Episode 15: Critical Elements of B2B Marketing | Stephen Kemish

In this episode, Stephen Kemish, Founder & CEO of Intermedia Global Ltd., discussed how his company helped a global tech company stand out in various markets by conducting an audit and mapping their content by genre and stage. They discovered that creating more educational content was the best way to sell and market the technology effectively. Stephen emphasized the importance of being helpful and awakening ideas, which taught them the importance of understanding the needs of the audience.

The conversation then shifted to the topic of AI in marketing, particularly in content creation. Stephen shared his insights on how AI is already capable of creating interstitial content like social media posts and emails, which frees up humans to focus on more intelligent tasks. He also warned about the compound problems that AI can cause with search engine optimization and the potential dangers of AI replacing humans in decision-making roles.

Keypoints of the episode:

  • Conducting a content audit and mapping it by genre and stage can help identify gaps in your B2B marketing strategy.
  • Educational content can be a powerful way to sell and market technology effectively, as it can build trust with your audience and position you as an expert in your field.
  • AI can be used to create interstitial content, such as social media posts and emails, freeing up humans to focus on more complex tasks.
  • Use AI wisely, as it can cause compound problems with search engine optimization and potentially replace humans in decision-making roles.
  • Understanding the needs of your audience is crucial in B2B marketing, as being helpful and awakening ideas can lead to more effective and successful campaigns.

Connect with Stephen Kemish on LinkedIn.

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Meet the Host

steve

With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.

Full Episode Transcript

Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody, it's Steve. Welcome back to Interesting B2B Marketers. Today, I'm with Stephen Kemish.

Stephen, welcome to the show. 

Stephen Kemish: Thank you, Steve.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. So listeners always know we like to start off with case studies, but before that we just do a quick 60-second intro. So tell us about who you are and what you've been up to.

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, sure. So I'm a B2B lifer, so 25 years in B2B marketing. I started last century, 1998, 99 in client side. So I spent half of my career so far, client side, and then literally for about 13 or 14 years I've been agency side. Based in the UK but I work with various organizations around strategy and planning, particularly on digital. But thankfully in the world of B2B we tend to see omnichannel or multichannel work rather than just exclusively digital. So I do that. I also lecture as well. I've spent 10 years teaching in London and in Helsinki, in Finland. A degree in digital marketing. I've given that up in the last couple of years, purely from time. But the one thing that I really am driven by with lecturing, which I do three or four times a year in various places around the world, is behavioral economics. I've stumbled into that in the last 10 years. Number, big advocate of emotion in B2B marketing. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Yeah. That's awesome. So thanks for the intro. You know, I'm looking forward to the conversation today because we're gonna talk about three different elements that are critical. In any B2B marketing world that we live in. Right? And it's data tech and content. So we're gonna jump into the first case study, which is all about data. And this one has to do with the facility management company. So go ahead and, and take us through the story. 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, I mean hopefully there's lots of crossovers for this organization through to whoever's listening in today, wherever you are in the world, in the industry. And that trifecta, Steve. We'll come over to the other two topics, but we'll look at data, technology and content, but actually most critically for me, how the three can really support one another and work together. And if you don't get all three in alignment, you may be missing out on opportunity. You may cause yourself trouble. The common thread, if you will, through all I wanna talk about is, is looking at things from a different angle, trying to solve a problem in a slightly different way. And as you mentioned, we've got a client organization, facilities management a large organization based out of the UK, but work all over by acquisition. They have a solar energy company. and what they were trying to do is work out how to target and then tell a convincing story to prospective organizations that might take this product. Struggling, so we came in with a slightly different approach from a data standpoint, and I think the common thread here is for every organization there's an awful lot of data. First party in your organization, third party data that if you can weave that together, I think you find one plus three if you will, first and third becomes far greater than four. And what we effectively created for them is an overlay of various data sources to try and help them identify good prospect organizations and then give them the compelling story, which to my point around the trifecta leads to content further downstream. And what this basically means is we've managed to create for them, Solar rooftop database. Now this, this doesn't sound the most thrilling thing in the world. I appreciate, but what it gives visually is a map that says for the 22, and if you're a rooftop fan, Steve, there are 22 million rooftops in the UK when you exclude. Garages and kind of summer gardens or sheds. Most of them of course are residential, domestic, and for some other organizations they may well be really interested in that, to place solar panels on the roof. Our clients are interested in commercial B2B. And therefore what we've created for them is already made kind of visual tool that allows them to hone in on target organizations. So think Fortune 500 in the US or the FOOTSY 100 or 250 in the UK here, find those organizations visually map their rooftops and using some really clever secret source, an output, exactly the square meterage of available usable rooftop that they own that could have solar. So there's the target. Then on top of that is how much of that solar, if it was used, would they then make savings on their current energy bills? So, you know, how can they turn solar into opportunity of cost saving one. Secondly, it will probably give them, depending on whether they're northeast, southwest facing overage and they can sell that excess energy back to the national grid. So the current over infrastructure across the UK and calculator, saving for that. And thirdly, and this has been the really interesting one. There's of course an awful lot of large enterprise organizations down have now got ESG targets, environmental, social, and governance. And the last clincher is this can also calculate the CO2 savings by putting solar on your roof by year, by five years, by 10 years, by 20 years. So not only can we target where these organizations are, firstly, then the overlay of third party is, well, who are the contacts? Who are the people by job function, by job title that would be actually interested in a story about putting solar on your roofs. And then the clincher for the content downstream is, and here's the really compelling bit we can calculate with great accuracy. If you put this stuff on, here's your cost, but here's your payback and here's your environmental element that in my experience, Steve, a lot of organizations are really trying to wrestle with what the hell do they do with ESG? How does the marketing department, does any department help support that? And how do we find a lateral way to do it? So this is taking data, turning it if you will, from a different angle and then looking back to see a different way in a different route to that organization. In this particular instance, via the rooftop.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I mean that's such an interesting thing here. So what I like about this is now, once you've created this profile of you've got it down to 27 million downtown. All right? Here are the people who actually can benefit based upon their actual roof size. What's great about that is your first outreach can be really rich, right? Like you we're only reaching out because you've met these criteria. We've run an analysis and that could be the pitch for the first meeting, right? You just say, “Hey, we just wanna share this with you so that you understand the opportunity.” I mean, is that kind of where the marketing outreach led to?

