as B2C ones
• A better way of differentiating the types of marketing
• What B2B can learn from B2C
• Why B2H is not the ideal 
• How the squashing of B2B and B2C impacts hiring decisions
• Categories of purchase journeys that impact the way you think about marketing

Listen to the full episode here:

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

Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the FINITE podcast. Today, we’re diving into a popular topic within B2B marketing and that is how B2B marketing varies and crosses over with B2C marketing. My guest today believes that there should be no differentiation at all between B2B and B2C and prefers that marketing is separated in slightly alternative ways, which we’re going to talk about. 

Our guest is David Fallarme, former Head of Marketing APAC at HubSpot and David has recently taken up a new role as Director of Marketing at On Deck. Throughout David’s career, he’s been moving between B2B and B2C businesses with all kinds of different purchase journeys and so I’m excited to hear his perspective on this topic. I hope you enjoy.

 

FINITE (00:45):

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 (01:05):

Hello, David, and welcome to the FINITE podcast.

 

David (01:08):

Hello Alex. Thank you for having me.

 

About David’s background in ‘B2B’ marketing 

Alex (01:10):

Looking forward to talking. We are talking all about this somewhat theoretical divide sometimes between B2B and B2C marketing, which I know that you have some strong and very valid opinions on which we’re going to dive into. Before we do that, tell us a bit about you, tell us a bit about your background and experience and also your recent role that you’ve taken up.

 

David (01:29):

I think one of the reasons I feel strongly about this is because I feel like I’m a rare creature from B2B, because I started my career in B2C. So I started my career at like Hershey’s and Toyota, United Way. So right there, it’s kind of crazy. It’s like automotive, chocolate and non-profits, so that’s how I started. And that gave me a pretty good grounding on different marketing principles. 

And then as I did that, I worked through even more different kinds of industries. After that I went into Facebook gaming, then I’m like, okay do I want to keep doing B2C or do I want to explore the map of what’s really out there in marketing? 

And so around that point where I decided that I’m not going to have a traditional career where I just go into a company or go into an industry and work my way up the ladder, I thought of my career more as a bingo card where I wanted to do all the different things and just understand it as much as I could. 

So after all those things, I did B2B enterprise SaaS, with a company called App Annie. Then that took me down into the B2C e-commerce B2B e-commerce world. Then most recently I was with a company called HubSpot, which hopefully most of your listeners have heard of. 

And most recently just taken a role with On Deck, which we’re still deciding whether it’s a B2B or B2C, but that’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about this topic, because I think a lot of people end up pigeonholing themselves into B2B marketing or B2C marketing. And so I’d love to dig into why I think it’s important.

 

Alex (02:54):

Sounds good. And what about the team at On Deck? It’s always nice to hear about the current role and team. I know you’re new in the role, but what does marketing look like?

 

David (03:02):

I think it’s going to be a company where we really work on the media side of things where we’re going to be building out thought leadership. How do we make sure that we are bringing new insights and earn secrets and sharing those with the rest of the industry? So if you think about On Deck currently, we are really well known for a place where it’s like a founder community, but we’re branching out into a lot of different things. 

So by the time your listeners share this episode, there’s probably even wider scope than that. So we’re known for community for founders, community for people who want to join early stage startups, investors. And then most recently into people like ambitious people who want to expand their network within product management, customer success. 

So our job is just to make sure that people view On Deck as a place where ambitious people can congregate, where they can learn, earn secrets from the tech industry. And so the job of the marketing team is to build that awareness, build that affinity and just make sure that people are signing up for our programs.

 

Why there is no divide between B2B and B2C marketing 

Alex (04:01):

Cool. Sounds exciting. We’re looking forward to seeing where that goes. Let’s dive into the topic and talk a little bit about why you believe there’s no such thing as B2B or B2C marketing. It sounds like in your introduction, as you said, you’ve kind of jumped around between different B2B, B2C, maybe B2B2C roles. 

I mean, I’m always interested in the car example because I think purchasing a car is often one of those B2C kind of journeys that’s actually probably more similar in terms of the value and the investment and the number of stakeholders involved and all that. So there’s some interesting parallels there, but why don’t you set the scene? Just talk a little bit about why you believe there’s no such thing as a divide.

 

David (04:39):

The main problem I have with it is whenever people talk about B2B marketing, what they’re really referring to, or the mental coding for that is like enterprise purchase that go through multiple stakeholders. Then I get really triggered when people say, oh yes, B2B is a logical and B2C is emotional. 

