John Reid of Aidentified: 5 Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

An Interview With Rachel Kline

FOCUS — Say less. Commit. Strategy is deciding what you’re NOT going to do. And holding the line…making sure your company holds focus…it’s a big part of the marketer’s job. You don’t just need to be about something, you need to be ALL about something. And the secret? You don’t even need to be all about the RIGHT thing. Just make a decision. Even if you’re only mostly right, you’ll be better off than trying to be broadly palatable. This is especially true early on.

The B2B marketing landscape is a complex and evolving space, with its unique challenges and opportunities. Navigating it effectively requires well-thought-out strategies and insightful tactics. With a myriad of digital channels available, what are the best ways to connect, engage, and convert potential business clients? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing John Reid.

John is CMO at Aidentified, an AI-powered prospecting SaaS platform. Over the course of his 25-year career, he’s worked with dozens of iconic B2C and B2B brands, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell, and more. He’s a strong proponent of the power of creativity to create irrational preferences for brands. John’s interests include game design, writing, and (for the foreseeable future) driving long distances to watch his kids play soccer and softball.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?

I started out my career as an advertising copywriter. I’ve always believed in the power of a big idea…how creativity can create connections between people and their favorite brands. Our ability to shape culture is really fascinating and rewarding to me.

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked at some of the best agencies in America on some truly iconic brands, like Apple, Google, Amex, Burger King, Dominos, etc. I was the Chief Creative Officer at Evolution Bureau, an Oakland-based digital agency. I ran my own agency, Illuminator, for three years. I was Head of Brand at a Web3 gaming startup. I consider myself lucky, for sure, to get paid to use my creativity and to have had the opportunity to shape all of these brands in some way.

Last year, a friend of mine who’s a co-founder at Aidentfied (an AI-powered sales prospecting platform) needed some marketing help…we’d meet for coffee and talk shop, which I’m always up for. I kept giving him advice until eventually he just had to hire me. So that’s been my focus for a little over a year now.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Marshall Ross was the Chief Creative Officer at Cramer Krasselt when I was there. I think that was the first time I had a boss who was genuinely interested in my professional and personal development. He encouraged me to “stop being such an insecure asshole and go have lunch with people.” (Paraphrased, loosely.) Sage advice that I’ve had the opportunity to share with other people along the way. Anyway, when I got into leadership, I modeled my management style on my experience with him and I think it’s why people like working for me…or at least find it valuable. Marshall set a high standard, gave people the tools they needed to live up to that standard, and didn’t fire people (me) when they screwed up. When your team knows you’ll go to the mat for them, they will do the same for you.

When I was working for Marshall, I got a job offer at what was at the time the best agency in the world. When I told him, he blurted out “Well, you gotta go! You gotta do it! Of course!.” That’s the mark of someone who has the best interests of their team in their heart. And that’s the kind of person who attracts great talent.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“DO SOMETHING, REID, EVEN IF IT’S WRONG!”

That was the mantra of Gerry, the owner of the gym where I trained in high school and college. Whenever he’d see any of us wandering around, or just generally not in motion, he would yell that with great volume and maybe just a little contempt.

It’s good advice in the gym and great advice in business and life. At most companies, inertia and inaction can seem less risky for individual people, but it is far more risky for the business itself. Action bias is probably one of my superpowers, so thanks to Gerry for that one.

Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?

Well, as I said, my action bias has generally served me well. I recently saw a book about the importance of action bias and how to cultivate it…I can save you $30 here: Just say yes to everything for a few months and it’ll become a habit. Solicit ideas from the people around you, look for things to do, and force yourself to try new stuff. It’s like a muscle. It’ll come.

I think my background in advertising has been a big advantage once I switched to the marketing side. In the six years before I switched to the CMO role, I worked on 18 different brands. In agency land, you quickly learn a lot about all kinds of businesses. I didn’t quite appreciate how valuable that would be until I fully committed to the brand-side.

Last, I’m curious. I think that might be the most important thing. I bring it up a lot, but smart, curious people are really all you need. When I’m hiring people, curiosity is maybe the number one thing I’m looking for. A smart, curious person can figure out what they don’t know. They will run circles around a non-curious “expert” any day. I don’t know if curiosity is a learnable trait. But if you’re cursed with asking “why” all the time and you have an impossibly wide range of interests, take heart. ADHD has its advantages.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

Patience. And it’s looking like this is going to be a life-long process. I’ve been making progress for 20+ years. The thing is, I like momentum. That’s good. But I need to have people around me who help me slow down at times. If you want to learn to be patient, try having some kids. Mine have been great teachers so far.

Let’s talk about B2B marketing. Can you share some insights into how you perceive the current landscape of B2B marketing?

It’s a great moment to be a B2B marketer. The good and horrible thing today is you have near-limitless options in terms of how to reach your customers, and how to engage with them. Also, our feedback loops are quite short which is also great and simultaneously terrible.

We have access to all the tools we could want as marketers…basically, you can build your marketing machine to be anything you can envision, given time and resources. Which, of course, no one has enough of. But it’s very easy today to give in to “shiny penny syndrome.” Which is a bad trap to fall into.

