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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#23: B2B Marketing in the Tech Sector with Polly Traylor, Komprise
00:26:12
In an ever-evolving B2B landscape, marketing strategies, and communications are continually adapting to meet customers' changing demands, especially in tech-driven sectors. Joining us today is Polly Traylor, Senior Director of Marketing Communications...
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- [00:00]
T Mobile Advertiser
Breaking News T Mobile Network outperforms expectations in all sectors because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device, credit service support in 90 days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expires in six months.
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Polly Traylor
The Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech, marketing operations and CX, bestselling author and speaker. Now let's get onto the show. In an ever evolving B2B landscape, marketing strategies and communications are continually adapting to meet customers changing demands, especially in tech driven sectors. Joining us today is Polly Traylor, Senior Director of Marketing, Communications and Content at Comprise, who who brings deep insights into these transformations. Polly, welcome to the show.
- [01:25]
Polly Traylor
Hi Brian. Yeah, thank you so much for having me today.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don't we get started with you giving us a little background on yourself as well as your role at Comprise?
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Polly Traylor
Yeah, sure. Very good. Thank you. So my background, I feel like I'm a hybrid comms person because I began in journalism and moved into PR and marketing sort of in an accidental manner. But I started in broadcasting in school, got my master's in Broadcast journalism from the American University right near. Right in your neighborhood there, Greg. Yeah, and then I was going to go into tv but then I ended up wanting to go into print instead because I just loved the written word more that I liked to be behind or even in front of the camera. So, so I went into print journalism and I worked for some magazines in tech and then ended up working at Microsoft for a number of years in their marketing team. And from there I went into sort of freelance PR for a long time because I had little kids so I needed the flexibility. And then about five, six years ago I went back into the full time corporate world and have been working for SaaS companies, smaller companies, 150 employees or less, Silicon Valley. And in that role I have such a broad range of Responsibilities across marketing and pr. But so I've always done work in content. It's just been across a lot of different landscapes, whether that is journalism, big Fortune 500 company, having my own consulting business and now back into corporate but in a smaller company setting. So it's been a lot of fun. And I guess the one constant for me is that I've always been in tech, even though that wasn't what I thought I was going to do in the very beginning. But it's been fun.
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Greg Kilstrom
Nice. Nice. Yeah. So we're going to touch on a few things here and you know, definitely with your background, looking forward to hearing your perspective on it. We're going to start by talking about some Recent trends in B2B marketing. B2B marketing and sales have shown a shift towards more self service options, increased personalization, decreased reliance on direct sales interactions, as well as a few other things. So from your perspective, you know, first of all, are you seeing the same things? You know, what are some of the most significant recent developments in B2B marketing, you know, that you're seeing?
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Polly Traylor
Yeah, yeah. I do feel like things have changed quite a bit over the past couple of years and in a number of different ways. Certainly, you know, most will agree that the pandemic, it sort of, it pushed us into digital more than ever. I kind of rarely hear about people picking up the phone. Everything starts with email or social media and it sometimes will go quite a long ways until you actually have a phone call. And myself being on the receiving end of pitches for marketing software almost never do I receive a phone call. And when I do, I often take it because I'm curious to hear what they're going to say. So it's interesting because I think all of our email inboxes are full of pitches and that can be difficult. But it also means that, you know, companies have had to really think hard about how they contact customers because things are getting so noisy on, on social, which is primarily LinkedIn for B2B and then via email. And you know, those are just huge channels that we all need to use. But I would say that, you know, beyond as you say, direct sales interaction, you're right, it has become less of a thing. Events are coming back, but not, they're probably never going to be what they were pre pandemic. But we have to talk about AI, right? Because I believe that is going to have such a big impact on marketing and sales teams. And you know, our company is fairly small. We don't use a ton of AI tools. We use Some like seamless AI for, you know, helping with, you know, lead gen and whatnot. But AI is going to be, start becoming more in the background of a lot of things that we do and I think it's important that we sort of learn how to use it and it goes beyond, you know, chat gtp. I, I know that this is affecting writers and it's affecting marketing teams to a certain extent, but I think for marketers, you know, the AI can be really great if you figure out how to balance it. And you know, me being a writer for my entire life, I'm not just going to let chat GDP or Claude do all my work, but I use it for research and that does save time. And so I feel that we have to adapt to these trends but at the end of the day we have to really put ourselves in the customer's shoes that they're getting bombarded all the time with digital messages and new digital content. And so how do we manage that so that we have a good relationship and not just another, you know, kind of buzz in the ear.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and I think that, you know, there's, there's a, there's a couple of sides to that obviously is you know, customers like myself. I really don't like calling people on the phone when I don't have to, particularly salespeople. But you know, it happens when, when it's needed or whatever. But like the people that prefer self service, they are only getting kind of what they ask for. Right. You know, they're searching for something, they're served a to their search, let's say or you know, they're getting what the brand thinks they want. But you, do you feel like we're losing something in that, in that brand interaction as far as, you know, by not having as much personal interaction, you know, how do brands kind of make up for that gap of like a salesperson that may just be really intuitive and good at what they do would be like, oh well, you don't really need this, you need this other thing. We could lose that in, in all of this. So like how does a brand try to make up for that in you know, without, without as much context sometimes.
