Speaker 1:

Hi, and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, where we get perspectives from industry thought leaders about strategies that are unifying marketing and sales cycles to help accelerate growth inside your world.

Richard Lane:

Welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds of marketing and sales one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane. I’m co-founder and chief commercial officer of durhamlane. We’re a revenue acceleration agency helping enterprise customers create always on channels of meaningful and well-qualified sales opportunities. Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Zsuzsanna Blau. Zsuzsanna is the global head of digital demand and campaigns at Nokia, a brand that you will no doubt recognize. However, Nokia now are a technology innovation leader who are pioneering a future when networks meet cloud to realize the full potential of digital in every industry, something that affects all of us. Zsuzsanna, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being with us.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m flattered to be here. And you’re right, we are not in the mobile phones business anymore. Nokia is a leader in anything and everything, network infrastructure and network equipment.

Richard Lane:

That’s amazing. I still have some classic Nokia handsets under my stairs, Zsuzsanna, so we’ll park those for now. But look, it’s great to have you, as I said. Perhaps to get us started and to help the audience understand you a little bit better, it would be great if you could introduce yourself and maybe share a short anecdote or two about your career to date.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

You could say I’m an accidental marketer, although I’ve been in marketing for pretty much 20 years now, which sounds insane. So you can imagine I’ve gone through a beautiful rainbow of change in these 20 years within marketing, I have experienced driving growth in both startup and large enterprise settings. I like to say that I work at the intersection of growth, brand and product with a very strong focus on digital channels, content marketing and customer advocacy. And last but not least, innovation. I’m so passionate about anything and everything technology related and digital marketing.

As you mentioned, I currently head up the global demand jam function for Nokia’s growth engine, what we call it, our growth engine. This is our 3.2 billion euro cloud and network services business. So this is our software and enterprise solutions business. And yes, it’s lovely working for a brand that has 98% brand recognition globally. That is amazing and-

Richard Lane:

Wow.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

… I’m super proud. We now need to make sure that it’s for the right reasons. So spent most of my career in B2B. I’ve been with Nokia for over seven years now. And before that I was usually the go-to person for startups or smaller SMB type organizations to call when they wanted to build a marketing department from scratch or they wanted to centralize a decentralized marketing department. I’m known to roll my sleeves up and get my hands dirty. I love tinkering and I love diving deep into data and trying new tools, being spending my career in B2B. So I’ve seen the changes that impacted B2B marketing, especially on the SaaS side as well, the Software as a Service side as well. So it’s really exciting times for marketers today, in my opinion.

Richard Lane:

Excellent. That’s a fabulous intro. As we were chatting pre podcast Zsuzsanna, I’m so excited for today because I know that we’re going to cover lots of areas that are really at the front of everyone’s minds at the moment. So let’s get on with the journey. You talked about being an accidental marketeer. I always say I tripped up into the world of sales. I’m part of the happy trip up club, so maybe we could join that as well from a sales and marketing point of view. You talked about the excitement of the journey. I feel the same in our world, but something that everybody seems to be challenged with right now is trying to do more with less. Challenging times, everyone being tasked with doing more with less. What’s been your experience of this from the world you occupy?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Oh yeah. I mean shrinking budgets and smaller teams, you have to do more with less. And also I think especially in the last couple of years, B2B inflation is really a thing and it’s really happening and it really takes more to win. Again, especially in B2B where I tend to operate, just recently Google had a B2B buyer journey survey that came out over the summer that told us that the average enterprise buyer journey for larger transactions takes about 23 weeks. And that is from the consideration stage. So it’s not even from the top of the funnel from building awareness, it’s once they are already aware. So from consideration, it takes about six months with 23 stakeholders across a range of roles. So you can imagine you have to do way more to get in front of these 23 stakeholders for that long period of time, keep engaging them across multiple channels.

There are more channels now, more audience targeting, more content, more touch points, more contact again, the 23 stakeholders. And we have the same or less resources to do all of this. So obviously content is a huge bottleneck. And also consumers or your prospects are much more demanding as well. They bring their consumer or B2C expectations into the B2B buyer journey. And so all of this leads to an increasing amount of content that all needs to be produced much faster and more cheaply than ever before.

So as marketers have a hard job, it feels like a no-win game, but there are certain things we can do to work smarter. Obviously we can win if we make sure that our teams have better insights across the buyer journey and know who’s actually engaging with their content, why they are on their websites, how long they spend with you. I really believe that time spent is a very important, if not the most important indicator nowadays of someone getting ready to be sold to. There’s a lot you can do there, use intent data, use AI wherever you can to be more efficient in your content creation. But just in short, B2B inflation is real. It takes more to win.

