Bill Zengel | ANA | The Confident B2B Marketer - Are You One of the Few?

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0:22Bill Zengel:Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. When is the last time you researched something on a website? If you're like most people, AI did that work for you. And that raises a question. If AI is doing the work, what is your website really for? This behavioral shift means AI bots are becoming your most important new visitors. A challenge our sponsor, Scrunch, is taking head on. Scrunch is the customer experience platform that helps you understand how AI agents experience your site, when and why they show up, and what's blocking them from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended.

1:13Scrunch shows you the content and citation gaps and technical blockers and helps you fix them so your brand shows up when consumers start with AI. because your most important site visitor might not be a human. For our listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website audit that uncovers how AI sees your site and how you're showing up in AI versus the competition. Run your site through it at scrunch.com slash CMO. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them, the Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

2:04I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Bill Zengel. Today's topic, the confident B2B marketer. Are you one of the few? Now, Bill is the B2B business-to-business practice leader of the Association of National Advertisers, where he has been for a number of years. His responsibility is obviously to elevate B2B marketing. Previously, he led membership at A &A, and he served as a creative director at Saatchi and an account director at Y &R Wonderman. Bill shared four B2B research studies with CMO Confidential, which include the Brand-to-Demand Maturity Study discussed in an earlier show by Tom Stein and Jan Schwartz, marketing impact measurement, using data to supercharge B2B marketing, and one that really caught our eye called the Confident B2B Marketer Study.

3:09So we're having him on to talk about all of those, really with a focus on the Confident B2B Marketer Study. But welcome. So welcome to the show, Bill. Thank you, Michael. It is great to be here. Nice to have you. First of all, I have to ask, Bill, why so many B2B studies? I mean, what is going on? What is everybody trying to figure out here with all these studies? Well, so, I mean, it's a great multi-part question. I'll start with why so many studies then tell you what people are trying to solve for. So what I've learned is, you know, marketing is actually a fairly heterogeneous practice. Yeah.

3:50I went to the School of Visual Arts. You could have a business degree. We could be with somebody from Stanford who's working at Google. We're all different. And because we're all different, there are no common traits or commonly agreed to principles in marketing. It's really what was the last marketer in the door. That's what the chief of operations here is about. and the most important thing in any business well not the most important thing but one of the most important things in any business is measurement accountability and proof of commercial contribution and that's what we're working on and in the b2b space do you think that like we've talked a lot on a bunch of our shows about how marketing is different and one of the reasons we do the show is it's the least consistent, most inconsistently structured, in my mind, one of the worst, if not the worst managed functions in the C-suite.

4:47Is it worse in B2B than it is in B2C? I think in B2C, and like you, I worked on both sides, right? So I worked on Proctor, I worked on J &J, I worked on Microsoft. So I have both experiences. I think in B2C, if you're working with a proctor, if you're working on Crest, if you're working on Tide, there's a heritage of brand building. And I might go work with Coors and somebody says to me, oh, I used to work at Proctor. The conversations are a lot shorter. Yeah. And there's agreement on, everyone agrees on the managers too. Sales, everyone agrees. Yeah, I think when you get to B2B, if you're dealing with a mining company, the head of marketing could have been not in the mines two years ago, but responsible for drilling equipment, right?

5:40He could be anybody. But, you know, we know B2B is actually bigger than B2C in total. But when you look at the B2B marketing function in general, it doesn't have the same seat at the table that it has in a lot of the business to consumer functions. Am I right on that? And if I am, why? Well, you're right. Thank you, Bill. I'm going to tell you why it's going to change versus why you're right. Well, first tell me why it exists and then tell me why it's going to change. Well, I think historically, quite often when people say B2B marketing, what they really mean is B2B Marcom. That Marcom was adjacent to sales.

6:24And in the old days, the salesperson might say, hey, Marcom, make sure the banner is straight at the golf tournament and I'll take care of the heavy lifting. That's completely changed in the last few years. the buyer group has arisen and marketing are the people to address the buyer group the people who are making decisions are younger they want self-service digitally that's about marketing communications the digital experience the the b2b companies are the biggest in the world 65 of the global economy is b2b not b2c yeah i if i buy a tube of toothpaste and i walk down the street, it's my decision.