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Polly Traylor
Yeah. And, and how does a brand, or how to, how do salespeople.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Polly Traylor
I guess both. Yeah, different questions. Yes. So I mean it's very good. I do feel that for, for. Okay, so it all always depends a little bit on your product. B2B is usually a longer sales cycle, a more complicated, more expensive product. And so you really, at some point you're going to have to have a phone call, you're going to have to have a demo. It may never require an in person visit, but you're definitely going to have to have a few phone calls with all the stakeholders. And I think one of the things that we have to remember is that nobody really likes to be sold to all the time. And if you can get the customer's attention enough, you know, let's say they downloaded some of your content or let's say they found you via SEO on a term and they got to your website and looked up something and then they were contacted by, you know, the business development team and eventually sales. So you start to have that conversation with them and then, you know, hopefully get them to agree to have a meeting sooner rather than later. And one of our salespeople was talking about this the other day and reminded us that really on a first call with a customer, don't talk about your solution. Ask them, like, what is it? What is it that you are trying to achieve? You know, what are your problems? What are the things that you really need to figure out? And they may find out after 15 minutes, you know what, we're not going to be the right fit for you. Or we might find out, hey, you know, there might be something here and maybe we can, you know, show you a little bit more about what we do. But I feel that there is so much urgency and so much competition that people just want to sort of two things that I see. Either, either slam the customer on the head with something before they're even ready for it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Polly Traylor
Or B, you know, try kind of tricky things to get their attention, which doesn't work.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Polly Traylor
You know, so I'm always about be straightforward. No matter how you contact somebody, whether it's on a call, whether it's on email, I don't want to have to decipher your email. Just, just be quick and clear. I don't really care that, you know, that I went to UC Santa Barbara. I mean, at the end of the day, like it doesn't really matter. Everybody just wants to get their problem solved and make things easier and good in front of their boss. So I believe that we have to get back to more of a conversational. Let's just get on the same page. How can we help you kind of framework before a customer really wants to hear about what you do.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
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Polly Traylor
So, yeah, and branding's, branding's hard, right? I mean, we're all just online with our websites and a certain point, you know, how much can you differentiate, especially as a smaller company.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Polly Traylor
Without looking like you're trying too hard.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And I mean, you definitely have deep experience in the technology sector. I wonder, are there different considerations that you might take because you're talking to a pretty technology and technical audience, I guess, versus what someone in a different kind of B2B setting might be doing? Or do you think what you're sharing really applies to any B2B sale at this point?
- [11:17]
Polly Traylor
Well, I'm not sure since I've always worked in tech versus other aspects versus other sectors of B2B. I will say though, IT people are just increasingly stressed. They, you know, or have been urged to do more with less for forever. But even more so, I think in the past few years, companies are, they have a lot of initiatives now. Everything is digital, everything's tech. Their staff can't do it all and they don't have all the skills they need. There's still a dearth of cloud and AI skills that is ever growing. And so you have people who are having to take on a lot of different responsibilities. You know, some of our salespeople talk about how they are, you know, our solution tends to be used by like a system administrator or a data analyst or systems architect, people who are maybe a little more in the weeds. Like, they're not a cio. We're not going to have a CIO be one of our users. And so these people sometimes can come straight out of college and they're not just managing one area. Like, we used to have these networking specialists or storage specialists or application specialists, and now we're kind of going back to this aid, at least at a junior level of IT generalists. And they're managing a lot of different stuff. So, you know, they don't really have time for a lot of fluff. They need. They love tips and tactics. How can they do their job easier? How can they save some time? How can they, you know, understanding what they are, how they were evaluated. For instance, like if an IT person is there evaluated on how, how they maintain the performance of the applications and the data for users, how they keep things up and running, and how they keep things on budget. Once you understand those three things, two or three things that the buyer really has to do every day, then you can figure out, well, okay, how can I apply to their world? And so you can say fancy things, oh, we're doing this, that. But if the customer is not there yet, it's going to be hard. You know, that kind of a message, the aspirational message is going to have to go to somebody at a higher level who's managing the strategy. So it's all about like again understanding who is your buyer. Because in it there's a lot of different kind of buyers these days.
