Tom Stein and Jann Schwarz | The Truth Behind the Curtain in B2B Marketing

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0:53I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guests, Tom Sein and Jan Schwartz. Today's topic, the truth behind the curtain in B2B marketing. Tom is the chairman at Stein, a firm he founded nearly 40 years ago. He is a champion of B2B marketing and serves on a number of industry boards. Full disclosure, we met at an A &A event in 2024, and this is his second time on the show. Joining him today is Jan Schwartz, the Senior Director of Marketplace Innovations at LinkedIn and founder of Think Tank, the B2B Institute.

1:39Tom and Yan recently collaborated with the ANA on a 2025 B2B Brand to Demand Maturity Study. Tom is the chairman at Stein, a firm he founded nearly 40 years ago. He is a champion of B2B marketing and serves on a number of industry boards. Full disclosure, we met at an ANA event in 2024, and this is his second time on the show. Joining him today is Jan Schwartz, the Senior Director of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn and the founder of Think Tank, the B2B Institute. Tom and his agency Stein recently collaborated with the ANA on the 2025 B2B Brand and Demand Maturity Study. And Jan and Tom collaborated with the ANA IAA bain and scores of b2b marketers globally on a new model for b2b marketing success called buyability they are here today to talk about their learnings from all these studies some of which obviously have the longest names in the history of studies welcome tom and jan you know we're not going to get off on the right foot if you think that's the longest study name in history.

2:56At the end, when we get the funniest stories, you can go with the longest study name if you want that you have. Why don't we start, though? We'll save that for the end. Let's start with a brief overview of the maturity study, and I think that's you, Tom. What did this research set out to do, and why do this research now? Well, as Jan will know well, we at Stein and actually many, many leaders in B2B have been working on the concept of unifying branded demand. And so a tiny bit of backstory and why the study and the maturity studies is important now is that branded demand for the last call it 20 years or more in B2B marketing history have been often, very often treated as siloed activities, discrete activities and within the same B2B organization, marketing organization.

3:56And so brand lives over this side of the building and demand lives over on that side of the building. And different KPIs, different leaders, different creative, different content, different approaches, different investment, and often in conflict with each other. And so it's an inside out construct that has never worked particularly well and doesn't work at all well now. So we've been very much advocating for the unification of brand and demand. And so holistic strategy, holistic creative and content strategy, messaging aligned with buyer journey, et cetera, et cetera. And so what we wanted to do as we've increasingly built models, more sophisticated models, more actionable models to actually help brands do this, we wanted to actually gauge where the market sits right now in terms of what are the B2B marketing organizations actually doing in terms of unifying brand and demand, integrating those activities.

4:58So ground this into what's really out there. What's the state of the industry? Yeah. Well, it's not great. And I think that what our study with research shows is that these are, in fact, very not integrated activities and every marketer that we surveyed believes that they should be integrated so so this study says we know we have this problem but nothing has really been done about it if if i am writing at large i mean there's some percent do you want to share any any numbers on this um yeah definitely you know i'll share a couple um and one is that um uh the the, let's call it 80%. 80 % of the marketers that we surveyed, 100 % leave integrating brand to demand is very important.

5:5880 % aren't doing it at all. So think about that. So they think it's very important and they're not doing it. So, and I think all the math pretty much shows, and we've had a bunch of people on the show that say, if you are aligning all your marketing into one space, and working it, you have a much better chance for growth than if you don't. I guess I would love to hear your take on this, which is, I guess this is really great for the companies that are doing it, or the companies that are going to do it, and it can aggressively move, but it would really be bad for the companies over time not doing it.

6:35Are you seeing that kind of trend, too, in results? We're seeing it in results, and personally, and we as an agency are seeing it in the nature of RFPs that are landing. And so there's an acknowledgement that there's an opportunity here, challenge and an opportunity. And I think that there's an intent, a keen interest in actually advancing the cause here. And people see the rationale. There are a lot of case studies out there, increasing number of case studies of performance increases that are happening as a result of doing this. So I think there's quite a lot of momentum in the market right now.

