Strategic Story Arcs That Shape B2B Narratives
Allyson Havener shares her insights into strategic story arcs that shape B2B narratives, ways to use data to analyze your market, and the benefits of an integrated marketing approach.
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Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Fazan, CEO of Cast Me In Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Alison, how are you?
>> Good, how are you?
>> I'm doing very well, excited to have you on the show, excited to chat.
Trust radius and your background, everything in between.
So let's get into it.
What was your first job in demand?
>> My first job in demand was at a company called Live Ram.
So I worked in the digital marketing space.
We sold maybe to see marketers at some of the biggest advertisers in the world.
And so I started in demand gen really focusing on field marketing.
And it was mostly selling into the enterprise.
So got a lot of experience, started with trial by fire working with our VP of
marketing.
So I was one of the first marketing hires that they had and
we really focused on trying to break into the enterprise.
>> And so flash forward to today, tell us a little bit about what it means to
be VP of marketing and trust radius.
>> So it was big transition for me.
I started at Live Ram when it was about 40 people and
I grew to over 2000.
And so it was quite a big company when I left.
So I decided I wanted to go to a smaller company and build.
And I think that's something in your career that you start thinking about is,
are you a builder?
Are you a maintainer?
And so I got to that point where I felt that I really wanted to go back to that
building phase.
I went to trust radius and started the marketing kind of from the ground up.
So they're really thinking about how they were going to reposition in the
market and
really establish themselves as a researcher and review platform in the B2B
software space.
I came in, how to rebuild the entire team, really start to think about, okay,
what are those mission critical people that you need right out of the gate?
And then started thinking, okay, what are the foundational
parts of marketing that need to be established before you can kind of build
anything else?
So it was definitely a balance between keeping the lights on,
trying to keep feeding our sales team and making sure that we're driving demand
But then you're also thinking about what you need to do foundationally to scale
in the future.
Let's get to our first segment, the trust tree.
This is where you go and feel honest and trusted and you can share the steepest
darkest demand secrets.
So zoom in out, what does trust radius do?
Who are your customers?
We're going to have two sides of the marketplace.
So we have buyers that come to trust radius.
They are looking at all of the reviews of different software.
They're looking at pricing, they're going to use it to compare different
software.
So they can really make the best purchase decision for their company,
whatever their business goals are.
On the other side, we sell to B2B marketers that are trying to attract these
buyers, right?
They're building out their profile, they generate reviews from their customers.
And they really want to understand who these buyers are.
So we sell them two things, we sell them the content.
So all of the user reviews, these are really robust reviews that they can
generate
customer stories from, the people that leave the reviews are also their
references.
And they take all of that content and it lives on trust radius and
then they take it and use it in their own channels.
So they're either using that on different landing pages,
creating more key studies, using that in their sales process.
The second piece is when these buyers are coming to our platform,
they're leaving all of these really high fidelity and 10 signals.
So they're either reading reviews, comparing you to whoever your competitors
are.
They're looking at pricing, FAQs, demo videos, whatever that content is.
So then the B2B marketer takes that data, they use it in their marketing
campaigns,
their sales team goes, prospects to those people.
So it's really creating kind of like this dynamic where buyers can get
information that they need and what they're looking for when they're making a
purchase
decision and then B2B marketers can use that intelligence and use that content
to then go after those buyers and making sure that they're being considered.
And so it's really creating kind of that dynamic for people to really make the
best
software decision for their company and for B2B marketers to reach these buyers
that are ready to make a purchase.
>> Of that B2B marketing persona, what size companies are you looking at there
and who's generally the buying committee?
>> Right now we look at mostly enterprise and mid market.
So because we have so much content on our website and
all the products that are listed on there are mostly enterprise technologies.
A lot of the buyers that come, they have a lot of buying power.
And that really attracts mostly from the B2B marketing side and the buying
committee.
They want to reach that enterprise audience.
And so our buying community usually consists of,
usually the CMO is involved because they really want to understand from a
branding
perspective, they want to make sure that whatever's being said about on our
platform
is consistent with their brand messaging that it's really helping them with
their
kind of total brand image.
And then we mostly work with either the demand gen side of the house.
So they're the ones that are using that intent data, they're building the
campaigns,
they're working with whatever their sales development team or
BDRs or business development, whoever they're working with,
their sales team to start generating demand and using the intent signals.