- [13:56]
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- [14:26]
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Greg Kilstrom
And to the point of, you know, while certainly needing to do more with less is nothing new to your point about the trend of there is a trend that this people need to try to do even more with with even less over time. Right. How is, how has that changed? Have you changed the way that you think about reaching those audiences because of that? Or like how is how has a company like comprise adapted your tactics to kind of match that that trend to.
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Polly Traylor
Do more with less? Yeah, the cost consciousness. Yeah. I feel like every tech vendor has to do that now.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Polly Traylor
But I will say that I'm super lucky because my company, the reason that customers buy us is because we honestly have a solution that can save them money very quickly. Name of the product is comprised intelligent data management. And so I'm not going to do a long product pitch here, but really briefly our solution will go in and it'll index all of a company's data across all of its Storage and then it'll kind of show them where their data is, how fast it is growing and where they can save. And so we have a dashboard that allows them to model new storage plans. And you know, the big value prop is if you move your very old data out of that expensive data center and into a low cost like archival storage situation, then you're going to save a ton of money. And companies don't really have a good handle on their data because there's so much of it now. So they don't even know what's being used how, and they put it all in one box because then they don't have to worry about it. But it's just becoming too expensive now. But going back to what you're saying is, you know we, we are able to talk about that more with less a lot every day. Now if your product, if it's top value proposition is not tied into like a cost roi, then you know, you need to figure out what your angle is and maybe it's about, hey, our solution can help drive your revenues faster and that is going to give you guys more money to work with. It's going to help alleviate some of those budget pressures. Or maybe it's a CRM product. Again, same thing, customer loyalty. The old saying is it's way more expensive to acquire a new customer than keep the ones you have. So I think if you can figure it out, most companies, no matter what the solution is, can figure out how it relates to the bottom line of companies today, then that, that is going to be really valuable and you obviously have to be able to demonstrate that. But it's not all about that. Right. But it is a factor in sales.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I wonder, you know, given your experience working across the technology sector, you know, you've shared a lot of the strategic approaches and insights into audiences. I wonder, you know, to get practical for a minute here, do you have any like, are there any like go to approaches or you know, how do you engage these, these tech savvy and technical audiences? Like are there any approaches that you usually maybe a go to when you're, when you're starting a new initiative or something like that? Like how do you, where, where do you start from?
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Polly Traylor
So I will say broadly speaking, what we see in our company in terms of our highest lead generator is through our website and our organic search has really been an area that we've invested in. So SEO really understanding that, you know, we have a consultant that we work with who provides a lot of counsel to us, because customers, you know, we know that our customers, again, it people are strapped for time. What are the first things they're going to do? They're probably not going to call up a friend. They may not download a report, but they're going to go to their web browser and they're going to enter in a term and they're going to see what pops up. So it's really. And we hear this from our customers like, oh, I was searching for this and then I found you. Or I was searching for this and I didn't find you and it's like, oh, whoops, we better figure that one out, right? So I think it's nothing fancy. We also do pretty well with white papers, which seems like this kind of old school thing. But a white paper doesn't have to be 20 pages, right? I mean it. People call me books now. To me it's kind of one of the same. But you know, a good piece of content that's between two and six pages, that has charts, that has data, that has something other than a fluffy story, which you know, marketers love to tell those but, but meaty enough to where the person who's reading it can quickly scan and see. Okay, wait, this is actually exactly the use case that I need. Now I understand how it works. Okay, I'm going to go talk to my boss about this. So those papers, that kind of content helps us. We also, you know, have a great BDR team and they're on email and on the phone and on LinkedIn all day long trying to engage customers as our front line team to help, you know, our, and, and then hooking into their AES. So our, our BDR team has been great. So we figured out like kind of what works for us. Now I will say like when you think about, let's say a campaign, our main campaigns are really focused around our product launches. We usually have three significant ones every year. And so for each one of those, you know, we usually plan like 30 days ahead of time. And the actual launch will consist of I press release, a blog, a demo, screenshots, analyst calls, maybe a data sheet on our website. And so we put together all this content and we kind of trickle it out over the course of a few weeks. And we also work that content into customer webinars. So we haven't really talked about webinars which are kind of were overdone during the pandemic. But we do find that when we have webinars that are especially for customers and prospects that really teach them about the topic and about, you know, new tactics. We get a lot of response. Webinars that are just promoting your solution. No, but if you really have something that's educational, that is a learning moment that we find that those have been really helpful. So nothing super fancy. We do social media like everybody else. And for a small company or even a bigger company, social media is a lot about branding and getting your name out there so that a customer hopefully hasn't heard about you for the very first time when they get that email or that phone call. It's also good for just relationships with partners and things like that. But I don't know, sometimes I feel like we're throwing things against the wall and you have to kind of step back and take a breath and say, hey, why don't we just focus on these three things that we know are working for right now? Don't try to boil the ocean, measure it, and then go back and refine.