7:15I want to go back to this, but I want to bring for both of you this question. If everyone could see this data and everyone knows this is the right thing to do, why are so many people moving so slowly to do it? Yan and Tom both fire away at this because in an age where everything has got to be happening almost immediately, it sounds like there's a lot of foot dragging here. What's the issue? I think there's a famous saying in Silicon Valley that you ship your org chart. So whatever, however you organize is what you end up producing as a business, right? And I think the big issue we have here is that the brand and demand teams, and then of course, the whole marketing versus sales organization, they're just very, very separate in the way they're organized.

8:04And that That's not how the reality of buying works in B2B, right? B2B is as human as B2C marketing, but in B2B, the big difference is it's groups of people, of professionals who together need to make a buying decision. And that's a very complicated interpersonal dynamic. And if you want to influence that, you cannot be as siloed as marketing and sales organizations are in B2B. And you cannot be as focused on how great your product is. You have to be much more focused on what are the emotional and social needs of buyers in addition to their functional needs and understanding that and then acting on that throughout the journey, not in silos.

8:53So it's the MQL, you know, the marketing qualified leads. Is that era completely over now? but a lot of org charts are still working on the marketers get leads sales closes leads you know product then chips the product is that what's still going on i can say with certainty and then jan will build on this i know because he and i have talked about it lots but it's not over um and but it should be um and i i think that's the the you know why why are branded demand not unified when they should be well why why are mql still a predominant metric and objective and so on when when perhaps they should not be and you know i i think that that um that it's hard to change and it's hard to progress and it's complicated and uh but also essentially necessary um jan what what do you say on that i mean my my favorite anecdote since this is supposed to be confidential behind-the-scenes gossip.

9:58It is. It's not supposed to be. It is. Well, there we go. I've got some gossip to dish, which is that my good friend John Miller, who is a brilliant... Oh, he's been on the show, yes. There we go. He's a brilliant MarTech founder. He founded Marketo and Gageo. He's kind of one of the godfathers of this industry. And he pretty much invented the MQL. He's now saying on the record, if you read his LinkedIn posts, that MQLs are pretty much BS. So it's quite ironic that even the person that invented the MQL is saying, let's stop using MQLs. That was helpful 20 years ago, but actually we should focus much more on the collective spirit of the buyer group rather than individual people clicking on a lead gen form and being counted as a lead.

10:45That's just the wrong way of measuring things. Our show with him was the B2B gumball machine is. That's right. That's right. And you have to fix it. You know, I want to also say in the research, which thank you for sharing, you also said this maturity research, 80 % of people said their creative is no good or needs improvement. You know, they didn't say it was no good. I mean, but what they're saying is it needs to be better and that there's improvement needed. And there is. You know, there's no question that in B2B, creativity is getting better, but it needs to be better. And the way I think about it now and over the last five years, creative and B2B has grown, risen.

11:35It's quite a bit better than it was. Can I put a fine point on this though, Tom? There's nobody that ever says my creative is as good as it's going to be. Everyone says it's got to be better. How dramatic is the needs improvement thing here in your mind versus the general, you know, theory of we always have to get better? it there's there's big improvement that's necessary and there's big improvement that's possible and i think there are a lot of people who a lot of cmos a lot of their teams that that understand it want it and you know the challenge is to create the culture in their businesses where um the cro and the cfo and the ceo um want that as well and if you if you look at b2c Mike and you've worked in those environments and not in every B2C company but in quite a few marketing is and creativity within marketing is as indispensable as anything else it's as indispensable as product innovation etc etc and I think B2B is not there yet and it can be needs to be I think will be yeah I would add like I think on average B2B creative is is five times worse than B2C creative on average.

12:52Five times worse. Wow, we're going exponential now. I mean, it's not just 20 % worse, it's five times worse. And like, I've seen stats of ad testing where, you know, you have a scale of one to five and most B2B ads score like somewhere between one and two at best. Like if no one breaks, even goes up to three and five would be good, right? So we're really talking like on average, we're pretty bad. There are exceptions, though. I would give a big shout out to our friends at ServiceNow. I think ServiceNow is really the company to watch at the moment. They have an incredibly ambitious marketing team, and they do some really bold creative, but they take it all the way through into performance marketing, all the way to onboarding once you've bought the product.

13:40They really understand the power of brand and consistent, distinctive brand assets. They've gone big. That's the ad campaign with Idris Elba, right? That's exactly right. So they use Idris Elba, but because Idris Elba, I assume, is very expensive, they also have a series of secondary characters. And the secondary characters actually show up all the way through the buying process. And so they really have built brand consistency and the importance of distinctive brand assets. They really understand that, which, you know, that's sort of table stakes in B2C. But again, in B2B, this is like big news.