7:04And quite frankly, if I don't like the tube of toothpaste, I might just throw it out at this point. But if you're buying a jet engine or software service for your company, it's a big decision and a lot of people are involved. And quite frankly, if you make the wrong decision, bad things could happen, including you could lose your job. Yeah. Especially on a jet engine, a lot of bad things can happen. So we're here. The ANA B2B unit is here to change that and lead, bring brand to B2B. Okay. Well, that's really good background to the Confident B2B Marketer Study. First of all, what does the Confident B2B Marketer even mean?

7:46Tell us about the study, what you did. just go wild give us give us the whole design of the study and what you're trying to get to in that so the great thing about working at the a and a is it's like a gps for the industry or at least a gps for me um when you see multiple people you respect talking about the same thing you know there's something there it's like being on ways and and you see all the red dots you know something's occurring at that location. So when I moved over from B2C to B2B, I asked a lot of people I respect, well, what's the most important thing? And they all had a different answer.

8:29So I said, you know what? I'm going to field a study. So we went to 200 senior marketers and out of the multitude of things that could be important, they identified these eight or nine key markers of success. and now we're bringing that to our members okay well let's let's hear tell us about the success and by the way you're getting your talking points in fantastically already so uh so tell us about these these things that go with being the confident b2b marketer and then also i want to point out when i read the study it looked like only 40 percent of b2b marketers are really in the confident camp.

9:08So let's go over what it means to be confident. And then we're going to talk about why you're a more confident marketer. 39 % actually, right? So Mike, the story I like to tell is I'm a cancer survivor. And when I was being treated, the doctor said to me, hey, a cell has escaped the pocket yes and if you're if you're in a retentive like i am you want to know what does that mean so i googled it and an adult male has 33 billion cells in their body and i'm like wait you're looking for one cell out of 33 billion yeah and then uh the mri can only see the size of a pencil eraser and i'm like well how many cells could be in a pencil eraser and it's a lot It's a lot.

9:58So today I am clear of cancer. They call it NSD, no sign of disease. And I'm free of it because they identified the markers, the biological markers that they needed to treat. And in that way, I'm here with you. Yes. The Confident Marketer, what that did is I was at our master's in marketing. You know, we represent about 300 ,000 markers. uh marketers 1700 companies and uh somebody got up on a stage and said marketers today have to deal with a quadrillion decisions plus or minus mike right yeah but a lot of decisions one gazillion yeah yeah you'll give it to me so we identified through this survey the eight mark out of those quadrillion decisions you're dealing with where should you be focusing your time and energy?

10:55So we identified the eight or nine places where marketers are succeeding, which if you're in the 61%, it's a good place to work. Let's hear it because only 39 % of people are succeeding or are confident. So let's hear it. Just give us a quick burn on those eight. Give us the rundown. um so okay so the first the first one is self-apparent to me it's measurement yeah if you can't report on the outcome of what how you spend your time i would think your career's in trouble yeah i used to go i used to go home at the end of the week and the person in the other side of the kitchen door if i couldn't come home with a paycheck which was the measurement of my contribution that week yeah i wouldn't be coming in the kitchen door too often after that so measurement is number one and it's the single biggest issue more marketers face beyond that some of the things i'm going to tell you are obvious but we validated them ai readiness it's it's not coming it's here the tsunami's here the water's at your ankles and what readiness we could talk about ready we could i want to talk about the other six but i want to now i want to double back on what does readiness mean?

12:16So AI, like measures, AI readiness, give us the other six. Okay. So, and there's eight or nine, but I'm just going to touch on the eight. Okay. So AI readiness, account-based marketing, buyer group, channel marketing, brand and creativity, data foundation, marketing technology. Okay. I think some of those are self-explanatory, but highlight a couple of the things that are like, what does AI readiness mean? And what does brand mean? So our listeners can write themselves into the story. And then I want to go back to the 39-61 split. Okay. So AI readiness for anybody who pays attention is obvious, but what does that really mean?

