Linda Fanaras: 0:00

Welcome to the B2B Brand180 Podcast, where we’ll discuss branding and marketing strategies for your business. Our goal today is to help you make transformative, innovative changes that can give you that 180 degree shift in your marketing efforts or complete reversals and brand strategies. I’m Linda Fanaras and I’m the owner of Millennium Agency, a branding and growth strategy firm and host of the B2B Brand180 Podcast. Today I am excited to bring in Dawn Grooters. She has 20 years of expertise and relationship driven B2B sales. She started as a successful field rep before mastering her own power of inside sales after the tragic loss of her son. She has developed a great hybrid sales approach that helps her sales colleagues really reach more customers, grow their business, and create that work life balance. That eliminates burnout. So great to have you here, Dawn. I’m super excited to have you share some of your insights. It looks like we’ll be covering maybe some of the differences and benefits of internal external sales teams and really how B2B companies can scale their Salesforce. So if you could just take a quick moment and introduce yourself. We could get started.

Dawn Grotters: 1:18

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me today, Linda. I’m excited to be here. So, yeah, so I’ve been in the gift and home industry for about over 20 years now, and, started as a buyer. So I worked for a chain of Hallmark stores and then I moved into the sales world, as a field rep going door to door for retailers, selling products in the territory that I had. I did that for about three years, and then, one of my children did pass away. And so when that happened, I knew I didn’t want to be out on the road anymore. And so the agency that I was working for had said, we’re thinking about starting inside sales. Do you wanna do that? So I thought, at least I can be at home with my other kids. I’ll go ahead and give that a try. And when that happened, they kind of gave me a computer, a phone, and a list to start calling. So I started calling those customers, made a lot of mistakes, got hung up on all the things that happened to us. But I started to kind of think, what if I could make these phone calls more like when I was in person, so what would I do in front of those customers that I could kind of translate over the phone? And so, I started asking a lot of questions, which led to building relationships, understanding the retailers more, and then, ending up writing a million dollars just over the phone every year. That’s so great. Yeah. So did that. And then now I have my own company where I help other businesses with inside sales and hybrid sales strategies.

Linda Fanaras: 2:47

That’s great, Dawn. That’s exciting to hear. So yeah, the door to door, those with the good old days, right? Yes. Yes. That definitely can’t happen today too often, but things have changed quite a bit. Yes. Awesome. Well we can get right into it. So I would love for you to explain, there’s a lot of differences there. A lot of things that have changed since. Do it going from door to door, making phone calls, having a Rolodex card and having tools like Salesforce and other strategies, and hard sales versus sort of a soft casual sale. What do you think the biggest differences and benefits are of, like, if you’re looking at an internal sales team versus maybe an external sales team? How do companies kind of get the best of both worlds with a scene like that?

Dawn Grotters: 3:29

Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s benefits to both, like inside sales and outside sales. I think there’s benefits to both. I think it’s more of a strategy. You need to look at more of like the customers that you’re working with and that you’re going after. What’s the best strategy for them? So there’s definitely customers that want an in-person appointment where they want to see the product, they wanna meet the salespeople, they wanna have those meetings. That’s very important for some of those customers. Then there’s some of those customers, and a lot of the times right now we’re facing that if you are a field rep where they’re like, I don’t want an appointment. I don’t have time to see you. want you to come into my store. I don’t want you to come into my business right now. I just don’t have time. And so that’s where more of an inside sales approach is better. They still need your help and your guidance and they still need for you to tell them like, here’s best sellers. Here’s maybe where the best products are or services that we need, but we wanna be able to share that information with them. But it could be through phone calls, it could be through virtual meetings, it could be through sending emails with like top sellers, things like that. So it’s using both of those approaches for the right customers. And so that takes a little strategy.’cause not right, everything is right for everyone, but it does take some figuring out where you need like those field reps, where you need those inside sales. And then even those field reps need more of those skills to be able to make the phone calls to use email appropriately. Right? Like all of those skills to kind of blend. And that’s kind of where that hybrid comes in, where you need to blend both strategies to really make a difference in your territory or, your book of customers that you work with. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah.

Linda Fanaras: 5:16

So you have a hybrid sales advantage that you speak about quite a bit. If you can break that down for me just so I can understand like why it’s so powerful with B2B firms in particular.

Dawn Grotters: 5:29

Yeah. So it is taking what I had learned as a field sales rep, adding the inside sales skills to it. So basically with that, what we do is we teach in hybrid sales advantage. It’s a training program. We teach you how to use the phone, know how to call your customers, what to say, what questions to ask. You know what that approach is. We have a four step phone call process that we make to help. Keep engagement with those customers that we’re calling. And so, we teach you that and those inside sales skills so you can leverage that, right? Then our second step in that process is we are looking at how do you blend both of those, so which customers do you go visit? We look at your list of customers and we say, which customers should I go visit? Which customers can I call, and which customers do? I maybe do both, where maybe I only visit them twice a year, and then I do phone calls in between. So we really look at how to strategize with your list of customers. Who belongs in which bucket, basically you say, okay, which bucket? So then we know how to approach each customer in the best way.

Linda Fanaras: 6:36

Yeah, that makes sense.

Dawn Grotters: 6:37

And then the third part of that process is we’re setting you up with a CRM. If you’re not using one now, you should be. And so how do you create that CRM and customize that CRM to fit your specific sales needs. Who should be inside sales? Who should be outside sales? And then who should be in as a hybrid customer? How do you set that up in your system? And then how do you leverage that system with the customer engagement data that happens through a CRM and knowing how to set up follow up tasks, all of those things. So you’re using that system to the best of your ability.

Linda Fanaras: 7:11

So when you’re looking at different types of prospective customers as an example, how would you break that up? So, if you were to handle Prospect A, certain way versus a Prospect B, can you give some examples to the audience on how that list may get? Split up, is it based on company size? Is it based on title?

Dawn Grotters: 7:28

If they have existing volume, that’s a sure tail sign. It’s a sure sign looking at the volume. So obviously your higher volume customers, you probably wanna have more of that in-person appointments with them. And then, some of the lower volume customers. That would be great to start with phone calls. If they came, if they said, Hey, we would love for you to come in and set up appointment with us, great. We can move them into a different bucket. But, we start by looking at volume. We look at the number of customers on your list, and then we look at kind of location. So if you are a field rep and a customer’s nine hours away from you and they don’t do quite as much volume, does it make sense for you to put them in a outside sales bucket where you wouldn’t be able to really, that’s not a great use of your time. Maybe it’s once or twice a year you go visit them, but not four times a year. So we look at some major factors in that to say these are the right places to go, but then obviously it’s communication with those customers to see how they want to be worked with and if they, you could have a top volume customer that doesn’t even want you to come into the store. True. So we wanna find out, you know, that’s where we start, is looking at some of those factors, but then we obviously work with the way the customer wants to work.

Linda Fanaras: 8:47

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So there must be some real key foundational pieces that have to be in place before you decide, okay, we’re gonna add reps, we’re gonna use an outside firm. What are like some of the different items or pieces that need to be in place before you start making those calls or doing outreach or email marketing or whatever the strategy may be?

Dawn Grotters: 9:09

Yeah, so you definitely wanna be ready for it. You don’t wanna just start and not have resources and assets in place. So if you have either digital or a hard copy catalogs. Those are important for field and inside sales reps. Making sure you have, price lists if that’s what you need if it we’re talking product here. But if you have price lists, if you have, bestseller lists, if you have, other like starter packs. You know, so sometimes like a starter pack or a bestseller pack, those are great things to have. You wanna have all of those kind of assets ready. Okay. Whether that it’s for field or whether it’s for inside sales, because they’re gonna both need those. So you wanna start with that? And then again, it’s looking at the customer and if there’s anything else that they need. And then also making sure your CRM is set up correctly too, because you wanna keep track of all of that information with the customers as well.

Linda Fanaras: 10:08

So if you were to look, if you were to compare field sales to inside sales, can you give me a couple examples or maybe a few steps that our audience should actually take to get each one set up properly?

Dawn Grotters: 10:19

Yeah. So if you look at field sales, if you are a product based company And you haven’t ever had sales reps. Starting small is always the best policy. Maybe you find a couple independent reps in channels that your customer, you know, you would have great customers. So maybe it’s spas if you have a wonderful beauty care line and you start with spas, maybe you look for some independent reps that sell into.

Linda Fanaras: 10:47

Okay.