14:14It's quite remarkable. I, you know, I admire Colin and Jim Lesser at ServiceNow and the work they're doing a lot. And I think I agree with Jan that it's an exemplar in B2B. But I also want to be clear. And, you know, Jan's five times worse. I don't know if I could quite go that far, but it's not as good. But that being said, working with clients, as I do at large enterprises, and that's what we do, the struggle of getting Idris Elba driven campaign that has that level of wit and charm, but also some might consider it risk. But actually, the risk is not doing it. The risk isn't doing it. But building that understanding that the risk is not doing it instead of spending the money to do it, that's a big hurdle that B2B, we're totally not there yet.

15:12I want to flip over to why. Like, if you look at the math, there's no argument that growth benefits from this. There's a lot of voices saying this. We've done a whole bunch of shows, including why is B2B marketing so bad and what to do about it. But where are the CEO, the CFO, and the boards on this? And why is not everybody agitating for the change that you two are talking about? And the study says, gosh, you got to do this. What's the issue? For me, it's really the disconnect between the CEO, the CFO, and the CMO. if you look at the most successful B2B brands, for example, Salesforce, right, which is another really, really good example of how to build a very strong brand.

16:04Well, the founder, Mark Benioff, knew from the beginning that what he was selling, which is CRM systems, was pretty boring and that he had no brand recognition when he started out. So he knew that he had to kind of put on a show and be provocative. He came out with this whole no software thing. He then pivoted very aggressively towards events, right? So Salesforce essentially now is an event business that also sells software. And that was incredibly effective, but it was driven by him and his personality because he's a showman. He's someone who understands the importance of marketing and making a splash.

16:43And actually most B2B CEOs are their engineers or product people by training. They're much more technical. They believe in the superiority of their product, but they don't necessarily understand why people buy things and how you have to use marketing and a strong brand to get people or groups of people in the case of B2B to actually buy stuff. And I think that's a big part of why we're still having this debate. Well, with all this data out there, where are the B2B boards and the B2B investors and why are they not agitating for more of this, given the math? There's not enough belief, Mike. There's not a, they do not, you know, in thinking of generalization here, they do not at present believe that that level of creative effectiveness, that level of overall marketing effectiveness is as important as it is.

17:41And so, you know, whether it's an education process that needs to happen or kind of a translation of marketing, you know, marketing speak into CFO speak or, but I think that that belief is growing. It's more apparent, but it's not, again, it's a gap in the B2B marketing situation. Can I jump in and say how much of this is on the marketer for not being able to make a case or not having the courage to make a case or not being able to speak finance? I think it's a chicken and egg thing. So the marketers definitely bear an equal amount of blame because they make themselves very tactical by virtue of the fact that they're being KPI'd against things like how many leads did you generate?

18:39What's the cost per lead. These are the wrong metrics because if you look at Forrester, Forrester says fewer than 1 % of marketing qualified leads actually result in any business transaction whatsoever. So we're not focused enough on how brand drives revenue. We're too much in the weeds of like, what is the sale? How do we juice up sales this quarter? We need more leads. Let's get cheaper leads. It's this very short-termist thinking, but that also comes from the finance department using a cost per lead or how many leads did you generate as a KPI instead of saying, how are we all working together to accelerate revenue, to close more deals faster, to have higher customer lifetime value?

19:28These are actual business metrics versus a cost per lead or how many leads is a very tactical marketing metric that's not related remotely to actual results. Yeah, to financials. Let's flip to the buyability study,

19:46like how brands are thinking about it. Why don't you give everybody a nickel on the buyability study and what it meant and what it is? Yes. So the reason why we call it buyability is because we want to signal very clearly that you need to be buyer-centric if you want to sell or market anything. Forget about marketing and selling. It's about buyers, group of buyers buying stuff. That's what you're ultimately trying to achieve. And so that's why we call it buyability. We need to move away. It's essentially an even bolder attempt to move on from the brand versus demand debate, which is frankly just not productive because it leads to this understanding in the c-suite that brand is something that costs money that we don't know whether it's going to work or not versus like demand gen and sales that makes money so let's put all our money there that's not a helpful debate to have at all what you need to instead ask is what is going to make our product or service easy to buy and how do we all work together to be the company that's most viable by groups of people in a corporate setting who need to all agree and need to collectively have confidence in your product or service.