And I’ve heard so many people say that from people who are just doing the marketing career all the way down through like pretty senior experienced people at conferences and speaking and they get off stage and they repeat this trope. And I think it’s really dangerous when you internalise this and don’t question it because if you start off with the assumption that B2B is an enterprise purchase, it doesn’t make sense. 

When you think about Getty images or ShutterStock and you’re buying stock photos and they’re a B2B company selling a B2B product, those two things don’t make any sense. Then if you’re a B2C marketer, you might think of your job as B2C are things you can purchase in a grocery store. 

But then, like you said, an automotive purchase, or if you’re buying private health insurance for your parents, the customer journeys for those look very much like what you would consider a traditional B2B buyer’s journey, multiple stakeholders, the buyer is not the user, there’s security involved. 

There’s concerns of paperwork and all this kind of stuff. And so if you zoom out, you realise there’s no such thing as B2B, B2C marketing, it’s really just all marketing and what really matters is the similarity of a go to market, as opposed to labelling something or labelling a person as a B2B marketer or a B2B marketing or thinking of something as a B2C purchase or B2C marketer.

 

What the gap between B2B and B2C looks like within the marketing space 

Alex (06:12):

And what about that gap in particular? How do you see that gap between the two being talked about in the field? I think there’s lots of examples. You’ve already given some of them, but why do you think some people maybe have a vested interest to create the divide, whether it’s marketing thought agencies, suppliers?

 

David (06:30):

It sends a vested interest, but I think it’s more like the problem practically speaking. So let’s take it away from a theoretical perspective from one point. Practically the problem there, and especially we’re talking about this during the great resignation or the great career acceleration, whatever you want to call it. 

It’s really hard to hire people right now. And so one solution you have there is to expand the pool of who you’re looking for. So if you’re a B2B hiring manager or you’re a B2B marketing recruiter, you’re just going to look at people who are from the same industry, B2B, SaaS, or B2B tech. 

But really if you’re thinking only of people in B2B, you’re missing out on all these potential B2C candidates that have done the same thing that have done the same channels and have done the same planning and have thought about content strategy, for example, in the same way as a B2B might do that. 

And so you’re missing out on all this big candidate pool that you could be reaching into. So that’s one way that it’s preventing people from getting the full value of what marketing could be from the hiring perspective, but also from a learning perspective. 

One of the things that struck me whenever I’m at a B2B conference or a B2C conference, is that the influencers and the bubbles are very hard to break through. So Alex, I think that people listening to this are probably what consider themselves B2B marketers or live in the B2B marketing world. And it’s very easy for all of us to name three to five B2B marketing influencers. I know Dave Gerhardt, Jason Lemkin, Chris Walker. I mean, I could keep going. 

But then if you challenged that same person to say, now name three B2C marketers, I think most people would struggle. And just to my earlier point, you’re depriving yourself of the learning and the ability to see marketing at a bigger picture and therefore do marketing in different contexts. And I think that’s where the trap is.

 

Whether B2B decisions are just as emotional as B2C ones

Alex (08:16):

This is an interesting one in terms of the emotional side and the logical side of this debate. And I’m jumping around a bit, but I think it’s worth touching on here. There’s a marketeer here in the UK called Rory Sutherland who heads up Ogilvy, you probably know him. He spoke at our conference, we had him on the podcast and he talks a lot about how in B2B marketing, things are much more emotional because when you’re making a B2C purchase, he describes the only risk or threat you feel is embarrassment to yourself, maybe one or two people around you. 

Whereas in B2B, if you mess up a decision, the whole company is looking at you, the CEO. So there’s a lot more on the line in a B2B purchase then there is a B2C one. If you buy the wrong pair of trainers or after a few weeks, you realise you don’t like them, you deal with it. And it’s only you that has to deal with it. 

And you mess up a big 500,000 pound contract purchase of a new piece of technology and everybody’s going to know about it and you’re next on the line. So that’s his perspective, which I love. And I think the example really rings true, but why do you think B2C and B2B are just as emotional?

 

David (09:26):

The point I love about B2C again, it usually gets coded as things I can buy in a grocery store. And how do you do marketing for FMCG? It’s like big above the line things, billboards, TV ads. And so what you’re usually going for there is emotional resonance, so that it sticks. So you build that mental availability, which is totally, totally valid, right? 

I think B2B is emotional, but in a slightly different way, it’s more like group psychology emotion because businesses are made of humans and humans are emotional because that’s just how our programming is. And now you put groups of humans together competing for limited resources and that’s like a recipe for emotional decision making. Right? So that’s one example where Rory was talking about. 