Culturally, I see a lot of brands trying to understand their customers in a more nuanced way. That’s good. Our customers, our decision-makers, they’re all just people, and people are emotional creatures who connect to great stories. No one has even been Powerpointed into falling in love. Luckily, there are plenty of amazing stories to be told in B2B especially; since so much of our personal identities are wrapped up in our work these days.

So overall, I’m psyched. I think we went through a “rockstar CMO” era a few years back. After that, there was a cultural push to try to make marketing a pure science, which it is not. I think we’re in a good spot right now where marketers are taking advantage of the full picture…the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the craft of our discipline.

How have recent market trends and changes influenced your approach to outperforming competitors?

They have not. Look, the recipe for winning doesn’t change. We’re an early-stage company and the things we need to do to be successful do not shift just because the economy either is or is pretending to be in a recession.

B2B buying cycles can often be lengthy and complex. How do you maintain engagement and nurture leads throughout the various stages of the buyer’s journey?

Empathy and value. We think about the person we’re there to help — what their pain points are, what a victory looks like for them — and then engage accordingly. We want our customers and prospects to know we are a brand that understands their day and has an insightful POV on the problems they face. Empathetic storytelling across all media is the key. Anything that gives our sales team a reason to be valuable to our future customers is a good thing. That’s how we stay tight with our future customers.

Personalization is gaining prominence in B2B marketing. What are some ways marketers can effectively leverage data to deliver personalized experiences?

Personalization is really about relevance. At least it is if you’re doing it right. And you don’t need to be operating at a massive scale to do it well.

The question to ask is “How can we use our data to make our marketing more relevant to our customers?” It has to be about more than just customizing ad creative and targeting. That’s surface-level stuff. It’s about being valuable and interesting to our customers.

Here’s a dumb stat I found online: “83% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.” I’m not sure who those other 17% of people are, but it’s just such an obvious thing. People like being treated like people? I feel dumber for having said that out loud, but man, marketers sure do get this one wrong a lot.

Our AI-powered prospecting platform is built around a good kind of personalization. Let’s say you’re a financial advisor. With Aidentified, you make a list of your ideal prospects. And because there are so many attributes available, you’re making lists of people who you have a real connection with. Personally and network-wise. You might be from the same town, or have the same hobbies, or be at a similar life stage, or graduated from the same university. It goes on. So you’re more likely to be actually connected in a personal way. More importantly: Because of our relationship mapping, you also get to see who you know who can introduce you. To me, that’s the ultimate in personalization…making it actually personal. A lot of what we call “personalization” in marketing is really just “customization”; putting someone’s name on the Coke bottle, so to speak. But we really need to focus on relevance.

Fantastic. Here is the primary question of our interview. What are 5 Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy to Help You Beat Competitors? Please share a story or example for each.

A lot of marketers want there to be a magic wand, but there is no magic wand. What winning comes down to, as any coach will tell you, is fundamentals. This is a good thing! If you can focus on these few fundamentals, and execute them with perfection, then you will win. The fundamentals are all things that anyone can do, but almost no one ever does. So here’s what you need:

