In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber interviews Scott Stockwell, an experienced B2B marketer and consultant with a unique background in retail, management consulting, and brand management. Scott is also the chair of the B2B Council for the Data and Marketing Association and an advocate for a B2B marketing community in the UK called Propolis.
In this conversation with Scott Stockwell, he shares his experience of using tone analyzer and personality insights to identify common themes in gold award-winning entries across 32 categories. They found that an analytical tone and a sense of joy were important in the winning entries, while openness and emotional range (particularly with low harmony) were the key personality traits associated with them. They also discuss a digital fan experience that won one of Joel's B2B Marketing Gold and Grand Prix Awards and the benefits of using design thinking to create sprints to drive engagement and collaboration in an online B2B marketing community.
Steve and Scott both emphasize the importance of co-creation and collaboration in solving problems and finding solutions, and the value of diverse perspectives in the process. The key takeaway is that the shared experience and wisdom from attendees can provide valuable insights to improve marketing strategies.
Key takeaways:
Connect with Scott 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: Welcome back to Studio 26 and to the interesting B2B Marketers podcast. I'm excited today because I am joined by Scott Stockwell, and as you can tell, if you're watching, he's coming live to us from a very interesting place. Before you give us your background, I want to give everyone who is watching a description about where you are.
Scott: Sure thing, Steve. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. And greetings from a converted Victorian laundry in the new forest in the UK, which is a national park. So behind me you'll see over this way one of the first washing machines, you generally put a fire underneath that. It's a big copper drum. Put your washing in there, mash it up, take it out, put it through some cold water, mangle it out, and basically it's a dry cleaners from back in the day.
Steve: I always have to do that. We had another show where there was one of our guests had a tiny shrunken head and a jar, and I can't not talk about the head in the jar. Tell me about the jar. So we had to open up that way. So give us a quick overview about your background.
Scott: Sure thing. So 13 years in B2C starting in retail, working on the sales floor, then in head office, and then training and development, followed by five years in management consulting. As a consultant specializing in performance improvement, multiple industries, multiple locations went through a phase of brand management for a merger, an IPO, and then an acquisition. And 20 years in the tech company that acquired the consulting firm, which is where you find me today. I'm also the chair of the B2B Council for the Data and Marketing Association, a fellow of the Institute of Data and Marketing. And I'm an advocate for a B2B marketing community in the UK called Propolis.
Steve: Yes, I'm familiar with Propolis. Joel has been on the show recently, so, We're in good hands. The large world of B2B marketing is all of a sudden smaller when all these worlds start colliding. All right, so great as we always do, we're jumping right into case studies. You've got a number to share with us, which is great. The first one you're gonna share has to do with artificial intelligence and how that relates to awards. So let's take that first case study.
Scott: Sure thing. Well, AI is super topical at the moment. Chat GPT in various instances, I think most people are giving it a spin and seeing what it can do for them. So this is actually going back quite a few years back to 2018. I've been the judge on quite a few different award panels and have been the chair for one group awards. I was interested to see whether or not AI would come to a similar conclusion as the judges of the panel that I was sitting on. So if you like testing the AI and then just seeing what the Gold Awards had in common, if there was something that they had that the others didn't. So I took all of the award entries across all of the award categories, and there were 32 categories. So I had a chunk of data to work with. I looked at all of the gold awards. To see if there was anything similar across the gold wards. And then within the B2B category, I looked to see if there was anything unique in the B2B gold winners that wasn't seen in any of the other entrants. I used two different AI techniques, one tone analyzer, which literally looks at the tone of voice of the copy that went into the entrance. And the second personality insights. So that one uses the ocean model, which is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Which are actually labeled emotional range to see if there was any data that I could see that kind of pulled across them. And interestingly there was, so in terms of tone of voice, analytical generally came out consistently in all of them. And the awards themselves are pretty much benchmarked on three things, strategy, creativity and results. So you need to be clear why the campaign was running. You had to have an interesting creative hook and then obviously it need to pay dividends and the dividends needed to link to the strategy. So three things to definitely get in place. Analytical came out as the overarching tone of voice, but in the gold winners, the second one that came out top was joy, and we found that there was definitely a correlation between the enthusiasm that the award was presented in and the judges' receptivity to kind of hear about it and if you like, it will also engage with it. So analytical, enjoy the tone of voice. Super important in terms of personality. The two things that came out top were openness and neuroticism or emotional range. So the awards that seemed to be very caring and sharing and wanting to tell you what was happening. Plus the ones that had the most range, but interesting. The range had a feature of harmony being the lowest. So if you like, it's the sort of the rebels and the loud rebels that really won in terms of where you would get a gold. So really interesting. AI actually came to the same conclusions as the judges and the judges there's normally on a panel about 12 to 15 judges from various different agency and brand positions coming to the same conclusion and showing that actually the AI tool can give you an idea of what is in an award-winning entry.
