In this episode of Interesting B2B Marketers, Steve sat down with Steffen Hedebrandt, Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder of Dreamdata. He shares his experience on how defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) and leveraging social selling on LinkedIn can help companies increase their momentum and growth.
Steffen also shared his experience with his first full-time job in marketing, which involved working with a partner who had created an online marketplace for vintage music instruments. They had 10,000 vintage music instruments listed on their website, and the goal was to get physical shops to upload their products to the website. Steffen's favorite marketing tactic at the time was search engine optimization, as they needed to get their guitars and other vintage instruments to appear at the top of Google search results to attract demand to their website. They managed to grow their organic traffic significantly, but were not able to monetize it effectively, and the company ultimately failed. Steffen learned the importance of connecting marketing tactics to revenue to avoid going bankrupt.
Key takeaways:
Connect with Steffen and Steve on LinkedIn.
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.
Steve: Hey everybody, it's Steve. Welcome back to Studio 26 and Interesting B2B marketers. Today I'm joined by Steffen Hedebrandt. And quick welcome to the show, Stephen. Thank you for, for joining us.
Steffen: Thank you so much, Steve. I think we kind of have a similar name. Mine is the Danish one and yours, Steve, the American version of it.
Steve: That's right. We've had a lot of Steves on the show recently, so maybe that's our guest acquisition strategy going forward. Alright, so welcome to the show and just give the audience maybe like a quick 60 overview of your background.
Steffen: Yeah, happy to Steve. So yeah, my name is Steffen. I've been in B2B marketing growth related roles ever since I graduated from university almost 15 years ago. And it's all been B2B companies. It's all been highly digital or completely digital companies in the last seven years or so. Eight years I've been a B2B marketing leader. And I think I've tried most tactics in the book and both failed with a lot of them, but also hopefully succeeded with some of them as well.
Steve: Great. All right. So, you're in good company. Everyone has their B2B marketing badge of honor, and I think when we all look back at our 10, 15, 20 plus years, when you look back and you kind of have a you know, sigh of like, oh man, I've been doing this for a while. That's your ticket to the show. That's how you get on the show. You have to have that looking back, sigh. All right, great. So, like we always do, we're gonna jump right into case studies. The first one that you're going to share focuses on the power of I guess two parts. One is developing a persona or you know an ideal customer profile. And along with that comes the power of saying no. Right? It's so for B2B businesses out there to embrace that. I have always loved that. I think when I started my business I didn't want to go there because it was like, I can't say no to anyone, but I quickly learned that the more carved out my positioning was, the better I could convert people who didn't know me. So anyway, I'm really curious about the case study and I'll have you take it.
Steffen: Thank you Steve, and I think you already briefly touched upon some of the things that are important to mention here. So, at my present company, a year or two years back now, we finally got ourselves together to try to do this kind of ideal customer profile exercise where we were to define kind of, okay, who are we actually really trying to? Up until that point, the few years before then, we were kind of selling to anyone and everyone we could find in the market that would be willing to buy our product. So, we ended up having a very diversified pool of customers, which, you know, it's nice that you can say that you can sell to a lot of different companies, but in reality, what you end up with is that kind. The use cases that you produce only attracts one or two parts of those the product you built. You end up spreading your development in the engineering team too, because this type of customer over here wants this feature and that type of customer over there wants this other feature. And you know, at the end of the day, there's practically not any company that has unlimited resources. And in order for us to you know, it's really pick up traction. We really had to go through this ideal customer profile definition project. We kept postponing it because people showed up at our doorstep and they wanted our product. Why don't we just sell to them and then postpone it another six months? And I think what got us started and I think it can be quite hard to say, okay, who is it exactly we're trying to go for? I think my advice to this was because like the business I'm in now is a subscription business so you really have to hardcore think about will they actually renew their contracts once we fought long and hard about who is the most likely people to be happy customers of ours. That was what we thought, fought mostly about anything else. Then once we kind of had that figured out, then you can move on to kind of how do we attract them? But it's hard, it's a hard process to get there. And what we actually succeeded with what we basically did was to start with an empty thesis of who our ideal customer profiles are because it can be hard to say exactly who it is, but sometimes, it's very easy, it's easier to express. It's not those guys over there, for example, with this CRM system we don't integrate with. So, they're at least not our ideal customer profile or now we are focused on B2B. So it's not the B2C companies that show up at Art Austin. And little by little, I think if you go ask every team in your company's sales team market, the product team, you can start sketching out, okay, who are we not trying to sell to? And then yep, after that exercise you can move into, okay, who would be the perfect customers that would be willing to pay a good amount of money for our product, but also be very likely to successfully onboard and also become happy customers that will renew afterwards. And what we really saw after doing this exercise was that momentum started to pick up across the company because in marketing where I work, we were only trying to attract specifically this kind of person. The sales team would only be assigned accounts that fitted that ideal customer profile. So, we run an inbound based model, but we would only assign the salespeople to accounts that actually looked like our ideal customer profile. So, we actually left the demand alone that came in, that didn't fit. And then the product team, again, also, they only focused on making our product great for this type of company. And that just like, if you think about it, a company can only spend its money once, so you need to make sure that all the money you spend is moving in the same direction. And at least for our company doing this ideal customer profile definition was really something that you can say, what do you say? Like wasn't an inflection point for a lot of momentum that everybody started pulling in the same direction.