21:07And actually the drivers of buyability, what gives these buyer groups confidence is not what we think it is. We usually think it's how great our product is, how competitive our price all the features, these are table stakes. By the time you get into the consideration set, all of those questions will have been looked at. But once you're on the short list, what actually gets you bought is whether or not people have heard of you from the beginning before the official process even starts. It's whether or not the hidden buyer, So CFO, procurement, legal, IT security, those kinds of people are incredibly important in weighing in on the buying decision.

21:53They need to have heard of you. So you do need to build a brand with those constituents from the start and then throughout the buying process. So let me ask because – Can I – Oh, yeah. I just want to add something there. Sorry. No, that's all right. You know, what I think Jan really points at here, and I don't know if he would express it exactly this way, but the way I think about it is that, you know, brand needs a fundamental rethink in B2B. And that rethink is really about the role of brand as a full funnel driver of commercial effect. And so brand doesn't stop at consideration. consideration brand continues from consideration to buyability so from a brand standpoint you need to get on the day one list because if you're on the day one list there's a you know 20 percent greater likelihood that you will prevail in a buying process so you know the the work of a marketer needs to be make sure you have the category reputation the relevance the understanding of what you're doing within your category leading the category category fame to get onto the consideration list.

23:06And, but a lot of marketers think job done. We're in the consideration set. My trip, my brand tracker says we're being considered job done. And I think that, that it's not job done at that point. It's job half done. Hey, if I, if I just know, if I just still what you two have said, what you're basically saying is look, the B2B funnel, sales funnel, marketing funnel, whatever, it's completely blown up. And now it's actually a merger of brands, companies, products, and buyers and sellers all at once. I could be getting this wrong, so correct me if I'm not. And that puts the whole model at risk. It's not just the marketer, it's the whole company.

23:47And it's how you approach. And AI changes the game even more because all the information's available. So is marketing the canary in the coal mine here? How am I feeling about all the B2B signals you guys are doing. We've written marketers in the story, but I want to say, okay, there's companies playing here that if they don't get it, they're going to be the canary. Tell me, am I getting that right or not? I think you're getting it generally right. I think the important thing is that, go back to the MQL conversation, the gumball machine john miller etc and you know mqls are still as i said a prevalent metric in in in in most in lots of b2b marketing organizations but you know the mqls came out of martech um and they came out of uh you know so they got that goes back to 2004 and um and i think that ultimately it was said to john miller's point again um uh it was not helpful um to marketers and it was not helpful to B2B businesses.

24:57And so there needs to be a model change. And I think that we're right there now. The model has to change. And I think the thinking and the work's been done to really create the new model going forward. And who changes that model from your guys' seat? Is it the marketer? Is it the CFO? Is it the board demanding it? How do you, like, we had all these marketers listening out here, and I'm sure a bunch are agreeing with you. I bet a bunch of agencies are as well. What should they do now? And are the B2B marketers ready to take this on? I think the smart B2B marketers are already taking this on and they're playing offense, right?

25:37The thing is, you have to understand that we do live in a new world where the funnel is no longer a mental model that makes much sense. The B2B buyer is very much in control and sales has similar problems, right? As marketers do, which is people don't really want to talk to salespeople anymore until very, very late in the process when they've already done the homework on who they want to buy from. So I think we do need to understand that we live in a new era now and we need to break down the silos and really need to focus on what makes you viable as a business and marketing and sales jointly have to go to the C-suite and say, we need a new model for how this works.

26:24We can't treat brand and demand and pipeline separately. We need to understand this is all the same continuum, and we need to figure out how we stand out in a world of machines and create both visibility through the machines, but more importantly, I would argue, a kind of human connection that makes the difference in a sea of sameness where everybody is trying to sell similar things and actually trust and human connectivity and human validation is actually paradoxically becoming more important in a world of AI, I would argue. Hey, how do I know? You guys both said, look, you got to play offense.