Steve: That's fascinating. How long ago did you run this through the AI?
Scott: So this one's going back to 2018, so it's relatively recent. But interesting that it's AI to look at what's happened, not write the award for you, I mean, now with Chat GPT would be kind of interesting to see if you got it too, or another AI you got it to write the awards, kind of what would happen there? I think that, you know, that might be something we start seeing in B2B.
Steve: That's interesting. I've submitted a number of awards years ago, and I remember like we would have specialists who just submit for award shows because there's the case of what happened, but then there's also like, you need a, a story that resonates with the judges and I was once naive enough to think, no, no, no, no, no. It's just about the case. It's just about the facts, right? And it's, you know, sometimes marketers fall victim to thinking, no, you have to market yourself. You just can't just tell the rational side of what happened.
Scott: And the secret from the AI is you have to do both. You gotta win the head, and you gotta win the heart. And if you leave the heart to one side and you don't tell a good compelling story about the campaign, you are less likely to win.
Steve: That's crazy. It'd be interesting to see what if the judges were presented that information prior to when they start judging, like would they try to overcompensate somehow? Or would they just say no, that's right. Like that's what works.
Scott: It's a, it's in terms of the judging panel for that particular award tends to go through, well, it goes through two rounds. It goes through a silent round where each judge independently evaluates the awards, sort of the short list then goes to a very short list, and every single one of those entries is then debated. One judge takes any of the very short lists and presents it as if they want that one to win. And then it really gets challenged by everyone else in the rooms. There is a lot of sometimes heated debate in terms of which of the worthy winners and the group has to come to a consensus, but the group doesn't know which the award winners finally are. It's all done by scoring on iPads. As judged, we get a nod from the organizers that we've come to a consensus and then we don't know who's actually won until the award night itself.
Steve: Interesting. That's pretty well done. Is it, you know, I've some award shows, I think actually they take all of the names out, right? So like the results are there, but they will just say like a financial institution and I think the intent there, you just don't gravitate towards big brands. I know that brand. I think I know the case study. Have you ever been a part of a show where you're judging and you're a hundred percent sure who it's for?
Scott: No, the awards I've judged, you've always been quite clear who the client is, but you've never been told who the agency is. So, okay, you know who the subject is. The other thing that's really interesting, I've been in awards where you've got the multimillion dollar campaigns and they're competing against, in one particular award, an organization that sent seeds around the country and had a very mature audience, and it actually won the Gold Award with a very traditional calendar and a subscription to packets of seeds. And it won because it had a very clear strategy. It totally understood its audience and the demographics. It really understood the customer journey for each one. And then when you looked at the results, They totally delivered what the campaign was designed to do, and it was up against, you know, multi million pound, multimedia, multi-channel, multi-country campaigns. But if you've got a clear strategy, you understand the audience, you get the results that you're looking for with something creative, that's what's gonna get your win.
Steve: So I mentioned Joel has been on the podcast recently and we talked about some award submissions too, and he was talking about one in the legal space where it was poetry, like they hired a well-known poet. They wrote poems about law. And it just was like that one very thing that was so unusual was just like, that's enough to get people to think twice. So I always am a big fan of the unconventional,
Scott: I like the unconventional, but I also like the results. Gotta get the results.
Steve: Yep. That's number two case study. This is fun for me because it takes me back to my childhood because it's about Wimbledon, right? And I remember my parents just always being so excited for Wimbledon and the tradition so anyway, I'm excited for you to walk us through this next one.