Stephen Kemish: I mean, the keyword in there is relevance from the get-go, right? Whether you put it through the post to them via email, whether you send a salesperson in with a PowerPoint or whatever presentation to say, look, let me just help you. And  I'm huge as a marketer. I'm a huge advocate of the word. Being helpful in sales marketing often does all of the selling. And yeah, if you can highlight to a Fortune 500 company, this would help you tackle some of your ESG targets, then it actually doesn't become about cost sale at all. It's a value conversation. So, yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure I know Steve, you've talked about ABM account-based marketing on this podcast before. And these organizations will be of size that an account-based marketing approach can then be fueled by this data because you know who you need to talk to and you've got a compelling set of messages by way of that CO2 data, that money savings, that revenue opportunity by putting this stuff on to then tie up with those contacts and those decision makers.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I mean the facility management space, it's what's really interesting is it used to be 20 years ago, it's the right thing to do and now you have the cost saving story. So it really is this one-two punch that you can go to a company and say, look, it's not only the right thing but here's the analysis and you're gonna save money. And that's I think when there's been more traction. And whether that's through local incentives, through governments or not that's a well-rounded story, right? Like we think about storytelling and marketing. It's that rational and emotional. And when you put both of them together, it's pretty compelling.

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, and it gives you something different to say as well. I mean, I don't think this is just a facilities management, but I've worked in a whole different array of industry, B2B industries over the years. my family, who have nothing to do with marketing are always amazed by the industries they didn't know existed until I start to talk to them about what I do for a job. You know, certain obscure products and services that only our B2B marketers know about. But part of the common thread in most organizations in most markets is they need some other way of standing out because it's competitive and everyone's got fundamentally the same product or service. So how do we change the direction, come from a different angle to have a different story, a different approach. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. And so tell me how long you put this data approach into place, like how long has it been, what is the impact of the go to market approach? 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah. So I mean, in that particular instance, we're talking a couple of months of energy to do it, excuse the pun, to get that data set together. But the principle it doesn't necessarily have to take that long, depends on what the recipes or what you're trying to achieve. If I give you a slightly different example of the same sort of principle we had a client the other day that was and we don't do ABM in our organization. We support others that do by nature of this data and other areas. But they just asked to say, “Look, we we're really stuck on a problem. We've got two really important ABM prospects. They're in the same industry. They're both in retail, manufacturing, very large global organizations. If you look at them from traditional data sets, they're the same turnover, the same employee size. They've got roughly the same amount of sites or offices all over the. We just can't find a way to talk to them differently.” And I won't take the credit for it, but one of my colleagues in our data team said, Hey, look at this bit of data that's publicly available, Company A, they use the same auditors all around the world because they're over a certain turnover. They have to publicly declare their records. And every country in the world that this company operates in, they use the same global auditors, Company B, which remembers of the same size, same kind of lookalike. They use different auditors in different countries. And again, a bit like rooftop Steve, how exciting is that? Well, as my colleague pointed, I said, well, that tells you that one of them is decentralized decision making. One of them is centralized decision making straight away. So company A, there is no point sales and marketing effort going anywhere else other than head office over in Western United States of America, the other company, we need a completely different approach. We need to go decentralized, and every country where there's an office is an opportunity for a sale.  So it's those kind of gems that are hidden in data that can really unlock sales and marketing process. 

