Margaret DiSantis of bioMérieux: 5 Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Don’t take the word “strategy” lightly. Don’t take shortcuts with discovery research. Never underestimate the power of “BRAND”. Great creative from your agency partners starts with a very clear brief. Beating competitors also means that your product must deliver.

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 Margaret DiSantis aka Maggie.

Maggie is a passionate advocate for building a strong brand foundation, understanding the psychology of purchase decisions and behavior economics and how these are applied at all communication touchpoints through marketing efforts. Maggie developed her well-rounded perspective and intuitive eye for what it takes to become a number one brand while working in Brand Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, in Advertising at Foote, Cone & Belding Chicago, in Retail Marketing with The Marketing Store, in Advertising Research with Ameritest, in Public Relations / Social Media with Edelman and in Digital Media with her Mpower Marketing. She humbly credits these experiences with providing her with the opportunities to have a seat at the “collective table” with some of the greatest marketing minds in both B2C and B2B industries over the past 20+ years.

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?

My professional passion is rooted in marketing excellence. Throughout my career I have been fortunate to be a part of something bigger than myself through the opportunity to have a seat at the “collective table” with some of the best creative minds working on world class, big brands. I’ve always loved to be involved in the strategic marketing process that, when executed correctly, not only achieves the goals and objectives it set out to but also makes a significant impact to customers and the company itself. I earned that seat through demonstrating core skills that go beyond marketing theory and best practices. I was curious, I rolled up my sleeves and leaned into the work of understanding buyer behavior to glean strong insights about consumers and customers, why they buy, what informs that behavior and considerations and influences that shape opinions. From there, we’d work to create a strategic campaign that delivers not just great advertising, but big sales.

I’ve been able to work on some exciting, big budget campaigns over the years in CPG and B2C that allowed me to travel all over the world, meet Olympic Athletes and work with top tier talent. However, it wasn’t until I moved over to the B2B world that I started shifting my career to more purpose-driven work. I now work at bioMérieux, which has a mission to “make the world a healthier place” through its work in developing the world’s leading offerings in in vitro diagnostics. I spend my days applying all the best practices and marketing skills I learned on the consumer side to B2B marketing. I’ve never understood the idea that someone is either a B2B OR a B2C marketer. If you’re a talented marketer, you can excel in both areas — as the act of marketing is the same. The most notable difference with B2B marketing is the insights you get from your audience and the touch points you use to connect with that audience.

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?

Throughout my career, I’ve sought out mentors who were so kind to share what they’ve learned. I’ve always been comfortable walking up to who I think is the smartest person in the room and asking them, how did you get here? What are your habits? Where did you learn how to do that?

I am lucky to have had many great mentors along the way, starting back when I was an intern at Andersen Consulting (Now Accenture). Practice leader Mike Gorshe taught me practical skills such a long-term networking in business. Two of my best bosses from The Coca-Cola Company, Lauren de Simone and Scott Thomas, taught me about big brand strategy and pushed me to hone intangible skills, such as knowing how to mine the best insights so that your creative is unique to only your brand and is distinct from its competitive set. I worked for the legendary Dave Ryan of Ryan Partnership, who taught me big picture thinking, while marketing research legend Chuck Young from Ameritest taught me the principles of behavioral economics, the concept of “branded memories” and quite literally what words and pictures work together to create memorable digital or TV ads that drive sales. One of my favorite creative partners was Tom Galbreath at both FCB and The Marketing Store who never settled for “good enough.” I was mentored by the great John Keenan who taught me data analytics and how to navigate complex projects utilizing consulting models, problem solving frameworks and tools that I never knew existed. Finally, Carlyn Kelly, was s a great role model to me and guided me on the equally important skills of how to navigate as a female leader.

I seek out reverse mentors too. I want to hear younger marketers’ insights on trends in social or new technologies since they are utilizing it more. It goes back to being curious. And now in this phase of my career, I too am a mentor, and I get great joy from paying it forward to the next generation of strategists.

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

My favorite quote is more of a mantra: “Make every day count.” I try to be present in life and understand that all we have is today which grounds me on how I want to show up each day.

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?