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to, to the first, you know, to the SEO and white paper components. I mean, it. That definitely sounds to me like, you know, you had mentioned you have a fairly educated audience. They just need to find. And they're strapped for time. Right. So, like, to me, that's a, That's a great example of they know what they want, they just aren't finding it in the market. And maybe, because maybe they don't know about you yet or whatever, but like, they, they know the questions to ask. They just need someone that's going to respond to that and then. And not give them just a sales pitch. Right. And actually give them. So that may be the webinar or whatever is. Or. Or a white paper of just like, oh, yeah, wow, that is, that's. I mean, I've been, I've been in those shoes as well, looking for, you know, part of what I do is I help enterprises evaluate and identify potential platforms to invest in. So it's like being in those shoes. It's like, I've seen a million sales pitches. We all have, as you know, per what you were saying as well. It's just, how do we make it as real as possible? And in some cases, I would imagine it's to your team's benefit to identify those customers that are not a great fit either, because that just takes up a lot of time and maybe they'll be a good customer in five years or something like that, but getting them now is just going to cause a lot of, you know, frustration and time spent and everything like that as well. Right.
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Polly Traylor
Oh, so Very true. I think sometimes there's the tendency in sales marketing to be, you want to be the solution for everybody, but. But that's just not smart. So we use words on our website and our copy that will hopefully help people identify if that's them or not.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Polly Traylor
Because, you know, otherwise we might acquire them and, you know, they're probably just going to drop. The solution has to fit the problem, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah. So, Polly, thanks so much for joining here. One last question before we wrap up.
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Polly Traylor
Yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
Looking ahead, looking, you know, a few months, few years out, you know, what do you believe are upcoming challenges or trends that B2B marketers should be prepared for? Is it, you know, is it kind of more of just more of. Of what we've talked about? Are there, Are there new things that, you know, B2B marketers should be prepared for?
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Polly Traylor
Well, I think in general, at a high level, I think marketers, my feeling is that marketing departments are going to get smaller and they're going to be tight because now, you know, for better or worse, there's a lot of tools that are replacing the need for an fte. So marketers are going to have to continue to sort of demonstrate their value. And I think honestly, the best way to do that, which is easier at a smaller company, but the best way to do that is to really figure out how you can help other teams, how you can work with your customer success team or your support team or your product management team, R and D, support your executive team. Marketers don't have to stay in the marketing lane all the time. I feel that we have a lot of skills and insights that can help other teams. That makes us more valuable across the organization. And that's not something that a tool can replace. Our ability to help others communicate with their constituents and to figure out how to approach a market or a customer problem, I think is really valuable. So that's what I think about every day in my job. We have a small marketing team and we do a lot of different things that maybe you wouldn't see at a bigger company, but bigger companies might be headed this way too, to where marketing departments are going to get smaller. And I think then the other thing is, you know, obviously use AI as it makes sense, but look at things from the data perspective, whatever you can measure, and there's so many ways to measure things now, you know, do that. We get caught up in creating because we like to create, but you have to measure a little bit every week. Like, you know, I look at our Google metrics, a couple different pages I've got bookmarked. I kind of look at them every week just to see what's going on. And so I feel that, you know, it just helps keep you grounded and make sure that you're focusing on things that are going to help move the business. Those would be the highlights. Really great, Great.
- [27:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Well, again, I'd like to thank Polly Traylor, Senior Director of Marketing, Communications and Content at Comprise, for joining the show. You can learn more about Polly and Comprise by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com that's b2bagility.com While you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [27:54]
T Mobile Advertiser
Breaking News T Mobile Network outperforms expectations in all sectors because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network. Switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualified unlocked device credit service report in 90 plus days device knowledgeable carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.