13:09That's really what we want to peel back. So I think there are two or three ways you could look at it. The first way we had Adobe present not too long ago, and they talked about the way AI impacted how you put together your marketing or marketing materials. The way we look at it in this study, and we're doing a part two, so shout out to any of your listeners who are in marketing today. We're looking for volunteers if they want to help. But the part two of it is you can't be AI ready if you don't have a strong data foundation. If your data isn't organized, you can't automate the process, which is what AI is looking to do.

13:53So data foundation and AI readiness are closely linked and the data foundation is often overlooked. Right. And we've had a couple of folks on talking about AI saying it's not the BI, the business intelligence stuff that you need here. You need this AI ready in a database that you can actually use it. Right. So, you know, because I feel like we're friends, I'm going to give your listeners a little secret. Okay. There are a lot of companies, a lot of companies that are not Proctor. I'll call them mom and pop, but mom and pop could be pretty big. Yeah. And they're running off Microsoft Excel on spreadsheets.

14:36And the data is not talking from email to the CRM, from CRM to the sales stack. He did a webinar last week. Where's the data from that? So I worked with a company where we went to unpack a data set. I won't tell you the company I worked at. I had hundreds of thousands of records. I had hundreds of data points per record. And the very respected gentleman in the industry said, just give me the column headers. If you give me the column headers to the sheets, I can help you unpack everything. So that's a little, for the companies that don't have a billion dollars to spend, just get the column headers and then get somebody in who knows what they're doing.

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16:20Now back to our episode with Bill Zengel. Okay, let's talk about what brand means. Especially in B2B, which is a wild card for B2B a lot. We've had a lot of people talking about, you know, the gumball machine is broken. You know what? It's fascinating, Mike. I listened to one of your early shows and I, well, I listened to quite a few. So I had a company, Black Rocket Productions. It was basically B2B2C. We taught kids how to make video games, but we worked through colleges. And somebody came on, I'll tie back to it in a second. and somebody came on your show and said, B2B will never spend money on branding.

17:07And that I wouldn't argue with that gentleman, because I think their wallet is a lot thicker than mine. But I disagree with that. The very first thing a B2B company does is borrow trust. And at the bottom of any B2B website is a long list of logos of people they work with. and that's implied and inferred trust. And that's what at the heart of branding. Do I know you? Do I trust you? And you may not have heard of my company name, but you see those logos across the bottom and you say, I did hear of that and I do trust them. So it's projected trust. Yeah, look, and it's essentially a testimonial because you usually have to get agreement to use the logo as well.

17:52So we have these things, these eight things, but your study says only 39%, 39 % of B2B marketers are in the camp of being confident and having these things. Tell us about the other 61 and then tell us, give us some honest test questions. Listeners can say, am I confident or am I not? I love it. So I'm just going to say, Mike, it depends. Do you look at the glasses half full or half empty? Well, I'm obviously a half full guy. I'm doing this show with you.

18:34So 39%, I look at it and say, that's a good number. And you might disagree. I think marketing does a really great job of shooting itself in the foot. Okay. So what's the first thing any marketer says about the money they spend? They talk about that they spend it. They refer to marketing as a cost. Number one thing I hear people say is, oh, my budget's been cut. I say, invert the conversation. Don't tell me about your attribution. Tell me about your contribution. How much money are you materially bringing to the bottom line of the company? And let's start there. So that would be my first statement about measurement.

19:13It's about contribution versus attribution. Every marketer I know says, oh, my media budget got cut. I lost two people. Who cares? tell me how you're helping the company grow so the marketers who are successful and are confident and we don't look at confident as a personality attribute we look at it as a compass point okay so you can learn and and thank god for the other 61 because that's why the a and a is here

19:51okay so so wait we've done a bunch of shows like um why marketers should speak finance you know why you should actually be able to talk to the company about outcomes versus other things we had a bunch of CEOs and CFOs on. What percent of marketers can really talk about contribution versus attribution, as you put it really in the B2B space? I mean, honestly. It's very, it's very small. And that's what we're looking to do is educate, take. So what's, who's the biggest manufacturer in the United States of America? I know, you know, the answer it's Apple. Apple makes more product that they happen to make it in China or someplace else.