And then on the other side, we work a lot with customer marketers.
So customer marketers are the ones that are helping get the content onto their
profile, generate the reviews, and then using that content throughout the rest
of
their marketing.
So it really can span a lot of the different personas on the marketing team,
just depending on their strategy.
But I would say those are the three main ones that we're talking to.
So it's a CMO, demand gen and customer marketing.
>> And how do you structure your marketing order to acquire those accounts?
Where do sales fit into the broader structure?
>> Right, one of your first questions is, we're do you focus on in terms of
when
you're kind of building the marketing team?
And so I would say when I thought about it,
I was like two things that you have to have is you have to have somebody from
a marketing operations standpoint.
I think especially if you're going after the enterprise,
you have to have a really strong data foundation to build those segments.
You already maybe are working with one business unit in the enterprise.
So you need to have really good customer data to understand, all right,
this business units are customer.
However, we want to sell them to these 10 other business units.
And so that's building that really smart segmentation.
The second piece is obviously a demand gen manager.
I think you really need someone that's thinking about how to guide the
marketing
operations.
They're the ones that need to think through how we're actually going to go to
market and drive demand and go after these accounts.
And then manage that execution layer with the rest of the team.
The other piece that right away was content marketing.
I don't think we need to be marketing exists without content.
So you really need someone that can be this strategic kind of arm and
also like executional and also think about scaling content.
Because as any good video marketer knows,
content is super, super important, but it is the easiest thing to make a lot of
So you really need someone that's not just going to make content for
content stake, but they're working with that demand gen person.
What are the campaigns?
What's the content that you need for that?
Maybe where are some of the gaps that we're seeing?
And then start to build the campaigns to push those out into market.
So I think that those three components right out of the gate you need to really
start kind of thinking about how you break into these accounts and go after
them.
And then to your other point around sales is you have to have this kind of
foundation and then you have to be working with sales to understand which
accounts you're going to go after and the strategy for that.
You have to have that partnership of like who's that ideal customer profile and
really focus on that, especially in the early days.
Because you don't want to waste time with unqualified accounts and
people that you don't want to be talking to.
>> Do you have a demand gen strategy?
Where does that fit within your overall marketing strategy?
>> Everything we do, it's coming from a place of driving demand for the company
And so when I think about our demand gen strategy,
I think about it from the data side of the house and thinking of,
we really need to understand who we have in our marketable universe,
who we're going after.
I also take it from a very integrated approach.
So you'll see that if marketing teams can get very, very fragmented,
that can happen for many different reasons.
But it's really easy, especially if you're at a smaller company,
that everything kind of turns into this one off campaign that you're running.
And so when I think about our demand gen strategy,
I really think about it from an integrated approach.
So what's that kind of story that we're trying to tell the market?
How are we setting up the problem?
How are we aligning ourselves to some macro trend that's happening in the
market?
That's going to be that like aha moment, like, okay,
this is a problem I need to fix.
And then once people understand that,
you have to lead them down that journey to, okay, what's the solution?
Just in a general sense, what's that solution?
And then your last kind of like that bottom funnel messaging is great,
but here's the solution and here's how your product can support that solution.
So you really want to lead people down this kind of story arc,
and we all know the buyer's journey is not linear.
All that information and content needs to be readily available for
wherever they are in their buyer's journey.
But it really has to be integrated and consistent approach across your content.
And your channel distribution.
When I think about demand gen,
you really need to be thinking about that story arc and how you're getting
people
to interact with your brand in a really consistent integrated way.
Okay, let's go to the playbook.
This is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help
you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play it, it's just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Uncuttable is, I think I keep going back to this,
but it's so important is marketing operations.
You need to understand how people are moving through kind of that lead life
cycle.
Right now I am spending a lot of time on understanding how people are getting
into our database, how they're interacting with the rest of our marketing,
how we're moving that to sales, how sales is interacting with them.
Because if you don't have a solid foundation of how people are moving through
your lead management process, then you can't think of how to make it more
effective and efficient.
I'm looking constantly at rates and how sales is interacting with them
and how it's actually all the way to closed one.
And so I would say uncuttable is your marketing operations.