Steve Goldhaber: I love data that's available publicly that sometimes we just think we need to buy it or we need to create it on our own. But I love publicly available data and here's an example from when I used to be in the B2C world. So I used to work for like more of a retail company and they would figure out where do we create retail locations? And it was all about drive time. So yeah, within a certain path, how many miles could someone get to us? And they didn't have the dollars to do the original research, but then the strategy they used was, you know what, McDonald's does this and they do a great job of it. So the whole data strategy was just get a map of all the McDonald's locations. Right? And if as long as you build it within a half a mile of McDonald's, they've done all the work for us. And it was so fascinating because it's like, sometimes it's the data or the insight is just in front of you and you have to take it. 

Stephen Kemish: That's the really key bit, right? Data is something that, in my experience, and by the way, I'm not a data marketeer. I'm a digital marketer originally, but data was suddenly thrust upon me 15 years ago and everything made sense. But data's boring to people, but insight is the cool bit of data. And that's really what it is. It's the output of data that says the eureka moment of, oh my goodness, that's what we can do. Just build it and they build it next to McDonald's and they will come into your example . 

Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. So let's jump into the second case study. We're gonna talk a little bit about tech and what I like about what you and I were talking about before was just we crave more technology. We think that more tech is the answer, and that's a flawed assumption. So go ahead and take us through the second one.

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, and I think it's an epidemic, Steve. In my experience in our industry, so many people we familiar with the MarTech landscape, whether you've seen a visual laydown, but we all know there's an awful lot of marketing technology providers out there. And last count I saw is tens of thousands, you know, 10, 11,000, and it just grows all the time. And that for me feels like the world's largest candy store. And outside of that candy store, us marketers decision makers who've been given budget and have been let loose, and I'm not sure if you're familiar, Steve, with ADOS , as a condition. So A D H D, attention hyperactive disorder. Marketers have this unique thing when it comes to buying technology, which is “Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny”. And we just buy this stuff,  without really thinking it through sometimes because everyone else seems to be. So we've got this I was gonna say pandemic, but we've had enough of those. We've got an epidemic of technology purchase. And, and in any time, whether recessionary or not a CMO is under pressure to justify their existence. So what we are learning more and more is that the technology that organizations are buying, there is nothing wrong with the tech. They have got a huge garage full of great stuff, but what they've invariably miss in that purchasing is the process that goes round it and, and people as well, right? There's a huge skill shortage out there for sure. We are way behind the curve of technology, sales and really good users of the tech. But the bit, and as we were talking about Steve, around a quick case study of a global recruitment company, actually one of the largest in the world that operate all over the globe. They had been on that gluttonous journey of buying all sorts of technology. They are decentralized, so they have got different regions, different countries. All of them were buying tech and data services all over the place. And what we were asked to do over a period of a couple of years, it was a large project, but again, the size of this project's irrelevant. The golden thread through it was the principles of firstly stopping and trying to understand and this will I'm sure appeal to many people if you're in global B2B markets and brands of the centralized versus decentralized argument. And in this particular instance, it's got so out of hand that we helped them centralize. So they ended up, that meant mapping a bit like your example earlier, Steve, around where do we put sites, where we worked out for them that Prague in Cheshire or Czech Republic as it was, or Czechoslovakia back in the day in middle Europe, was the perfect location for many reasons, to put a centralized resource to cover a lot of the backbone of sales and marketing. And not build that amd they will come, but build that and they will save and actually for that organization over a two year period, just by helping them stop buying relinquish licenses, put process in place where process wasn't all sorts of again, seemingly boring things around the edges of sales and marketing that organization in first year alone saved in US dollars, somewhere in the region of 21 million US dollars in marketing spend because they were just so inefficient. And that's nothing to do with that organization alone. Again, pretty much all organizations, as I said, we bought too much tech. We're not utilizing it properly. And if we just step back and go, what do we really need? Let's get rid of the rest. Let's build process, centralize it. And then actually I'm a bit proponent of centralize and then decentralize to thrive. If you compare you and me, Steve, it's not about Zs or Zeds, it's about the cultural essence of what you communicate as well. And depressingly every year, there's a stat that Gartner published on tech and the last I saw of it only a couple of months ago, and there's many other sources of the same depressing fact, is that 42% utilization rate in marketing. So companies buy a hundred percent tech and use 42% of it, but pay for all of it. I dunno, Steve, what house you live in or your listeners live in. But hey, if we were a family of three, that's like buying a five bedroom house and never using three bedrooms. I mean, that's criminal, but that's the reality of what happened. So just by stepping back, not the tech, process improvements in their case unlocked an awful lot of marketing budget that could be used for other things. So I think the thread for anyone is make yourself more efficient with what you've got. You'll be able to find that budget that you couldn't for the things that you really want to do. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. And I'm gonna touch on something. You know, you talk, we've both been in global roles and the challenge becomes that balance it. Where do you do it? And I like what you said about centralize it and then decentralize it. Because what happens in so many big companies is regions have their own budgets. They need to run their business and then all of a sudden five years later, there's 600 instances of Salesforce. And those instances were sold through seven regional salespeople who were all probably doing really well, And there's so many strategies to kind of fix that. I've always been a big fan of if there is a role of corporate in something like that to say, you know what, we're gonna let the local regions or teams do what they want, but at least at a minimum, we are gonna own the contract and we need some global contact at Salesforce that can negotiate with us. So we can at least have a sliding scale to say, based upon usage, whatever it is. You can get some cost savings there, but it is so challenging because now you've got like, just to get the meeting with like the seven regional heads of it. And they've already done their contract, so it's like, well, how do I get out of a contract that was negotiated three years ago in another language? It's a really hard world, so I like that centralized and decentralized approach. 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah. It is and look, there's no perfect answer to it either, it's an impossible situation in some ways, but to that where there's already contracts regionally, you can't just wipe those contracts away instantly but the commonality again is, well, if you're stuck with a contract, let's look at how you can make the most of what you've got. And it might not be utilizing all the tech it might be, but again, it could be, and this is why this trifecta of data and tech and then content so important is it could just be the best way to make the use of what you've got is to put more, less, or different data into the top of it as the fuel for your technology and you'll get better outcomes that with it. That will mean you can stomach that contract because you're getting better value until you can change it. 