Scott: Sure thing. So this one is continuing the theme of what WINS awards. This one actually won one of Joel's B2B Marketing Gold and Grand Prix Awards. So that's where this one comes from. The challenge was how do you make a digital fan experience as good as somebody that is sitting court? And that's a nice juicy brief to get a team behind. It was the first time that we actually brought a cross-disciplinary team together physically in one room. So we had advertising, we had pr, we had social, we had writers, we had animators from the agency all in one room. Not only for the two weeks of the tournament itself, but we had them periodically for two weeks leading up to it. We did a lot of work to design the customer journey and a lot of design thinking techniques, but one technique in particular stood out in terms of finding a creative pathway for it. I went to Central St. Martins and one of the art school classes, we had had an exercise in it called tear stripping, where you would have a set of magazines, you'd take three minutes, you'd give yourselves an objective, and independently everyone would just grab pictures out of magazines and stick them on the wall. So we called this the Wonderwall. Now, if you've ever heard the song Wonderwall by Oasis. Take you back to maybe in your day, in your early, early years bedroom, you had one wall that was your fan wall, and it might have been pop stars, movie stars might have been a hobby you were interested in, but effectively that's your wonderwall. So we created a wonder wall for the event. Spent some time looking at are there any themes, are there any trends? Is there anything consistent in how we want the fans to feel? And we found that there were things that were fast, things that were accurate, things that were colorful, and things that were very British. And we said, if this experience was a person, who would it be? And the two that came out were Jude Law and Joanna Lumley. So you've now got a marketing team cross-disciplinary, thinking about a digital fan experience that if it was personified would be Dub law or Joanna. Came up with a technique that actually borrows from B2C. So in B2C you can produce a series of garments and you leave a certain volume which is kind of undyed fabric. You look at the sales and as you see the sales progress, you die to the most popular colors so that you've got enough stock to meet the market demand. So we looked at is there a way to create digital content where we had about 90% of it ready, but we could use 10% from the live event so that it was really current, so that when we published. It looked as if we'd almost baked it live. And yet you need time to create animations, which is what we did. So the agency created a series of animations ready to drop in data points, like the longest rally, the longest game, the fastest serve. And then they had a group of us watching the live gains waiting for us, did we think this was the one that would be the 10% to finish. So each day is kind of competitive in terms of seeing what we could come up with. The other thing we did was we invented sellers and we invented our own employees with a very visible leaderboard of social sharing and onward engagement. And it's the first time in this marketing team's experience where there was more engagement and more sharing externally than there was from the employees. So the employee leaderboard really encouraged the first wave, but it was a really popular animation series and it really got some traction with the end audience.
Steve: Nice. Tell me, I would take us back inside that, you know, you started the story off with the brief, right? And the brief, when I've seen this, it's getting to a great brief is what is gonna create an effective campaign? How was it easy to get to that brief or was that just as difficult?
Scott: The client for the sporting event really understands their brand and is very clear on what they're looking for. And I think when the client's very clear on the outcome, it makes writing brief and getting them to respond to it a little bit easier because they've got a very clear idea, this is what I want, or this is not what I want. So it's a little bit of a, I'll know it when I see it because they're very clear what it is they wanna see. So the criteria, very clear. Creativity gives you broad range and very crisp feedback from the client helps you get a brief that's very workable.
Steve: Yeah. I mean, I think it just goes to show you that the clients, even though the clients are not like the campaign worker coming up with the ideas, it's the courage of those clients to have some guidance or some stake in the ground. Because many times clients will just, hey, we're doing a seasonal campaign. We wanted to do X, Y, and Z. Make sure not to forget about one, two, and three. And it just becomes this thing where, how can you create something that does everything? And then you push back on that and then they go, well, that's your job. You're supposed to figure that out. It's not always that easy, but yeah. Every marketer's a little bit different.
Scott: And good to get a client that sticks to the requirements. Quite often you'll find as you go through the process, The requirements change, the goalposts shift, the creative idea needs to bend. You know very clearly that didn't change.
Steve: Yep. And one thing that someone taught me a really long time ago is, you know, usually you have a brief, the campaign or concepts come 2, 3, 4 weeks later. And one agency I used to work with was really good by saying, okay, before you see this we've printed out the brief, we need you to read it. So spend two minutes on your own, read the brief, that's how you should be evaluating the work. And I've always, I've always enjoyed that discipline, the rigor of, of making sure that you are still grounded in the brief. All right, cool. We are moving on case study number three, and this one's related to food. I'm already getting hungrier right now talking about food and dinner parties, but take it.