Dawn Grotters: 10:47

Get that, get their feedback on what’s working, what’s not working, what kind of displays you need to have, all of those kind of things. So start small with a couple independent reps and make sure you have the inventory to support whatever they’re going to sell. So I would say that’s where you would start with. Field reps Okay. For inside sales reps. Again, you wanna have all of your things, all of your resources available to those inside sales reps, but they’re gonna be making phone calls, so what are the questions that you want answered? So you would know the right products to direct to them? Because on a phone call you don’t have a lot of time, so what are those few questions that you need to know? You know, if it’s, let’s take spas again. I’m calling into spas. I would wanna know, like, do you have a go-to face care line that you already work with. And then you would wanna say, well, does it include an exfoliator? Do you have moisturizing? Do you have sunscreen to go in that line? And then based on those questions, you can say, okay, well maybe you don’t have a makeup line to go with that. Right. This would be a great makeup line to introduce to them. And then having a couple key selling points for them to share. Like, did you know this is gluten-free? I didn’t know that was such a big thing, but it is, we don’t test on animals, so what are the three things that you would want to portray to a customer on that phone call? So again, having that information ready for whether it’s field or inside sales is gonna be very important. Whatever direction you decide to go.

Linda Fanaras: 12:18

Yeah, that makes sense. At least getting some of those initial steps in place. I think for the audience to start small with maybe these one-off ideas, I think it’s a great opportunity for them to take advantage of that. Yeah. So I’m sure a lot of businesses make sense. They drop the ball, you start out all excited. I know companies will bring in these CRM systems, get them started, then they fall by the wayside and depends who’s there and who’s not. And everybody has their products that they like or dislike. So where do you see companies really dropping the ball?

Dawn Grotters: 12:52

I would say what with the, like a CRM or anything that they’re doing, it’s the follow up. That’s where I think the ball gets dropped a lot. Maybe they call a customer if they’re gonna do inside sales and they have it in their CRM, they call them three times and they’re like. Right. They’re not answering. They’re not responding and then they just let it go. Well, typically it takes like six to eight phone calls to be able to get a customer to be engaged. Right. And so you have to push past that. You have to follow up, you know, more. I’m not saying follow up every other day. That’s not a great cadence, but. Right. What, like you would continually keep that customer in your funnel and follow up with them until you did get a no, and then maybe you would wait a little bit longer after that. Right. So I would say the follow up, whether it’s emails, whether it’s phone calls, whether it’s follow up to a meeting that you had and you didn’t, the follow up that happens. That’s where the ball gets dropped the most, and the CRM can help you with that if you schedule the tasks and then you complete them. That’s a big part. Completing those tasks.

Linda Fanaras: 13:56

That makes sense. Yeah. And I think that’s probably the hard part is really using that system in a way that is consistent because companies, or if it’s a B2B, other companies may not buy exactly when you wanna sell. But six months from now, if you have those reminders set. That might be the time where you’re actually, making a connection or they’re ready to make a change, and that, that takes time. It just takes time. And then it’s all about timing and need. Yes, absolutely. Awesome. So, as far as marketing and sales working together and sort of the speed of brief strategy, how do you see them best working together?

Dawn Grotters: 14:33

Yeah, so marketing I think is really important for providing those resources, right? The catalogs, the digital assets that they would need best sellers. Marketing is really important in that, but then even if they’re sending out like marketing emails to customers. When we send those out as a brand, you can send those out and then you get feedback. Who’s opened? Who’s clicked on that? Well, a lot of times. Companies don’t do anything with that, right? They’re like, oh, I had a 20% click rate. Well, that’s a great click rate, but if you don’t do anything with that, then it doesn’t matter. Right? Right. And so using that, to be able to say, Hey, maybe I should call this customer that had clicked on that, and this would maybe be a great place to start, that these customers have all clicked on it. They’ve, shown, expressed some kind of interest. Maybe I should call them and see what they were interested in. You know, we sent out this email, maybe it was some top selling products. Hey, what, caught your eye with that email? and then getting some feedback from them. And you could actually turn that into a sale just by using that marketing information. And then following up with those customers and generating sales from that.

Linda Fanaras: 15:41

Yeah. That makes complete sense. Are there any other strategies or insights that you’d like to share with the audience today?

Dawn Grotters: 15:47

Yeah, I really think that, it’s really important to take what you have. Whether the products and all that you have and continually just work with your sales team and your customers to figure out what is the best direction. Right. I think right now in the way things are, in the economy and stuff, we really have to level up on what we’re good at. Yeah. And so what are those customers saying that they’re like, I want more of? We’ve been working with a client and we’ve been calling some of their customers for them, and the customers were telling us that, we purchased this more in the fourth quarter, more in the fourth quarter. So then that, client went to a trade show and they said, they were hearing from the customers. We purchase your line more in the fourth quarter. Okay. We’ll take that information then and say, if you don’t wanna just be purchased in the fourth quarter, what kind of products can we innovate and create that would be purchased, in other times of the year, not just the fourth quarter. Right? So taking that information from those customers and leveling up on it to really expand your line or grow your line or be innovative in your line to figure out the best way to do that.

Linda Fanaras: 16:57

Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of strategies like that, that are out there that companies don’t really take advantage of.

Dawn Grotters: 17:02

Yeah.

Linda Fanaras: 17:03

And this is that opportunity. Whether it’s partnerships or like you said, tactics that maybe they just haven’t really looked at. Yeah. I think it’s a good opportunity especially to reach out and really get insight. Yeah. No, that’s great. Any other things that you’d love to share or.

Dawn Grotters: 17:18

Yeah, no, I, would love to work, I love working with B2B companies and so if anybody’s interested in learning more about hybrid sales or hybrid sales advantage, or how we do inside sales, you can always book a connect call with me, and I’m happy to talk through where you’re at and if we would be a good fit for you.

Linda Fanaras: 17:36

Great. Yeah, if you could let the audience know how they can get in touch with you specifically, that would be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Dawn Grotters: 17:43

So, you can go to my website, brokenvesselsales.com and then, there you can connect with me and then we can schedule that call and kind of talk through. I do like phone calls, so it’s a good time for me to learn more about you and you can learn a little bit more about me, and then figure out the best foot forward. So definitely there. And then I’m also on LinkedIn, Dawn Grooters there and then also on Instagram @dawn_grooters.

Linda Fanaras: 18:08

That’s, fantastic. Awesome. Well, thank you Dawn for coming in today and joining us for the B2B Brand180 Podcast. And, it’s great to have your insights around sales and marketing and really some steps to get the process going in a systematic way to help companies grow. So for our audience, I just wanna thank you for joining me today and listening in. If you need to get in touch with Dawn, you can go to brokenvesselsales.com. If you’d like to reach me directly, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or visit lindafanaras.com. Thanks so much and have a great day. Thank you.

Linda Fanaras: 0:00

Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast where we’ll discuss branding and marketing tools for business. My goal here today is to provide you with some transformative and innovative approaches that can help you make 180 degree shift in your marketing. So I’m Linda Fanaras and the owner of Millennium Agency, a branding and growth strategy firm, and host a B2B Brand180 podcast, and I’m bringing in Justin Rashidi. He’s the founder of SeedX. I’m super excited to talk to him. He has a digital marketing firm. He takes a real unique and scientific approach to marketing. He comes from a science and engineering background, and he has an analytical mindset, which works out great when it comes to marketing, and that seems to be his backbone to his success. Applying these methods to his success. So, welcome Justin. I’d love for you to take a couple minutes and tell the audience about yourself.

Justin Rashidi: 0:52

Hello, my name’s Justin, as Linda said at SeedX. I lead basically data science and then strategy. And so what that means is we work with organizations that help them better understand, how to structure their data, how to understand attribution, how to understand reporting, and ultimately how to activate that data into marketing channels.

Linda Fanaras: 1:11

That’s perfect. So today you’ll better understand, he’ll show you how to use the brains built-in triggers to get more people to say yes to your ideas. Really taking a look at some of the logical components of this and tying it back into, the emotion to really drive those purchasing decisions. And you’ll just learned a little bit more about how to get more people to say yes. So let’s talk about building an ICP. It’s your Ideal Customer Profile. And I think what’s key is maybe trying to figure out when you are building out these campaigns, is that an important factor?

Justin Rashidi: 1:44

Yeah, of course. yeah. Yeah. I mean, the answer is yes, it’s very important. Yeah. Can you, I mean, from a messaging standpoint to make sure that I, mean, yeah. I think brand positioning in the market and how the consumers see your brand in the market compared to others, and what that messaging is, actually quite important. Especially if you’re in a saturated field or there’s dominant players and you’re an up and coming player and you really need to differentiate yourself from, the established market.

Linda Fanaras: 2:13

Yeah, that’s great. So when you’re talking about taking a scientific approach to marketing, I know marketing is creativity and science all pulled together. When you speak about that, what do you mean exactly?

Justin Rashidi: 2:23

For us, what it means is, from a B2B perspective, it’s actually being able to track how deals are being created and what campaigns are actually generating those. So a lot of organizations they rely on in platform metrics in order to help inform them or they rely on impressions, click through rates and metrics that often aren’t always indicative of business growth. We see a lot of organizations that they feel like we’re, doing paid social, we’re doing paid search, we’re doing LinkedIn, we’re doing organic, we’re doing, whatever activity. And all those channels look good when they’re, everyone’s reporting all the teams report. But the leadership team feels the opposite, that like they’re not actually growing and it’s usually because there’s a disconnect between what’s actually functioning correctly and driving growth and what’s being reported. And so from us, that’s usually what it means. It’s like trying to connect the whole cycle so that way marketing activities actually drive business growth.

