Eric Williamson on Fixing the B2B Branding Blind Spot

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Eric Williamson, Chief Marketing Officer at CallMiner. Eric brings more than 20 years of experience across tech and consumer marketing, spanning both the agency and brand side.

0:38at call miner he leads all global marketing functions working hand in hand with sales and channel teams to fuel growth and pipeline before stepping into his role at call miner eric served as vp of brand and digital marketing at aquia hopefully i said that right you can correct me eric in a second where he led everything from creative to demand gen for the open dxp platform now his agency days include senior leadership roles at mull and low and the martin agency where he shaped digital strategy for powerhouse brands like Google, Geico, Walmart, P &G, and Microsoft. From Pizza Hut to Intel, Acura to Royal Caribbean, he's been in the trenches of marketing innovation his entire career.

1:21Eric Williamson, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You came close. The company is Acquia, so it's hard to spell. But yeah, so thanks for having me on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I took a shot. Now I know Acquia. yeah i learned some okay really really looking forward to this we had a really good off the air convo if you will and we first met and you have quite a wide variety of experiences that i certainly want to tap into and i know my listeners will get a lot from so i want to jump right into one of the things that is so near and dear to my heart and that's the whole b2b versus B2C conundrum?

2:02Is that the word? I don't know. But it's been around forever. And just jumping right into it, in your experience, what are some of the biggest branding blind spots B2B companies have that B2C brands figured out years ago? So I would say, first and foremost, I think on the B2B side, the biggest blind spot is most... A lot of B2B, especially B2B tech, quite a few of them just don't really have a lot of value or put a lot of effort into what we would consider brand. I think HubSpot generally invented it, but it's been decades now. And I think a lot of B2B tech, especially the ones that are not SAP or Oracle, Dell, a lot of B2B tech, it's very formulaic.

2:48It's the demand gen engine. You've got some in-person events, which are changing up drastically, but it's really more of a transactional input-output type demand gen engine as opposed to a combination of brand plus some sort of marketing engine sitting underneath that. So first and foremost, it's just a lack of understanding or budgetary respect for brand itself. It's probably the biggest mess for B2B. Beyond that, I think what you end up having is because it's very formulaic, you get into a lot of techs and specs in terms of the messaging. You get into a lot of talking about yourself as opposed to truly tapping into emotions and having true differentiation and creativity.

3:33So to me, those are some of the main differences you see. And I'm casting a wide net. There are absolutely some B2B brands out there and B2B tech, which is my particular area, that do a great job of embracing brand and interweaving brand and demand gen really eloquently. But I'd say for the most part, what I've observed is you've got a lot of marketing leaders that never really went to brand school, so to speak, where I've had the serendipitous career journey where I grew up on the agency side. So literally, 90 % of what we did was all about brand and understanding creative briefs and understanding pain and happy emotions and how to tap into those with succinct headlines, etc.

4:18etc. So when I entered the B2B tech world, I was a little bit shocked and dismayed at how, I guess, non-differentiating and varied text and specs a lot of the messaging and positioning was and lacked a lot of creativity. I think what ends up happening or has happened is you've got a lot of B2B tech marketing leaders who didn't have that experience, or they came up through product marketing, or in many cases, demand gen. So they are masters of those particular areas, but they missed the brand school part. It almost... I mean, I could probably go back to my days at Forbes, which is going on 15 years now.

4:57I know I wrote at least half a dozen articles about this very topic all those years ago, and we're still talking about it. It's starting to get better. And I think, honestly, AI is helping to force B2B to to start to respect and figure out brand, mostly because a lot of what's being introduced is disrupting things that used to yield in those classic demand gen engines. So they're having to start thinking about brand a lot more. So you said something, two things, you said emotions and AI. And those two things do not go together. But you just said something I thought was very interesting. You said AI is forcing, right?