Steve: Yeah, it's really interesting. So, what I like about this story is that most marketers just are using this to define how to better speak to people. And what I like about what you just said is this wasn't just the front end of the messaging; this was the business model behind it. You know, like you could prioritize development activities based upon if this was a feature that fit into your persona. So, I love that there are business metrics behind understanding. So, as you, how long did it take you to shift that mindset internally from when the dev team had a better filter to say yes or no to certain pieces of functionality?
Steffen: I think it's kind of, it's not something you just do overnight. I think for us, maybe it took even six months from when we like actually starting dealing with it until it's kind of. If we hang this person's piece of paper up on the wall and it says X, Y, Z, this is how we do it. So, I think we were just a small company, I could imagine being in a larger company and this process being harder. And smaller companies, you can kind of just say, okay, this is the line. We all are in the same office here. This is how we're. But you actually, right, Steve, you actually touched upon something super important as well. Like when it comes to communication, it really matters how specific you can communicate. Like are we talking to all marketers in the world or are we talking to B2B marketers in software companies with 500 to a thousand employees, then you can be like, the message you're trying to get across will travel so much further and faster if it can be super specifically tailored to those you are trying to attract.
Steve: Yep. I want to know more about the sales force. How did they react to this? I mean, my instinct is like, most salespeople, if you're taking away the target audience and the size goes down, they're inherently fearful of that. So what was their reaction to refining who you guys sold to?
Steffen: I think initially they struggle a little bit with, like, spotting the differences in who we should pay attention to or not. But I think over time we also spend time explaining to them. Renewals are important and why certain customers are a better fit than others to our product. This kind of motion came at the same time where we entered into kind of a product led or like a freemium model as well. So, in order for the salespeople to be successful with the set of integrations in our technology. You also want to pick those out that, you know, can plug in and where it works right away. So, their commission would all be also easily achievable if they stuck to a certain amount of like a certain definition of who they should try to sell to. But like really in the beginning, it was a bit all over the place. If somebody's booking a demo and they say they're interested in buying it, it's very hard for a salesperson to not pick the phone. So, I think there comes I don't know if it's an old school world war word to use or term, but like, it's also like a little bit of a change management process. You need to enforce it week on week and explain it. Why is this important? Why are we trying to go into this direction? Why shouldn't you spend your time on these? So just take some massage to make sure.
Steve: Yeah, it works out. Interesting. I wonder if anyone's ever gone as far as the change incentives for a sales team to say, you know, that we know that this profile type is. A great fit for our business, so we're not gonna pay you as much I, you know. It would be interesting to see if anyone's gone that far in the, you know, like, cuz what you said, it's so accurate. It's all about change management and culture change. That's my request, maybe to our listeners, send us examples of businesses that have actually changed the incentive plan to get people aligned.
Steffen: I guess you could probably connect some of it to whether the customer renewed. So, if you've oversold promises in the sales process, it will be caught by that component. Do they actually renew the contracts somehow?
