I can’t believe it – in my last marketing campaign, I broke my own rules. I fell into a plethora of cognitive biases. I know this stuff so well, both on an academic and practical level, and yet I screwed up!

It shows how hard this job is that despite all my training, expertise, and dedication, I still made rookie mistakes during my last marketing campaign.

There are so many ‘experts’ out there who seem to have all the answers yet, so obviously, don’t.

If they are so great at marketing business to business, then why does their company only have one employee?

Why do they even have to to sell us on this stuff? 

Surely they should be luxuriating on their yacht as all their dedicated workers carry out their instructions using all their marketing ‘secret sauces’?

So yeah, I’ll admit I still have a lot to learn. And I’m certainly not saying I have all the answers. 

I don’t run the best business-to-business marketing agency in the world. I haven’t even given up my marketing day job! Nor am I a multimillionaire yet.

What I do have is plenty of experience and training in b2b marketing which I’m passionate about sharing.

I am happy to share my mistakes and failures with you. Hopefully, you will find them useful and even entertaining!

Let’s face it—what story is better?

—the fantastic holiday in the Caribbean where everything went perfectly?

– or the one where your plane was delayed, the hire car broke down, your hotel was a dump, and you were two miles from the beach? 

Isn’t failure so entertaining and relatable?

So, with that in mind, let me share my failure. More importantly, I want to know why I failed.

During my career, I have built a tried-and-tested model for creating high-quality sales opportunities. You can look at a successful version of this—the sales team told me they liked this infographic a lot—so hopefully, you will find it useful, too. Simply click on the image to enlarge it. 

I’m not worried about sharing this stuff, because as Steve Jobs, the Apple founder, put it so well ‘don’t worry about sharing your ‘great idea’. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all in the execution’. 

Also, I am aware that prospects are human beings and don’t simply follow arrows and a chart. But the picture is a loose picture of a general buyer journey.

But sure, if any of you CMOs or founders want me to come in and execute my best B2B campaigns, I’m happy to do that for you!

I know how it works – you start with a shallow engagement piece of content. Let’s say it’s an ebook guide ‘ten steps to selecting the right cyber security provider/martech provider for your business’

You have to make sure this guide is good—that’s why I started hiring content strategists and designers. 

There is no point in creating killer ads and copy and spending tens of thousands on ads, getting great, perfectly targeted leads that are ‘in market’ right now—only for them to read your guide and decide it’s garbage. 

Then, your prospects will never engage with you again. They won’t be interested in your emails or any great future campaigns you have; and most importantly, they won’t want to talk to your SDRs or Sales reps. 

The second step is to invite them to a webinar. Again, you have to focus on quality. The sales team will push you to have salespeople pitch the company and ask your prospects all manner of sales questions. 

But you must always consider the prospect’s perspective: ‘Why should I attend this webinar? What’s in it for me?’

• Great speakers
• A customer who can describe the buyer journey
• Brilliant topics – do your research
• Well executed with military precision.

You need to get sales involved only after the webinar is complete and we have the numbers—let’s say 400 signed up and 200 attended.

They can look through the list and decide who the hottest leads are —the ones most likely to buy from you.

At that point, sure, have a salesperson run a ten-minute pitch at the end of the roundtable. But again, the roundtable has to provide real value to the prospect. This is my tried and tested format:

Amazing topic – a roundtable I ran in the publishing sector was – how to thrive and survive after the demise of third party cookies.’

Great speakers and good attendees (prospects must be ‘hot’ for sales, but there must also be a good mixture to make the discussion dynamic and interesting).

It’s only at this stage, after the roundtable, that sales and SDRs will follow up. If you have eight attendees on a roundtable, you should get three or four sales opportunities. 

But of course, you also have maybe a thousand leads that you can continue to nurture to create more sales with more webinars and roundtables.

Now, what did I do wrong in my campaign, I hear you ask? Isn’t failure great to read about? 

I started with an unknown brand (mine – Rudy learning about startups). Neither Damien nor I am a big-name thought leader (yet!), though we are building a good following as micro-influencers. Of course big names and big company brands do draw larger audiences.

Then, on top of all those handicaps, I made the cardinal error of ignoring my entire content funnel and jumping straight to the roundtable before my prospects had warmed to us, my message, or my brand.

The result—miraculously, I got 28 attendees signed up, spending under $1000 (Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads, some email blasts). However, only a handful showed up for the event. I was aiming for 15! 

What are the traps I fell into?

Overconfidence bias: Hey, I know my content strategist is fantastic, and I have a lot of good stories, and we have a great rapport. So you’ll instantly think that, too, right? Nope! 

I would also add – 28 prospects signed up, so at least 14 should show up, right? – wrong! 

False consensus bias: My colleague and I both thought this was a great idea, as did a couple of my other marketing colleagues (who weren’t invested in the project). So, I have at least four experts who agree that it can’t fail, right? Wrong!

Halo effect: I have great feelings about how my colleague and I work (I still do), but of course, why do I assume others feel the same way? Especially when they barely know me.

Confirmation bias: I have run many campaigns like this over the years, and the success rate has been incredibly high. But I have generally followed my own guide of building out a content funnel. However the few times I didn’t do that, I still had some success. I was lucky. 

Yes, you heard it right. In the past, I was fortunate. 

But this time I wasn’t so lucky! However, I learned from my errors and identified 95% of the problems. So I can go forward confidently in my next campaign.

If you are interested in marketing strategies for the business-to-business market. If you want to learn more about how to generate business leads, and how to get the best ROI from your marketing, I hope you continue to read about my adventures in b2b marketing. 

I aim to escape the black hole of B2B marketing with accurate buyer-level intent data and 1st party lead generation.

I’m looking to accelerate sales dialogue with real-time insights into “who” is actively expressing intent in an account, “what” actions that person is taking, “when” those actions took place, and uniquely “where” those actions occurred.

I’m searching for ways to translate content into business outcomes and sales revenue. 

Buyers are out there—you just need to find them, communicate with them, and entice them, all at the right time. So, I will continue to share my stories as I learn more about startup marketing.

Yes, it is hard, very hard. But I continue to enjoy writing about it.