Linda Fanaras: 3:16

Right? Because there are so many different strategies and although there seems to be a lot of activity during one, from one strategy, maybe it’s just not really driving growth. So do you have any examples of maybe situation where that’s occurred, like maybe trying different tactics where you, one looks like it’s working really great, but it’s not, and you’ve been able to maybe uncover something that makes more sense.

Justin Rashidi: 3:37

Yeah, I mean, we see this every day. This one is like as of last week, we were just onboarding a new customer. They’re running paid social, they’re spending about 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a month, and they view that certain campaigns that intuitively they feel that these campaigns are, bringing in leads and, the platform metrics show that these campaigns are doing well. What we did though is we ended up tracking the leads from these campaigns all the way to what actually closed as customers. And what we actually uncovered was that the campaigns that seemed to be doing so, so were actually the ones that were generating the new business. And the ones that they thought that were doing so great, were not actually generating the new business. And that’s interesting. This can based off of Yeah. Creative or audience targeting. Right. And so we see this quite a bit, that there’s a disconnect between the platform metrics and then what actually is generating book calls or actual deals.

Linda Fanaras: 4:28

Yeah. Leads. Yeah. So how do you look at that? Because from a digital marketing perspective, if that’s what your focus is, you’ve gotta look at the messaging, you’ve gotta look at the creative, you’ve gotta look at how you’re setting up your campaigns. You’ve gotta look at the ROI. Are there certain things that you think your customer or a marketer should prioritize when they start to look at these campaigns?

Justin Rashidi: 4:48

Start to prioritize. In my personal opinion, I think the best thing to prioritize is actually understanding how you are connecting to the end result that the business wants to achieve. And I think that requires usually for marketers to go beyond like a typical understanding of marketing and actually be more of a business mind. And so I think people who I really respected marketing, they’re actually business leaders first and functional specialists. Second, and so they’re taking into account the growth or the direction of the business, and then they’re applying their function to it in a successful manner. I think that is actually like the approach I usually would recommend people to think about from a marketing perspective.

Linda Fanaras: 5:28

Yeah. So you’ve, worked with a lot of large size companies. What do you think kind of differentiates what you guys do versus other companies?

Justin Rashidi: 5:35

Every company at different stage just has different types of problems, right? And so generally, yeah, like if we’re dealing with a smaller company, usually they don’t even know what metrics to be tracking, how they should be thinking about those metrics. and then you get to like slightly larger where they kind of are tracking it, but it’s not great. And then you get to like really large organizations where they have so much data, they don’t actually know how to stitch it together and make. A story out of what is actually happening.

Linda Fanaras: 6:01

Yeah. Are there different approaches that you use that maybe other digital firms don’t use? I mean, there’s so many different things to choose from out there, and I think that might be part of the challenge for our clients that are out there trying to pick a medium and trying to figure out what strategy to use. Do you have any insight on that?

Justin Rashidi: 6:19

I mean, the answer is no. Every company that we have worked with, or I’ve interacted with the channels that are successful for them, sometimes they’re similar, but oftentimes you’ll find, oh, Google search works great here and horrible for this company. Yeah, LinkedIn is great here and good for this company. Event marketing in person marketing, right outbound. Can be actually vary depending on the market, like the space. And I think this kind of ties back to your first question of like, messaging IP and right. Do you believe that your customer will actually convert from that specific marketing activity? Right? And so there’s some obvious ones like, you know, you probably don’t need to post that much on TikTok if you’re like targeting like this very specific B2B buyer. But I think then the more narrow one is actually, there are specific industries and markets that outreach doesn’t work as successfully. And actually Google, like, you know, SEO generative engine now and stuff are actually much more successful for their companies. And yeah, I think people always wanna take default advice. Right. They’re like, oh, I hear LinkedIn’s good. So we should be on LinkedIn and Yeah. Oh, I hear this is great. Right. So we should be there and usually I’m just like, it could be true or could not be true. Right? Like, you really have to actually test and run a campaign pretty rigorously to remove the idea that whether it’ll be successful or not successful.

Linda Fanaras: 7:34

Yeah. You have to run it for a while, is what you’re saying.

Justin Rashidi: 7:36

I think the problem is that, there’s so many problems in marketing,

Linda Fanaras: 7:39

but

Justin Rashidi: 7:41

in terms of like channel testing, I think, I’ve seen two problems where the one that I see quite often is that we believe that this channel, it could be successful for you, but it was previously ran in a way where like the messaging wasn’t correct. Our audience target wasn’t correct. You were sending to like a landing page that like didn’t actually make sense for like this customer, right? And so the organization believes, oh, this channel doesn’t work for us. In actuality, like you didn’t really run the campaign that well. Right. And so that gets into do you believe that you ran the campaign successfully? And if so, then does that channel not work for you? It’s usually the questions that people have to debate.

Linda Fanaras: 8:19

Right. And that’s actually a great point. So if you were to kind of back this up for our audience a little bit, and like I said earlier, like I was asking you earlier about the ICP, I feel like there’s some certain steps that need to be taken, like. Who are you trying to go after? What are you trying to achieve? What do you need to say? How are you positioning yourself in the market? You know, is there something downloadable? Is there a landing page? What are the different mediums that make sense for your market? Do you have a certain basic process? The questions that you would ask around that, that you think would make sense for a marketer to know? Like maybe, and those might be the questions, I’m not sure. But, just from their perspective, if they had a takeaway and you said, well, you should definitely think about what your messaging is, number one, you better make sure that you’re targeting the right market. Number two, so maybe there’s some takeaways on that you could share.

Justin Rashidi: 9:05

I agree with all of those. I, think the only one that I would additionally add is where in the funnel are you expecting this person to be? Right? And so when you can have great messaging for your ideal customer, but are you really trying to push them to get on a demo and like you actually really need to be warming them up. They need to actually get more information about you. They should be watching a video or, like you’re saying, downloading a PDF or a lead magnet of some sort. I think a lot of companies, they treat marketing like sales, which is like this eager beaver, like, oh, they’re gonna close right away. And good marketing in my opinion. Like Al also has like the idea that you are reaching like your entire addressable market, not just like the small percentage of people who are in market. And I think besides what you’re talking about with messaging landing page, it’s like. Is this campaign reaching the top of the funnel and truly awareness? Is it middle of the funnel people who are kind of like in the search phase? Or is it people who are really understanding like the product space and they’re looking to get a solution soon? And I think that’s the last, and that usually ties into how you build messaging out too.

Linda Fanaras: 10:09

Right. Now, that makes sense. What’s your thought process, because I keep hearing contradictory data on like landing pages versus creating the call to action within the existing website. Do you have any thoughts and feedback on that, or does it vary?

Justin Rashidi: 10:21

Yeah, it varies obviously. So standard, typical advice is that landing pages perform better than a website page, but my personal experience has not proven that to be content as true. Yeah. So I find in my personal, like me as an individual too. I like, being able to discover all the information. I think that this idea of squeeze pages, and maybe this is like pretty anti, what people generally say is people believe that there’s no attention span and people will just need to see one form and they’ll submit it. Right. And I have never really had that happen. I usually, it’s like for us, what I see work is video content, long form articles explaining things, different types of like demos or like interactive tools. And then they can browse the website and then submit the form on the website. And usually from quality standpoint, you don’t wanna be like tricking a bunch of people to try to submit the form. It’s like you wanna get people who are actually interested in like buying. And so, right. I don’t know. Do you have a different opinion? Is your experience different?

Linda Fanaras: 11:24

you know, I could be totally wrong, but I always felt like if you could build a contact us on the top of an existing website page, so let’s say you’re driving them to a specific page within the website that you’re actually trying to market. If you can create a sticky head. Yeah, a sticky header or something on the top. That would be your best bet. I mean, we’ve done landing pages before and we haven’t had the best luck with that. Or at least if we do them, we need to make sure that the contact us form is above the fold. Right? So there’s some key things like takeaway. Some people will build out landing pages and the contact us is at the bottom of the page. It’s like, to your point, no attention span. So you’ve gotta figure all that into play as well. So I’m not sure if you’ve also experienced that.

Justin Rashidi: 12:05

Yeah, I don’t know. I, just see, when we’re looking at like time on page and these different types of things, like I see people spend more. If we’re thinking about what is a quality touchpoint, isn’t it someone who’s interacting for a longer period of time? Like visiting more things, reading like more content. And so I just always have yelling the, problem with landing pages is they’re supposed to purposely not guide you anywhere, right? Like you’re supposed to just be here and it’s like a yes no. Right?

Linda Fanaras: 12:30

Right.