Steve Goldhaber: One other strategy I've heard recently that was really good was a tech buying rule to say, if you're one piece of technology, one has to come out and it's a great trick because you instantly go, “All right, well, okay, if I'm gonna get this, then this goes away.” Or, I mean, if someone makes the case, no, I can't, here's why I need to keep it all, then that's good. You've made the case, but one in, one out is always good.

Stephen Kemish:  All the best nightclubs in the world. Right? They've run on that basis. 

Steve Goldhaber: That's right, who knew they were at the pioneers since a hundred years ago. All right, cool. So case study number three. This is we saved content for last because you know, as we've talked about, it's not just data tech or content on its own, but content needs to wrap it all up. So walk us through the third case study.

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, so trying to keep a golden thread through everything. Pick on a client of ours. They're a global, they're a US headquartered, but global company that work in tech but they work in markets like retail pharmaceutical retail, healthcare, manufacturing, delivery, all sorts of different spaces, and they're representative of, they've got the tech, they've got the data, right, but they just weren't cutting through with their use of particularly marketing automation and social media. And I'm sure an awful lot of B2B marketers, if not all of us listening in, are, we've only got finite channels to try and get these people's attention. Firstly, there isn't a magic part of the, well, if there is a magic part of the internet, I haven't found it yet, that says this is the answer to B2B marketing. It's often the same channels that everyone else is using and finding a way to stand out. And what we discovered, again, a basic 101, was to do an audit that you've got your sales process, whether it's your funnel, your waterfall, or whatever journey you wanna call it, and map the content they've got by the stage, but map the content by  size, but then genre of content as well. And I think if I boiled it down, Steve, to one thing, the real difference we found was looking at content and by content, I mean guides, white papers, blogs, videos social media tiles, infographics, all the stuff that we all probably churn out if we're listening in. But the genre of it, right? There's four key genres I think we've found for any organization as a starting point. So if you've never, huh? Content genres informative, inspirational, entertaining and educational. So two I’s, two E's, and you can create any other genre. But those are the ones we tend to come back to and we found for this organization, they were really, and quite a lot of organizations we've worked with since, have tons of informative content that's basically talking about themselves. This is how great we are, this is the reasons you buy, here's our product, here's our features, our benefits, all the stuff that boils back to everyone else has got the same. So how do you stand? The inspiring stuff harder to do and you wouldn't do it in the same quantity. But if you think about for every 20 pieces of content you might create for a quarterly campaign, yes, you do need informative, have a few inspiring things. They may not even be your content. They might be third party. Here's a video from somebody doing something interesting. And I mentioned at the start, I'm a big fan of emotion in marketing it's so important because B2B doesn't really exist. It's human to human. How do I get somebody in a job to care, to show some form of emotion?Some draw. The entertaining one, I'd say the entertaining one. By the way, Steve is the hardest to do. Back to our conversation around centralized and decentralized. What I might find funny and what you might find funny, for example, can be really different. So that's the one to tread carefully with. But in B2B we often keep our kind of suit and tie on. We're really formal. There is to that humanity, find a slightly different tone of voice to stand out a bit. And there's some great examples of organizations all over doing that. And, and the last one, which is the most important, is educational. And it leads back to that word help if you boil it down in a different way. And what we've discovered with them through trial and error testing is to say, look, let's mix up the content genres at different stages of the journey using the marketing automation for their nurture routines and then we can measure which of those genres tends to get the best engagement at the best stage. And overall, and there's lots of learnings, but the key learning for me was that educational content, time and time again, is better at selling in inverted commerce than any of the other genres because it's not trying to sell it's being helpful. It's sign posting, it's awakening ideas. So just by doing that and creating more of that educational content not just for the marketing process by the way, but back to the first case study, back to those facility management guys, giving the salespeople helpful content. That has been one of the best ways to sales and market, if you will use of the technology. They've got to run those routine. 