20:38But the biggest manufacturer in the United States is Apple. Apple's pretty big in B2B, B2C, right? Warren Buffett says that a brand is a moat. Right after intellectual property, a brand is the second thing. If you have proprietary IP, better. but if you don't have proprietary ip or you do a brand is the moat around your business so you look at the if you look at a brand finance we were just on the phone they have the top 500 brands in the world yeah the top five the video yeah google meta app they're all b2b brands yeah google we look at google and meta as media companies because we work in advertising they're b2b companies So what we're looking to do is reposition brand as a growth driver within B2B companies and look at the companies that are doing it well and the marketers that are doing it well and to kind of spread that gospel in frameworks for the rest of the membership.

21:45If I, but Bill, if I go back to, and not to, not to pound on the B2B thing, even though this is a B2B show. If I go back to the show we did with Tom Stein and Jan Schwartz, they were talking about the branded demand study, which said 75 % of marketers aren't doing what they think they should be doing. and 80 % think their creative needs improvement and they think brand and demand are disconnected. Why aren't more people raising the roof on this given the study and given the data? Mike, I love it. And just tell Jeff, here's the short. You can just cut it right here because you just nailed it. So I was at a members only conference where the brand to demand study was presented and a company that you and I both know the brand name, very highly regarded, got up and put up a chart.

22:39And it said$319 cost customer acquisition costs. That was in the middle of the chart. At the top of the chart was$798. And we asked the company, well, you must be spending$319 on your customer acquisition costs. And they said, no, we're not. We're spending more. And they're spending more because companies, not marketing, companies are addicted to leads. And they're addicted to leads in the next 90 days versus taking a long view. So marketing can only reflect what the C-Suite wants. So that's one. So performance marketing. Short-term focus. Short-term focus. and think about the name performance marketing, which is the last 20 years of our industry.

23:34They out-marketed - John Short's called performance marketing. Biggest misnomer in, he said it was great, bad marketing because all marketing should be performance marketing. Right, exactly. They out-marketed brand, right? Because everybody wants performance marketing, but it's all going away with zero click and large language model and generative engine optimization. So what everybody's been addicted to for the last 20 years, you better get off it because well john miller did a whole show with us called the gumball machine is broken why mqls should be tossed but you're telling me but you're telling me here and this study you know the brand of demand thing is proving it and in in some sense the confident b2b marketer thing proves it too people are still very slow to change in spite of all the research Is that fair?

24:24They're slow to change because it's what management wants. And I want to give you, this is like the third or fourth secret I'm giving you because I want to be asked back, Mike. So let me give you the other secret, right? So people talk about creativity. The number one emotion is just as important in B2B as it is in B2C. But the emotion in B2C is often joy, right? If I brush my teeth, my teeth are whiter. i feel more socially adroit whatever it might be yeah you look better on the podcast yeah exactly well thanks crest uh or whatever toothpaste i use we've got a lot of members i know i know but i gotta think of the full membership i love coldgate just as much and all the other brands um so um so in b2c it's emotion driven and it's joy often in b2b it's emotion driven as well but it's fear so what influences a b2b person making a decision the emotion is will i lose my job if this goes wrong and if you had jan and tom on i would imagine that jan would have mentioned that because he did jim okay so think think about it you're you're worried well and also a lot of times you have a slow purchase cycle so well let's just say i mean one of the theories is you have a slow purchase cycle because so many people are involved but let's just stay with the emotion before we go someplace else so you're afraid you're afraid that's the emotion you're afraid you would lose your job then people say let's be creative creativity is about taking a chance it's incongruous with the emotion of fear So people tend to be fairly conservative while they're being creative.

26:18And those two words really are at odds with each other. Now, that said, there's some great B2B creative out there. There's some killer B2B creative in the space. But, Bill, if I read between the lines of everything you said, the companies that actually go out and take these risks and make moves over a long enough time horizon they are going to win but the the question is if i'm a marketer how much time horizon do i really have in this space and how do i if i'm looking for a job or someone is trying to hire me how do I figure out which company is going to give me a chance to do this? Because if I do this, it's a giant proof point on my resume.

