How to Turn Complex Data Into B2B Marketing Strategies

Many B2B marketers drown in the ubiquity of data when they could be using it to uncover some untapped opportunities. However, data alone doesn’t solve marketing challenges. What’s needed is a clearly-defined strategy, objectives, and smart decision-marketing. What can marketers do to leverage data strategically and avoid “death by mediocrity?”

That’s why we’re talking to Rebecca Shaddix (Founder & Managing Partner, Strategica Partners), who shares incredible insights about how to turn complex data into actionable B2B marketing strategies. During our conversation, Rebecca emphasized the importance of setting a clear strategy and highlighted the need for defining acceptable mistakes, aligning cross-functional teams early, and avoiding common pitfalls that impede performance. She also offered a practical roadmap for marketers aiming to drive better results through collaborative, insight-led, and data-driven strategies.

https://youtu.be/U_ZHGihYCbU

Topics discussed in episode:

[1:40] The challenges B2B marketers face with marketing data and why mediocrity is the biggest threat for any company

[7:54] The role of data in smarter decision-making for marketing

[11:21] Untapped opportunities that B2B marketers can find in data

[13:04] “Not articulating and aligning the acceptable mistake” is the single most important pitfall that B2B marketers should avoid in data-driven marketing

[16:51] Best practices to generate useful and actionable insights from data through a crowdsource group activity

[23:22] Actionable tips for B2B marketers on leveraging data:

Aligning the acceptable mistakes for projects prior to kickoff
Get buy-in early and collaboratively
Setting problem statements that you agree on first before developing hypotheses and experiments

[28:13] Case study: How to address bottlenecks in the funnel with better data

Companies and links mentioned:

Transcript

Christian Klepp 00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Rebecca Shaddix. She is a managing partner at Strategica Partners, a writer for Forbes, one of LinkedIn top voices in product marketing, and the expert in residence at the Product Marketing Alliance. She leverages her background and research to merge data driven strategies with innovative marketing approaches. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp 00:31

Okay, I’m gonna say. Rebecca Shaddix, welcome to the show.

Rebecca Shaddix 00:35

Thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 00:36

Great to have you on the show. We had such a fantastic pre-interview conversation, and I should have hit record back then when we were chatting, but here we are, and I’m really looking forward to this discussion, Rebecca, because I think you are gonna drop some incredible insights that I think are gonna be relevant and extremely valuable to our audience.

Rebecca Shaddix 00:58

I hope you’re right. Let’s see.

Christian Klepp 01:00

No pressure, right? Set the bar really high. But yeah, let’s, let’s dive right in. Shall we? Rebecca, you’re on a mission to create an incredible experience for customers by delivering clarity amidst the chaos through B2B marketing strategies developed through data driven insights. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission, how to turn complex data into actionable B2B marketing strategies. So let’s kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think a lot of B2B marketers drown in I think what you call the ubiquity of data?

Rebecca Shaddix 01:40

Yeah, I think it’s most often the root cause is going backwards with the order of evaluating data and setting a strategy. So the strategy, the strategic level company and then departmental, needs to come with clear insight into your place in the market, your differentiation, and a vision for that, and then how you’re doing and getting there is supported by the metrics and the dashboards that would indicate your progress. But if you don’t have clarity on to which metrics matter, what you’re optimizing for and what’s noise, it’s too easy to just be inundated with tons and tons of data that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does may not be set up to be collected, to telling the stories that you think it is, and then you’re asking it to deliver insight that it wasn’t set up for.

Rebecca Shaddix 02:28

So I think most often the biggest challenge is going backwards. Thinking more data means more answers means more clarity, and that’s not the case. All of the data in the world could be interpreted in any number of ways, and most of it is noise, if you don’t know what really matters. And so if you haven’t set that strategy up top and been really intentional about the trade offs, it’ll take to get there, what you’re not optimizing for, what you don’t need to invest in, then you don’t know which metrics you need to influence or measure and improve, and then it just becomes death by mediocrity of spiraling.

Christian Klepp 03:04

I’m gonna steal that one, death by mediocrity. Wow.

Rebecca Shaddix 03:09

Yeah. And I think that’s a big problem. I think mediocrity is probably the biggest threat that any company faces, because if something is clearly, objectively terrible, you’ll take action. If you don’t have any data to tell you what’s working you’re going to validate your assumptions. But if things are just sort of fine, and they’re just sort of languishing along, you’re not necessarily having the urgency to change things. You could be worried about the opportunity cost of messing with something that has some progress. And then, over time, the delta between where you are and where you could be is so much greater than it would be than if something was terrible.

Rebecca Shaddix 03:46

And so to the earlier question of drowning in data, I often think that when people have data, they think that they have just completely unbiased answers, but all of the data in the world is only telling you what this set of inputs is being able to measure in the output, so it’s not actionable unless it’s set up in a certain way. So I think of that mediocrity of enough data to sort of kid yourself that you’re not making assumptions which you are, enough growth, even if it’s stagnant, to kid yourself that this is progress, those are the two biggest threats that people tend to just let persist without taking action decisively. And the decision inherently involves not doing something you’d like to do, or a trade off, or a risk of something you would like not to have, because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a decision, right? It would just be the obvious thing to do.

Rebecca Shaddix 04:38

And so this risk aversion, this really myopic definition of accountability, I think, is a big threat to marketers who are sort of incentivized to play, not to lose, not play to win, and to play the short game, because they’re not going to be around long enough for the long game if they take big swings that don’t pay off. And so I think. Now we see a lot of this languishing mediocrity, because the incentives are such that people just don’t want to do something bold that could get them fired. And so organizations that say they want to take big risks, they want to do big innovations, have to really back that up and say they’re okay with certain things not working out, and if they’re not, they just have to be honest that they want consistent, predictable growth, but you can’t have both.

Christian Klepp 05:23

Absolutely, absolutely, um, don’t do something bold that seems to be like a symptom that is prevalent in B2B, like, across the board, wouldn’t you say?

Rebecca Shaddix 05:33

Sure, I mean, yeah, if something can’t be proven wrong, it can’t really be proven right. So you haven’t set things up that are bold enough just the short term thinking of short term investor c...

Ep. 174: How to Turn Complex Data Into B2B Marketing Strategies