If you mess up the thing, your reputation is on the line. So you’re actually going to be more risk averse potentially. But another thing I would say is like time constraints. So there’s been so many times where I have to hire an agency because I have some content I need to create and I’m way behind my deadline. 

And instead of making the quotable logical decision of putting an RFP out there or sourcing the right agency and getting all these quotes and comparing them on a spreadsheet, instead I’m just like, I just need to make this decision in the next 24 hours. And I’m going to work with someone who I know is not amazing, but good enough. 

And so I’m just going to hire them. That’s not a logical decision, that’s definitely an emotional decision. So I think it’s emotional, but in slightly different ways and not the ways you would expect. But for sure, you cannot separate emotion from humans and humans are made of businesses. And so both of those are emotional.

 

A better way of differentiating the types of marketing

Alex (10:57):

And so are you arguing that the best way of thinking about this is more around levels of involvement in terms of the purchase? We’ve talked about examples of where B2C purchase might be more similar to traditional what we think of as B2B and maybe vice versa. Some are very high touch, take months, lots of people involved. Others are pretty frictionless. 

I think when we talk about B2B, but especially B2B SaaS, particularly if you’re selling a $10 a month product, there’s often, get into the product, free trial, everything happens. They might never speak to anyone. Buffer the social media management or a tool such as that versus a contract worth hundreds of thousands. Are you basically saying, instead of looking at B2B or B2C, it needs to be a bit more focused on the actual purchase journey and how that looks?

 

David (11:45):

I think so. I think that’s a way great way to put it. It’s the B2B and B2C thing. If you think about the way it’s been embedded in our brains, it’s just not a very useful divide. And I think customer journey, similarity go to market, is much more useful and productive. 

So one example there is, if you want to hire your own insurance company and you are trying to find people for your content marketing team, like you shouldn’t just look at other people who worked in trendy companies, you want to actually look at B2B SaaS, marketers who worked with a product that was fairly expensive because it’s the same model. 

There’s probably guides you have to put people through, there’s ROI calculators and that kind of thing. So it’s very important that you just match it to the similarity to go to market. And that allows you to find people you normally wouldn’t have considered for recruiting, but also like different learnings. 

So instead of thinking that the only B2B things you do are white papers and Google, then landing page, an ebook, then drip campaign, then BDRs, maybe there’s a different way that would be relevant to your go to market. So if you’re, let’s say self-serve B2B product led, let’s call it Canva. You wouldn’t necessarily benefit from B2B expertise, right? 

You might benefit more from B2C marketing tactics, which is above the line, creative and all that kind of stuff. And so a large extent, that’s what they’ve done. So that’s a huge reason why it’s important to take down this false wall of B2B B2C. But it’s more just marketing. And if you want to try to find and sort through all the marketing stuff out there, what is a similarity of go to market and similarity of customer journey and learn from that.

 

Alex (13:21):

The Canva example is a great one. I mean, there’s lots of products and journeys similar to Canva. I think in the post that you wrote, maybe we can link to this post. I think you did a great post on B2B versus B2C. And I think you made reference to, if you’re a B2B SaaS startup, your instinct might be to hire someone from Salesforce, but actually maybe better off with someone from an e-commerce background, given that very low buyer’s journey that is pretty frictionless. 

And actually the enterprise Salesforce man or woman is probably not going to understand that kind of journey, or maybe not have as much experience as that.

 

FINITE (13:53):

The FINITE community and podcasts 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.

 

What B2B can learn from B2C

Alex (14:13):

What are the learnings that you think you’ve taken from your time at Hershey’s and others?

 

David (14:18):

Huge, huge. And I think it’s one of the reasons that whenever I work with people who’ve done both what is considered B2B and B2C. I find that they just have a better overall grip on the foundations and principles of marketing. So one thing that I can relate to for B2B SaaS, right? 

What we can learn from FMCG is the four Ps of marketing: price, product, place, promotion. Typically in the tech world that we spend most of our time in, we really just talk about the promotion part of it. So marketing equals content, LinkedIn, social media podcasts. 

That’s what marketing is, but in the B2C world, marketing is like, what is the price of the product? Which retailers do we want to engage? What is the distribution channel? Who do we want to appear next to? So it’s a much more holistic view of marketing as opposed to how do we just promote the thing?