5:38And because it's, it's my next question was going to be how to, why is it so hard? How can B2B markers that emotional resonance, right? That B2C brands have long since figured out. Sure. So I'll get to the AI, why I think AI is actually sort of forcing B2B to start thinking about brands. But, you know, in terms of how B2B, just a basic playbook, if you want to get really corny. You can go back. It's probably 15 plus years old, but there's the classic sort of Simon Sinek video where he's doing the why, how, what target. And his description of Apple versus PC or whoever he's talking about, where it's an outside in, where they're talking about their techs and specs, and then they get to the why in the middle.

6:20That's an easy model for people to really truly understand why you have to think about emotion at the center of your unique value proposition. And the key thing here is, when you think B2B, you can get very much into forgetting that these are humans you're working with, that you're trying to engage with and ultimately sell to. These are still humans who are consumers who engage with some of the best B2C brands out there. And that sets a level of expectation for a similar level of experience with the marketing all the way through to the product and post-product experience. But I think with emotion, really unpack your different customer segments and think about, at its most simple, what are their main pain points?

7:06What are their main happy? What are the things that make them happy about the core aspects of their business? And if you can hone in on those things and how your product makes a promise, which is what a brand is, makes a promise to solve for those things, then you can tap into really raw emotions. Happiness, fear, pain are all good emotions to start with. I think beyond that, the other thing that I think B2C, in many cases, does a much better job of is differentiation. So not just in your unique positioning, but in your messaging as well. Again, it's a lot of text and specs. So if you're starting with emotion, that's great.

7:43But then what really truly makes your company and your brand different? What's different about your promise than your other 3 top competitors? So I think making sure you have a very clear, differentiated message. And that could be a combination of the message itself, but also it could be your tone. Yeah. How you deliver that message. So are you really edgy, provocative with your message? Do you have sharp elbows against some of your competitors? Or are you continuing to say the same headlines everybody else is and they can just swap logos out? I think the last part, and this always comes after positioning and messaging, but the creative itself, both the brand visual aesthetics or the quality of your videos and the artwork and the things that go into all your ads.

8:28Also, I think says a lot about your brand as well. But creative always comes after positioning and messaging. Correct. Correct. It's just, I got to stop myself because we could spend the whole time talking just about this one topic, how it still absolutely blows my mind why so many B2B marketers still cannot grasp the fact that you're marketing to another human being. I don't understand it. Well, I do think, and just to connect it to the AI stuff, maybe we'll talk about this in a second, but I think ability, if you can figure out the positioning and messaging part, which I think a lot of B2B brands will have to do that first, but leading to the actual creative part, AI is dropping the cost of being able to do high quality video and artwork and things like that dramatically, where as before, I can understand because I have a very different budget at CallMiner than I did for maybe like a Geico.

9:16Quite a different thing, many different zeros. But the cost of creating some really fantastic video and it's getting better every day is dropping dramatically. You still need great creative writing, etc. to fuel that. But I can do some great video and a lot of it at a reasonable budget, whereas before it was cost prohibitive. I couldn't. It is somewhat oxymoronish, right, to think AI can help from an emotional perspective. I think AI is going to it's it's more of the ability to get rid of some of the mundane tasks. Thinking about a marketing operation, a lot of the mundane tasks, administrative, repetitive things you can inject into your marketing operation.

9:59Now that AI is helping with free up time and resources that you can now focus on proper positioning and messaging. You know, ultimately, an AI generated video is going to still suck if it wasn't done based on great positioning and really smart screenwriting, if you will. Right. So is there an area of marketing? Why area marketing or do you think AI has made more of an impact so far than others or we're still kind of feeling it out? So I think if you break it out into the outputs versus some of the things that go into your overall marketing engine, meaning your operations, I think AI has probably already been playing a part in some of the any marketers, any B2B marketers tech stack for some time now.

10:43It's just playing a much bigger role. I think most CMOs at this point, at least for the last couple of years, are getting routine questions from their CEO and their CFO, which is, how are you utilizing AI as part of the marketing operations? How are you using AI to help perhaps do more with less budget? And so those questions everybody's kind of encountered. What we've been using it generally, I'll just speak about Gen AI. We use a lot of that regardless of our tech stack with a lot of the content writing to get to a V1. Probably you're a writer, so it's in your past. So the blank page is the worst part of being a writer.