Scott: So here we go. A dining table doesn't make a dinner party. So this one relates to an online community of B2B marketers in its early days, months, years. As with most communities, you tend to find there's a small number of very engaged people and a larger number of people who are very happy to see what's going on, be the more passive observers and sometimes with a little bit more engagement. But to really try and drive community membership. What we decided to do was take a little bit of thinking from design thinking and create a sprint, a time-boxed period where we would try to get some wisdom from the crowd, identify a few challenges or problems that they had, but then distill it down to the biggest problem they really wanted to. Then open it up for some ideation, get some really interesting ideas, narrow it down again into the best ideas, and then finally go to all of the B2B marketers in the community and say, if you were trying to make this idea live, what would you do? What are the actions you would take? What would the outcomes you expect be? So the wisdom of the crowd to both find the problem, narrow the problem, find some solutions, and then get to actions and we held it over three weeks. Again, the sort of the dining table and dinner party. We had a VIP. You know, if you're gonna go to a dinner party, you want someone interesting there that's gonna kind of keep the conversation moving. You want it to be an interesting place somewhere. Maybe you haven't been before. You need a bit of a draw. You need some sort of speed to be there. You don't want it to get too slow. So finding the speed plus the VIP plus the experience and varying the techniques used over three weeks. We managed to get a really high level of engagement for the community. They came up with a challenge which was all around measuring the value that marketing brings. Came up with some ideas on how you would do that and some actions too. Super successful. We've run three sprints like it since. And I think it's a technique that the community's going to use going forward.
Steve: I think that's so interesting. I look back at the history of B2B marketing and so often we rely on this academic perspective where any event or any campaign. The most important or interesting person at a podium speaking down to everyone. And we all were like, well, now we just go back to college or university to learn. And I, the more I've seen B2B marketers embrace that like collaborative model to say, we're just not gonna speak at you, but we actually are listening, we're collaborating and we're creating something. And I think that as a participant, you want to go to things like that, like you want to think and brainstorm. And it's interesting. I mean, there's always gonna be a place for the white paper, which mirrors that university, you know, approach. But I love the experiential stuff and I love the co-creation stuff.
Scott: I think all of the stories once I, you know, was thinking about this for the podcast today. The theme that underpins all of them is the diversity of the people participating and their willingness to collaborate on solving a problem or finding a solution for something.
Steve: Yeah. What's also nice too is like in those events, you know, if you're prospecting, you now get a sense of who these people are, right? So, If there's five, 10 people who are really active, you understand what's interesting to them. And then that also becomes how you follow up. You know, if someone was really into something like a creative exercise or a technique, you can then pair that up and say, oh, hey, in that meeting I heard you say this, thought you might be interested in that. And it just becomes breaking that whole teacher-student mold.
Scott:There's a, there's a role I think's really important in any of these, these exercises, and it's what I'd call the catalyst. So it's individuals whose job it is to look at the conversations. Find out who is having similar conversations or demonstrating some expertise or an opinion and bringing them into the conversation. You know, hey, you might find this interesting, or have you thought about getting an opinion from this person over here? And I think if you've got a catalyst or you kind of keep the energy going. If you are relying on the community members to do that on their own, it has a tendency to put you out. Because as the conversations grow, they can become quite unwieldy and people will go off on a tangent. You need to kind of constantly corral everybody in the conversations and keep them in the direction you need them to go.
Steve: All right, cool. We're moving on to case study number four, and it would not be a B2B marketing podcast if we are not gonna talk about sales enablement at one point. So that's what this next one is focused on.
Scott: There you go. So, I'm titling this one. What Gossip Girl Taught me about Sales Enablement. Now I'm a big fan of the big back pocket, so where you find inspiration in something and you think there's something there that could be useful. I'm not quite sure how or why. But I'm just gonna tuck it in my big back pocket and this one is something pulled from there. So I did really like the TV show. I thought it was really compelling that there was this sort of mysterious person who had their eyes everywhere, always knew what was happening, was the place to go if you wanted some information or insight. And always managed to sort of, on trend, where they need it to be. And one of the challenges that we have with sellers is there's so much content, they're so geographically distributed, they cover so many topics. How do we make sure we get them the right information that they need? At the right time, and it's almost been QA as being completely right for them. So I thought, hmm. If we're doing this like Gossip Girl, we can have a group of people who are actually curating that content. They can have their eyes everywhere, they can be over all different systems. They can be talking to sellers in different locations, so they're always knowing what is current, but there's only one voice that is actually serving the material. We had one hashtag. Which we used for the material that we thought was the most salient. So if you wanted to search in any of the content catalogs, a seller could look for something and instantly find the stuff that had been sold. We also created a magazine to make it a bit glossy and to really celebrate the seller as the hero of the piece, hoping that it would become aspirational and sellers would want to be on the cover of the magazine, which ran quarterly and digitally. It took probably three additions of the magazine for it to really start to take off. But then it really did take off, we called it a bestseller. So we had a bestseller, hashtag bestseller magazine, bestseller alerts via email, bestseller monthly roundups of the things that were most topical. And whilst it ran, it was the most pulled upon piece of content and curated material that sellers engaged. So taking some learning from something, a bit left field but using the same techniques was something that solved a perennial problem.