27:09How do I actually do this? Because you said, here's what I'm taking away. What's in the way of marketing progress is one, fear. Two, short-term itis or results. Three, it's always easier to do what is the company wants you to do than what's right for the company. How do I pick the right company for me? So I want to take everything you just said and stand it on its head. Knock yourself out. The confident marketer is about hope. It's not. But if you're making that decision about where you go, I think you've had Richard Sanderson on your job. B2B CMOs live longer. Yeah, they do. So if you're trying to make a decision for your career on where to go, B2B is the place you can make your mark because brand, there's unlocking$1.9 trillion in brand value hidden inside B2B companies.

28:13So it's a huge white space if you're a marketer. Second is if you get in and solve it, you're going to last longer, you're going to live longer. And more and more, we're seeing work around training and workshops around strategic B2B. How can you price for success? Things that you would expect from a B2C marketer. So I look at it very much B2B. I'm here because B2B is a giant opportunity. If I'm looking at this, it used to be a lot of B2B marketing was driven by sales. Sales would control it. you know, ask for stuff. A lot of our guests have said that that whole funnel has collapsed. The MQLs are done.

29:00What would you tell B2B leadership to actually be doing and testing right now? And I don't mean just the marketers. I mean, the B2B boards, the B2B CEOs. What should they be doing and testing to make sure they don't get passed by their competitors that are really using more marketing as a strategic weapon versus an aid to sales? So what I'd be saying is look at the leaders in the space because they're leveraging marketing as a strategy, not as a tactic. I'd say look at what the investment community values because the investment community is pouring over those 10 Ks and they want to see more than just revenue.

29:47They want to see the source of the revenue. And a lot of times that's marketing. The third thing I would really encourage people to consider is when I mention brands like Apple, Google, Amazon, when we trade places with Amazon, what is Amazon's logo? Yeah, it's the little arrow. It's a smile. It's an upward smile. Whose smile is that? That's the customer's smile. So I would encourage your listeners, I would do this as compliments to you, to go to ana.net forward slash B2B. I was a direct marketer at one point, Mike. We have a... And if you call now... You get a cheese straightener. No, because there's plenty of work in this space.

30:33And I think people are so busy, they don't read it. So in addition to the great work that Jan's doing with us, in addition to the great work Tom's doing with us, we have a report. It's a little dusty, maybe, but it's called the Google Day One Report. And they did it with Bain. And there's a day one list despite the long life cycle, despite all the systems, despite all the facts. Buyers have a list the day they start. And it's called the day one list. and the way you get on that list is peer reviews to one of the ways peer reviews and it's customer reviews so one of the best things you can do to acquire new sales is take care of the customers you have now got it all right this is getting us towards our last question which you know because you've listened to all our shows we appreciate that it's a two-parter you can take one or both but you must take at least one funniest story you can tell on the air and or practical advice we haven't discussed yet yours to pick one or both all right well i feel the whole show is practical so i'm gonna go with funny so all right we love that we love funny at cmo confidential so i worked in the entertainment industry for a number of years and i worked with a producer and production companies are no different than anybody else.

32:00They look at trends. So at the time, they used to call it a sandals and sun was hot, right? Like the Odyssey is coming out next summer, right? There will be a flurry of sun and sandal pictures after Christopher Nolan's Odyssey hits on the big screen. so a producer friend of mine flew to greece uh and he got there uh hundreds if not thousands of extras and they were making a movie about uh the trojan war okay swords swords sandals shields beautiful women everything but they forgot the trojan horse

32:48and then i got a second one for you all right we'll take it i worked on burger king when i was a writer and we launched the burger king kids club and we did uh at the time mcdonald's brand was a little higher value than burger king so we co-branded with companies that had high brand value so we worked with the teenage mutant ninja turtles we sold more teenage mutant ninja turtle toys than any retail i've lived in a year we go out to la we're shooting the commercial we're out there for a month everything's great until it comes to the product shop how many french fries go in a bag and nobody knew and it was a saturday and we could not reach any executive so we went out to i don't know how many stores that we decided would be an average yeah you bought all the Burger King fries you could buy.