Justin Rashidi: 12:30

And so does that lower like the audience trust, like when you’re trying to like force this behavior? And I think consumers are smarter.

Linda Fanaras: 12:39

Yeah.

Justin Rashidi: 12:40

On the front end Yeah. And so from like a landing page perspective, again, the answer though is test, right? Like, you should test a landing page. Yeah. Right? You should test like web, a website and just test them both. So that’s, but I’ve tested it a lot against a lot of campaigns and unless we’re just really bad at landing pages, which could be true the results that we generally see is that, yeah, like having some type of easy access form where they can peruse and get information and then submit whenever they want performance better.

Linda Fanaras: 13:06

Yeah, but to your point, I think if they’re on the website, they can get as much more, you know, they can get a lot more information that they want. Otherwise, like they may get a landing page and then they have to figure out where the website is and they may toggle back and forth and by that time they’re sick of it. So I think, to your point, that makes sense. So are there any other strategies or tactics that you think would be valuable to share that you think, when you talk about attribution and things like that and the analytics component and tying that into the creativity, can you speak a little bit about that? Maybe things that you found really work well or don’t work?

Justin Rashidi: 13:37

For us depending on the business side, there’s two things that we’re usually like talking about. It’s like how you’re setting up the CRM or how you’re like interacting with like a data warehouse. And so, for most companies, they aren’t understanding that their CRM should actually help them a lot with attribution.

Linda Fanaras: 13:55

Yep.

Justin Rashidi: 13:55

And so, the advice is really like, you should understand your CRM probably better than you think you should under understand your CRM. And it should be a more impactful tool in your organization than, if you have a CRM, it’s just sitting there, not doing much. Then like you’re probably actually not running your marketing campaigns to the best effect because

Linda Fanaras: 14:13

Right, right. Yeah.

Justin Rashidi: 14:15

Most attribution tracking whether you’re using HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics. Right. I have a preference for HubSpot because I like their attribution. Like that’s built in. Yeah. But all of them can do attribution tracking with different types of setups, but a lot of people don’t. Know that, they should be like utilizing it in that way. They think about it from tracking deals and these things, right. But if you’re leveraging your CRM correctly in marketing, it actually is like your major hub for attribution tracking.

Linda Fanaras: 14:44

Can you explain to the audience what attribution tracking is?

Justin Rashidi: 14:48

Yeah. So attribution tracking is, say we’re running an ad on LinkedIn, they click this ad. We should be able to understand what was the campaign, what was the audience, what was the creative that actually got that person to the website and, made them convert into a contact. Additionally, attribution should be multi-touch, right? So if you, yes, you should understand. Okay. Like their first touch was this. Right? So what’s driving a first touch point and then what’s driving a second touch point? Right. And so some of the big ones, and, no, I’ll add one more on that is we see where, okay, like the first touch point was a branded search. And well, like that’s only because it was like click based. What actually happened was there, there was another impression somewhere in that like customer journey that actually made them go to Google and track that. Right. And so another part of attribution is we also like self-reported attribution. So how did you hear about us? And then we like to understand basically, what do we see in the CRM from these attribution touchpoints? What do we see in the marketing platforms? Like what it’s attributing, right. What are self-reporting? How does that reflect against. These things. And all of it’s to just help drive better understanding of what is effective.

Linda Fanaras: 15:57

Yeah. What’s working and what’s not. So you can double down on what’s working. Yep. Awesome. No, that’s great. That’s great. so I think that’s been great. Thank you so much, Justin. Are there any other key factors that you think would be helpful to our audience that we haven’t covered today?

Justin Rashidi: 16:12

Ooh, in general

Linda Fanaras: 16:14

trick question. Huh.

Justin Rashidi: 16:17

Yeah, I don’t know. I was gonna say, one of the ones that I think I have been talking to organizations more about, is getting off of online and actually like being in person.

Linda Fanaras: 16:29

Okay. Yeah.

Justin Rashidi: 16:30

Like, wow.

Linda Fanaras: 16:31

that’s interesting. Okay.

Justin Rashidi: 16:33

Yeah. that, that, that’s like the, I mean, I believe a lot, obviously I do a lot of online marketing, so I believe. But I’ve seen in-person events just really outcompete, like when you think about like the investment, like this investment of $40,000 or something, right? Yeah. And if you took the same investment and put it into an online channel. But a lot of times we do see that in-person events actually will outperform, online campaigns. Right. And so, yeah, I think from like a general business building perspective, I think that people online feels easy. But maybe it’s, also getting competitive, right? And so I think thinking about your business and other ways outside of online marketing is actually important as well now.

Linda Fanaras: 17:16

Yeah, and I think, if you can double down and you can actually do online, let’s say, so you have a client going to a conference and you’re actually doing some geotargeting around a conference, and then you’re, actually going around to the conference areas, to the booths and doing introductions and things like that, so you’re just, you’re hitting them multiple times from different directions, which is always key to marketing anyway. So things like that I think make complete sense. And I, agree with you. I think there’s gonna be more of that. I think, digital can be challenging. I think it works great in a lot of instances, but some, it’s more difficult. But, yeah. No, absolutely. So that’s been great. So thank you so much, Justin. It’s been great to hear from you today. I appreciate all the insight that you gave to our audience. So I would love for you to share with everybody how they can get in touch with you and your agency.

Justin Rashidi: 18:02

Yeah, you can just email me at [email protected] if you are interested in having a conversation with us.

Linda Fanaras: 18:08

That’s awesome. All right, well thank you for listening into the B2B Brand180 podcast today. I hope you got some great digital marketing insight and you can take that, put that to work as soon as possible. If you need to get in touch with me, you can visit me at mill.agency or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you. And happy marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 0:00

Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast where we discuss branding and marketing tools for business. My goal today is to provide transformative, innovative approaches that can help you make a 180-degree shift in your marketing efforts or complete reversals in brand strategies. Hi, I am Linda Fanaras and I’m the owner of Millennium Agency, a branding and growth strategy firm, and the host of the B2B Brand180 podcast. Today I’m bringing in Chris Fox, founder of Ideas-Led Growth. Chris is focused on amplifying voices. He’s a ghost writer, mentor, does strategies, and he is skilled in developing messages that influence and inspire. Prior to his corporate world career, Chris taught literature and culture at the undergraduate and graduate level, and he holds a PhD in French literature from the John Hopkins University. So in this episode, you’ll learn a few things. You’ll better understand how to determine a unique selling proposition. Why is thought leadership still relevant in the world of B2B content and what are the best strategies or approaches companies can use to publish thought leaders? Those are just a couple of the topics that we’ll be covering today. So now with our conversation with Chris, welcome Chris. It’s great to have you here today.

Chris Fox: 1:23

Great, Linda. Thank you. I’m, I’m really looking forward to the conversation. And I guess, uh, since we’re on video, the audience has already met one of my best interns and we had a little animal visitor over my shoulder. That’s great. But, uh, I’ve, I’ve sent him off to go do some other tasks and we can, uh, focus on our conversation.

Linda Fanaras: 1:39

Fantastic. So we’ll just get started. So let me ask you, Chris, so how do you determine, how do you determine a value proposition and what is the actual process that goes with that?

Chris Fox: 1:51

Yeah, so I, I think that’s a great question because there, there’s a lot of topic and talk about this, this idea of generating a, a, a value proposition or, or a USP and. One of the ways that I like to work with clients is, is let’s kind of put all of that aside and take a further step back and use that as your starting point. And that step back is, and I, and I really believe this, I’ve seen this from very large B2B organizations that I’ve worked with that are established and they’ve been in business for decades to startups that have just gotten the ball rolling. There’s something really special that can anchor a USP. That is, I believe that any product or service is based on an idea about change. And what I mean by saying that is that business owners or product leaders just don’t spend all of the time and energy and all the intensity of developing a new product or a service unless they really believe that it’s going to do something better somehow. And so the first place to start on that USP is take a step back out of building mode and even take a step back out of marketing mode and think about, I am committing to this idea because I believe that a change is necessary in the world and it can be a very microscopic change. So I devote my business ideas led growth to changing the way financial institutions. Do their thought leadership. Now, if you look in the world around you, that’s not a really huge niche, but it works really, really well. And a lot of the clients that I work with, they’re developing a, a very specific B2B product to help hedge funds do their accounting or to help portfolio managers run their investments or these often very, very niche topics.

Chris Fox (2): 3:51

Mm-hmm.

Chris Fox: 3:52

But underneath that, the reason why they’re dedicating all this time and energy is because they believe. A, that something needs to be changed, and B, that they have a, a set of tools and approaches and solutions for making that change happen. So when I start with clients and when I would really talk to anyone about A USP, I always start there as put everything away for now, and let’s talk even on just an emotional level. Why do you care so much about this thing that you’re building? And that’s often the. The most valuable thing because everything else can be replicated in the market. But that underlying passion in that I have an idea for change and making something better is very difficult to replicate by any other company.