Steve: Yeah, I've heard of sales teams doing that where, you know, it's not just the front-end commission after, you know, 60, 90 days, but there are renewal commissions so that the salesperson knows, I'm gonna invest more time in people who are more likely to renew. In theory, I'm getting paid more over time. I thought that's always been a smart approach to make sure that the salespeople aren't just gaming the system and they're hitting their 60- or 90-day retention threshold, and then the customer cancels.
Steffen: Yeah. And I think this is also like a cultural thing that management needs to enforce. If you keep seeing actions that are outside of the strategy, you also, you, need to help align this. And you know, if examples come up, you have to like to talk with the sales team about why this is not the right thing to do. And, you know, if they ultimately refuse to like to align with what is the strategy, then maybe there's a place they fit better into.
Steve: This is all of a sudden turning into a sales performance podcast.
Steffen: I really think this intersection between marketing and sales is super crucial in b2b because we can produce the best demand in the world, but if the salespeople look the other way or don't follow up on the leads. Like our scorecard is sales in marketing.
Steve: Yep. That's just so crucial that you make friends with those guys. I agree. I've kind of, in the past I've even said, I don't like this whole idea of marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. Because to me it's the same thing. Like the ability for the marketers and I get it, people are, you know, they're at different stages in the funnel and maybe the marketers are driving more top of funnel demand. But ultimately you have to have an understanding of whether the person is a qualified lead regardless of where they are in the funnel. And I think that's my hope is one day to stop talking about MQs and SQLs. It's Ql That should be the new, that should be the new metric.
Steffen: We have actually developed a metric we call sales acceptable leads. So, we count the leads that come in, that looks like our ideal customers, so that is the number that we are to deliver in the market. And I kind of like it because here we can be proactive about generating it and not being dependent on whether the salesperson is hungover the day that they have the demo call or like just perform poorly in the sales meetings.
Steve: Yep. That's another thing I've heard companies do is like they plot out their sales forces. Retention rates over time for these member customer retention models. And you know, after a year or two you have that conversation with your salesperson and say you're retaining customers at this rate compared to others. And yes, like some of that might be out of their control because of the customer success person on, but if you can clearly plot out you are trying to model good behavior of the salespeople who can get people in for longer retention rates. That's just an interesting way to look at it. All right, I like this case study. I want to thank you for sharing the first one. Now we're gonna jump into case study number two, which I love. It's about social selling, right? Like you know, I'll just use LinkedIn as an example. It started out as just, well, I have a resume or a cv. I'm gonna put it online, and that's it. You know, over the last 10 years it has evolved into so much more. It's so dynamic and it's from a marketing and sales perspective, it's just, it's a channel that you can't ignore. So, walk us through case study number two.
Steffen: Yeah, I'm really happy to. So, I think most companies can figure out the buyers in their market that are super active or in the market, as you say right now, where are they present? I think typically you talk about that one or 2% of the market that you could address is actively in the market right now. We kind of exhausted those channels. In my personal company where kind of once you've covered the most obvious search terms in Google with paid ads and organic search ads, you've covered the review platform. So people read reviews about products in your market. Once that's done which I will always advise people to start with, then we were facing this challenge that we are one of these like venture funded companies and to kind of unlock the door to the next investment round, we need to be growing extraordinarily fast. We did four and a half x or something like that last year, but to get there, we really needed to find a resource where we could get in front of the right people. So, in the market there are the right people at the right time. We needed to find somewhere where we could just get in front of the right people so that when it was budget time, they would think of us because in B2B, they don't always have budget or don't always have time for the project. So, we just needed to raise the awareness about our solution significantly amongst our ideal customers. And, we tested out different things, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, et cetera. What we podcast like this as well. What we found was the most scalable, most impactful thing that we could do was really what today is probably a term as social selling on LinkedIn. For us, it was something we kind of stumbled upon in the beginning. My colleague Laura posted some customer journey photos on LinkedIn and said, this is one of our clients. We just want, or we just want a client, Here's the journey, how’s it looking? And then Chris Walker, a really big B2B marketing influencer. He went and commented on her post and that one single post got like, I think 50,000 views or something like that. And that one single day was peak traffic on our website and the most demo calls that we had historically even though there was kind of no link in what she posted. And that kind of, you know, as you get some experience, you know how to spot these moments of, okay, there's something here that works. There's some blood in the water here that we need to take a closer look at. So, we actually set out to do, it sounds logical afterwards, but we set out to just do, okay, let's try a quarter where we as a team, all of us try to contribute to this effort. So, we set a target of: can we get 300,000 views of our posts during this quarter? Then we'll go for a team night, have dinner, and get some beers, cocktails, et cetera. And I think we ended that quarter above 500,000 views. Because we made it into kind of a team effort where we, like most people, would post every day or every second day on LinkedIn. Little by little then you organically start to spot what people react to which of the posts generates leads? Which of the posts generates reach? How do we scale our efforts? How do we make sure that we get enough reach? So, we've set up a Slack channel also, where once you've posted, you share in there, so everybody can go and like, and comment and little by little. Now, I think I have above 14,000 followers there now on LinkedIn. Some of my colleagues are closer to 20,000 and it's incredible to think about. So, our target group is B2B marketers. And that's probably why it's such an effective tactic. If you're more into those bricks and mortar, the tactics or like where you need to go golfing or eat steaks, then it's probably not it.