Steve: How have you known, looking back over working with sales what do you think has gone really well when something is just like there's that mutual respect between marketing and sales. What, what's happening when that occurs?
Scott: I think if you can make it like a three-legged race and not a relay race, you are on the path to success. So in a three-legged race, you know, one of each of your legs is tied together, but you have to run at the same kind of speed to get anywhere. Works much better than running and passing on between people. So anywhere where you are really close, the closer you can be with sales. The better. The second thing is a shared objective: what's measured or rewarded gets done, and if you're both being measured or rewarded on exactly the same outcome, there's far more of an incentive for closer collaboration. I think when marketing has a set of KPIs, sales has a different set of KPIs, I think it makes it harder for that collaboration.
Steve: I agree on the KPIs. I've been on a mission for a year now too. MQLS and SQLs and just call them QLS because there should not be any difference there. I'll report back to you on my progress on that one. I don't, I don't know if I can undo the 10 years of Legacy acronym and Culture in the Space, but
Scott: Steve, I think you need a poll with the readers to see, you know, who is still on SQLs and MQLs and has anyone got to QLS and you know, see how you go.
Steve: I love that you know what? I feel like that change really only comes from the top. You need a senior leader of the company to just kind of call nonsense on a lot of this stuff and just be like, no, we're not doing that. There are not two different definitions of who our audience is. Yes, they could be in different phases, but they're the same. They're the same people.
Scott: Yeah. From my experience of B2C and B2B, my experience of B2C is shared objectives and outcomes is something that everybody involved is after exactly the same thing. B2B is where I've seen more difference between sales and marketing, looking at different measures and different outcomes.
Steve: That's the only, the downside of the robust technology and analytics is there's just too much of it. But anyway, it's a good problem to have cuz at one point we only had two or three things to go on. All right, so our final case study, what you're gonna walk us through, has to do with what we've spoken about traditional B2B marketing and certainly the event is such an important thing. But this one is all about how you get ROI from that event.
Scott: Absolutely. And this is taking traditional with probably something very untraditional in terms of a B2B marketing technique. So a couple of years ago I went on a course to qualify as a facilitator of something called Lego Sirius Plate. So this is literally using a curated piece of Legos modeling system. Putting it literally into people's hands, giving them some particular activities and objectives to achieve, and then letting their hands do the talking lets them build a model. Bring the model together and see where the gaps and the opportunities are. So I ran this with a group of marketers in the UK who were looking to get better ROI from their events. Everyone had exactly the same objective. Built a model of what the best journey would look like, pulled out what they thought was the most compelling part of that journey, and built it into something end to end. And the objective was very much, we need the ROI to be going right through to sales to deliver on the event. So everyone builds their own unique model, brings it all together to build a shared model, talks through the shared model, asks themselves the exam question, right? What are we taking all the way through to? Everybody looks at the model. Literally looks for the physical connection between the event and the seller who was in the model. No connection. It's like we haven't found a way to connect the seller into this particular experience. So then the question is, what do we need to do to build that connection? What is it in the model already that would manage to get through to that final end seller? And a little bit like going back to the community model is what's the wisdom of the crowd? What is the wisdom from the attendees? What is the shared experience? What have we learned from the people going through the event? Where they're telling us or indicating to us what they find compelling and interesting, and how do we get that to sellers so they've got a reason to call with some insight and some tangible backup material that continues the conversation after the event. Yeah, so building the model physically, we could see the gap and then within the model itself was actually the answer. We just hadn't seen it before.
Steve: So what were the sessions that they were using, the hands-on build session. Like what, how long was something like that?
