A conversation with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
Will Milano’s Golden Rule of Marketing
The role of brand and the consumerization of B2B buying behaviour means that there’s an even more pressing need to rethink the way we meet our clients where and when they are. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with the ISA’s own Will Milano, CMO at Integrity Solutions, to talk about this change in buying behaviour, and what he and his team are doing to keep up with this change.
SM: What role does marketing play at Integrity Solutions?
WM: At Integrity Solutions, marketing has four functions: brand building/awareness, customer acquisition, customer retention, and sales enablement. And I know people are skeptical about investing in “brand building,” but the fact of the matter is that you can’t generate leads without building your brand.
SM: Yeah, I attended the World Business Forum in NYC this fall, and had the pleasure of hearing Marcus Collins speak about the importance of brand and the role it plays in helping you find your audience. He took a nearly full house at the Koch Theatre through a rapid-fire history of marketing, beginning with its origins in basic trademarking (“marketing” as a matter of legal ownership) to “trust marking” (where exposure through repetition and carefully framed-up value propositions built a sense of trust in the brand) to “love marking” (reflecting the shift in the “Mad Men” days of advertising where brands sought consumer connection through stories, emotions, etc).
Where marketing is today, he argues, is “Identity marking”: in a postmodern reality where identity is conspicuously self-constructed, consumption becomes a cultural act—one that signals to others aspects of our identity. And successful brands, Collins says, manage to become both a coveted part of people’s hand-crafted identity and shorthand for ideas and beliefs—something that says to others: “this is how I see the world.”
Tomorrow, Collins argues, brands will be “tribal marks”: they will signify not only individual identity, but group belonging. When brands have a POV about reality, Collins said, they find people like them. And his instructions to all of us were really clear: find your “spiky” point of view, and go evangelize. Find your congregation, and then don’t sell people—serve people. Go from value props to ideological congruence.
WM: That’s right. In our businesses in particular, we are marketing people and IDEAS—not products. People don’t care what you have to sell, they care what you have to say. So that idea of ensuring that your ideas are finding your way to their intended audience is really important. Companies like ours have 3 assets: People, Brand, and IP. The question is: are you giving adequate attention to all three? People – our buyers, out in the world in the places they are (webinars, Linkedin, podcasts, googling)—they’re looking for answers to their questions. You need to ask yourself: what question(s) does your IP answer?
SM: I’ve become aware in the last year or so that there is tangible evidence that buyer behaviours have shifted in particular in the past few years. Even B2B buyers are more resistant to traditional sales cycles and face-to-face buying processes, and spend about 80% of their time in a buying process self-educating and self-qualifying before even engaging their short list of suppliers. Like you say, these people are out there googling and searching for information, and for most of these shoppers, B2B buying is fully digital, and people are researching vendors first, on their own terms, and their own time. How are you responding to this shift?
WM: Yes, buyers are now at least 70% through the buying process before engaging with the sales person. And the other thing that’s changed is that about 85% of engaged contacts are anonymous—only about one in a hundred people who come to your website will fill out a form. They turn off cookies. They want to look without letting you know they’re looking. So it’s just becoming more difficult to see who is interacting with your content. But here’s the thing: you can swim against that tide, or you can learn how to swim in it. We’ve figured out that we’re playing a longer game, where we’re building credibility, and we’re willing to be there, ready for when the customer is ready—because it’s their timing.
SM: I love that. Our CMO, Jill Murphy, talks about marketing’s role as loving the customer before the transaction that makes them a customer. There’s this deep sense of respect and being in the service of the customer—versus selling them at every moment which is just so obviously, transparently self-serving.
WM: Exactly. You need to just treat your prospects better. I heard this great line on a call the other day, and I’m thinking of it now as the Golden Rule of Marketing: “Treat your prospects the way that you want to be treated when you’re shopping.” No one wants this whole experience of, fill in a form, then we’ll call you, then we’ll email you into submission, and everything along the way the whole time is all we/I/our/us. No one wants that. What people want is this: give me breathing room; provide me with something of value; remind me who you are.” That’s serving your potential customers instead of just selling them