Steve: I like that, that's in the secret recipe for B2B marketers. There are steaks, golf, and then a third box. You've uncovered the third box probably.
Steffen: So, I think this goes for any tactics you need to think about who the person you're trying to get in front of and where they're present. And I think most B2B marketers spend at least half of their day on LinkedIn or something like that. So, we found a very attractive way, a very scalable way to, to get to these people. The underlying engine of this project was also that we knew who our ideal customer profile was. You have a hundred connections. You can exhaust each week on LinkedIn. So, if you show up every week and connect with a hundred people, that looks exactly like the ones you want to get in front of. Then it's kind of, it's not rocket science, but it's just hard work showing up every posting quality stuff in front of these people. So, little by little, your awareness and what you do become like starts reaching the right people and suddenly they start engaging with you and they mention you when other people post et cetera. And I don't know how many markets there are on LinkedIn and B2B marketers, but there's probably millions there, if not tens of millions we've really found a channel of their kind, it feels like it's almost inexhaustible because it's so large. What we just need to constantly help each other with is to stay inspired about what are the pieces of content that we can continue to put in front of these people. And then always remember that it's a team exercise. So, if one is good at making popular posts like memes or funny stuff that just have a wide reach, then others might be really good at explaining something super technical. But then if the person that has all the reach then goes in uncommon on the very technical stuff, then that still gets placed in the feeds of those that have the far reach as well.
Steve: Yep, that makes sense. I think, you know, my own theory on social selling, why it works a lot in the B2B space, is it's just about trust. That's the whole process, right? We are here. Create something that people can trust and then buy it. And I think traditionally when the messaging has come from the brand, there is no face to the brand, it's third person. But when you see online individuals who represent companies, you just can't trust them faster. And I think that's simple. And when I've looked at the engagement data, the individual engagements, two, three x usually to what a brand will do. Now, the brand does have the scale, right? So, it's not uncommon for a brand to say, well, we have a hundred thousand a million followers. So, I don't advocate going all in on one of those approaches. But the ability for individuals to convert more efficiently, just so much better when you do social selling.
Steffen: I think it's called mirror exposure effect. So, the more you see something, the more you trust it and you need to think about it to make B2B buying decisions. You're looking at journeys that are six or 12 months and like we put out some benchmarks last year. Like we had the average journey would be like from our, from our customers from first touch until we win a deal. It would be 192 days and there would be 31 tracked digital sessions. And I think you could easily time that number by two or three of how many exposures you actually need to a brand before you're trusted. So, like one thing is this kind of social selling tactic. Another touch could be the sales rep that calls them up, builds trust. It can be case studies, retargeting ads, you know, you can even send physical letters to get another brand touchpoint in front of them.
Steve: Awesome. All right. I love the case study. We're gonna jump into q and a and tell you about your first marketing job.