Scott: That one runs about two hours.
Steve: Okay. It's kind of nice because, you know, the traditional way of doing that is let's just all go in our own worlds. Let's get the PowerPoint out and we'll just do slides. Right. And we've just, some become so accustomed to that as our way of planning. That the leg thing is a great forcing mechanism to just say, stop.
Scott: We're doing it differently. And I think one of the things that it really encourages, so if you ask people to draw something, invariably people feel a bit inhibited. You know, I'm not an artist, I can't draw, there might be judgment on what I've drawn. If you put Lego in front of people and say, build something, it's very rare anyone says, I can't. And people don't feel the same inhibition. There's not an expectation that everyone around the table is gonna be a master Lego builder, and the technique isn't about building a model that looks like something, it's building a model that you can talk to and use almost like an analogy. And it's building the model and then explaining the model and explaining the story. It's that explanation that has the insight and generally where the solutions come from.
Steve: Yeah, so I have to applaud the people of Lego because their product appears in such random places. So one that, what you just mentioned, the other one I got to go out to California for a digital conference that I essentially created for a team that I used to manage. And one of the stops was in Stanford and on display was the original Google search engine. Like, it was essentially just the drive that stored all of this content and the top of the drive cuz they wanna do it to get hot so they needed more air. So they took off the top and then they used Lego to build a top of this thing so nothing could get in it. And they used the traditional Google color palette in Legos. And it's just so funny how Legos are just such a part of the fabric of who we are. It's just wow. We all can relate to them through our childhood. But again, Lego's doing something there, you know, they are making us think about Legos all the time.
Scott: It's one of the things I think, you know, when we are growing up and we are learning and we are developing, the first thing that we do is build things. You know, the classic kids building blocks, one of the first things that you are playing with as a child, and we go to school and then we sort of sit still and we read and we write, and we almost get groomed that there's only ever one answer to any question. And in fact, there are infinite answers to any question. There's just degrees of applicability and suitability and outcome. And we stop doing that. We stop building, we stop drawing. We stop being open to different kinds of different ideas, and we just kind of narrow in and edit things too quick. You gotta do both. You've gotta expand and create. Then you gotta edit.
Steve: And if Elon Musk was on the podcast, which, you know, maybe we'll hear back from his PR team soon if he's gonna join us. But his whole philosophy as it relates to questioning is like, you have to question the question he asks, cuz if you don't acknowledge that a question can be inherently flawed, then you fall victim to just, you've been framed into this space and you're thinking in that space. So the ability to push back and say, is that really the right question? Is sometimes a very powerful technique.
Scott: And spending time on it. I think, is it Einstein that came up with the, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 50 minutes understanding the question and 10 minutes solving it.
Steve: Yep. I love that quote. That's a great one. Similar since we're just gonna, this is the rest of the podcast is just historical quotes from interesting people, right? There was another. I don't know. I could be getting this wrong. It may have been Abraham Lincoln where it was the same thing. If I had a half hour to chop down a tree, I would spend 25 minutes sharpening my ax, you know? Yep. It's just those powerful statements. Who knows if they're true or not. My other, my other favorite quote from Lincoln, which you've seen on the internet, I hope, is the it's, you know, it's a picture of Lincoln and it says, don't believe everything you read on the. And I always think that's just like, you can't beat that meme. It's so good. It's so perfect. All right. Well, Scott, we are fortunate for you to share all those case studies. We're now gonna jump into getting to know more about you. So you mentioned that you started on the B2C side, but give us that understanding of your first B2B marketing job. What was that?
Scott: So B2B marketing, I guess I've gracefully moved into it without it having a definite, here's where it started. I moved from consultancy, which involved multiple industries and multiple different types of challenges into a tech company, but within the tech company I did a lot of brand management. So you could say that it started at that point, which would've been about, hmm, 20, 25 years ago now.
Steve: Not as long as the laundry behind you.
Scott: But yes, the laundry has been here a whole lot longer. Yeah. But again, it's gone through, it's gone through a re-imagination, you know, this used to be the kind of the workplace of the people for the country manor at the end of the road. And it still is a workplace. It's just a different type of work.
Steve: Yep. What do you enjoy most? Being a marketer? Like what? What is just, if you could say, look, if I could clear out my calendar for the next week, I would only be doing this.