Linda Fanaras: 4:41

So when you go through the process or when a company determines what their unique selling proposition is, what is the next step for them? What do they do with that?

Chris Fox: 4:51

Yeah. So then I think that’s when it starts to break down into some areas that are a little bit more recognizable as traditional marketing or traditional strategy. So let’s say, I mean, it’s, it’s really easy to use my own example and I think it’s maybe more approachable than some of the very obscure institutional finance stuff that I do with clients. So I, so I will talk about my own business, but only as an example.’cause I, I think it will be helpful to listeners. So, you know, I, I, I started off with this idea. That I have about a better and more impactful way to do thought leadership in the financial industry. Right? So you take that, that’s my idea about change. And then I decompose that into, what does that mean strategically? It means I need to work with a solid mixture of. Top tier and established companies and startups because I have to understand the full cycle of innovation in the industry and it means I have to understand what marketing teams within these companies, or sometimes a smaller company, what the founders, how are they doing it now? Mm-hmm. Breaking it down into that sense of like, alright, so my strategy is a lot of these companies. Have internal writing teams that struggle to handle the very complicated and technical financial ideas, or they’ve worked with content agencies that are great at doing things like SEO content or ad copy or some of these other things, but they really struggle if you’re talking about something complex around regulation or. You look at like a hedge fund, and there are these real, these obscure financial instruments that they trade in. That’s what the product leaders want to talk about,

Linda Fanaras: 6:41

right? Marketers.

Chris Fox: 6:42

Marketers are great at marketing sometimes when you’re talking about a very technical field like fi, finance. Uh, early in my career, I had some experience with this in healthcare as well. The, the things that the people building the product or service care about and the things, the marketing care. Team cares about don’t always come together.

Chris Fox (2): 7:03

Right. So that

Chris Fox: 7:03

was another element of like, if I believe that’s the change, then break it down and figure out, well, I have to get inside that mix. I have to be able to step between the marketing team and some of the content agencies that they’ve been using to show, like when you’re doing the thought leadership, there’s a better and different way instead of like multiple and multiple drafts and. Executives and subject matter experts get frustrated. Oh, it’s still not right. It’s still not right. You’re not getting it. You’re not getting it. It’s because they don’t have that expertise. So what I’m really saying is because I understood the change that I wanted to create, then it was looking for those strategic opportunities. Like I have to position myself as a top tier strategic advisor to some of these large institutions. Now, my company is very small. I have eight. Team members. I’m sometimes dealing with companies that are 50, 60,000 employees. So the, the breaking down the USP into figuring out well how to get to be part of those conversations with my clients, I think that kind of model works really well for other businesses too, where once you know what change you want, you have to figure out, well. Who delivers that change? How? How are things working now and how can I intervene and create some space for myself in there that then I start to build up the credibility. My, my industry is very word of mouth based, so my strategy from a marketing perspective as well, now I have to create all that word of mouth through relationships, through client work, all of those different aspects, right? And so that’s what I mean about how you start to break it down into. Pieces, like, okay, if I say I want to change the world of thought leadership, you have to break it down to say, okay, well, what that means is I have to be in the conversation when they’re doing the planning around their product launches. And in order to do that, I need to know these people and have them aware of what I offer. And in order for them to be aware of what I offer, I have to, I have to run a certain set of marketing campaigns that gets that messages out there. And so that’s really what I mean about like. It sounds like, oh, wow. Like you’re, you’re talking about these big philosophical things, but that’s what you do. You start to break it down into like, well, how would I do that? How would I get there? How would I get there? How would I get there? And by the time you’re like five or six levels down, you have some very specific and actionable things about, all right, well, that means I need to be. Posting on these four topics on LinkedIn on a weekly basis. And I have to make sure that I’m following these types of people with this profile.

Linda Fanaras: 9:45

Yeah, and I think, you know, from our audience’s perspective, to give them a little bit of context around this let’s take a technology firm as an example, or manufacturing firm. When they’re developing their unique selling proposition or their value proposition, whatever you wanna call it, they’re determining either some uniqueness or emotional factor. That really helps differentiate them in the market. So let’s say manufacturer’s making widgets while they have a certain process that they use that is so unique and different. And then all the other companies out there, they can stand on that and and use that to position themselves in the market. The beauty about something like that is they’re able to take that topic and if they can develop some strategy or abstract or concepting around how they can bring a subject matter into the market around that point, can help them elevate themselves as a thought leader. In the market. Yeah, and I think to your point, you know, if you take, you figure out, okay, how am I unique? like these companies, let’s say, let’s say our audience, for instance. For example, technology firms, manufacturers, whatever, architectural firms, how are they unique? Why are they different? It’s not like we’re great, but maybe they have a unique offering. Maybe they’re different mm-hmm. In some sort of capacity. But taking that differentiator and being able to connect it to some sort of. Thought leadership perspective, which then allows them to build content around that. And then to your point, build maybe LinkedIn posts around that, especially on the B2B side and being able to create a strategy or PR strategy to get some of the material published. Through publications or mm-hmm. Other, other ways to get their name out there, white papers. It could, that could, it could, it could be everything. It could be all of those. Some of those or all of those. So are there any strategies that companies or maybe a, an approach that companies can use to publish the work that they do? They have to have credentials, right? Can’t just jump up and be a thought leader. You can on the internet if you want, but to actually have some legs. You wanna make sure you have some cred credentials behind you. So can you speak to that a little bit?

Chris Fox: 12:00

Yeah. I like your example because it, it might show something a little unexpected. So if, if you’re in the manufacturing space and you have a better widget, maybe it’s a certain. Piece of a machine that runs on a production line, but you believe that your piece is, is faster to produce, that it has fewer failure rates, that it prevents the, the, the assembly line from stopping as often as it does, or it reduces accidents or, or some, like, all of these different things that are the benefit of your new widget or you, your new part. Or you’re adding a special guard that reduces injuries that that are, that are possible on a manufacturing line or something like that.

Chris Fox (2): 12:43

Mm-hmm.

Chris Fox: 12:44

Your thought leadership, like, yes, you want to talk about the benefits of your product, but you might also wanna help those manufacturers understand, well, what are the causes of breakdowns on their, on their manufacturing line? What are some of the causes around injury rates? And things like that where you could then say that becomes one of those things that you talk about. So you’re not just educating your customers about the thing that you make, but you’re helping them understand the problems that they have in a different and more fact-based way. Right? So like that example that, that we’re talking about with, you know, let’s say it’s something that improves the it, it lowers the error rate on. Different items that are being passed through, let’s say, like a stamping grid mm-hmm. On a manufacturing line. So one of the things that you might want to educate plant, plant executives about would be things like what causes those flaws and what are the costs of, you know, if, if you are turning out. One out of every 10,000 items needs to be rejected versus one out of every 4,000. That’s a pretty big improvement for something that has a lot of throughput. So just helping people understand the costs of letting things be the way they are today, so that you can then create that excitement and energy around the change that you’re delivering. So then you break it down and say, all right, well if this, you know, if we’ve done some research, maybe we’ve done some of our own studies, we have some case studies with our customers, uh, we have all these things, then you can block those out on a, on a, I mean, literally on a calendar and say, well, week by week we’re going to talk about these things. And, and it’s, you know, now it’s April, right? And our theme of the month is going to be, uh, reducing safety incidents. And we’re gonna do that by maybe publishing one longer article that really talks about the whole thing and 15 LinkedIn posts that highlight different aspects of it. And maybe a graphic that shows the data and you know, other social media if you’re using it. And if you have, if you have email capability, you’re gonna send that email out to all of your clients and prospects. Around this, you know, potentially new or unique way to look at manufacturing failures. And you make that your anchor, uh, that’s your anchor for the month or for the quarter. And everything you do is around that one topic, right? And then the next one you move on. So maybe one month or quarter, the theme is health and safety. The next month or quarter it’s error reduction.

Chris Fox (2): 15:30

Mm-hmm.

Chris Fox: 15:30

And you, you kind of go from there. But the thing is, and why I kind of went on a little bit at length about the whole, like what’s the idea for change? Is that if you don’t know your idea for change, you don’t really know which of those angles you should be talking about.

Linda Fanaras: 15:43

To just, I think summarize for the audience, I, what we’re really talking about today is companies should all have a unique selling proposition or a value proposition, and I am all about the perspective of having it from the emotional. Viewpoint, not just this is what we like, we have a great product because of X, Y, Z. That doesn’t really resonate with the markets like an emotional connection would using a value proposition. And once you determine what that is, maybe start to think about how you could craft some messaging around that and maybe an article or some sort of abstract that would help. Push that out into the marketplace. So to your point, Chris, if you had a company, they had a unique selling proposition, they did something differently, they were able to build out a thought leadership piece around that and use that as maybe a long form piece. And then from there, start to extrapolate that out into different marketing messages or strategies, being LinkedIn. You know, social media posts. It could even be an email where you’re allowing them to download this piece. Or it could be paid search or other strategies where you have it as gated community. So it’s a great way to figure out why are we different, number one, and what can we build around that that’s different? So I think that’s what we’re explaining to our listeners today. I’d love to ask you a couple, a few more. Questions real quick? Sure. I think it’s helpful. You know, I call’em rapid fire questions, which means that, you know, if you can kind of answer in a few few sentences, that’s, that’d be helpful.

