Rethinking B2B Marketing

According to Jon, many marketers are too focused on “fixing the little things” and spending excessive time on demand generation. He emphasized a return to fundamentals like product-market fit, positioning, and reputation.

“When we get addicted to the sugar rush of MQLs, we go off track. The CMOs who are most effective at collaborating with their peers around the fundamentals will be the most successful in the next 15 years.”

He continued: “Pipeline generation is a complex, dynamic system,” Jon stated. “You can’t just fix one thing and expect everything to be good.” 

Getting bogged down in tactics leads to “useless debates on things like lead source and cost-per-lead,” or worse, editing headlines and press releases. “That’s treating the symptoms, not the problem. If you’re not hitting your revenue targets, fix the big stuff first.”

Jon criticized the simplistic view of marketing as a direct input-output system. “Marketers have taught CFOs that ‘if you give me this much budget, I will generate this many leads and it will drive this much in pipeline.’ Unfortunately, marketing doesn’t work that way – it’s much more complex.” He emphasized the need for reputation-building, which addresses emotions rather than logic, through creating experiences and deeper connections.

Mediocre content is a significant contributor to a poor buyer experience. Jon urged marketers to avoid gating content unnecessarily. “Don’t gate content that shouldn’t be gated just because you’re trying to hit some metric!” He added that poorly written and poorly organized content fails the audience.

With 75% of B2B buyers preferring to buy without interacting with a salesperson, Jon also highlighted the need for content and tools that enable informed decision-making. He noted the challenges of providing transparent pricing and personalized product experiences.

While acknowledging that the current use cases for Generative AI are overhyped, Jon believes the long-term impact will be revolutionary. He highlighted the significant leap from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4.0 and stressed the importance of CMOs ensuring their teams use these tools. “It is important that every CMO makes sure their team is using these tools, not just for content creation but to understand the ‘jagged frontier.’”

Jon envisions AI that synthesizes work life. He described a future where emails are summarized with prompts for recommended actions, significantly impacting email open rates. He advised marketers to focus on what machines can’t summarize, like creating emotional connections and brand experiences. Synth AI will also reshape search, as seen with Google providing answers without click-throughs. “Knowing that your organic site traffic from Google is likely to drop requires a total rethinking of your content and related-experience strategy.”

Jon criticized the overemphasis on sourcing metrics and suggested replacing them with team-based pipeline metrics. “Too much time is spent on sourcing metrics – it’s a false narrative. When you assign credit to marketing or sales you’re hurting the collaboration you want and encouraging finger-pointing.”

Despite the rise of new communication tools, email remains resilient. Buyers appreciate relevant and valuable offers via email. However, many companies abuse email, leading to junk overload. Jon pointed out that personalization of email at scale is still on the horizon, but emails from real people with interesting stories will continue to stand out.