1. EMPATHY — First up, it’s important for B2B marketers to remember: There is no business. Only people. Businesses don’t buy anything. People do. And people are emotionally driven creatures. They have aspirations. They’re gunning for that promotion. They want to look smart, or at least avoid looking stupid. They have kids, and mortgages. They wake up at 3:30 a.m. worrying about their jobs. Sometimes they get back to sleep. They have a problem. If they don’t have a problem, then there’s nothing to talk about. So we don’t start with the features. No one cares about the features. They care about the “job to be done,” which is the end result. They do not care, at least not at first, about how you get there. Start with the customer, and what they need to accomplish. Only then should you dive into “the how” of what your product does and how. Look at every phase of your marketing plan. Ask, “What does the customer need right now?” It’s a great filter. It is the best, most under-used way to influence our decisions. Remember: We are here to help. My secret weapon here is that I talk to our customers. Not in any structured, scientific way. Every other week, I email a bunch and see if anyone wants to do a quick Zoom. They are often surprised, and I usually have to assure them I’m not selling timeshares. It’s a disarming way to connect and I hear something valuable in every conversation.
2. A GREAT TEAM — On the other side of the equation, if you want to beat your competitors, your team must be better than their team. So, find the best people. Hire them. And keep them. Fewer better people get more great things done faster. (Remember, there is no business, only people.) My hiring hit rate improved dramatically once I adopted the right interview process. It’s helped me gather A-players with high emotional intelligence. High-achieving people do not want to go through a lengthy interview process, and they’re in demand so they don’t need to. Too many big companies have interview processes designed to ensure “fit” vs. excellence…if you’re currently doing five panels worth of inane questions and letting everyone in the company meet each candidate, stop. After two meetings, if you’re asking the right questions, you will have all the data you need to make the decision. At that point, if there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt. Move on. I have a Project Manager who I’ve hired at three companies now. I recently came across my notes from her original interview. We met twice during that process. My final comments on her were “She will kick butt, mine in particular, and everything will go faster and come out better because of her involvement.” That’s exactly who she is and what she does. I’m not a hiring supergenius, I just have a good process that works. I think we’re in a little bit of a wild west moment with B2B marketing, where individual teammates with the right expertise and experience can create an outsized impact. So the team is king.
3. FOCUS — Say less. Commit. Strategy is deciding what you’re NOT going to do. And holding the line…making sure your company holds focus…it’s a big part of the marketer’s job. You don’t just need to be about something, you need to be ALL about something. And the secret? You don’t even need to be all about the RIGHT thing. Just make a decision. Even if you’re only mostly right, you’ll be better off than trying to be broadly palatable. This is especially true early on.
4. A PLAN — It’s important to have an idea of what you’re building, or at least what you’re building towards. Especially in early-stage companies, it’s easy to find yourself on “side quests” a lot of the time…working on initiatives that are stopgaps or bandaids, and maybe not in full service of the ultimate machine. You can think about this in terms of the differences between “busy” and “productive.” It’s very easy to stay busy all the time. Being productive requires intention. So as you’re building out all the functions of your marketing machine, one-off projects and opportunities will crop up, right? It’s easy to want to prioritize them and knock them out so they’ll go away so you can get back to the master plan. But maybe there’s an opportunity to write a playbook there. So, let’s say you need to do a quick webinar. Webinars are something you’re going to do every quarter. So let’s not miss this opportunity; let’s build out our playbook for how we do webinars every time. Now, next time, we’re not starting from scratch, and we built up some functionality for our machine. Also, let’s be really thoughtful about what functions we’re going to have in our machine. Maybe your brand is going to live and die based on how you do conferences. Maybe conferences aren’t that big of a deal. Either way, if we’re going to spend cycles on it, let’s do it really well. Time, effort, energy…let’s do fewer things better. If we’ve decided we want conferences to be a big part of our machine, let’s create a playbook for how we do that. Let’s make it repeatable. And if something doesn’t work, then we just change the plan. But it is important that we have one.
5. The humility to execute — Ideas are the easy part. Certainly the fun part. But definitely not the part that matters most. Our culture celebrates the big idea, of course. There are a few inflection points (in marketing especially) where a big idea changed everything. But not without great execution. We need to know when to shift into “make mode.” Or have enough humility to know when the best way to advance is to stfu and do. When we’re in blue-sky idea mode, we’re dealing only with possibilities. “We can do this cool, interesting thing, and then…all of our problems will be solved!” But when we shift into make mode we’re dealing with a relentless barrage of reality. The problems that pop up. The reasons why something might not work or at least might not be easy. The tendency I observe in a lot of organizations is this — when a cool idea hits a stumbling block, that’s the moment when people will shift back into idea mode. But that’s when we need to triple downon being executional. Describing someone as “executional” can feel like a ding, or can at least feel like being “damned by faint praise.” But the people in your organization who execute are the most important people. If you consider yourself an “idea” person, taking a breath and staying executional…really seeing those plans all the way through…is one of the most important things you’ll do for your organization. Earlier in my career, I was in a strategy session with a group of execs from a St. Louis-based adult beverage concern. Many of the people there had long titles that included the word “innovation.” I was impressed by one of the guys who seemed to have a lot of great ideas and mentioned that to one of my more senior coworkers who had worked with him before. His response: “Yeah, his work makes a huge impact right where the rubber meets the air.” Nothing of value emerged from those meetings, because the group had no way to shift into make mode. So that’s it. If you can truly empathize with your customer, if you can build a team that’s better than your competition, if you can commit to a core message even when it’s hard, if you can envision a marketing machine that works for your brand and make sure the vast majority of your effort and energy goes towards building that machine, if you can keep your head down and make progress every single day, then you will win. It’s not complicated. It’s just really difficult.

How do you utilize data or AI to refine your B2B marketing approach, and what tools have been particularly impactful in gaining a competitive advantage?

Well, as they say, we eat our own dog food. Aidentified is an AI-powered prospecting tool…if you give us a name and an email address, we can paint a 360° view of pretty much any contact. So our targeting is awesome. We focus on financial services professionals currently, but there’s an obvious marketing and media planning use case for this technology, which we certainly take advantage of.

Are there any underrated skills or qualities that you encourage others not to overlook?

Curiosity, 1000%. It’s one of the main things I look for when I’m interviewing someone. It’s also one of the more predictive qualities of someone’s success with me. And maybe success in general? I think the best people, the most interesting people, are always the most curious. They tend to know more about more, different things. They draw interesting connections other people might not see. And if there’s a skill someone doesn’t have, a curious person will fill in that gap if you give them a bit of real-world experience.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

The longer I kick around this world, the more I believe this: We are here to help other people. That’s the meaning of life. It’s hard out here for everyone. No one has it easy. So just, please, see if you can make today a little easier for someone.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

My mom. We don’t get to eat lunch together as often as I’d like, and I can guarantee she’ll see this.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.