Chris Fox (2): 17:18

Absolutely.

Linda Fanaras: 17:19

Keep them short and sweet and then, and then we can give our audience some great takeaways. So tell me what you think the number one communication mistake is from businesses.

Chris Fox: 17:29

The number one communication mistake for businesses is. Just going by the playbook with without, without really putting it in terms of those things that really matter the most to your business, whether it’s product, service, aftermarket service, how the, you build client relationships. If it’s not based on that, it’s just generic content and everyone else is already doing it.

Linda Fanaras: 17:54

And then what would you say the biggest communication strategy that gives businesses the biggest ROI.

Chris Fox: 17:59

I would say it’s focusing on narrow casting. I think any business at any point in time, there are maybe like 10 or 15 clients that would change the quarter or change the month in terms of sales. Figure out how to focus just on those instead of focusing on getting a hundred thousand impressions on your website. And maybe one or two of them are the right people. Right. Just focus on those right people and come up with ways to get things in their hands.

Linda Fanaras: 18:29

That’s great. And then do you have one piece of advice to A CEO or a CMO or a top marketing leader?

Chris Fox: 18:36

Yeah, the, the one piece of advice I would say is that we’re at a point right now, especially with. Artificial intelligence that like the wave is still coming. There’s this massive wave of content. Slop people aren’t even less, there’s already way too much content out there in the world. Imagine that a hundred or a thousand times these machines that can produce, produce it infinitely. The thing that I would say is you really need to emphasize a strategy like, you know, I’m describing it as a wave. You have to be a good surfer and figure out how to ride that wave and be on top of it, not swamped underneath it.

Linda Fanaras: 19:12

Well, that wraps it up. Well, thank you, Chris. I appreciate all of the valuable information you have shared with us today. Again, you are Chris Fox, the founder of Ideas-Led Growth. I would love for you to tell the audience how they can get in touch with you.

Chris Fox: 19:28

Great. Really, two, two things. I, I love connecting with people on LinkedIn, even if you’re not in my industry, if you’re just generally interested. Find me on LinkedIn, Christopher Fox, and if you’re watching the video, you’ll see my face on my LinkedIn profile. The other thing is our website, ideas led growth.com. You go to the website, there’s actually a sign up for a weekly newsletter. Uh, I write every week on sometimes very specific and sometimes more theoretical aspects of the whole process of marketing content, thought leadership, and how to get your message out there.

Linda Fanaras: 20:00

Great. Fantastic. Well thank you for listening to the B2B Brand 180 podcast today. And if you like what you heard, we’d love for you to share or subscribe, and if you wanna connect with me directly, you can go to LinkedIn or visit https://mill.agency/ or https://lindafanaras.com/. Thank you for listening today.

Linda Fanaras: 0:00

Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast, a place where we focus on transformative strategies and innovative approaches in B2B branding. Today you’ll learn how to make a 180-degree shift in your marketing efforts or actually complete reversals in your brand strategies. And I’m Linda Fanaras, And I am excited to bring in Dan Balcauski. And he is the Founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility. They are out of Austin, Texas, where we all love Austin, Texas. And he focuses on really helping those high volume B2B SaaS CEOs determine pricing and packaging and anything that they need to roll out new products. So Dan, it’s great to have you here. I’d like for you to take a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our audience and maybe share some insight.

Dan Balcauski: 0:50

Yeah. Well, very excited to be here. Thank you for hosting me, Linda. Well, you did a wonderful job in the intro. So as you mentioned, I run a consulting firm called product tranquility, focus on helping high volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new, as well as optimizing for existing products. So, I’ve been doing that for over. Six years now, which is a little bit amazing to think about. But yeah, I’ve been in my, I’ve been in the tech space, my entire career, sort of more on the building side and realized that the computers did not care how angry I got at it still would not run the code that I tried to have it run. So quickly realized that my interests and talents are better suited more focusing on how the. Products that we were building actually created value for customers and how that value turned to dollars and cents for the business. And then there’s kind of a long winding path from there to where I am today. But yeah, I have the honor and privilege today of helping a lot of SaaS CEOs and the leadership teams to make sure their products are profitable and successful and match the value that they provide their customers.

Linda Fanaras: 1:54

Yeah, that’s great. And SaaS is, I mean, there are lots of SaaS products out there. I think pricing can be a little challenging and however you bundle things up or packaging can also be challenging. And often people just don’t get it right or they’re not sure where to start. Maybe they’ll take a look at some competitors and make a best guess and go from there. But I’d love to hear from you. what do people really get wrong about pricing?

Dan Balcauski: 2:17

Yeah, well, there’s a long list, but I would say that. Most fundamental level, you know, when it comes to SaaS pricing, your most executives think that what you charge determines your success. In fact, who and how you charge determines your success. So said another way, if I was advising a team, I would say, spend most of your time on what the price tag goes on and little time. On what number goes on the price tag. So when I say I do pricing, a lot of folks immediately, you know, like, Oh, should our prices end in fives or nines or you know, those are, those are fun, interesting conversations, but they tend to be the least impactful. And you pointed it out sort of in the, in the premise of your question, which is a lot of the conversation is. You know, do we even have the right things bundled together? Because you know, we don’t, you know, really comes from an understanding of, of your customers and, and what they need and, and working sort of backwards from the customer. A lot of folks really start, especially a lot of technical teams, you know, you get companies that are founded by a couple of engineers that really enamored with the technology and start with the features and capabilities. And just like, Oh, well, well, this is a feature that it. It was really hard to build and so we should charge people for it. But while your customers don’t really care that it was hard for you to build, right, what job does it get done for them? But then also, right, as you go into the marketplace you don’t want to force, you know, it’s not only making sure that those. Features are land in the right spot, but they are able then to communicate that in a language that the customer understands. So, you know, you’re not using sort of feature language, but benefit and value language as well, because to be able to communicate to people that, Hey, like this is, you know, this package is for you. This is the benefits it gets without, you know, listing, you know, the 200 separate features that might be in your software product, which could be overwhelming as well.

Linda Fanaras: 4:08

Right. And I think, you know, interesting to your point there, because since there are a lot of SaaS products out there and you may have a couple of techies that are building something out that’s really cool and innovative and hasn’t really hit the market yet. But on the other hand is who are you selling to, which I think is what you were getting at. Okay. So who are you selling to? And then what are they interested in buying? And then what are they interested in paying? How do you go about figuring out, you know, I’m assuming you’re looking at the market, you’re looking at competitors, you’re looking at the features, you’re looking at the benefits, you’re looking at all the other things that may impact their pricing. But what is What is your, your tactic as far as how would you go into somebody to help them with this process?

Dan Balcauski: 4:47

Yeah, well, in lieu of teaching an eight week course to answer your question, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll kind of start at the high level, which is, you know, I’ve, I saw so many Challenges with companies trying to tackle this problem. And I noticed his patterns, the companies tend to face four big problems over and over again. They don’t really know who their customers are. They don’t understand how their product helps customers. You know, they can’t explain why their product is special differentiated. And they forget that pricing is more than just picking a number. So to help those problems, I created a model that I use all the time. I call it the services model. It stands for svcs or the four letters acronym segments value competition and strategy So just I kind of break that down the first three elements so segments. So who are your customers? You know, what do they you know, who are they and what do they want? Right. Because we often think, you know, get stuck on that element of just firmographics or demographics. Oh, this is a, this is an enterprise customer. It’s a small business customer, you know, it’s a college educated consumer. Right. But that doesn’t really tell me much about what they need and why they might make a different purchase decision. You know, next is value. Like, you know, how does your product help customers? Why is that important to them? C is your competition. Like what other choices do customers have? And then these First three elements considered sort of inputs to the pricing process because your pricing power ultimately comes from understanding the differentiated value that you create for a particular customer segment beyond the competitive alternatives that are built. So those three elements then filter down to the final piece, which is strategy. So like, how will you sell your product to the right customers in a way that effectively communicates why you’re different and why you could help them? Does it in a efficient way that you’re, then your team doesn’t have to go through a full on explanation of the history of all the features that you possibly could do, right? But that helps lubricate your go to market engine versus becoming sand and that go to market engine. Right. And strategy I use in the Michael Porter sense of the word, because strategy is ultimately about making trade offs and this is where teams get real, get real nervous because you can’t make everyone happy and ultimately pricing is one of these areas where. This is where the rubber hits the, hits the road. Like you can, you can have the sort of corporate strategy session where you, where they come out with a list of goals and everyone serves like, well, all of these things are in diametric opposition to each other, but I guess I’ll just go back and do my work. But you can’t, you can’t come out of a pricing exercise that way. It’s like, we have to figure out who are our customers and who are we actually trying to serve and who are we not, who are we not interested in serving. And that really forces a trade off because you’re often left with a lot of very difficult decisions that pertain to things that, Hey, this group of customers receives or perceives value in an entirely different way. All right. And so we charge per user in this context, these customers will be really happy, but it will really alienate these ones. If we charge per gigabyte of data stored. Vice versa, right? And so we’ve got to sort of, that’s where this rubber hits the road of these, of these trade offs. And so we’ve got to really understand which customers we focus on, you know, how will you show them your products, your best choice, and how will you package your price, your product to make it easy for them to buy? So pricing is just not about picking a number. It’s really about understanding those customers and smart choices, how to align what you sell with the value that you ultimately provide.