Steve Goldhaber: I love that. I mean, that's been a theme on the podcast for such a long time is that marketing is all about building trust. So many of us have the the flawed thinking to say, you know what? I'm gonna tell you about my capability and my solution, and you could go that path, but it is a bumpy path if you don't already have someone's trust. The fastest way you can build trust is for you to almost know, look, I bet based upon who you are in the size of your company and the industry, this is your pain right now. And once you can say, I know the pain you're going through, and I can give you some ideas on how to solve it instantly, if you can prove. They trust you. And then the conversation can go back to where we mostly take it, which is the capabilities and solutions and if you're a marketer out there, your Salesforce with more pain driven content, you should really have something that says, here are the eight different pain points of our buyers. And we have journeys all driven on pain. That eventually will lead to a solution. But they don't start with the solution. 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, a hundred percent, kind of 101 of mistakes is starting with the solution. The chance of the solution being right at that time is very limited. If you can take people on a journey. In another world. Right. If we were a Medical Doctor and we just said, right. Hey Steve, how's it going? Well, I'm not feeling very well. Great. try this drug, see if it works. Try this one, try this one. You would do a bit of diagnostic first to work out to your point where the pain is, and then recommend the best kind of solution cuz it's got a much better chance of working. 

Steve Goldhaber: You've just described the US healthcare system right there and you didn't even know it.

Stephen Kemish: I don't wanna stumble into that word literally don't wanna stumble and fall. It'll cost me too much to get up. But we should borrow from other industries that human to human bit for me is what would work. The other bit, just to pick up on your point around the pain and being in relevant but also inclusive, you can create content in a way that without patronizing somebody really awakens them to the fact God, they understand us. They really get what we are about by talking about people that are the same as them. And I mentioned behavioral economics and behavioral science with that hat on. It's about social. This is the idea that people like to do by spend time or otherwise with people like them. So the humble testimonial, a sentence from somebody in your industry that said these guys were really good, is often all it needs to get people to go. Oh, right. So they solved a problem for them and I know them. Oh, right. They'll be able to solve a problem for me as well. Again, that's not selling, that's just sign posting and helping. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's crazy. It's the best analogy I have as it relates to kinda what you just described. Men who are buying an engagement ring for their future wife, right? We don't know what we're doing. We're buying a diamond, which whatever you wanna spend, I mean, you can spend a little, you can do a lot, and then all of a sudden it's kind of like, well, there's this thing called the Four Cs, right? And the four Cs helped us understand the cut, the clarity, the quality, so it was a little bit of educational but ultimately if my buddy Rick did this six months ago and Rick had a good experience, I go with what Rick is saying, right? So it's funny how that is a really good point. That's trust building. 

Stephen Kemish: You know, it's a really good point. Cause actually I think that the, the crossover there is that in that imperfect knowledge cuz hopefully Steve, hopefully you only ever buy one of those once in your life, right? But, and therefore you just don't have the knowledge. But if you've got a friend, a trusted friend in this case or somebody in the industry that go well, they've been there before. Great. The bit that I think back to content that B2B marketers often on the other side when they're creating content to this audience, assume that the average decision maker or buyer has a lot more knowledge than they do. And that's not, again, to patronize them, but I often challenge, when I was teaching, I'd say to anyone I worked with, I said, assume for a minute that the average buyer of your product or service. They don't think about you very often at all. They probably never bought you before. So just step back and go, what do they really need to understand and in what language? We use something called the Flesh Scoring Index which you can Google and find really easily if nobody's familiar, it's simply a zero to 100 score on how readable your content is. A hundred is it's kind of designed for kindergarten. One is it's incredibly difficult to read and I can tell you that a benchmark from hundreds of pieces of content we've worked with, and if we ever start with a client, we'll always take their content and run it through that to get a benchmark. It typically is in 40 to 50 out the a hundred. Now that might sound bad, but it is not, not necessarily that the balance is create content that isn't condescending and patronizing, but also just doesn't use jargon that loses them. Because they probably, to your point with the four Cs, yeah, I dunno what it is. They might have heard about it, but they've got no idea what it really means, even if they're really senior experienced people.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I love that. Is that used to be the Flesh Kincaid Index? 

Stephen Kemish: That's correct. Quite right. The full version Flesh Kincaid is  somebody just Googles or whatever search engine they want to use.

Steve Goldhaber: That may be in the US, you may get into some issues by Googling flesh that that's a whole separate genre. They'll stop doing marketing for the day and just continue. 

Stephen Kemish: But that's not just a US problem. We're back to epidemics again. I think.

Steve Goldhaber: I do love that ability for something to analyze your content and just say like, are you way too buttoned up? Are you talking jargon? You know, there's another technology I've seen in sales training courses and I'm sure this is like a Zoom plugin that they have, but they essentially have an analysis of how much do you spend talking as the salesperson versus the prospect, and you get scored on it. And if you end up talking more as a salesperson, your score goes down. It's a great little diagnostic tool similar to the reading index, to kind of say, are you engaging the right way? And I think they were suggesting based categories would change if you're a salesperson, if you can speak 20% of the time, you're really good at what you do because you're listening, you're asking questions, you're guiding them down a path as opposed to just saying, here's my pitch, and it's gonna take 25 out of the 30 minutes that we have today. 