Like you have to have really good pulse on that.
Yeah, and I think another thing there is that almost every marketing leader
that we talk to,
when you talk about marketing operations specifically, that there's always like
a number.
And then when you dig in that there's like some lesson that might be counter
intuitive
or might be interesting or I host another show called Rides of RevOps,
where we talk about revenue operations and it's all we talk about.
But there's always these little things that you learn through marketing
operations or revops
that are not very obvious when you just look at like the bottom line number.
And we always talk about sales marketing alignment and getting aligned on
numbers
and all that sort of stuff.
But I think that what we learn most of all is that the data is not always
telling you the full picture.
And if you don't have someone thinking about all of that and like wondering why
a certain number
is doing this thing and someone isn't owning that and like really digging into
all that sort of stuff,
then it's really easy to just say, okay, we're getting 12% conversion on this
campaign and 9% on this campaign.
So that copy must be better.
Kind of just making those things just because the number says so.
If you look into it and you're like, oh, well, five of those leads that
converted,
all of those converted because of this one event that we did,
that's actually the reason why all those converted not because this campaign
had better copy.
So having someone dig into the numbers and ask the questions of why it's
happening.
I think where like that rev ops role is so dynamic now.
It's mission critical, really.
And I think everybody is talking about the recession and you have to do more
with less.
And that's just been a huge topic.
And you can start with your marketing operations.
You can start to find inefficiencies really quick.
You can start to see where your conversion rates are dropping off.
However, at the end of the day, what you need to look at is understanding those
inefficiencies
and where they are and why they're happening and start to fix those.
That's like the low hanging fruit.
And that's where I would prioritize.
What's your number two?
So the number two uncuttable is the content.
I think that you have to think about content and it's everything that goes into
that.
So what I work with my content marketer on is one piece of content is actually
10.
Right.
And so it's like, how does this piece of content turn into social?
How does that turn into video?
How does that turn into long form, short form pieces?
So uncuttable is content and the production of content.
You can be super strategic about how you get a lot out of it and a lot out of
different
pieces of content, but it's worth investing in and it's worth thinking about
how to scale it.
So I think you can still be really smart about it, but it's something you need
to really carve
out some budget for.
You're preaching the choir as someone who makes podcasts and video series for
living.
So obviously I love that and content usually comes up as an uncuttable for a
lot of folks just
because like you said in B2B, you just have to be doing it and you have to be
doing it well.
I'm curious, like, you know, you talked about creating derivatives and
something also near and
dear to my heart, but I think that one of the things that people kind of get
wrong with derivatives
a lot of times is like they start with a piece of content that kind of just isn
't that strong
and then they make a bunch of derivatives of it and the rest of them are all
kind of saying
nothing, nothing, and they don't live in that medium to actually do the thing
that they're
supposed to do. How do you focus on creating quality at the top of that to
create derivatives
that also create value?
I think it goes back to that story arc. So when you think about content and
what you're going to say,
like you have to have strong messaging. Again, you're thinking about what you
're really trying
to say and the point that you want to drive home with your audience. And a
couple of things that
I think about with content is from the top of the funnel or more of that kind
of media worthy
type of content is what are those macro trends in the market that you can align
yourself to?
And not in a way that doesn't feel authentic. Like, it really, either there isn
't a macro
trend and then you need to maybe find one or something that we do at TransRad
ius is we do a
buyer trends report every year. And so we survey all of the buyers that come to
our sites. We have
a huge community of buyers and millions of buyers that come and use TrustRadius
. We survey them and
just try to understand what do they want when they start the buying process?
What kind of information
do they want to find? How do they want to interact with the vendor? How do they
want to interact with
the sales team, marketing team, etc. And so this really helps us understand,
insert these trends that
are hopping from the buying community. That's huge. I think from a content
perspective is like,
you have all of this data that you can use and you can create these stories and
these trends and
you can insert them into the market. That's super powerful. I think the second
thing is from
marketing and a lot of what our customers use, as I mentioned before, is those
customer stories.
Like, what are your customers saying? What are they dealing with? What are the
pressures that
they're feeling? It's really fun to market to marketers. So you've got to have
that pressure
point. When I look at the content we make, I'm like, would I read this? Would I
get this?
