The Big Levers of B2B Marketing

To achieve big objectives in B2B you need to pull on the Big Levers of Marketing. The ones that deliver maximum impact from modest resources. Here are three foundation-level ideas that have shaped my thinking. I come back to these ideas time after time. They each deliver usable insights in their own right. But they can also be combined in pairs. Or mixed in a mash-up of custom proportions to suit the job at hand. Enjoy.

Seen right from the very top, the challenges for B2B Marketing don’t actually change much year-on-year.

1.??? Improve the speed of response to evolving Customer needs.

2.??? Improve alignment between Marketing and Sales.

3.??? Achieve more output with constant resources.

The external imperative drives the internal focus; and both drive the process and productivity issues. All three are simultaneously a problem and an opportunity. It boils down to to getting more of the right stuff done. And spending less time and energy on the rest. How? Use the Big Levers of Marketing: thought tools that multiply your productive power.

Find the Multipliers

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I’ll move the world. Archimedes

At first glance, this statement seems to be about achieving a specific effect, but I think it reveals a lot more if you treat it as a comment about causes in general. “I shall move the world” is certainly an impressive claim. But the critical factor that Archimedes highlights is not the size of the object to be moved. Instead, it’s the length of the lever; and the location and stability of the fulcrum. He’s focusing on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’.

Reality Check

If Archimedes weighs 100 kg and wants to move the world 1 metre by using the moon as a fulcrum, the lever will have to be 609 quadrillion kilometres long.

At an average walking speed of 4.5 km/h it would take Archimedes 15.45 trillion years (without stopping) to get from his home in Greece to the end of the lever.

The first wobble (a movement of, say, 1cm) would be noticeable after walking along the lever for a mere 1.5446 trillion years.

If Archimedes can persuade Stephen Covey and Bertrand Russel to join him, they will achieve the first wobble in just 617.8 billion years.

Ah! The power of collaboration ...

Understand levers and you know how to create an effect. As in: “apply a small force here” and you get a “big effect there”. That’s the real power of levers. And major impact means multiples. Factors. Not quite lottery-ticket-winning returns. But most definitely orders of magnitude. Input = 1; output = 2. Or 10. Or 20. Or even more.

The word lever conjures up multiple options for ‘ways of doing’, too. Engineers classify levers in three groups according to their effectiveness. So my mind immediately conjures up images of see-saws, wheelbarrows and shovels. Several different ways to multiply the energy that a single person can apply to a challenge.

Now expand the principle that small forces, judiciously applied, can have huge impacts: turn the physical concept into a metaphor. And from there, the possibilities are endless. Wow. How do I apply that thinking to my marketing resources, processes, outputs?

When a ball, thrown high in the air, reaches the peak of its trajectory, it is weightless; at that precise moment, you can change its direction with the smallest of forces. And it’s at this point that the idea of levers itself can pivot - and transition into a completely different line of thought.

Methods like levers enable us to multiply the effect of limited resources. And if we combine methods creatively, we could solve pretty much any problem we choose. Which leads to a new thought: given that time is the most limited resource of all, the issue now becomes “how do we prioritise the challenges before us and select the one that will have the biggest impact?”

Change the Process

Every truly great breakthrough is a break with an old way of thinking Stephen Covey

My all-time favourite illustration of this line of thought is the ‘Red Bead Experiment’ invented by Edward Deming as a way to teach production engineers and managers the essentials of Quality Control. The experiment provides powerful insights for folks in Marketing and Sales, too.

Deming used this experiment to highlight the futility of an Old Way of Thinking: that you can improve the Quality of results by Management Edict. Simply defining a fresh target and expecting that results will follow is utter folly, said Deming. And yet this was how Quality programmes were often managed during the latter half of the last century. [See youtube video here] In some companies, it is the method HR still uses today, to decide who to keep and who to let go.

In the experiment, the production environment is represented by a container of a thousand small beads: 90% are white; 10% are red. You stir the contents of the container to make sure it is randomly mixed, then reach in and extract exactly 50 beads at a time using a purpose-built scoop. You make a note of the number of red beads on a score chart. Now return all the beads to the container. Stir the beads again. And repeat. Over and over again.

Presented as baldly as that, you can guess what happens. Individual counts of red beads in each sample will vary. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But over a period of time, the result will show an average of 10% red beads per sample. ‘Obviously’, you will say – and you’re right.