Stephen Kemish: And probably the basic version for me is we were born with two ears and one mouth. It makes sense to use it in that ratio. Not just sales, but marketing as well. Cause if you go in with a pitch as a salesperson with a presentation deck, that's super, but it's got utterly no relevance cuz you've not asked some fundamental qualification questions. It's a waste of their time and the same for marketing. And that's back to that content genre. If you just create informative content that talks about you. You're probably running into that same risk as that overtalking salesperson that you're not really listening to what they want, you're just trying to pump anything at them you think might stick.

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Cool. Well, all right. Thanks for sharing the case studies. Let's jump into your first B2B job. Did you take it saying, this is gonna be amazing, or you're like, oh my God, what am I signing up for? 

Stephen Kemish: So here's the funny thing, right? And this is how naive I was back having come out of college at 21 years old and knew nothing, and I probably still know just a little bit more than that now. I took a telemarketing job in a publishing company Business to Business Tax Publishing. I've lived in some pretty cool industries, because I saw the word marketing and  I didn't really understand what the tele bit was and I thought, oh, cool a marketing job. Dunno what tele means. I was just there and I literally so I was in a sales job by accident. I will say the first time I ever picked up the phone to try and make an appointment for a salesperson to try and sell tax software on CD rom to accountants in Glasgow, Scotland. And if you're not from UK or from Glasgow, Scotland, you won't know how tough a market that is. But the first ever call I made and made an appointment and Steve, that's when I thought, I've gotta get out because this isn't for me and how on earth do I ever beat that? So yeah, my first ever marketing job wasn't even a marketing job because I didn't know what I was doing, didn't even know what the role meant. 

Steve Goldhaber: That's funny. I had a telemarketing role. This was not really a job, this was a volunteer position. So I spent five years living in Belgium when I was a kid and I went to international School of Brussels and recently they were trying to do some Chicago based fundraising. So it was actually pretty good. They had all the list of the alumni and they were like, look, you're in Chicago, we are giving you the list of Chicago people. and your pitch, Hey, I'm a former ISB alum. Yeah. I'm in Chicago. You're in Chicago, right. And I had to, I was there dialing for dollars. Right. And it was really tough to do. Thankfully there's enough of that rapport building where, you know, hey, I went to the same school and I live in the same city. That was enough to diffuse. Any tension on most telemarketing calls. But it is super tough. It is. 

Stephen Kemish: I know. I think it's a crossover back, Steve, back to what we've been talking about around content, is that most of us, by the way, I've got great got great respect for salespeople anyway, because B2B marketing is nothing that doesn't deliver sales value. But good content writing inclusivity should be factored into sales scripts. You can tell a really bad telemarketing sales script straight away, or I certainly can, I'm sure most people can. But marketing, if you've got real skill to create really compelling content. The first sentence of a telemarketing script is make or break. So I think there's the opportunity for the two functions to help one another more there too. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. So after your first job where you dropped the phone and said, I'm done one for one, I'm out. What was your next? 

Stephen Kemish: It wasn't quite well, do you know, it's funny, maybe this is, I hadn't even thought about it, Steve. It's the common thread that runs for my career. I then ended up the area of the UK lived in, there was a very large IT hardware and software provider that specialized into education. A mid-sized organization rather than enterprise, but big. And they were the kind of the place to be employed. And I naively went, well, that's enough for me. I'll try and get a job. And I ended up in a job doing technical support. Now I'm not, I wasn't technical at all at the time, so I've then stumbled into another job that's got nothing to do with marketing. But by being in the right, right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time very quickly I went from that to mediocre technical support to them, and this is the late nineties and websites will suddenly become a thing, an FTP and dial up modems for our history fans. And I moved really quickly from that to we need to build a support website because we've got all these software drivers and all these patches and all this boring stuff that you need. If you had a Windows computer back then. So it was a huge drop by accident into the deep end of the swimming pool to go in and physically build a server, install the software. I can't. It's not a particularly cool party trick for a podcast or otherwise, but I can code, I can write in html. I had to learn and that started a journey that leads me to where I am today, which is by, again, by accident, I understood web, I had to build websites. I took on two years later, their e-commerce platform, because we developed this understanding kind of the fastest fingers first, back then to how does the internet work, what can we do with it? And they had an e-commerce store. This is probably my proudest moment, Steve, I think, or one of them was it, for 18 months, it had done 36,000 pounds. So what's that? About 50, 40 to $50,000 say. Over 18 months. We, my team, which I built, took it over and five years later it was a $25 million arm of the business. We really had just hit that kind of up slope, but just thought through process, we understood where technology and where communication and commerce met fits. So my marketing background by qualification, my accidentally falling into the pool of tech and geek, if you will, meant that we just were able to understand how to apply digital to people and solve problems. The most interesting bit of that, and probably the scariest, is they had 500 salespeople in that organization dotted around the uk. And I became the head of online for this company to this debt. And this happened in 2001, so 20 years ago. So a long time ago, the sales director introduced me to 500 salespeople as Steve from the internet, who is gonna talk to you about the.com project he's working on and what it will mean for your jobs in sales?