I have a little bit of an unfair advantage, the fact that I sell to myself. But
what are your
customers talking about? What matters to them? And so if you can do that in a
really authentic way
and make content that your customers are going to care about, and you hear a
lot about these
forums where it's just like, hey, let's just get our customers in a room and
they can talk about
the struggles and challenges that they're seeing, how they're working through
them,
and that's kind of like sense of community. That's super valuable. And then
taking that and building
even more content from it. It's thinking about what's going on in your market
and in your industry.
How can you influence that and how can you tie yourself to it? And then how do
you figure out
what your customers are talking about, what they care about, and build from
that as well? So if you
can do those two things, I think in a really authentic way that's aligned with
your brand,
then that's how you stay on track and you don't make content that's just fluff.
Okay, what's your number three on Cuddable? Sales development. So I think that
this is probably a
very controversial topic in the marketing and sales world. There's a lot of
dynamics and every
company kind of does it a little bit different with their kind of sales
development team
or business development team. I think that they're just uncuttable. So you see
a lot of automation
happening in the world. Somebody inbounding, they're going straight to the
sales team,
they're getting that meeting, etc. And I think that if you really use this kind
of sales development
team, you build it in a really smart way, you think about how they're also like
a feeder team
into the rest of your customer facing roles, it's uncuttable. You really need
this team to be
aligned with marketing and with sales. And you need to be having a really
strong program
that's essentially training them to be customer facing, to feed your customer
success team,
your account management, maybe your AEs. My take on this is that it is the
easiest way
to burn credibility when they're annoying. And like, it's just that's just the
way it is. And like,
I feel like people shy away from that, which is just like, we all get hit up.
If you're an executive,
all day every day by people in every single place where we can receive messages
, we get hit up by
people all day every day. So it's like figuring out a way to not be annoying
and having the right
train. I love that that's uncuttable for you is like figuring out the right way
to do that is
extremely essential. If your entire brand ethos is like having all of this
marketing and
brand message and all this sort of stuff, and then you have a super annoying
person,
just like hounding someone, like all of that work was for nothing.
And I totally agree with you. And that's why I think it's so important that
they're aligning with
the marketing team. They use the intent signals from trust radius to feed their
BDR team. They're
like, Hey, here are all these accounts and people that are researching, you
know, either our solution
or our competitors. How do we go after them in a really smart way? And we know
they're in market,
we know that they are towards that bottom of the funnel. And how do we, like I
said, engage with them
versus to your point where it seems like kind of chaotic that they're just
going after whoever,
whenever type of a situation. And you're right, that's really damaging to your
brand. And it's
really inefficient. What's your most cuttable? What's the stuff that you're not
going to be
investing in near future here? One thing that we're maybe scaling back on is
our PR strategy.
I think about PR in the sense of how is our brand message being projected
through the media. And
one of the things that I am working with now is what is that brand message?
What is it that we
really want to be projecting through the media? And I don't think we have like
the best answer.
And so when you're thinking about your PR strategy, you have to have a very
crisp answer ready to go.
What we've been really focusing on is our reports that we do buy our trends,
but they're not necessarily
again that trust radius story that is really going to be crisp in the market.
So I think that
when you are approaching PR, you need to have that strategy. Otherwise, you
better have something
else that we've been really relying on our reports. We've been really relying
on having a lot of
that data to get that media coverage. Okay, any other thoughts on campaigns or
uncutables or
where you're spending your money? Yeah, I think the other thing is I've kind of
been alluding to
this a lot. But I think in especially if your budget's coming under pressure or
your team or
however your team is being measured is coming under pressure, think about the
low hanging fruit.
Like what are things that you can do that are going to impact your bottom line
the fastest?
Buds are coming under constraints. You want to prove out the value of the
dollars that you have
as quickly as possible. So when you're building out campaigns, when you're
thinking about
defectiveness of those campaigns, think about the lowest hanging fruit and
things that are
going to convert the fastest and ultimately build pipeline and be closed one.
How do you view your website? Obviously, TrustRadius, you have so much on the
website that is your
product. And then also you have this other side of your website for vendors and
for your solutions
and with pricing and all that other stuff and content and resources. Yeah, I
love that you brought
that up. So we're actually in the process right now of redoing our entire
website on the vendor
side of the house. So brought up a good point. We have TrustRadius.com. That is
where all of the
buyers come and do research. That's where all of the software product profiles
live.
