How to win in B2B Marketing: 6 things I wish I’d known at the start
I joined Onfido in 2015 as the first person in Marketing. There were 25 of us crammed in a tiny room in Aldgate East. As we grew we had to knock down walls and turn the pool table into a hot desk to fit everyone in. When I left Onfido almost 4 years later, there were 180 of us over two floors in a swanky, high-ceilinged office in Liverpool Street. We worked with almost 3,000 clients including Revolut, Indiegogo and Monzo.
It was an exciting journey of rapid scale, but it wasn’t all plain sailing. There were many things that could have been done faster, better, more effectively if only someone had told me at the beginning. Here are 6 lessons — presented at Crane’s annual summit, FLIGHT2018 — that I hope will help you sail faster in the right direction.
Lesson 1: Make your business appear 100x larger than it is
Marketers are like estate agents. Their mission is to create the illusion of scale.
Firstly, banish the word ‘startup’. If you’re trying to work with the world’s largest corporates, they don’t want to work with a scrappy ‘startup’ where everyone’s running around like headless chickens in a basement somewhere. They want to work innovative, professional, market-leading businesses. So how do you pretend to be one?
The first thing you can do is sales enablement. Software businesses do often have market-leading technology but they just don’t know how to sell it. Speak to your sales team. Shadow them in meetings. Do they know how to pitch confidently, demo the product, talk about its features and benefits? Do they have the right pitch decks, one pagers, demo videos and case studies to support them? Having a good product is only half the job; knowing how to sell it is the other.
The second is building credibility. Your pitch might go brilliantly, but these companies are big — there are hundreds of stakeholders you won’t have the opportunity to meet in person. So when they research you, they have to be impressed.
In the early days of Onfido, we did everything we could to get our name out there. We focused heavily on PR and we sent the founders to every single conference, panel and trade-show in the industry — we even hosted our own conference, Breakers to Makers, inviting 150 CEOs from our target businesses. We wanted our potential clients to see Onfido everywhere they looked.
Lesson 2: Forget B2B, it’s Human 2 Human
The counterpart to brand awareness and credibility is lead generation.
In B2B, Sales is all about speaking to people face-to-face. If your product has a 5 or 6 figure annual contract value, it’s unlikely that someone is going to convert off the back of a Facebook ad. As a marketer therefore, it’s all about trying to facilitate and replicate that face-to-face interaction.
We had a lot of success with events, in particular hosted ones. Some of our most successful events included a Compliance Coffee Morning, a Customer Advisory Board and a Cinema buyout — events alone drove 2 million in pipeline per quarter.
But events are hard to scale so we complemented them with the usual content and digital marketing. You’ve seen it all before: e-books, case studies, webinars… But while the content type was conventional, we sought to make sure that the format and content itself were not. We strove to deliver our messages in new, more engaging ways. Goodbye long, dull written case studies — hello short, snappy ‘Coffee with Clients’ videos.
Just because it’s B2B doesn’t mean it has to be safe and boring. You might be selling to businesses, but there’s always a human on the other end!
Lesson 3: Invest in your CRM and Marketing Ops!
If I could turn back time, one thing would be at the top of my list. Hire Marketing or Growth Ops to build a robust Salesforce infrastructure and lead path. It doesn’t sound riveting — I admit — but it’s the single biggest thing that would have moved the needle.
What tends to happen instead is that the company hires more and more sales people to hit their ambitious Growth targets. And whilst Sales people are great at sales, they are not so good at Salesforce (sorry guys & girls, it’s true). Sometimes there’ll be a deal value, sometimes there won’t Sometimes there’ll be a lead source… almost always there won’t.
And you brush it aside; it’s not ideal but you can get by. Then one day, your investors ask you for granular, historical marketing data. Hmmm. You’re a bit stuck. And it’s not just embarrassing — this data is critical to making data-driven marketing decisions.
We overhauled our system from the very top. We had lots of awesome inbound leads coming into our system. Only problem was, we didn’t know very much about them bar a name and email address. So the first step was to qualify them, the two key criteria being a) fit and b) engagement. To determine fit, we integrated a nifty data enrichment tool called Similarweb into Salesforce and used web traffic to infer company size. This let us see whether the company was large enough to qualify as a potential client. To measure engagement, we implemented lead scoring using our marketing automation software, Hubspot.
Once the lead score threshold hit, they would be automatically converted to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and assigned an Inside Sales Rep owner. From that point, it was their job to work the lead and progress or reject it. A tight relationship between Marketing and Inside sales is crucial to keep the Marketing team honest and the quality of MQLs high.
If you want to track your leads from origin to close and understand the pipeline value you’re creating, it’s imperative to take control of the top of the funnel.
Lesson 4: Constantly test your Product-Market fit.
A staggering 80% of SaaS companies never make Product-Market fit. Don’t let yours be one.
Product-Marketing fit is not just something you do at the beginning. In the first few years, startups often change direction, pivot, evolve… it’s a natural part of the journey. As a marketer, it’s crucial to have a pulse on the market, constantly evaluating if there is a product-market fit and understanding how the product can evolve to make this even tighter.
At Onfido, we shifted our business from background checks to identity verification in late 2015. Whilst in a similar space, these were two considerably different markets, with different buyers, and different requirements.
We introduced the concept of Product Marketing in early 2016 to bring the market closer to the product. We held focus groups, workshops, interviews and ran surveys with existing and prospective clients. From this, we developed a triangle called Principle 1 which featured our customers’ 3 key buying factors to help guide all our product and marketing decisions. There is something powerful in simplicity and Principle 1 remains a core to our business strategy to this day.
Lesson 6: Rally everyone behind your WHY
Some people call it a mission, a vision, a purpose — the semantics aren’t important. At its core it’s a WHY. It’s a reason to exist.
The first question to ask yourself is: do I know my company’s WHY? The second question is: does everyone else know it too?
In 9 startups out of 10, the answer for both is no. We all know it’s important but there are always more urgent things to be working on, and things evolve more quickly than they’re documented. But the later you leave it, the bigger the ship, and big ships are hard to steer.
At Onfido we tackled this project in earnest as the company hit the 150 mark. Incidentally, this is also Dunbar’s number — a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Proponents claim that numbers larger than this require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
Often, the essence of your WHY does exist, it’s just buried — most often in your founder’s head. With a bit of digging, you’ll find it no doubt but you do need buy-in from the leadership team. This project doesn’t have a quantifiable ROI but if everyone in your company is rallied behind your WHY, you’ll find yourself moving effortlessly in the right direction. When your ship is big, you can’t steer it by adjusting every individual sail — you have to control the wind powering them.
So here we go! Please try, test, experiment. I would love to hear how it goes — email me any thoughts, feedback, and comments at hey@chiaraquadranti.com