Steffen: Yeah, I would start with my first full-time job. I've probably done marketing before that as well, but now I started out you can say in a two man pan where we this guy I worked together with had invented this online marketplace for a vintage music instrument. And what we kind of had there suddenly was we had 10,000 vintage music instruments. So, it would be like a Gibson list Hall, 1972 or stuff like that. And the model was kind of to get the physical shop to upload their products to the website. Okay, but what I liked about the first entry into marketing was the, I don’t know if it's a niche tactic, but search engine optimization. So, like all these guitars, when people search for that on Google, we really needed to get them on top of the search so that the demand would come into our website and then funnel through to the physical shops that we're selling these. Now, I think if we had done as well as we did today, the company basically failed and we would have gone bankrupt. But we managed to like, I think we managed to get to like a six-figure digit organic traffic every month. But this is back in 2010 or something like that. So yeah, we had to struggle to get like $40 for a subscription where we would be sending. A thousand, 2000 clicks every month to the website, which I think today people would get it. There's affiliate tracking, you know, custom to stuff. But we are kind of one of my favorite pillars of learning why it's so important to impact revenue with your marketing. Because you can say, we grew the organic traffic extremely large. We didn't manage to monetize it. And then, you know, businesses fail. So, I kind of, it's good that you have traction in a certain thing you do, but it also needs to connect to revenue in some way. Otherwise, you need a big bank account to keep up with that one tactic.
Steve: I remember, you know, as you mentioned, like this is the earlier days of SEO. I remember I bought a piece of furniture and we had someone help us select a bunch of furniture, and they were like, oh, the good thing is bring it into your home. If it doesn't work out, we'll take care of it. And yeah, the designer who selected this piece of furniture, the scale was just completely off. It looked so awkward. We called her up and she's like, well, we're not gonna take it back. And I just was like, this is ridiculous. This is your policy. I couldn't get any attraction. I had a blogger. At the time, you know, like just a personal blog. So, I'm gonna go write an article about this experience. I think within the two or three days the search engine ranked it pretty high using their brand's keywords. I got a call from the corporate office apologizing and like they were the friendliest I had ever experienced with this company and I was, I don't think you could do that today. Like, you know, there is so much demand for things like that. But yeah, I won't name their name, keeping it anonymous, but big brand name and man, they were so good about following up and making sure that I was happy.
Steffen: Yeah, I think this is the, the painful and interesting part of marketing, that like tactics, they each have their time and all of us get some podcast conference, et cetera, and we tell each other about how well it works, and then we exhaust this and then it's done. Move onto another tactic, and so it just continues.
Steve: Yep. I agree. I'm always interested in what's not being talked about out loud in conferences, because there's always people who are like, I'm not sharing this. This is too good. Why would I, why would I share this? Awesome. All right. So, what about your next job? I liked how he started and failed. I say that in a good way, right? Because you learn more. You don't wanna be failing at the end of your career. You wanna be failing at the beginning of your career, right? But what did you do after the online marketplace?
Steffen: It's a story con. It's kind of like when you look back at it, it's funny how things turn out, but at my last, that first company I read the four-hour work week by Tim Ferris and it was really interesting. And in that book, he mentioned that hey, you can use this platform called Elans and then you can just outsource all the work you don't want to do. So during my tenure there at that vintage music instrument platform where we started posting jobs there, I think I wrote a blog post about how we did it and like, we had a little organization of 10 people with some in India, some in Europe, and then some in the us. And like once when then Elans were opening the first office in Europe, which is now Upwork this freelance platform they just basically asked me whether I wanted to come join that European office and you know, like spread Elans in Europe. And since I was kind of a, I was already an ambassador and I knew the type of people that would be good fits here. I hadn't been making any money for a couple of years. Then I joined Elan's office that then became Elan's, Odis, and then Upwork at the end of the tenure. And I was the country manager for the Nordic countries, which is like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland.
Steve: Now Upwork's a really interesting model. It’s amazing. You know, it's a direct to employee model or a direct to freelance model.
Steffen: And it's also, it's a very hard model to execute as well, because it's like, one thing is that an Uber ride that everybody wants the same. They want a card that takes me from A to B, but with work it's more like I need a graphic designer or I need a PHP developer or somebody who can write a sequel or need a translator. So, there's constantly chicken and X problems between what is the demand we're generating in terms of work tasks? Do we have people that perform it and can we match those two together? When I was done there, I was happy to have a more specific task at hand. Kind of okay, you have this thing you need to sell and it's these people who're gonna take it. Whereas at Upwork it was more, a much broader scope of go to market, you can say, because the product was relevant for everybody in the world.