I believe the characteristics that have helped me get to where I am today have been shaped by the challenges I’ve faced in life. The strengths that I’ve developed along the way are drive, perseverance, and wit. You must find that fire in your own belly if you want to be successful. Mistakes are an opportunity to rebrand into a learning for yourself, otherwise you’ll get stuck and lose confidence. And cultivating wit as a character trait is one part optimism, one part humor and one part grit.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

I’ve found that resilience is key, and something that I’m always fine tuning and refreshing, some career curve balls are harder to bounce back from than others. As a woman in business who is also a mother, it can be tough just to get through some days and show up as your authentic self. At work, when there’s a tough day, I find myself having to dig deep to reset. That’s where having other great female friends, or as I call them “my boss babe crew” comes in. I have a network of amazing women leaders as friends who I am on this journey with. We often trade strategies for navigating this world of career ambition and motherhood.

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

I see some great marketing in the B2B space coming from organizations that truly understand the value of marketing and the power of brand, for example IBM and HubSpot. Budgets aside, I think they are successful because they know the value of their customer and more importantly, what their customers value. This allows them the license to really dig into the crucial work of brand, marketing and customer experience and engagement. It’s a stark contrast from many B2B companies that “brochure their customers to death” with dense copy and technical jargon, never putting the customers’ needs and pain points first.

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

It’s satisfying to see marketing is now more focused on customer experience today. We see new roles popping up such as Chief Experience Officer and I believe this is critical to customer retention. To me, customer experience means the total perception of the company, interaction by interaction, from the first touchpoint to the last — and it’s a goal the whole organization should be working tirelessly to achieve. For example, if I’m your customer and I’m talking to Accounts Payable, I still want to feel like it’s the same great experience I had 1:1 with a salesperson or with that brand on their digital platforms.

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?

This has been a big change for me as a marketer, coming from CPG. In consumer goods, the cycles are quick or even impulse purchases. At my current company, the sales cycle can be up to 18 months. Sales and marketing need to work together even more closely than on the B2C side to nurture leads in a collaborative and even surgical way. Sales provides the longer context of the “why” to buy with a lot of feature and benefit information. Our marketing tends to focus on building awareness to keep us top-of-mind, to provide value via educational content and to deliver confidence that we are the best choice over competitors because of all the things that differentiate us. We work tirelessly as an extended team to ensure that, regardless of where the message is coming from, it is always well coordinated and part of our bigger brand or product story.

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

Personalization is critical to a great customer experience. Customers should be able to come to your website, be recognized and offered suggestions based on prior purchases or interactions with a company. Amazon has set this expectation for all of us, whether you’re a consumer or a customer. We all want that Amazon experience whenever we interact digitally. The caveat here is that personalization must add value to the customer’s life and not just push the sales agenda of the organization. Sadly, I don’t see any of us doing this to the best of our ability yet in B2B simply due to the low investment in marketing and the lack of proper tech stacks. We have a long way to go to provide a better and more dynamic experience.

ABM has also gained traction for its personalized approach to targeting high-value accounts. What advice would you give to fellow B2B marketers looking to adopt this strategy?

Most organizations have their 5–15 top accounts that are a priority and that is who ABM marketing should be dedicated to. I feel like ABM is a buzzword, because traditional marketers have always had to develop key account plans. There is no cookie cutter approach here. Each one of these accounts are very important to the company’s success and at minimum they each need their own unique plan to acquire and/or nurture these accounts along. From a strategic perspective I would advise that you study the high value accounts’ annual reports, their pain points, their brand marketing and the current competitors you are trying to remove before you start throwing random tactics out there that will not make an impact on the brand reputation or sphere of influence you are trying to build.

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.

1. Don’t take the word “strategy” lightly. I have seen many marketing plans that list tactics as strategies or do not clearly define marketing objectives. I am bullish on the fact that everything must start with great strategy. This means you must do your discovery work first to collect meaningful insights about your competitors, the marketplace and your customers / prospects, and you must have proper brand architecture. Understanding your customers’ pain points has never been more important to creating a great customer experience. Upon gaining these insights, then you can start to create your annual strategic marketing / advertising plans. To achieve effective marketing and generate leads, you must be operating out of a white space that is unique to your organization’s products. Over the past few years at my current organization, we have revamped this process internally with a more formalized annual planning process and we are seeing double digit increases in most of our KPIs including brand engagement, earned media opportunities, and our MQL’s are much higher quality leading to better close rates. Often B2B organizations are too informal with their marketing process, and as a result they do not have proper personas and other fundamentals to provide a clear picture of why their competitors are winning.

