How enterprise marketing is adopting the inbound playbook
And why the future stars of marketing are going to come out of this crisis
There are two reasons my podcast consumption has increased this last month: One, I’ve discovered a few really good ones; and two, they are great company when you are doing the dishes.
I do have a favourite, however. Databox’s John Bonini hosts this brilliant podcast called Ground Up where he interviews some of the best B2B marketers we know of. I love it, because it delves not only into tactics and strategies, but also into how some of these stellar careers were built. It’s great stuff.
And that’s where this begins. Yesterday, I listened to him talking to Patrick Shea, formerly of the partner marketing team at Hubspot, and now VP of Demand Gen for Cybereason.
In it, Bonini and Shea talked about the differences between SMB and Enterprise marketing, and how a lot of the inbound marketing playbook, usually deployed by SMB marketing teams, was now being adopted by enterprise marketing teams.
Or as John Bonini put it: Inbound (marketing)’s going enterprise.
The reason this struck me as important is that a lot of marketing’s best laid plans are being forced to change in these times. It certainly has forced me to reevaluate my strategies for Interview Mocha. My CEO Amit Mishra and I just had a conversation about Demand Gen, and how to start rethinking marketing priorities when budgets were low.
5 takeaways for enterprise marketing teams
The background is that I am an SMB marketer who’s now leading an enterprise marketing team, and I need to use whatever advantages I have. But that also means unlearning some of my instinctive SMB tactics, learning the enterprise playbook, and then combining and adapting the two so they work in the here and now.
I tried to write some of the advice I gathered from the podcast down, mostly for my own benefit, and so I understand them better.
In a time when some of the most effective parts of the enterprise playbook are being rendered useless, enterprise marketing is moving online. Field marketers are doing webinars and online demand gen activities. This shift is going to accelerate and companies which adapt better will have an advantage.
The playing field is now level for enterprises - large or mid-market. Creativity, coverage, and tactics are going to win in a landscape when everyone has the same real estate: what they own online. And what people improvise and come up with will be amazing.
The future stars of marketing are going to come out of this crisis.
In SMB marketing, there are a lot of things a marketer can do to speed up the discovery, adoption, and sale process, especially if the product is an immediate need. But even the best marketing team in enterprise is not going to take your sales cycle from 9 months to 4 months. That’s just not going to happen.
Which is why enterprise marketing needs to help your salesperson be interesting to the opportunity every week for the 6 months it will take to close the sale.
Connecting the offline to the online still remains the cool(est) part of enterprise marketing. People who are able to innovate on this on a larger scale can be the ones who really get ahead during this time.
Place a lot of emphasis on messaging and positioning. Get it right first. Don’t just fly out the door with half-baked campaigns. There is a great reward for this kind of diligence, patience, and thoughtfulness in enterprise marketing.
The podcast ends with a short, but super-valuable discussion on the several ways in which a marketing career can be built. Shea runs through the journey of how he became a full-stack marketer, and it’s barely a minute or so. But for marketers early in their careers, it’s priceless.
This became a starting point for a whole lot of discussions and thought this weekend, including with several other marketers I know, and though it robbed a ton of my Netflix-time, I don’t think I’m complaining.