Tons of amazing content there. We have our resources and everything for actual
B2B marketers.
So we're in the process right now of redoing that whole web experience. And the
way I think
about our website, it kind of just falls into this content bucket for me. It
should have all of
that information that buyers want. So a big piece of that, like you mentioned,
is our pricing
and packaging. I think a lot of software companies shy away from that,
especially in the enterprise.
But buyers want that. We saw in our research that we did with buyer trends,
over 80% of buyers
want to see that right out of the gate. And so if you don't have your pricing,
that could be a
hindrance when buyers are making their shortlist. And so pricing is like a big
component for people
to understand, okay, what am I actually getting? And does that fit my budget?
Do I feel you can
still have that strategic conversation with your sales team? But the pricing
isn't the
sales team isn't a gatekeeper anymore to that. I think that you can still do
pricing in a strategic
way that opens up that conversation. And the sales person can really drive home
the value.
But I think it's super important for buyers to get that upfront. So I think
with our website right
now, we're redoing it to make sure there's enough information for buyers to
really understand the
products that TrustRadius offers. And then also thinking about all the content
that we create and
making that readily available as well. And then being really transparent with
our pricing and
packaging. Okay, let's get to the desktop. So every talk about healthy tension,
whether that's
with your board or sales team or competitors or anyone else. Have you had a
memorable desktop in
your career? Yes. And you know, I think it's actually in a funny way, I think
that you always
kind of have desktop with your sales team. And you should have that healthy
relationship or you
can have those on our honest conversations with your sales team. And one story
is I always kind
of go back to with our sales team around messaging. So you know, salespeople
are always thinking about
what is what is that messaging that's going to get that meeting? They're
thinking about what's
that bottom line conversion, what's going to get them to take the meeting with
us, etc. And so
there's sales messaging and there's the way sales approaches that and the way
marketing has to do
it, right? When you're thinking about that story, and so I always feel like
there's a there is that
kind of healthy desktop when it comes to messaging and and what sales is going
to what sales is how
their approach is different than the rest of what marketing needs to do. Okay,
let's get to our quick
hits. These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how qualified
health companies generate
pipeline quickly. It's happened to your greatest asset, your website to
identify your most valuable
visitors and instantly start sales conversations. It's quick and easy just like
these questions.
Go to qualified.com to learn more. We love qualified. Go to qualified.com to
learn more. You can talk to
someone right on the website right there. It's so quick and easy. Allison quick
hits are you ready?
Yes, I think so. Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your
resume?
I was a ballerina. So we'll see if I can still do some of this up that I used
to, but yeah,
I used to be a ballerina in my younger days. Do you have a favorite book
podcast TV show that
you've been checking out recently? Love Freakonomics. I that's one of my
favorite podcasts. It's so
entertaining. Favorite non-marketing hobby that may be indirectly makes you a
better marketer?
Yoga. It's you got to center yourself and meditate. If you weren't in marketing
, what do you think
you'd be doing? Probably open a wine bar. What advice do you have for a first
time
head of marketing trying to figure out their demand-gen strategy? Oh, and I
would make sure
you hire the right people. You want to surround yourself with really, really
capable smart people
that are hungry and that aren't afraid to ask for forgiveness. So I would,
first thing I would do
is make sure you're hiring really smart. A second piece I would say is finding
a community for you
to talk to other heads of marketing, other CMOs. It's super important,
especially when you get to
that executive level that you consistently are learning and reaching for that C
MO community.
For myself, I'm part of CMO Huddles, which is a great community of CMOs. We
meet, I think it's
bimonthly and there's other events and things like that. It's really nice to
have that kind of
camaraderie to problem-solve and a little bit of group therapy as well. Allison
, that's it.
That's all we got for today. For our listeners, go to TrustRadius.com. Check it
out. Check out
some of the slash resources. They have some cool content on there. And just
overall,
scoot around on TrustRadius for all your next purchases and everything else.
Any final thoughts
anything to plug? Yeah, come check out TrustRadius and reach out to me on
LinkedIn. Love to talk to
other marketers. So thank you so much Ian for the time. This is fun. Yeah,
thanks for joining and take care.
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