Richard Lane:

Some scary stats in there, Zsuzsanna. I like the phrase B2B inflation. That is definitely happening and 23 weeks from what I would call sort of recommendation stage is a significant time lag. But then 23 stakeholders, that’s a real jump from the stakeholder communities that we’ve always talked about in the past. But I think what makes that even harder is that you have to give each stakeholder more than you’ve ever given before. So not just more of them, but you have to give them more. So yeah, so challenging environment. What are some of the things perhaps our listeners could do to make sure their budget is working as hard for them as possible? Have you got thoughts and things that people can take action with?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Yes, absolutely. So I think when you’re not going to get more budget, it gives you the chance to make the most of what you actually do have. So optimize and audit what you have. You can definitely re-prioritize and become laser focused with everything that you do. Sometimes as marketers tend to have a laundry list of tasks and tactics and programs that we want to do, but it’s your chance to really become laser focused both in your goal setting but also in your targeting, for example, so to be more efficient in spending your budget.

You can also do the channel audit that you’ve been postponing for a long time. So what really works for you. And there is so much advice out there from gurus on LinkedIn about what works, what’s dead. We’ve all heard, “Oh, email marketing is dead, SEO is dead, content marketing is dead. Everything is dead.” But I really don’t believe that. I think if something doesn’t work for you, maybe you haven’t tried well enough or hard enough, but just stick to what actually works for you. Don’t listen to anyone else. So do the channel audit, find what works for you and hone in on that.

Cancel some of your subscriptions. There are studies out there about what percentage of all the tools and technologies that we have in our tech stack we actually use, and it’s getting worse and worse each year. I believe this year it’s around 30%. So make sure you really assess your tech stack and cancel some of your subscriptions that you’re not leveraging a hundred percent.

Richard Lane:

That really came out of COVID as well, didn’t it? I think there was a real balloon of the amount of technology. I think people just subscribe to whatever to try and work their way through, and then they have to go into a period of audit and making sure that they’re using the technology that is helping drive the right behaviors for their team and the right results.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

And let’s be real. I mean, there are some really amazing tools out there and it’s like a shiny new toys… Like you’re going into toy store and you just want to try and buy everything because they all promise you something new and better. As marketers, we still struggle with how to really, really prove our impact on the business. So obviously we would be happy to try anything and everything that would help us do that. But yeah, cancel some of your subscriptions and zero in on building and optimizing your first party channels, as I said. So that would mean audit and optimize your web pages for SEO. Expand your emailable database, make sure you understand what percentage of your database is actually opted in properly and can be emailed and try and expand that or assess your CRM hygiene and make sure that your taxonomy and your data hygiene is spot on.

Look at employee advocacy. Double down on your customer advocacy and your employee advocacy. How can you use existing customers to find new ones that will help you save a budget as well?

And one more thing, I mean brand kind of programs, brand awareness, brand building programs are usually the first ones to be cut in times of a downturn. And CMOs are usually faced with the challenges of allocating resources effectively and maintaining that balance between short-term cost cuttings, and also long-term brand building efforts. And while investing into performance channels can be very, very appealing to hit short-term sales growth and sales targets, keep spending on brand because it will help you in the long run. It will make your demand capture or lead generation later a lot cheaper if you keep investing in brands. You can think of this similarly to how you think of SEO versus PPC. SEO is a long-term game. That’s your brand building programs. PPPC, you turn it on, you turn it off. But marketing as a whole, I learned this from Jon Miller, B2B legend, marketing is not a gumball machine. You cannot just put your campaign budget in there, turn the dial, and then 10X pipeline comes out. It doesn’t happen that way. So you have to keep putting money into, an effort into brand building.

Richard Lane:

No, that’s a really great point, and I think there’ll be listeners in all sorts of roles Zsuzsanna, who are probably facing that very challenge, which is their boards or their management team are saying, “Stop spending on brand. It’s all about campaigns.” And I know we’ve had that conversation internally and we’re trying to manage across and continue to do everything because I think from our point of view as a lead and demand generation organization on behalf of our customers, these are the times when you can make real gains, but you have to be bold and brave to go with it. So challenge is definitely for every marketing team up and down the land and around the world, but some great thoughts there and all with that context of how do we do more with less? The job doesn’t change, we just need to find new ways of doing it. I do think challenging times help us to be more creative and to think differently.