Linda Fanaras: 8:04

Now, Dan, I’m sure you’re challenged from time to time when you are working with SaaS customers, those who actually have similar or competitive products in the market. So you’re looking at pricing strategy and to your point, you’re looking at a lot of other things, ICP, their, you know, potential customer profile and so on and so forth. Mm hmm. When somebody is releasing a new product that is in a highly competitive market where there’s generally a pricing structure that might be set out there, how do you come into the market? Do you come in less? Do you come in the same? Do you come in more? Do you try to push on your differentiators? Are there certain tactics and strategies that you use to help, you know, leverage a new launch that may be in a competitive market?

Dan Balcauski: 8:45

So look, ultimately it comes down to what is your goal, right? And you’d be surprised. This is another area where companies go a long way without ever officially sort of writing down what they’re, what they’re trying to achieve. Right. And so, you know, we really want to understand, okay, is our goal to go grow top line revenue? Are we trying to increase profit? Are we really concerned about more, you know, unit economics type increases like customer lifetime value or, you know, reducing our customer acquisition costs? What are, what are we going after? Because the. Answer to your question is like, well, if, if your goal is to grab market share, I’m going to give you a very different answer to that. That if your goal is to maximize revenue or maximize profitability. So, you know, one of the very first things that. You know, I often need to do is help everyone come to the table about what your goal is. And so it’s kind of funny cause you’ll often get, you know, a bit of an eye roll from members of the executive team, right? Cause you’ll ask a question, right? You know, that’s the benefit of a consultant, right? We get to ask the stupid questions cause we don’t know. Right. So you’d be like, well, what is your goal with your pricing change? I’ll be talking to the CMO. Oh, I rule. Well, of course it’s to increase, you know, how many leads we can get, right? Market share, right. And you go to CFO, what’s, what’s the goal? Oh, of course it’s to increase gross margin,

Linda Fanaras: 10:14

right? Right. And so

Dan Balcauski: 10:15

that, so that I get to walk into the room with all of them and be like, okay, all of you are a hundred percent convinced that you know what the goals are and you’re right, except none of you are sharing the same goal. So let’s get that aligned first. And that might seem like a business one on one, but surprisingly common and maybe not as a surprise to you. No. It does. for very long.

Linda Fanaras: 10:38

Yeah, that was, that was the first thing I thought of. I’m like, wow, you’re going to get all these people in a room and actually get an agreement on the first shot. It seems like that would take some time. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree with that. Go ahead.

Dan Balcauski: 10:48

But but you know, there’s, you know, there’s no right, you know, one, one answer to rule them all in, in those cases. What I will point out are a couple of patterns that you tend to see in, especially in the tech space where. You will tend to see a a lot of companies try to go for especially if they’re like venture capital, funded you saw this a lot with like Uber, for example, Uber and Lyft, we all benefited for, I don’t know, eight years with venture capital subsidized rides, right? Because they were just trying to go grab market share. They were just funneling money into it, you know, either just paying out a cost or, or even below that. In the, why would they do that is because there was a fundamental belief that those, that was a network effects business. And that once you were the dominant player, you had an unassailable position. And at that point, then you had market. Power to raise pricing longterm. So what does that mean? It means the answer also depends upon what is the relevant timeframe, because you know, if I’m playing a, you know, a 10 year, I need to win this market, you know, at all costs game and there’s, and we’re in a market. Dynamics where there’s going to be one winner. There’s going to be just one meta, but there’s going to be just one Google. Then I may have very different incentives that affect my pricing strategy today than otherwise in B2B. It’s much less clear that those are that those winner take all dynamics. Are actually as relevant. And so I see a lot of folks who use hope as a strategy of, look, we’ll go one topic you’ll hear a lot in this, in the software world is land and expand.

Linda Fanaras: 12:28

We’ll go, we’ll

Dan Balcauski: 12:29

go land all these customers and then we’ll upsell them. Well,

Linda Fanaras: 12:31

yeah.

Dan Balcauski: 12:33

But that tends to be more hope than strategy. It’s not usually aligned. It’s not usually outlined very clearly what that path is. They haven’t really thought about what’s the customer value journey you’re going to take them on that merits them actually paying you for that next step in that next step. Or, or that’s, Hey, that’s a future roadmap. We’ll build those capabilities after we go get all this marketplace. So, there’s usually not a great approach in B2B markets. You tend to see a very different dynamics. And so that’s one thing I would always caution people be aware of the lessons you learn as a B2B leader. That you say, Oh, well, this worked for Amazon. This worked for Uber. This worked for Google in this other consumer space. And you try to bring it over to a B2B space. It tends to be very different because look B2B buyers don’t like “winner take all” markets. They like being able to play suppliers off each other. So, so B2B markets are like sort of self-healing a lot in that way, where there’ll be like, Oh, Hey, we don’t want, I’m not going to give this business. I’m, I’m going to pay Microsoft and Apple and whoever else this money for all my, you know, whatever services because, you know, I don’t have any of them to run away with the lead.

Linda Fanaras: 13:40

Yeah. No, that’s good. That’s great feedback. And I appreciate that. So I do have an interesting question because I think pricing can be a little more complicated than often companies or marketers or CEOs can think about. Can you explain the difference between a price metric versus a value metric? How that might play into, you know, what you do.

Dan Balcauski: 14:00

Yeah. So, when I, when I think about, I’ll take a step back because we were talking about pricing and packaging writ large and so packaging, if you’ve only been in a CPG space, you might think like, Oh, what does he talk about? Like the cardboard cartons with the, with the bright colors on it. Like, no, within the world of SaaS, I break the packaging aspect into four different elements. So just real quick, those would be things like your, your price metric. So that’s a unit of value. I charge a customer for is that seats, API data your price model. So this defines how and when payments flow through a system. So this is a perpetual license. I pay you once and then I can go use the software forever. So subscription, is it more of a pay as you go type model, like a utility building model, like you might have for your electric company bill, you know, they charge. Meter how much you use and then get on your bill at the end of the month. There’s your bundles or offer configurations So these would be things we often see like a good better best type of you know Hey, we’ve we’ve grouped sets of capabilities together and in predefined ways to help you make your purchase selection better And then finally you have like your price fences. So, these are often distinctions of how I Two different customers can pay different prices for the same product. We have this all the time in in consumer markets, right? If I get on the bus, I’m going to pay one price, but a student or a senior citizen may pay an entirely separate price, right? We have the similar effects in, in the, in the B2B world. So you asked specifically about. Price metrics and value metrics. And I’m glad you asked about this because one thing that can be frustrating for even pricing folks, let alone anyone trying to look in from the outside and understand the spaces that the, the pricing world has not aligned on different, I try to be consistent. So price metric ultimately. You know, it could be things like the numbers of gigabytes of data stored or transferred or number of API calls or the number of seats that you need to buy, right? But all of those things are very product facing, right? There are things that we can count as the vendor that scale with usage, right? If a company is coming in and buying 10 seats.