Now no room has gone colder quicker than that, right? So this guy's gonna come and make us redundant. That's what I think my boss just said. And, but actually we turned it around the other way and said, look, we recognize that you don't wanna sell a $5 mouse or $10 keyboard. You wanna sell the Hundred Thousand dollars software solution. So we're gonna use.com over here to get that crap out of your way and make you successful and support you with quotes and stuff that online can do quicker. And that's really why we won because the salespeople, we just enabled them to be better at selling by getting the stuff out of their way.

Steve Goldhaber: I remember I've had some.com jobs. This is in the late nineties, early 2000s. Oh my goodness. The tension between sales and they literally just looked at you as like, yeah, I know this thing is good and it will eventually take over, but I don't like what you're doing. Like, it just was so adversarial. And we actually, in one of the businesses I worked for, we brokered a deal cuz there was so much tension from the Salesforce with selling online is we at least said, look, if we sell something in your territory, that sale will get lowered from your goal. You know? So it was like some acknowledgement of like, okay, you're not stealing anymore from what I have to do. Maybe they didn't get paid as much. But at least there was a matching process. And I'm sure today that that's eliminated that you just sell online and that's it. I like what you did there with the every salesperson goes through a ton of frustration with customers who just don't have the enough budgets. So I thought that was pretty smart back in the day. 

Stephen Kemish: How can they use their time more effectively. You know, it wasn't as contrived as that. Don't get me wrong. I look back in retrospect and we were just finding our way, but it was just common sense, best we could, and the critical bit actually for me as a marketer with sales or any other part of an organization and for us in that organization, the other key area where IT, the developers, so by accident, because I could understand code, I could speak geek when I needed to. But I shifted our team, well our team were in marketing, and there were a complete siloed parts of this huge building. I moved our team to sit on the end of sales so that actually we spent more time with salespeople than marketing people so that we just, even SP osmosis could listen in to their frustrations on phone calls and go, Hmm, how could we use the.com? And the.com was a part of the business, right? The business was much larger, 500-million-dollar business, so it was still relatively small, but it just took quite a lot of the pain out of their day-to-day. That meant actually they were really responsive to helping support us do more.

Steve Goldhaber: I love what you said there about listening in on a sales conversation. I've never learned more faster than just either being in the room with sales or just like, Hey, tell me what, how your day went. What did you here. And the insights that you get are super helpful. It forces you not to just go to default mode of brainstorming as a marketer and saying, oh, well this is what I think. The real conversations are so helpful. 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah. It's what the customers or prospects are not thinking, but are saying. It's a good content stream as well. I always challenge marketers. I meet with go. When was the last time you actually spoke to a customer? You know, I had a record by the way, and I won't name the organization, but seven years. Somebody in marketing said to me, seven years since I've been on a customer visit, and okay, there's been a pandemic. There's been other reasons, but come on, if you really are responsible for communicating with customers and people that look like. You gotta just listen to them again 2 two ears, one mouth. Right. Go and listen to what they say. Yeah. You learn so much. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right, so we've talked about the past, we've both confirmed our age, our ages we're probably similar ages. So now let's look into the future. What do you see happening that we haven't already discussed? I mean, what's about to get really good or what's about to get just horrible because of weather. Technology ubiquity or anything? What do you see the big trends coming? 

Stephen Kemish: Yeah, I think well we touched on one already, sales enablement, and I think this is a positive of the last number of years of general growth of the internet factor in a pandemic without trying to date us too much. But that's really important to stamp that. Sales, marketing and B2B have been forced closer together because of the pandemic. And I think that one of the positive is marketing. One of the trends I've seen really focused on is sales enablement. How can marketing make sales more successful? And I think that's really healthy because it means that the divide is less. The likelihood of success is greater back to tech. I think it's a double-edged sword, Steve. It's a really interesting one, and you may well have covered, and I'm sure you will on this series is AI when it comes to marketing, but particularly content there's been an awful lot of focus on it recently, but there's a lot of really interesting AI out there.