One thing that’s rapidly becoming more apparent as well is the customer acquisition. So net new logo isn’t the be all and end all. Customer retention is something that a lot of people are talking about and customer retention is a key measure for many businesses. And I guess you have experience of both what I would call a mega brand like Nokia, but also in the startup and SMB world. How have you seen companies adjust their strategies to accommodate that?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Yeah, retention is definitely the new acquisition. You as a CMO or a marketing leader have a really tough job to balance your budgets across brand or demand creation versus demand capture kind of campaigns or retention versus acquisition or per channel, per region. It’s really tough, but you do have to balance budgets across the buyer journey and the whole customer lifecycle. And what we know today, and this is again according to LinkedIn’s very recent B2B marketing benchmark report, about 71% if I remember correctly, of B2B marketing budget goes to new customer acquisition. However, it actually costs about 50% more today to acquire a customer than it did five years ago. So it’s becoming more and more expensive to acquire new customers. So that is why we also need to really think about retention programs, loyalty programs, upsell, cross-sell. How do you keep the customers that you have today?

And again, just going back to brand programs, if you keep building and creating demand for your category, for your brand, for your products, it will significantly lower the cost of acquisition in later times as well. Today it costs about five to 25 times more to actually acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. And one, I’m going to throw another number at you, which is really interesting, is just a 5% increase in retention rates will increase your profits by about 25 to 95%. So it really does make sense and it really does work magic to actually double down on customer advocacy and retention programs specifically. So you have to enable your customer marketing teams to evolve from onboarding and just creating static PDF case studies and reference quotes into churn prevention programs and retention and loyalty programs and personalized communication. As I said, cross-sell, upsell initiatives and anything else to foster overall adoption and lifecycle health.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, one thing we’ve done as a business as I know is we’ve shifted from always being about net new acquisition for our customers into how can we build teams that can help you cross-sell, upsell, work into your base, help with retention, support lifetime value, and it’s something that every organization is looking at, I believe. How does marketing really feed into that? I guess I’m maybe thinking away from a Nokia and more into your experience of smaller organizations. What is the impact that the marketing team can do there? Because I guess a lot of marketing is traditionally campaign-based and it’s focused on acquisition. How do you actually shift the lens?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

That’s a really, really excellent question. And I always say that measuring doesn’t make you taller and how you measure things is actually how you see things. So the choice of metrics will be an absolutely crucial decision for you because it will shape the perception of you, your whole team, the perception of marketing’s performance and strategic nature within the organization. Not only that, but the choice of your metrics will also influence strategic decisions and can actually lead to different interpretations of success or failure.

For example, if your main KPI is a number of leads generated, at first it may sound quite business centric, but if you dig deeper, you will realize that it ultimately doesn’t influence business results and it’s actually something that can be easily manipulated. So for example, you could be out there celebrating how you’ve outperformed your KPI of a hundred MQLs for the year while your sales team is having the worst quarter or worst year ever. So this is why I believe sales and marketing alignment is actually still an issue in 2023 or 2024 soon.

I really think that instead of measuring marketing qualified leads or marketing qualified accounts, we should be measuring team source revenue or at least marketing source revenue. So connecting your KPIs to business results and business goals because this will allow you to really look at how your buyer converted and how your buyer entered the pipeline, and then how they are interacting with you for retention programs, how they are ending up in new pipeline generation, which I think is a much more customer-centric view because you are assessing these results from the buyer’s perspective, what they did in order to end up with new pipeline. And you’re not assessing the results from an internal stakeholder’s or internal department’s perspective like how your MQLs are moving to sales accepted or sales qualified opportunities.

And in my opinion, this will also allow you to crack intent, buyer’s intent because you’re kind of reverse engineering a whole part of your customer’s journey to purchase. That means you’ll be able to identify patterns, you’ll be able to identify specific steps that they may take before they decide to buy something from you. And that will give you actually forecasting ability as well, which we always say we want to see at the revenue table. And in a lot of cases, marketing is still being looked at as a cost center. So that forecasting ability will definitely get you a seat at the revenue table.

And just another Jon Miller reference. Shout out to John. I mean he’s really amazing, but he did say that a great kind of way to avoid power-reducing metrics and being a cost center is swapping references like cost per lead or customer acquisition costs with investment per opportunity because it will frame marketing very differently. The former cost per lead, customer acquisition cost will frame you as a cost center, while investment per opportunity will not, it will frame you more as a strategic-

Richard Lane:

Strategic resource.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Exactly.