Steve: Yeah, you didn't know it, but you were working, you were essentially working at an online dating site. It just wasn't that people weren't looking for partners, they were looking for people to do their job.
Steffen: Today, I still absolutely love the concept because, you know, I think you say that talent is equally distributed around the world, but opportunity is not. So, you can really like, just because you have a task in the city you live in, there's other people who are incredibly talented, who's living in a country that is not as expensive as the country you're living in. And they would happily take up your task. You get a more effective payment structure for getting work done. And they often make more than the local rate of what they could have done.
Steve: Tell me about where you see everything going? Like, you know, obviously technology is the biggest thing that just constantly moves and it's the catalyst for a lot of what we do. What are, what are some movements that you'll see happening in the B2B marketing space?
Steffen: I think one thing is, as we touched upon earlier, that the need for crisp brands and communication is gonna grow because the competition is just heating up because the world just becomes more and more transparent through the internet. So, everybody has a website now. So, like for many products, you're competing against hundreds of companies who could do something similar. So, like you really need to stand out with your brand and your communication. Otherwise, there's no chance that you can break through the noise. With paid marketing or trade shows or stuff like, and then, that's kind of one component. And the other component is then you also need to heavily utilize all the latest technology that makes you more effective than your competition. And you know, that for me, that just exemplifies why marketing is such a tough, diverse job because it's this constant left and right brain. You need to be super creative, great at communicating, et cetera, but you also need to be hyper effective with your resources and how you utilize technology and so forth. The good thing though is that you can have a team and you don't have to have everything in one person. But as a leader, you can get a little bit dizzy. Having to kind of manage all of that sometimes.
Steve: I agree with that. It is crazy how harder it is to keep up in today's marketing stack. I enjoy it. Like that's what, that's what gets me going because I'm such a technology person as an enabler of sales and marketing that I just, I constantly am like, oh my God, this is exciting. How can I use this to get better? But in the beginning of my career, there was nothing like that. This is how all the equipment works. You, you're gonna print this, you're gonna buy media here, and that's about it. You know, and that was like, okay, we missed the deadline for the, you know, the July edition of whatever trade magazine, so we're gonna wait for August. Wow. That was, you know so it's funny how you need to stay on top of it, otherwise a competitor blows you away.
Steffen: It's like, it's not something I master, but this ChatGPT is also, I can almost not have it in my brain. It's gonna impact everything. Like, I'll tell you two things I've done the last week. I took 111 reviews on a platform called g2 so kind of people explain something about our product and I put it into ChatGPT and asked them, can you please just summarize the five things’ people mentioned the most in these reviews? And then like five minutes later, like two minutes later, I know what our customers are saying when they write reviews. Which is like an analysis that would probably take a day or two days, three days. And it's so massive what it's gonna change once it's gonna be ingrained in how people work.
Steve: Yeah. I am with you on that. The last couple months, people have incorrectly gone to content creation. This will write this for me. Blog posts, social posts. I think that may work. I think that it's not as easy as that, but I think there's still a role for that. But to me it's insight development. It's feeding a bunch of data into open AI's platform and habit to the thinking, and then you validate. Oh, that actually sounds right. Let me, you know, I kind of, I described it to someone recently as it's like an algebra equation, and once you solve it, then you can take that answer and plug it back into the formula and be like well, is this really, is this working? Recently I watched the online demo. I started playing around with it. Yeah. And even now it's like I was asking it to do things where I put a bunch of data in there and then I said, once you output the data, I want you to output it in this way. I want you to create a table and column A, is this, column B is that, so it's, it structured that data for me, and I was. Man, it would take me 10 minutes just to structure the data that it gave me, and now it's doing it for me. I just, I don't know. I like you wanna walk away from your computer and be like, I can't handle this. Like, this is too powerful.
Steffen: I'm not, I'm not much for hype cycles and I hate buzzwords, but this, it really feels like, and the inflection point right now is that if you really get to master that muscle that you have there's really an insane potential. But I'm not even close to knowing enough about it. It's crazy.