2. Don’t take shortcuts with discovery research. It’s critical for B2B brands to not only understand the features and benefits of a competitive product compared to their own, and it’s also equally critical to understand their marketing and share of voice. When we studied the competition at my current company, we discovered all the competitors’ marketing were saying the same things we were, and it was all in the Maslow’s base level of functional needs. We pivoted and elevated some of our claims to a higher order and started addressing the value we bring VIA emotional benefits. Our messaging became clearer, and more succinct which has proven beneficial inbreaking through the clutter and further distinguishing ourselves.

3. Never underestimate the power of “BRAND”. It’s imperative to stay top-of-mind through brand awareness, thought leadership and distinctive messaging. This is an especially hard concept for management to understand and appreciate in most B2B, sales-driven organizations, as opposed to the CPG side where the power of brand is so highly focused on. In today’s digital world and the internet of things, and now with AI, companies must buckle up and get on board with the digital aspects of brand building. Building a brand properly adds credibility to your business, keeps you top-of-mind over competitors and personifies the organization so much so that you can shape and influence purchase decisions and increase value perception to justify premium pricing.

4. Great creative from your agency partners starts with a very clear brief. I was trained on how to write a proper brief more than 20 years ago when I worked for the Coca-Cola Company. There I learned that the battle for good creative starts at the briefing stage. I have sat in meetings where marketers are leaving the strategy up to the agency by not being clear and defined in what the objective is and what the product attributes are that they want to highlight. I have even heard marketing managers in my past assume that the agency is responsible for all the thinking, and that’s just not true — agencies are coming to clients wanting a strategic brief to build advertising or communication plans from. A strong brief encompasses all the points I make in tips 1 &2. My creative partners always value my briefs and I often hear creative teams come back to me and say “put me in a box” meaning don’t give me an assignment that is too ambiguous. It seems counterintuitive, but it works well.

5. Beating competitors also means that your product must deliver. I believe the product and the marketing must go hand in hand. If products are low quality, it’s a marketer’s role to deliver those learnings via research back to R&D. There’s value in knowing your competitors’ product viability and performance. By having an ear to the ground, when it’s appropriate, you can craft messaging that addresses the gaps in their products to gain market share — ethically of course! We invest a significant number of resources into educational content for a prospect along their purchase journey to find videos and articles on the differentiators we hold over the competition.

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?

I’ve found some of the AI graphics tools to be particularly helpful, as I am not a designer but love to have quick graphics to make a post or a presentation look cooler. I’ve used Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly and Kittl to create quick graphics for posts or decks. I’ve also used Chat GPT to review original work I’ve created, to check for inaccuracies or validate my thoughts. I wish marketers would embrace AI more. It’s here to help us, not replace us.

Which digital channels have you found most effective in reaching your target audience, and how do you optimize your presence across these channels to outshine competitors?

When it comes to outshining competition, we must be very surgical in our execution so that we’re not tempted to outspend. Our narrative or story arc is often created with my PR team and is well orchestrated across paid, earned and owned channels–both digital and traditional.

My current audience is highly technical and scientific, and I have limited budget, so I mostly rely on paid digital channels such as LinkedIn and Instagram.

For owned channels, our websites and content hubs for long-form content such as videos, newsletters and blogs do a great job of providing engagement and stickiness, including time spent on page. For short-form content, news and alerts, LinkedIn is my main channel for owned.

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

One of my favorite sayings is: “strategy can be taught but fire in the belly cannot.” If you do not have the passion to work in marketing, it does not matter what skill is taught, you’re not going to crush it in marketing. Being in marketing means you are always thinking about your brand, your mind never shuts off and you’re going to work tirelessly to find those new skills, ideas or opportunities for your brand to thrive.

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.

I have been to numerous networking events and people are too shy to engage in meaningful conversations or unwilling to truly help the next person. My best friend, Amy Rodgers and I have envisioned a movement called “She’s One of Us,” a women’s networking group where women truly come together to help each other thrive in business. It’s meant to be inclusive. You know when you introduce one great friend to another great friend? You always say “she’s one of us,” and that’s shorthand for saying please treat her like you treat me, get to know each other and help each other. It’d be amazing if there were chapters of “She’s One of Us” all over the country.

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.

I’d love to meet Sarah Blakely, entrepreneur and founder of Spanx. I have so many ideas for her to leverage the power of her brand in new ways. She has the love and respect of so many women. This is where I want to spend my time — helping women not only in business but also in life.

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

Thank you!