Linda Fanaras: 16:03

You

Dan Balcauski: 16:03

know, ultimately they should pay a lower price and company by it coming in who needs to buy a thousand seats, right? And so this is a way for my price to scale what’s missing in that is Does that pricing metric align with the value of? That your customers are receiving from the product you offer. So the idea of a value metric is the value metric is entirely customer focused So it’s the metric that a customer is going to use To judge the effectiveness of the product in their environment. So are we helping them? Save time, save money, increase their revenue, decrease risk you know, and those are sort of what we think of as like functional functional value metrics. There might also be, you know, more emotional type metrics, right? A Timex and a Rolex have the same functional requirements, but one has a very different emotional effect than, than another. But in the B2B space, we really want to understand what. like how our customers are thinking about judging the value of our product and then picking a price metric that correlates with that value. Because although we may say, Hey, Linda I know we were talking about some marketing. Technology platform that your marketing team wants to buy. And we’re going to make all of your campaigns more efficient. And, you know, it’s going to ultimately drive a ton of revenue for your business, right? We’ve, we’ve showed you the ROI spreadsheet, right. Of, of how much money we’re going to make for you. We may not be able to, for a whole bunch of reasons. Just say, well, how much revenue are you making now? Right. And then, then the year we’ll check in and ask you how much revenue. And then we’ll just, we’ll just take a percentage of that revenue that we, you know, cause you’re going to turn around and you’re gonna say, well, you are responsible for all of that. And we had to do a bunch of work. It could be a whole bunch of reasons. Right. But that doesn’t, but we, so instead we want to look at, okay, in general, Linda’s buying this marketing technology platform because we’re helping her increase her revenue for her business. What like, what is the, Components that we can track that correlate to ultimately that value such that, you know, because it might not be seats and often in for marketing technology, it’s not right. It’s not like, my marketing campaigns, the more successful they are, I use my marketing head count, right? It’s usually something else. And you’ll find most marketing technology businesses. There’s some, it’s more like if you like a MailChimp, it’s like the size of your contact database or like how many accounts you have, right? That’s more aligned with, with how value scales in that space versus if you’re in the CRM or sales space, you’ve got, you know, per seat model tends to dominate because you’ve got quota carrying reps and every rep you have means they’re holding the bag for that much more quota. And so it does scale nicely with revenue. So you, you see these patterns start to emerge that, that although both have the same value metric of helping you increase revenue, you might choose different pricing metrics.

Linda Fanaras: 19:00

And I think that’s what you see a lot of today where you didn’t see as much of it before, but if you’re buying a SaaS product now you might be buying credits or so many API calls or so many, whatever. It could be anything. It could be photo images, could be seats, blah, blah, blah. So the list goes on. So I totally understand that. But I did want to ask you one final question before we get to our rapid fire question is. How should sort of a CMO CEO execute an actual price increase? Are there a couple of different tactics that you can share with me today or share with our audience?

Dan Balcauski: 19:31

So like anything else, start with a goal. What is it you’re trying to actually achieve and get folks aligned on that? Because you know, it’s like we want to increase price is not a goal in and of itself. it’s a, means to an end. And so what you want to be able to do is say, okay, we, we want to, you know, use this as a lever to increase overall retention. If we do that, we expect, you should. Go through some, a bit of modeling, right? And be like, okay, we, we would expect there’s going to be a cohort of customers that are totally fine with it. We’re never going to hear a peep from, there’s going to be a cohort of customers who are going to complain, but they’ll continue with, there’s going to be a cohort of customers that tells to go pound sand and they’re going to go find another vendor. Right. And so now I’ve got, okay, my goal, I’ve got some idea of what might happen. I’ve done some customer segmentation based upon that, right? I have some idea of, Hey, there may be some different levels of risk embedded here and this is another area where something like B2C versus B2B becomes very important because the. Think about Netflix raising prices, right? If they lose any given customer, that one customer is not any more important than any other customer. However, if you’re in a B2B scenario, you might 20 percent of your accounts might be 80 percent of your revenue. True. So I might want to cordon that off and be like, okay, let’s look at all the, the long tail, the 80%. And let’s go experiment on our messaging and communication strategy on that. Before we get to JPMorgan and Disney and Sony and, and, and have them tell us to go pound sand. Cause that’s going to ruin our year. Not just right. If they leave. Yeah. Also not a bad idea to, you know, have conversations, right? Have your sales team or sales or customer success, whoever might be handling it, arm them with. Help them bro play, right? A lot of this is enablement on the front end, but you can, you can do sort of iterative rollouts, right? Nothing says, Hey, I’ve got to you know, and, and specifically right now I’m talking about changing customers changing pricing on existing customers. Raging pricing on new customers. I don’t know about you. I’m a pricing expert. And I, I like, if I go to a website today, I was like, I just assumed that’s what their price has been. And I’m not like going back and doing a bunch of historical research to figure out if they changed the price in the last six months so changing price on a new customers, just like, just change the price, like, and then but it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, but you know, the, the tricky part is on the existing customers. Build out what your communication strategy is. Using scientific method, like much like you would for any, new marketing campaign and be like, Hey, we, we expect to see this kind of uplift. We expect to see this many people tell us to go pound sand if it’s underneath 5%, our model still works. So I’m going to go send a sample of it. thousand emails, right? Oh, we actually didn’t hear anything from a thousand. All right. Well, like let’s throw out the next thousand and then, Oh wait, hold on. We threw our first thousand. We hear from 10%. Ooh. Okay. What was it? What did we not understand? What was, what can we tweak in our messaging? Et cetera. All right. And so, you know, there, there are those ways to, to de risk any of those, and I, I tend to find that, look, uh, pricing tends to be very emotional as much for the people inside the vendor, probably more so than it is for the customers. Right. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of worry and projection done from inside the building to customers and most customers kind of shrug and be like, yeah, yeah, okay. Obviously there are, there are the exceptions those tend to end up on the front page of the New York Times. But there’s, we could, we could talk, we’ll unravel some of those in a, in a deeper dive. We had more time, but in general, there’s not, there’s not you’re, you’re probably not going to make headlines with your, with your 10 percent price increase.

Linda Fanaras: 23:30

So what I’d love to do now, Dan is I’d like to ask a few rapid fire questions. So what does that mean to you? So. You would be responsible for answering the questions with like maybe two to three sentences. I’d love to try to get it through as many as we possibly can. And it goes pretty quick, so you may have to speak fast, but I would love to get started on that. Are you, are you good with that?

Dan Balcauski: 23:49

I’m game. Let’s go. All

Linda Fanaras: 23:50

right, let’s go. So who should be responsible for pricing decisions?

Dan Balcauski: 23:54

I would give the ownership to product marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 23:57

Awesome. Okay. Is freemium a good idea?

Dan Balcauski: 24:00

No.

Linda Fanaras: 24:01

Okay. And what are the advantages of free trials?

Dan Balcauski: 24:04

So free trials. Are I recommend almost always the better answer in b2b over freemium because they allow Your prospects perceived value of your product to increase but then also give them a Deadline to make a decision to drive action Which freemium doesn’t have so definitely in favor of free trials not in favor of freemium in general

Linda Fanaras: 24:30

good to know Okay, awesome. So should a company actually show pricing on its website?

Dan Balcauski: 24:35

It depends. Okay. If you’re the only company in your space who doesn’t have public pricing you’re going to have a bad time. If you need, or if public pricing and packaging can help you filter out non qualified prospects because your sales team’s time is very expensive and you don’t want to have them quote data on every call that they could just. Have on the web, especially if that conversation tends to be like, Oh, well, if I knew that much, I wouldn’t have had this conversation. So it could be a good filtering mechanism. Understanding what your competition is doing. And then also goes to like, what kind of market are you in and what is the current complexity of your pricing and packaging? Because I’ve definitely worked with clients where it would not help to put their 50 page PDF price list at, you know, 10 point font on the website have it public. No one would understand what they were even looking at. In that case, if you have that situation, just call me and we can help. We’ll

Linda Fanaras: 25:29

help. You’ll help. And my last question is, is how should companies deal with inflation? Should they actually raise their prices?

Dan Balcauski: 25:34

Well, I’m hoping we’re going to see the end of this inflationary environment. You’ve seen a lot of companies already do so. In B2B SaaS, it actually has not been a predominant driver because the cost of goods sold and the gross margins are nowhere near what they are in a more. CPG or, or other industries. So, you know, you’ve seen a lot of that already pushed through the market in, in B2B SaaS you know, it’s, it’s, it hasn’t really been a factor, so I have a longer, I have a longer answer,

Linda Fanaras: 26:07

but

Dan Balcauski: 26:09

this is the rapid fire question, this is a very difficult rapid fire question. It

Linda Fanaras: 26:13

is. It is. Some of these are really tricky. So anyway, Dan, so I would, so we’re going to wrap it up. So I appreciate all of the insight that you shared on SaaS. pricing and packaging and who’s making those decisions and how. So I would love for you to tell our audience how they can get in touch with you. You know, where you come in to help and any other information you’d like to share.

Dan Balcauski: 26:32

Yeah. Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for your, you know, to your listeners for their time and attention. I’m happy to connect with folks on LinkedIn and Dan Balcauski. I also have a podcast called SaaS Scaling Secrets where I interview CEOs of scale up B2B SaaS companies. So if you find that wherever podcasts are, are available and then look happy if folks have, you know, specific pricing packaging questions reach out, you know, happy to have a conversation and see then if it, you know, if you know, if I can be helpful.

Linda Fanaras: 27:01

Great. Thank you so much, Dan. So I just want to take a moment and thank our audience for listening in today. Again, this is Linda Fanaras, the host of the B2B Brand180 podcast. Thanks for listening in to Dan and hearing about how to really price out SaaS products in the most effective way. And if you need any support in that area, please reach out to Dan. Thank you again for listening.