Steve: Here's my own opinion. This is a sneak peek at my learning model as it relates to this specifically. So, I was on TikTok for a while. I spent way too much time on it, so I've banned myself from it. So, I'm in my like month four or five banned from TikTok, but I have a special pass to go on TikTok that I give myself, and specifically for AI or GPT three or four, I will search it. And I've, I've been able to learn faster using TikTok because it's such a short window of, of a video. So, I can spend 10 minutes on TikTok just from a search query. So much, like I feel like the content is produced so much faster as opposed to going to YouTube where you're waiting for viewers to essentially upvote your, your search results. So that's, that's my fastest way to learn about the new stuff is just search for it on TikTok and people are, yeah. All right. Anything else you wanna share with the listeners? We had a really good conversation. Just how to sell more effectively where things are headed. Anything else?
Steffen: This, I don't know which are there so many other topics that we can dwell into, but yeah, probably should.
Steve: All right. We'll do one thing. What drives you crazy? What's one thing in the B2B marketing space that you're like, I can't handle this stuff. If I say it one more time, I'm gonna go nuts.
Steffen: It's, it's something that is on my mind, which you probably have even more experience with Steve, is kind of how competition behaves. Like some of them play nice, some of them completely copy your go to market. Some of them talk badly about you, somebody. Some of them lie about you in your ads and stuff like that. And I've been kind of lately, I've been kind of getting too upset about these things. And maybe you can be my psychologist saying to kind of just relax and focus on your own business. But I find it quite interesting that sometimes you need to pay attention to what the competition is doing, but you don't want to be following them. You want to be going on your own path, having them following you. So lately I've been detoxing by like, disconnecting myself from them, from LinkedIn, not going to look at the webpages, et cetera. Because what you really need to figure out is kind of what is really the path for your company, the business that you are in. Like what is the clear path that you need to take and not be constantly. Like misaligned by what competition and saying, and stressing out about a new feature or stuff like that. But I don't know how, Steve, you managed to keep cool in these situations?
Steve: Well, one, you know who are you to say that I keep cool in all situations, but, you know, I try to think someone gave me good advice when it came to this. As they said, understand what your competition is doing, but don't obsess over it because what you know, what you just said is once you start obsessing, then you're not leading it. You're not leading in the market. You are essentially pivoting left and right and left and right. And it takes away your ability to do any long-term planning because you essentially put yourself in a position where, well, I don't know what they're gonna do in six months, so I can't plan that out. And, you know, you wanna avoid that, so, you know, I think be smart about it, know what they're doing. But focus on your business as soon as they take 10, 20% of your brain. When you're not focused on your own core business or your own customer needs then they've won, you know?
Steffen: Yeah. I think that's really spot on. Particularly kind of what is the long-term path that you wanna go on and then like, forget about like if they release a feature or two that it doesn't matter for where you're going and like yeah, the only thing you can impact is how well you treat your current customers and like the next marketing activities you go out and do.
Steve: Yeah. I think it's just; you know, I'll use an example of that. I, you know, there's a, there's a c r M solution that I use. It's, it's, it's a medium size company. And, you know, I do a task where in my prospecting I will send an attachment to people as part of a nurture program. So, they already know who I am, but I'm just nurturing them and emailing them. And I used to have to save, get the file for my desktop, upload it. And there were like three or four steps and clicks. And the CRM company had an enhancement and they said, now you just upload the file into here. And it's literally, you can send an email that has the attachment in it. And that happened and I'm like, oh my God. Like this has saved me so much time. I bring this example up because they didn't copy a competitor. Figured out what the customer's pain was and just focused on that. So, I think that my other advice is if you start focusing on your competitors, you need to be spending more time with your clients or customers and seeing what they really need. That's how you're ultimately gonna grow it.
Steffen: I think that's really good advice too.
Steve: All right. Thanks. Awesome, Steffen. We'll send each other the therapy bills afterwards. This is maybe the podcast that can be a medical write off. It can be a medical expense. We'll consult our respective tax advisors on that one. But Steffen, thank you for joining Interesting B2B Marketers today and we'll look forward to everyone. Tune again for the next show. Take care everyone.