11:26So getting to a V1 and then taking that and letting the human part take over is one of the biggest, I would say, benefits from a marketing team and marketing engine standpoint that we're utilizing it. We've also been tapping into it since I've been talking about video. Clearly, we've been playing around with it a lot with video so we can do more of those. And in those cases, some of them are marketing level readiness type videos. A lot of the ones we're using AI for are more for field enablement. So explainer videos and different things that the field of salespeople, AEs, CS people need. That's really where I never had the budget to be able to create those.

12:05But now someone in my product marketing team can crank out four or five explainer videos really just by understanding the product and the narrative. Yeah. And using the right prompts, right? That's what I mean. You're exactly right. I think, you know, over the next few years, we're going to see that become a skill that is going to be a must, you know, really in every department. But for marketers, being an, you know, being a great prompt engineer is going to be a big deal. Yeah. God, I don't even know if that's an actual title, but you might have just coined a new title because prompt engineer.

12:39Possibly. Yeah. We'll make sure you get the residuals for that. Good to know. So another thing that's always top of mind, I say always like AI now, but one thing that's never going away, whether it's B2B, B2C, whatever, is customer experience. And you use this term. I don't think I've ever heard this term conversation intelligence. Elaborate on what that term, how do you define it? And then we'll get a little deeper into it. Absolutely. So I'll start with. So first and foremost, call miner, you know, I introduced you. You introduced me earlier. CoalMiner is squarely in the conversation intelligence industry.

13:14And it is an actual industry. We've had the, I guess, the great benefit. Forrester Wave has defined it as conversation intelligence, etc. But we've been the only player in this space that has been a leader in the Forrester Wave for conversation intelligence multiple times now. So some excellent competitors that we're in there with. So conversation intelligence, when you think about customer experience, most CX leaders, what that really truly means is surveys. So in terms of when they think about how they measure CX, it's almost entirely through surveys. And that's a very legacy CX mindset towards how we measure things.

13:52Because surveys, that's solicited feedback. Think of every time you've ever answered a survey. And you're probably either you did it because you were really mad at that brand, or you were extremely happy about them. It's so very polarizing as well as has a low response rate. What's missing from that is the millions of other interactions a company has through their contact centers, through the interactions that they may have with their chatbots on the website, etc. All that unsolicited data is what's being missed. So conversation intelligence taps into all forms of data, surveys, but also every phone call, chat, etc.

14:32It uses artificial intelligence to then analyze all of that and deliver back real-time guidance to the customer service agent. It delivers back a bevy of insights that can be spread across the organization from those millions of interactions. A better gauge on emotion and sentiment than a survey can do. So what our platform does is ingest all of that. Artificial intelligence analyzes all of it. And then on the output side, it's giving guidance to customer service agents. It's giving insights to various leaders across the organization. The last part of our platform is essentially us entering the legacy CX players space.

15:13And we this year have launched essentially our take on surveys, which is more of an analytics powered version of those surveys. We call it outreach. And also last week, we announced that we acquired a company called Vocals out of the Czech Republic. And Vocals is a voice agent. So AI voice agents, as well as they have live translate. So the joint value proposition there is if you take those things and you put it on the most powerful interactions analytics engine, you're going to have a much more powerful survey outreach effort, as well as your voice agents, your AI agents are going to be much more informed.

15:55Do you have, I don't mean to put you on the spot here, but do you have an example, whether at Calmar or other parts of your career, where something was uncovered during conversation in CX that led to something? Sure. Absolutely. I'll use, you know, it's, I think one of the biggest use cases is what I would label as product experience. So, you know, if you think about, if you are a, I need to get approval. If you're a large mobile phone company and you've got multiple contact centers, you've got all sorts of touch points where you're gathering this information, there is every single day, every hour, thousands of insights about your product because people are complaining about it or they're calling it because they have a problem with X, Y, and Z and they need it fixed.