And yet, there are still some folks today who think that a survey response rate, an email click rate, or a sales conversion rate, is something that can be influenced by ‘motivating the staff’. It’s rubbish of course. These indicators are all effects, caused by the way the process is set up. If you want to reduce the percentage of red beads to 5% per sample extracted, there should be no more than 50 per 1.000 in the container to start with.

Clearly, you can’t hold the worker responsible for producing a 'poor result’ if the process is rigidly defined. So what’s the way forward, for managers? My opinion: make the worker responsible for the process. Give them the authority to use their knowledge and experience to come up with ways to improve the process, so that it can deliver better results. In this context, the Marketer is a process owner, prioritising the use of available resources for innovating processes, not just an operator.

Once that principle is understood, the follow-on is blindingly clear, too. Refining the parameters of an existing process will only ever provide a fractional improvement. If you’re serious about achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement in output, the only sensible approach is to re-design the process. And that means change.

Creating a breakthrough in Marketing is often a collaborative change management effort. You’ll need to build consensus with all the stakeholders: the people upstream who create your inputs; those who authorise the resources; the people who do the work; and the people downstream who use your outputs. It usually involves diagnosis, design, and delivery of a new process.

Shift the Focus

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. Bertrand Russell

If you enjoy problem solving, Marketing provides a never-ending source of challenges. For me, collecting tools, models and methods for problem solving is an ongoing passion. Some ways of questioning are like tin-openers; a single purpose tool with high frequency of use. Others are like Swiss army pocketknives – multi-kits with general applicability. And then there are the specialist tools which - like specialised service tools for vehicle engines – are invaluable in specific situations. The job is easy with them; almost impossible without.

The way you look at a problem has an enormous effect on how effectively you can solve it. Facing a problem? You might want to start by changing your perspective. If you’re standing – sit. If you’re up close – stand back and get some distance. Try the view from the other side. Shift from supplier to customer view. From seller to buyer view. From trainer to user view.

A faulty diagnosis about the size and shape of a problem will lead to an incorrect result. The eye sees a metal cylinder containing liquid and the brain registers ‘tin’. So the hand reaches for a can opener. That’s fine for the majority of cases. But drinks have ring-pulls. And when the tin contains paint, the best tool for levering off the lid is a screwdriver.

Some problems are inherently difficult, the way a cryptic crossword is difficult. Others require logic and perseverance, like a tough sudoku. Others are essentially easy, but made difficult by context – like that screw, deep down in the engine compartment that has rusted in place. The hardest part of that sort of problem is figuring out how to reach it.

Priorities can be a problem in their own right. Given that we have limited time and finite resources in Marketing, which issue should we tackle, and in which sequence?

There are times when the specific issues demand attention. For instance, the integration and automation of data flows between website and CRM. This is a classic example of an investment decision: the time and effort required does not directly generate Leads; but the process improvement definitely results in a more effective flow of information to Sales and a faster response to customer enquiries.

And then there are the issues with very broad applicability. For example, creating a new positioning that aligns messaging from four separate product divisions around a clearly defined set of target customers, to address a key industry segment that represents over 80% of global revenues.

So another way to look at a problem is to evaluate its importance. What do you gain by solving it? How does this issue rank in the grand scheme of things? How much time and effort will it take to solve it? Can we get all the stakeholders to agree? What’s the downside risk if you ignore it? (Insight from Sales: this 'status quo' thinking is the reason why between 20% and 40% of buying projects - depending on industry - never actually result in a contract.)

Questions about style can contribute useful parameters for solutions. Do we do any lasting damage if we use brute force and flatten it? Should we go over the top? Build a by-pass around it? If we share the problem, can we get advice or expertise from others? Where is the fulcrum? How do we insert the lever for greatest effect? If we collaborate, can we bring more resources to bear??

In the final analysis, the quality of an answer usually depends on the quality of a question. And the purpose of questions is to shift the focus. From ‘how to solve this problem?’ to ‘how to describe this problem so that it can be solved?’

What ideas work for you?

Contact

I'm Andrew from Ansaco Marketing Consulting. I help marketing directors at leading international B2B companies to align strategies, improve processes, and overcome marketing roadblocks.

Want to explore the potential for collaboration? Just send me a message.