Richard Lane:

So that’s amazing, Zsuzsanna. Full of actionable insight, which is something we always try to achieve here on The Insiders. So thank you so much. One thing we are doing at durhamlane, is we’ve built a RevOps department, so that includes our new business sales team, it includes our marketing team, and it includes our account management customer success team. And so we’re trying to get away from some of the silos that typically exist. And I think one phrase we came up with on series one, episode one of The Insiders was mass sales and how do we blend these two worlds together? And at durhamlane, we try and make it our mission to sort of act as the middleware that connects marketing and sales for our customers together to create great results.

So look, thank you for all the amazing insight that you’ve shared with myself and our listeners so far. We’ve added a section into this series called Ask the Experts. So we’ve gone out into our networks and asked them for a challenging question for Zsuzsanna. We’ve got one here from Alex, which I’ll share with you. It’d be great to get your thoughts just to put you on the spot a little bit. Alex says, “I’m interested to get your thoughts on generative AI tools.” There’s the thing. “Do you think they have had a positive or negative impact on marketing, not just as a profession, but also how marketing is perceived?”

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Oh gosh, that’s a really great question.

Richard Lane:

It is. Good one.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

There’s lots and lots of conversations about GenAI obviously, and from a personal perspective, I definitely see a lot of room for opportunity for us to leverage GenAI and be better at what we do. I don’t think GenAI or AI in general will replace us and our jobs, but I think that if you don’t get on the bandwagon and if you don’t really start diving into what it can do for you and start learning about it, then others who actually do will replace you. So that’s my view. I think GenAI is a co-pilot, hey, Microsoft, and not autopilot. So that’s very important.

I mean, if you’re just playing around with ChatGPT alone or any of the other… Bard or other tools, you’ll see hallucination is still huge. And I mean, I’ve had plenty of occasions when I gave it very specific direction to count something or give me examples and it gave me completely wrong answers and I asked it to do it again and gave it examples of where it went wrong and it still did it wrong. So you really have to be there and you really have to make sure that there is a human actually checking things.

Of course, there are implications from the legal perspective, copyright perspective. So especially larger organizations, they will be very cautious of full adoption and what constitutes content that is your own versus that is AI generated. We also know that there are some implications from a ranking perspective like Google will actually penalize or does already penalize AI generated content, but we don’t know where that line is, what actually is AI generated. If it’s just the framework, which then I completely rewrote, is that AI generated? So there are still a lot of open-ended questions, but I do see ways that will help us be more efficient. We did talk about B2B inflation today, even in content creation. It can help us scale and be better at personalization, so we should definitely leverage what we can. But my main advice is just try and stay on top of it and understand how it can help you, listen to others, deep dive into use cases from different industries and verticals and see how others are using it and see if that can be applicable to you.

Richard Lane:

Great answer. Thank you. My view would be always be inquisitive.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Right.

Richard Lane:

So always be inquisitive and use the right tools, but always think carefully about what you use and some of your points there, IP being genuine I think will become more and more important.

Look, it’s been great having you on The Insiders, Zsuzsanna. Thank you so much. We have one last question. Sometimes it is the toughest question of the lot in our experience, but we’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist. It’s an eclectic mix of songs. We ask every guest to give us a song that they would like us to add just to remember them by on our podcast series. So have you managed to come up with a single song from the billions that are available?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Yes, I have actually. I actually have two, but the one has to be Bowie, Changes.

Richard Lane:

Oh, very good.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

So life in marketing nowadays is like that song, constant and inevitable changes, reinvention, all to stay relevant. Personally, your brand needs to stay relevant as well. And Bowie, if anyone, he was a perfect role model for marketing. Always on the move, bold, ever-changing. So, it has to be that song.

Richard Lane:

Amazing.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

To be a little bit cheeky and you can choose to not add it to the playlist, but Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done for Me Lately could also be a great song for marketers.

Richard Lane:

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Yeah.

Richard Lane:

Excellent. Well, two great choices. I’ll put it to the committee, Zsuzsanna. I’m sure we’ll find room on the playlist for two tracks.

Look, it’s been great having you as a guest. As I mentioned, you’ve come up with some wonderful one-liners, the accidental marketer. We talked about B2B inflation, we talked about measuring doesn’t always make you taller. I love that one. And lots more. So an episode I hope that our listeners will be able to take a lot from, and not only that, but take action. So on behalf of everyone, thank you so much.

Zsuzsanna Blau:

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Richard Lane:

And thank you to everyone for tuning into The Insiders. Please subscribe on your preferred podcasting site to ensure you are notified of all of our new episodes as and when they’re published. And if you’d like to learn more about durhamlane and our unique method of selling at higher level, please visit durhamlane.com for more information. Until then, see you next time.

Speaker 1:

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