And so when you take a step back and realise that marketing actually has a much bigger scope than what most B2B SaaS marketers think their job is, then you open up your impact to be much larger than, I nailed my SEO strategy or I nailed my email drip campaign or I work with the BDRs really well. And instead it’s like, are we priced the right way to the audience that we’re going after? Do we have the right distribution channels? Maybe we’re missing an integration partner or missing to be on an app marketplace that we should be on. 

So that’s an example of how thinking of marketing from the foundational principles. And one of the influences that I love is Mark Ritson is because he always, so he’s traditionally what’s considered like B2C, right? But he just talks about marketing in general. And one of the things he keeps highlighting is a lot of marketers actually have not been trained in marketing. 

We have been trained to quote-unquote in this school of quote-unquote digital marketing, which is not really a thing, but that’s probably a separate podcast. And he’s like, most marketers today came up at the time of AdWords and Facebook ads and email marketing where everything is quantifiable. There’s clicks, there’s a pixel, there’s a UTM tag, but marketing is much, much bigger than that. And so once you zoom out and take a bigger view of what marketing is, your impact increases, but also the ideas you can come up with to actually drive results for the business, they’re just way more.

 

Alex (16:27):

This starts to stray into the brand building versus performance marketing side of things. And I guess the stereotype that B2C companies invest much more in brand and almost just general above the line advertising and building awareness to a mass market.

 

David (16:44):

That’s one of the reasons B2B marketing is so boring is because people just think B2B is like white papers, eBooks, LinkedIn ads, and feeding leads to the sales team. You just listen to the same B2B people over and over. Drive your SEO and make sure you have white papers, get on the Gartner magic quadrant, that’s it. 

But I’m confident in the fact that this is starting to change because I think LinkedIn is doing a good job of driving the narrative around this. So they’ve been working with these marketing professors who are extremely well known in the B2C fields, Lesben and Peterfield, and they’re pushing this narrative of, B2B needs to be doing brand building. 

And they’re putting a lot of good content out there that helps people understand how to think about it. How to think about investments on the B2B side, actually the way to do long-term business growth is to invest in brand. And it’s less, so much about the AdWords and the LinkedIn direct response. We’ve been all doing forever. 

And so it’s so important that this conversation keeps going. And so I’m just trying to do my small part in making sure people realise that there’s a much bigger world than just B2B marketing or B2C marketing.

 

Alex (17:52):

Yeah. And we actually had Jann Schwartz, Director at the B2B Institute which is part of LinkedIn, on the podcast a few episodes ago. Talking about a piece of research you’re referencing with those professors, which was fascinating. 

And I think the most interesting bet that they, and I don’t know exactly how they got to this number, but it feels roughly in the right place, was that for most B2B companies, only 5% of your total addressable market or your target customers are actually in market for your solution at any one point in time. And the other 95% are not at that length of the buying cycle for whatever reason, only 5% are ready and waiting. 

And when you think about it daily, where do you go next? And the only answer is to invest in building that brand and that awareness so that when the 5%, when the rest of the 95% do become like it, they know who you are and they see you as the leaders in the industry, they’ve come across you before. Whatever it is, they’re aware of you. And I think a lot of, as you say, a lot of B2B businesses are so focused on just cost per lead.

 

David (18:57):

Yeah. It’s pretty hilarious. When I showed that report to some of my friends who are in ad agencies or like P and G and they’re like, yeah we’ve known this for decades. Like why isn’t LinkedIn shouting out about this? Like, we’ve known this for a very long time and this is how we’ve been operating it. 

So again, an example of, if you zoom out and really just think of it more from marketing principles, you see things that other people don’t. And it gives you a huge advantage in terms of your scope, but also in terms of learning that you could potentially get.

 

Why B2H is not the ideal 

Alex (19:22):

Recently, maybe more common, I don’t know whether it’s a solution to this issue that people are talking about is business to human. Instead of B2B or B2C, they say, it’s not B2B. It’s going to be B2H, business to human. What do you think?

 

David (19:33):

Yeah. I’ve also heard H2H is human to human. I personally can’t resonate with that. It’s too cheesy for me, but it is true to some degree. But I think what’s more relevant, and you said it earlier, it’s not so much the business to human it’s about the customer journey. 

I think that that’s the right way to categorise and bucket all these things, because if you’re talking to a human that is not a relevant buyer for you, then it’s not amazing in terms of the impact it will have on your business. So whatever way you want to paint it, I think that that works, at least it gets you away from the B2B to B2C to something a bit more productive. But more power to you if you can find value in that.