27:06There's nobody out there thinking I am playing defense today. Everyone thinks they're on the edge of offense. I want you to tell our listeners how to look in the mirror and say, am I really playing offense or am I just telling myself I am? I mean, one way you would know is if you say things like, you know what, chief revenue officer, I'm going to get you fewer leads than I did last year, but they're going to be better leads. And because they're no longer treated as individual MQLs, I'm going to give you buyer group qualified lead. So whatever you call it at your business, where you say, I'm going to show you at an opportunity level, at a company level, how warmed up is a specific buyer group to hearing from salespeople.

27:58And that's how we're going to go to market. That's how we're going to think about it, right? Like that requires a tough conversation about how the old model no longer works. So it's no longer about as many leads as possible or cheaper leads. It's about fewer leads that are better because they're qualified at the collective level rather than the individual level so you got to give something up to make it to the other side and win that's the thing if we're playing offense you have to understand what are we giving up to get something new and instead of sort of trying to be all things to all people and keeping the status quo while also i have to read so you're saying we got to reap you got to reframe this and tom i'm guessing that's what you guys do when you go in on a pitch.

28:42Yeah, we do. And I think that you need to have the right financial story. And it's really, it's a, you know, we love to do marketing. That's what we, you know, that is one of the truths behind the curtain is that we actually love this stuff. But, you know, we need to financialize how we think about it. And we need to financialize the conversations that we're having with the marketers so they can bring it to their boards, their C-suite and so on. because that becomes a really interesting conversation. And I think the financial conversation is, this is what you gain when you do this the right way with the right model.

29:21And this is what you lose if you don't. And I think if you start putting it in that terms, then it's a different conversation. So if I summarize what you two have said, you have to financialize buyability. I think that's right. And I think that there's still work to be done around the viability concept to validate that in its fullest sense. But I think inexorably it is taking hold. And it's taking hold in the industry for a reason. Because the logic behind it and the data behind it, which is quantitative in nature, is pretty irrefutable. so before we get to our last question i want to i want to ask you both what's the one thing i have to have to tell you one one other thing and you can cut this out of the whole thing if you want to we won't there's one data point from the maturity study that sticks with me um and uh uh i think that that this will be surprising or not but um we asked the marketers that we study And these are larger enterprises and very senior marketers to tell us what percentage of overall company revenue their marketing budget represented.

30:45And so we got a response back that was lower than a lot of the other benchmarks and indexes that are out there. But the most surprising aspect of it was that 28 % of the respondents said they didn't know. Wow. That's over a quarter of people saying, I don't have any attachment to the financials. Well, that's not the way to endear yourself to the CFO and the finance team, right? You really need to understand what the economics are of the business and how marketing contributes to revenue growth. And that's the conversation to have. And again, it's about buyability. What actually helps us become easier to buy?

31:34What gets us bought by our customers? And how do we dial that up? So I think this is a great pivot to our next to last question, which is, all right, you're talking to all of B2B leadership, including the marketers out there, but not just marketers, anybody that's in the B2B space or really any space, what should they be doing based on these pieces of research we've talked about today that they might not be doing now or what should they start doing immediately? So I'll start by saying that they need to think about their brand in a different way. They need to think about brand in a different way, not just their brand.

32:19And they need to invest more in it. Full stop, they need to invest more in it because the investment there is not fluffy. The investment there is actually what drives ultimately consideration and then ultimately beyond that, viability, among other things. And then there's specific strategies and tactics that you need to apply within that contract. But full stop, they need to invest more in brand. They do. I would add three things. Number one, they have to understand how to build category fame in their specific category that they want to own in order to get on the short list. And that means, as Tom said, strong investment in brands.

33:03Secondly, if they want to move from consideration to actually being buyable, they need to be liked, trusted, and recommended by a network of professionals who influence the buyer group. And number three, they need to move from vanity metrics, such as cost per lead or clicks or engagement, to actual business value metrics, such as pipeline velocity, customer lifetime value, deal size. It's like that kind of thing is influenced very strongly by marketing, but it's often not measured in the right way. And these things are harder to measure than what we're currently measuring, which is why people tend to default to vanity metrics.

33:49But ultimately, we have to have the tough conversation and say, we can't predict exactly how we're influencing revenue. This is much more of a probabilistic thing than a deterministic thing. But if you have the right model, it will pay off in the long term. And people have to have patience to understand how buying actually is influenced and what makes us buyable.