Scott: Good question. I think understanding what the audience really needs is the thing I find most interesting. Again, going back to have you really understood the exam question properly? Often we have a, here's the ex, here's the problem we wanna solve, and here's the people we wanna solve it. But you then need to spend some time with those people to understand, is that really the problem they feel they need having solved and what really is underneath the need that is driving that problem? And that's the stuff I find interesting, compelling, and great to dig into.
Steve: I agree with that. And it's also the not so obvious answer when you start a project. And also very risky because you don't know, I'm very fascinated with cultures and my experience has been that the bigger the company, the safer the decisions tend to be. But when you really get some interesting insight around customer needs, It's just fascinating to go in those new areas. And I feel like that's where, you know, we've talked about a lot of awards, the effectiveness of a lot of those programs come from people who are dared to go in there and find out what is that unspoken need or, or want.
Scott: So I think you have to get to that. You have to get emotional. You know what is really going to get you to be interested? Be compelled, want to try something and see if it really meets the need. You know, if you just want it or you're being told you should have it. Is it something that's really gonna be lasting?
Steve: Yep. All right. Another thought or question I should say is, You've been doing marketing for a while, if you could go back in time, tell yourself, hey, you had it wrong. If you could, if you could go back and say, do it this way, or don't be concerned about that, what would you wanna teach yourself for people who are, who are newer to B2B marketing?
Scott: I would want to go back to the first job I had in consulting where I was advised by the client. Partner on the job that I didn't have sufficient gravitas to go far as a consultant, which I really sort of knocked me sideways because you know, Blustering larger than life, little bit Sweary character wasn't my style was never gonna be my style. And I wondered at the time, you know, if that's what it takes, then maybe they're right. You know why in the clock forward several years somebody asked me to run a training course and I was taking over from someone very senior who'd moved onto another opportunity. And I said, why? Why me? Why do you think I'm the right person for this job? And she said, you are the only one we've got with the gravitas to pull the storytelling side of things off. I'm like, okay. So I didn't have it back then when I thought it was one thing and now someone else is telling me I have it and it's a completely different thing. If I had just realized that it's what makes you inherently you is the gravitas, I think many things would've been different in between.
Steve: Yeah. It's such a good point. I mean, it's. We, you know, we can grow as individuals. We’re always growing, but it's the added environment. I've found myself in similar shoes where in one environment I index low on something. In the other environment, I'm essentially the same person. So for me it's always been a good lesson in reading the room, reading the industry that you're working in. You know, I remember one of my clients, this was a long time ago, but very conservative. And like every meeting, you couldn't have seen more fine clothing on men and women than in my career. And they were just, they were just dressed really well. They were very well spoken, but I'm like, there's nothing going on here as far as marketing. But it was kind of like, okay, culturally I need to assimilate to that, otherwise I'm not gonna be taken seriously. Like you have to play to have that seat at the table. So it's always, it's always fascinated me culturally just what, what you have to do to understand an organization to, to have impact. That's always been the trickiest thing for me.
Scott: I think it goes back to the point we were talking about earlier, about understanding the need. So I think if you can demonstrate you understand their needs, there's less of a need to conform. Because you're demonstrating you've understood them and where they're coming from and how you can be helpful to them. Again, going back to our famous quotes, I don't know who said this one. But you weren't born to fit in. You were born to stand out. Is one I've always really liked and something, which I think, and I've talked about it in some of the stories. If you don't tread a traditional route, you can still find, and often it's the only way to find really good solutions for thorny problems.
Steve: Yep. That's awesome. Anything else you wanna share with us? You've done a great job of just sharing some wonderful cases to really get a sense of who you are and, and how you can kind of get in there. Uncover the needs and the insights which have helped in your marketing campaigns. Anything else on your mind?
Scott: I'd say my motto if I had one, would be stay curious. Be the one that has the big pack back pocket, you know, tuck those interesting things in. You never know when they're gonna come up, but generally you are gonna feel for when that idea is gonna have its time. And usually, it makes quite a big difference when you find that opportunity. Some of the stories here have done that. I have several others and several in the back pocket that I haven't tried out yet. Yeah, so top tip, be curious. Tuck everything in your back pocket. Every great idea has its day.
Steve: Awesome. That's a perfect way to end the show. Scott, I wanna thank you for joining us today, and thank you everyone for listening in and or watching Interesting B2B Marketers. All right, so until the next episode, we will see you and have a wonderful day everyone.