 

How the squashing of B2B and B2C impacts hiring decisions

Alex (20:12):

What about hiring decisions? I don’t know whether you’re building out a team in your new role at On Deck. You’ve talked a little bit about what you might look for in terms of experience, but I guess if you have a role coming up now, I assume that the whole B2B B2C thing is not even really on your mind.

 

David (20:27):

Yes. So I’m putting my money where our mouth is. We are building a content team because like I said, one of the main priorities we have in the short term is to build sort of a media arm where we build thought leadership. And so we’re looking across the spectrum. 

So in the pipeline, we’ve got former journalists, we’ve got former B2B marketers, and we’ve just got people who are really good at writing and good at writing at a certain level of quality. And so that’s what we’re solving for, and not necessarily people who worked in community management or RegTech or online education, which are some of the ways that On Deck has been categorised. 

But it’s more about what are the skills that we are looking for, and how do we make sure we are finding that at that level, as opposed to unfairly bucketing people into categories that are not productive.

 

Alex (21:12):

And I guess in a lot of cases, you’re not too interested in past experience between time spent in B2B enterprise journeys versus consumer. I guess On Deck is by definition a bit more towards the traditional kind of B2C, but you’re right, in terms of being aimed at an individual person, not large groups of stakeholders. Is that a fair summary?

 

David (21:34):

Yeah. For now, yes. I mean, there are some people who use their company’s L and D and personal development budget to join On Deck. So it’s one of those things where it’s kind of in the middle. And just to your point about B2B slowly waking up to this idea that we should actually do brand building. 

And if I was a social media manager for a B2B company, I think one of the narratives around social media that’s changing for B2B is don’t just treat it as like a company announcement, broadcast channel, but actually engage with people. And so I’d be looking at people who are working for B2C companies, e-commerce companies, even fast food, and get those people over to your team and that’s not a place you would traditionally look, if you are a B2B marketer, looking for somebody to run social media. 

You probably look for other people in your industry or in broadly what you would define as B2B. But looking beyond that, you’re going to find much more talent. You’re going to find much more opportunities. I think one of the reasons I’m so excited about working in a company that’s not exactly B2B, not exactly B2C is because I get to interact with a lot of people who have similar backgrounds. And I do like jumping around B2B and B2C. 

And what I can just find is the list of ideas we would come up with are just all over the map. And I mean, that in a good way is because we all come from diverse backgrounds. And so that allows you to see things from different angles, which means you’re going to come up with ideas that your competition probably isn’t to come up with.

 

Categories of purchase journeys that impact the way you think about marketing 

Alex (22:59):

Makes sense. Are there any other examples that you think about mentioning of, I guess like parallels between purchase journeys? I think it’s useful to give listeners a sense of some of those purchase journeys. I know you mentioned, I think that as an example, in a blog post you’re between switching CRMs and buying a mattress, maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

 

David (23:16):

Yeah. So let’s say that you are a person in charge of upgrading your company CRM. Since I just came from HubSpot, this is what your purchase journey is probably going to look like. You are running into some pain where you can no longer stand the fact that you’re juggling spreadsheets and like post-it notes and paper notebooks, and passing that around on your team. 

Then you start to Google around, or you probably even start to ask your network around what a good CRM could be. And so you start to build a rough list in your mind of who the players are along that journey. And it might not be an immediate need, but you’re kind of doing research in your head. 

So what you might find along the journey is that there’s going to be some list of brands that keep popping up because you keep seeing the blog posts that are so helpful. You listen to the podcast, you listen to the YouTube channel, then you start to build affinity for them. 

And so when it comes time for you to engage with the salespeople or sign up for a free trial, they already have some kind of mental ranking in your mind. And you’re more likely just a little bit more to sign up with them or give them your business. 

So what I just described could easily just be the purchaser for a CRM, but could also be for, let’s say a mattress where your back hurts, you’re experiencing pain. And so what would you do next? You probably look up 10 best mattresses. There’s entire industries where people are competing to be on the first search for best mattress, right? It’s extremely competitive, probably just as competitive for the search term for CRM for a SaaS or something like that. Then you’re probably going to ask your friends, what mattress do you use? 

Then the next thing you know, you start to form a mental list in your mind who those short list brands would be. And then when it comes time for you to make a purchase decision, or you go to a showroom, you’ve already made up your mind. And so you’re more likely to buy from a certain brand. Both of those companies traditionally would not be considered in the same realm. 

And I’m betting that the marketing teams do not look anything the same within on the same background, but it’s a B2B company and a B2C company, but the purchase journey is the same. The way that they talk to the customer is the same. And so what really matters is not B2B or B2C, but the similarity of the customer journey. And that’s what allows them to have success. 