16:43So at scale, on a weekly basis, a chief product officer is looking at a dashboard that's informed by our engine that's allowing them to understand really where they need to focus their product development roadmap. Same thing goes for a use case where it's more of the chief operating officer or chief customer officer. Let's stick with the large mobile phone. They're angry about billing or whatever the situations are. So from a services standpoint, same general concept. But these things happen essentially for large enterprise organizations, which is who we focus on. Nearly all of them have millions of interactions happening a day.

17:22And in many cases, so many insights are just being missed because they're not tapping into that data. But that's the best quick example I can think of. I'm sorry, I wasn't able to say the brand name. It's a very good catch. And we could have edited it out. So it's no more. No worries. I can hear my head of PR if I said the name yelling at me later. And legal and compliance. Yeah, everybody. Exactly. Of course. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got that subconscious filter. So very, very, very. Okay. I want to go back to brand. I know we talked about the difference from B2B and B2C, but I know you have strong thoughts, beliefs, et cetera, on why you think now more than ever, brand is important for B2B.

18:13Yeah. Well, first and foremost, I think Gen.AI has disrupted everything, not just marketing. It's not like AI had not been around for a while in most of our tech stacks. But really, the last two years and the pace of how it continues to improve is just lightning. So it's been really an experience at first a little bit scary. But now I think everybody's fully embracing it. But I think that is forcing B2B out of their comfort zone, which is that sort of classic B2B tech demand gen engine. which is what we were talking about before. So the reason I say it's forcing out of that comfort zone is because of Gen AI and how it's disrupting, let's just say search for a second, where you've got AI overviews.

18:57If you think of Google Gemini generating AI overviews, things that normally would have yielded great returns on investment with your classic demand gen engine, many of them are just not yielding anymore because Gen.ai has disrupted how buyers engage with us. So they're having to really step back and think about, okay, what's wrong with my engine? And a lot of what's missing and a lot of what is informing a lot of these LLMs are things that we normally would have thought of as brand work, which fell by the wayside in those engines. So I think it's forcing B2B to really start considering brand and some of those tactics a lot more, as well as how to better interweave what we would normally think of as brand into their demand gen type efforts, as opposed to demand gen being just purely direct response.

19:47You know, this is going to get me four leads for every one dollar that I spend. That type of mentality has to have emotion and messaging and brand fundamentals. We've woven into them. Yeah. When I hear brand, you know, my first reaction is top of funnel. Right. And it still is. It still is. But what's interesting now is what's informing a lot of the LLMs out there, whether it's Gemini, etc., is a lot of materials that are available on the internet that normally would have fallen into the brand bucket of investment. And I think that we are finding ourselves in a place where people are having to step back and be like, all right, really, I wasn't able to afford a lot of YouTube videos before.

20:31But now I'm noticing that Gemini sure does consider YouTube a massive source of information. Maybe I need to start making some AI videos that are at least high enough quality that we can start filling that up. And I need to shift money out of my classic display ad budget to start funding some of those. So I think these are some hard questions because for a lot of, let's say, B2B marketers that have been doing this for a while, you get to a playbook that's been yielding and it's very hard to walk away from that. Yeah. And I can appreciate that, but we are being forced to. And I just have the luxury of being someone who came from a brand world into the B2B world.

21:10It's funny you say from a playbook that's been working. Yeah. And whenever I hear that, very respectfully say back in so many words, yes, it's working. But do you realize it could be doing even better? Absolutely. I think I mean, I'm thankful that it's forcing us to us B2B marketers to, you know, start appreciating brand more and start thinking a little differently than how we have repeatedly. It is I could appreciate it is easy to get in that trap because your CFO wants to know how every single dollar. Most CFOs, I'm painting a broad description here because there are some CFOs that absolutely understand the value of brand, but I think most don't.

21:53And they understand that$1 should equal$4, whatever, in their model that they don't on a spreadsheet. So I think I can see why the demand gen engine worked for that type of relationship between the CMO and the CEO, CFO. But you do have to start thinking about some of the brand aspects, even if you're not spending it on out of home or big TV spots or anything like that, even to get to better messaging that has a hierarchy of brand level messaging and then product and promotional level messaging. I think you need to really embrace the fundamentals of emotion, positioning, differentiation and strong creative.