And without question, and in fact I've been teaching on this for best part of 10 years, is I think if you think about your content creation in an organization and look at it like a pyramid, AI is already at the point at the bottom of that period where the volume of content needs to be created. The interstitial stuff, the bit that keeps you moving along the daisy chain, if you will. So not your big pieces of hero content, but the important, the email, the social media post that nudges them to something. AI is already right now capable of doing that, better, faster than a human. That's not a con, that's not a threat. That's just actually opportunity to say, look, get AI to do the stuff you just don't like doing. And then you as a human can focus on the really intelligent stuff. And I think the marketing function is starting to become more like an editorial office in a newspaper. Someone like that where you've got your chief editor, that's you and your small content team of humans, and you've got all these sub editors, and you've got all these sub writers, which is the AI that can help. So there's the positive on the flip side, you know, the technology,  it causes compound problems with search, SEO, in terms of all sorts of different aspects around not being able to stand out. Cause it's effectively sophisticated regurgitating of existing text. And who knows beyond that? I did read actually the other day of a hedge fund actually in New York that their board of directors used to be five humans. It's actually four humans and some AI, and they all have equal vote. And then the story becomes, how long before the AI convinces the four humans to vote themselves off the board and be replaced by other AIs? And then we're in the territory of Skynet and terminate and a judgment day and terminate two style. Oh. We're in trouble. So,  it's a really good proxy for tech, right? There's always opportunity with technology, but you have to think about it from a point of view of what's it really gonna help to complement. And again, back to the sweet shop, the candy store for you of, there's so much tech, there's so much AI tech already hundreds of platforms. But don't just go, let's buy that. Cause everyone else is really think about it and understand where it will help you. Your budget, or more importantly, where it's gonna help your conversation with the customers you're trying to talk to.

Steve Goldhaber: So I did a LinkedIn post about the AI… 

Stephen Kemish:  Did you write or did the AI write it for you? That's the question.

Steve Goldhaber: I actually wrote this one. I've experimented with the other, but I did write it, and here was the takeaway on kind of my view of AI. I think it's amazing as it relates to not just the creation side of content, the planning and the sourcing, you can prompt to say, Give me the pain point of this customer, or you can be very intentional on how you use the internet through AI to gather information that we've normally, you know, like we've just gone to Google, we've been conditioned to Google because Google solved the problem was, I need information fast. To me, AI , the real value is in getting information faster. I think so many people think AI is like, Ooh, content creation, job displacement. And sure that will happen. But I think the learning and the insights is more interesting. And, you know my outlook on AI too is like, I'm not concerned today for marketers because if you've been in marketing for the past 5, 10, 20, You know how to do your job the right way. You understand how to discern good sources from bad sources. You know, you're a good judge is that effective? Is it gonna work? My real concern with AI is that it's gonna be so good in five to 10 years that anyone new to the industry will be relying so heavy on it. that they won't have the same skillset to evaluate if what it is created is a good thing. And that's my big fear is, longer term you will have a new generation of marketers that if they don't have that discipline to understand how to use market resource or how to validate a source, it's gonna be a different world. And that's my biggest fear with AI is the long term applications.

Stephen Kemish: It's a very good fear. I think there's a parallel, Steve, technology advancement and I would, if you replaced AI with social media or social networking before it became social media, it's the same principle, is what you started to see is people come into And this is not an ages thing, but it's just evolution. You see people come in that are really comfortable with digital natives, with social media platforms in terms of using them, but have no idea why it's relevant to an organization to use it or not use it. And what I saw over 10 years is loads of organizations, B2B and B2C just start social media platforms cuz somebody young and cool came in and went, yeah, I know how to insert name of social platform, but to your point, didn't have the checks of measure of the context of whether it's what it's doing and whether it's just a waste of time at best or a fundamental break in that relationship when you come, as you say, with AI and content creation, it could just go off on its own and completely damage your brand if it's not looked. It would be like giving your 17 year old self a Lamborghini or Ferrari to drive. Right? You might have passed on your driving test, but you aren't gonna be able to use that properly. You need to learn how to be an advanced driver before you let loose on the cool stuff.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm gonna do one more question. Leave the audience with something ,of course, spectacular and mind boggling. Right. But maybe I'll give you a little bit of focus. What's the one thing that these B2B marketers can do every day. Like what's a good reminder of, hey, at the end of the day, “Do this or remember that”. What’s one lesson that you've learned over the years that you think is really relevant? 

Stephen Kemish: So, without question, my favorite book in the world is To Kill a Mockingbird by Atticus Finch. Right? And there's a quote within that book, if, regardless of whether you've read it, that if I paraphrase, is you never truly understand somebody until you walk around in their skin. And I think for me the biggest learning with marketing and the thing you should come back to regularly is, am I talking, am I doing this? Are we doing this from our standpoint or from theres? and at a macro or micro level, so often we fall into the trap of subjectivity or assumption. And a healthy marketer that has that as kind of inbred, close your eyes and see that and say, right, okay, hold on. Have we accidentally stumbled into what we think we do versus what we truly understand our customers, our prospects to do? If we are not take social media as an example, if we are on Snapchat or TikTok or Facebook or insert any social media platform all of the time, but our target audience on then social media is totally irrelevant. Don't fall into that trap. So yeah, absolutely. Go and read what Atticus Finch has to say into Killer Mockingbird. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right, good advice. Thank you, Stephen, for joining us today. Remember everyone out there who is listening or watching, make sure to like and subscribe, and we will see you next time on interesting B2B marketers. Take care, everyone.