And it’s not necessarily the B2B company. They ran a bunch of ads, they did YouTube. They send a bunch of e-books and re-targeted me on LinkedIn, but it’s more about how did they serve the customer journey and the similarity of as matters.

 

Alex (25:34):

Makes sense. I think that’s another great example. I was going to ask you a few kind of final, quick fire questions to wrap things up. Is there a marketing tactic or tool that you’re most excited about? You’ve come from HubSpot, so HubSpot might be there. Anything else out there on the landscape?

 

David (25:53):

I hate to say it, but it really is that HubSpot is pretty great. And I can say this without a HubSpot hat on, just because I am very aware that there’s a lot of companies out there who are experiencing the pain I described, which is the CRM, or they even have a CRM now, but they just don’t like it. But HubSpot is really good at making sure that their NPS has a high product usage. Another MarTech tool or just any marketing tool?

 

Alex (26:19):

Yeah. MarTech, marketing tool, whatever comes to mind.

 

David (26:24):

Outside of the HubSpot. So there’s a few of them I’m pretty impressed with, so we’re using Webflow at On Deck, because of Webflow and HubSpot on On Deck. Webflow has really impressed me. I didn’t think it was capable of doing all the things that it could. 

So one of the things I’m impressed with Webflow is that we don’t have a ton of stuff going on, but the marketers are completely just going into the website themselves and making changes themselves, which enables us to execute at a lot faster pace than if we have to go through a developer. We had to let go to an internal marketing agency, start out as a web flow program.

 

Alex (26:56):

And biggest challenge? You’re a few weeks into a new role and maybe that’s a challenge in itself, but what do you think are your biggest challenges right now?

 

David (27:06):

Biggest challenge is probably content strategy. So we are essentially going to compete with, imagine you’re going up against Harvard Business Review or first round. And so you want to compete at that level and you have the ambition. It could be at that level. How do you get there? So if there’s anybody who wants to reach out to me with content strategy, tips, or content strategy, frameworks, or insights, just hit me up on LinkedIn and I’m happy to chat. Yeah.

 

Alex (27:28):

Some big, big competitors. And what do you think is the challenge really just like getting content competing with bad content, like building an audience you’re basically building?

 

David (27:40):

Yeah. I think it’s building content that’s at that quality. Cause one of the things with On Deck is it’s a business based on communities and communities are only as good as the quality of people that you are able to attract. That phrase about A-players attract A-players. 

 

And so in order for us to attract a players, we have to make sure that we can give value. That is that high quality before people even consider joining a program. And so we’ve built a reputation that allows us to attract really high quality people. So the challenge is how do you compete with Harvard business review? You compete with first round, New York Times editorial level of quality. So I think it’s going to be a tall order, but I’m pretty confident that we have a way to get there.

 

Alex (28:24):

Cool. Sounds exciting. And looking ahead, and ending on an optimistic note, what are you most excited about in that? The question is in the world of B2B marketing, but as we just talked about, I guess in the world of marketing more generally?

 

David (28:36):

Yeah. I think it is this line between B2B and B2C that is shrinking. So I know we spent an entire episode talking about this, but I really do believe that this is coming, this, this gap is closing and closing every day. So LinkedIn is doing some really good work around this because they’ve realised, Hey, the B2C people know a ton of stuff that traditionally B2B people don’t know. 

And it’s kind of obvious now when you think about it in hindsight. So I’m very excited about that. Because traditionally again, B2B is pretty boring and there’s a couple of companies who are leading the charge on not boring marketing. So the first company I think of is Gong, who does a really good job of just standing out and making sure that they are doing, let’s say social media to not boring way. 

So the more guns we could have, I think the better off we’ll all be the better marketing we’ll all be exposed to. And the better work people will all create. So that’s one thing that I’m excited about. People are waking up to the ideas of people like Byron Sharp. 

So if nobody has read the book, How Brands Grow, you need to buy that book because it makes the entire B2C branding world, which is a big black box to a lot of B2B marketers. It all just sense after you read that book. So I think the blending of those two things and realising that marketing is just marketing, foundationally is something we should all be excited about.

 

Alex (29:49):

Awesome. Well, I think you’ve given everyone listening a lot to think about, I think you pretty challenged, challenged some traditional thinking for some of our listeners in a very healthy way. So thank you for coming on the show for giving me your time and yeah. Thanks again, David.

 

David (30:01):

Thanks for having me, Alex.

 

FINITE (30:04):

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