22:35Yeah. And it's hard. Like you said, I get it. If you've been, if you're a B2B marketer kind of set in your ways, and if you're a CFO of a B2B brand, you're set in your ways. And especially CFO wants to look at a spreadsheet and go, this is what we did. This is the ROI. It's not as easy at top of funnel to do that. We could have a whole other podcast on how to develop a great relationship with a CFO as a CMO. But I think to not go off down that rabbit hole, I think the best advice I would give to any CMO is embrace your CFO. Talk to them often and early. Don't just do the couple times a year budget check-ins.

23:17But make sure you're actually doing some tactful. don't placate them, but make sure you're educating them on what actually goes into a lot of the marketing aspects. Make sure you're educating them on the value of brand and that I may not be able to give you a direct line to this, but know that we're going to see some leading indicators that this investment is working in. In the past, I would have said organic search. So now I would say we're going to see some leading indicators in how often we show up in AI overviews. We're going to see some leading indicators in more brand mentions, you know, in our share of voice, et cetera, et cetera.

23:55Yep. Whether we want it or not. I mean, yeah. And, you know, I can't tell you how many dollars that return to us exactly. But I can tell you that that leads to the next level down, which is what, you know, our sales team wants, which is of course, which we all want. Exactly. Yes. Okay, as I end of every show, I end it with the random five. If you're not familiar, Eric, I just ask you five random questions for the listeners to get to know you as a person, all in the up and up. And if you're game, here we go. Absolutely. Number one, if someone shadowed you for a day, what would surprise them the most about how you work?

24:31I think if they shadowed me for a day, they would realize that I am the most productive between 6.30 a.m. and 9 a.m. So I do, I'm fairly routine based, but I do a 5.30 workout every morning, Monday through Friday, unless I'm sick or something. But when I get home, I have my coffee, but I get more done and I'm more productive. Like if I need to build a deck, it's happening between 6.30 and 9. Because once nine hits and I'm in meetings and by five, you know, my brains, my creative brain is mostly mush. So as one, I think we're around the same age. I'm 50, yeah. What do you do in the afternoons when the afternoon hits?

25:08I mean, honestly, there is a lot of meetings. So I'm able to deliver. It's really more of like when I say productive, I'm thinking about building a deck or when I need to put something together that's going to potentially be the creative brief for a campaign we're putting together. So I put a lot of that work into the morning because I know my brain is functioning the best and I'm the most creative at that point. Gotcha. Okay, next question. If your career had a soundtrack, what song would play during the credits oh gosh tough one i know um that is a tough one trying to think or is there a song that has a real impact for you just in general like probably uh this is gonna date me but you know it's i'm sure it's from the 90s so you you you either it's gonna be either grunge or it's gonna be rap one of the two i'm not sure.

25:59Those were my two biggest things in the 90s. Okay. So what are those two genres? Pretty much. Got it. Okay. Number three, what's something people often get wrong about you? Sorry, I think it was either mine or you. All I heard was what's something. What's something people often get wrong about you? So I'm originally from Texas. And because I don't have a really thick Texas accent, people wouldn't think that. But that's because father was in the military. It was in the army. And so we moved everywhere until I was about in middle school. And I guess accents don't kick in until after middle school, apparently.

26:36My y 'all does come out a lot more when I'm in Texas, but I've been in Boston for quite some time now. But yeah, roots are - I would have never known that. Yeah. No, there is a zero hint of an accent. Now, my wife, on the other hand, you can definitely tell she's from Texas. Got it. Next question. I'm really interested to hear this one. Is there a word or phrase you wish that we would retire from the business world forever? I would say let's loop back on that.

27:09There's so many. Oh, yeah. That's the first one that comes to mind because there's no looping. We never loop back. All right. Last question. When do you feel most like yourself? No titles, no roles, just you? Let's see. No titles, no roles. Probably when I say the team, the team could be cross-functional. It could be a team of marketing, product, etc. But when we're at the stage where we're kind of brainstorming and we haven't figured out the problem, we haven't figured out the solution to the problem yet of the core messaging for the campaign. We're just thinking strategically and creatively together.