THE

MARKETER
Issue 5 Quarter 1 2019 QUARTERLY

Need-to-know ADVICE FROM

SEO trends CONTENT PIONEER
ANN HANDLEY
THE MAESTRO
ON THE METRO:
A MARKETING
MYSTERY

How to build
your ABM
strategy on The ultimate
LinkedIn
guide to
sales and
marketing
orchestration

THE CONTENT HERO ARE WE UNDERVALUING OSCAR-WORTHY B2B

WHO SAVED DISNEY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP? VIDEO STRATEGIES
INTRODUCING
VIDEO ADS
Raise brand
awareness

Captivate your
target audience

Fuel demand
generation

linkedin.com/videoads
5 Sophisticated Marketer
FROM THE TEAM
A NOTE TO SOPHISTICATED MARKETERS

A
ligning sales and marketing tops the
priority list for every B2B marketer. We
know that it will drive growth, boost
morale, increase lead quality and
demonstrate our contribution to the bottom line.
The big question is: how can we make it happen?
In our latest issue, we’re setting out to
answer it.
We’re exploring every aspect of the critical
art of Marketing and Sales Orchestration, from
a planning framework for Account-Based
Marketing (ABM) strategies to aligning around
a shared view of your target audience. We ask
why sales teams get more excited about events
than other marketing tactics, how to build
the right kind of chemistry with your sales
colleagues, and how to leverage video at every
stage of the buyer journey.
In between you’ll find plenty of exclusive
research and insights to help develop B2B
marketing that the whole business values:
more advice on content marketing dilemmas
from Ann Handley, our latest state of sales
research, key SEO trends that you need to know
about, and new data that shows the real value
of thought leadership.
This is an issue packed with inspiration
for marketers who care about working more
closely with sales.

We hope you enjoy it!

I I
THE TEAM: EDITORS Jane Fleming Grace MacDonald Megan Golden I
I I I I
Alex Rynne Sean Callahan Steve Kearns Kate Mallord Amanda Bulat
I I I
CONTRIBUTORS Ann Handley Keith Browning Meghan Brockmeyer Keith Richey I
I I I I
Penry Price Justin Shriber Siobhan Waters Pallavi Sharma Liam Halpin
FOR CREAM PUBLISHING: CONSULTANT EDITOR Matthew Cowen I lnkd.in/US-Blog
I
ART DIRECTOR Tim Mapleston PUBLISHER Victoria Furness lnkd.in/EMEA-Blog

CreamPublishing
Cream Publishing, Adur Business Centre, Little High Street, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex BN43 5EG.

Sophisticated Marketer 3
 CONTENTS 38 70

06
38

60

06 CONTENT OR CONTEXT 18 THE SMALL BUSINESS 32 THE SECRETS OF SALES AND

A mysterious musical experiment
proves why marketers should
value context.
10 ASTONISHING TALES:
How Blendtec created a media
empire by pulverizing top tech.
13 THE TROUBLE WITH:
PERSONAS
If you’re serious about customer-
centricity, they need more data.
15 THE RISE OF B2B
PRODUCT REVIEWS
Why customer voices matter—
Cover illustration: Tim Mapleston
MARKETING ROUNDTABLE
Four SMB marketing experts on
the opportunities ahead.
20 DEFINING ACCOUNT
BASED MARKETING
What does the buzziest of B2B
buzzwords really mean?
23 TOOLBOX
Trends, top tips, insights
and inspiration.
29 THE UNDERVALUED
POWER OF THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP
MARKETING ORCHESTRATION
Justin Shriber explains why Sales
and Marketing Orchestration is
now essential business strategy.
36 WHAT EVENTS CAN TEACH
DIGITAL MARKETERS
Why do salespeople love events so
much? And how can we spread that
love to digital marketing?
38 THE TRUTH ABOUT SMARKETING
The best attempts at alignment
won’t work without the right
chemistry experiments.
42

and how to manage them.
17 THE TROUBLE WITH:
BEST PRACTICE
Marketers can’t afford to follow
overly restrictive rules.
Sales and marketing are both
missing its real impact.
30 ASKING FOR A FRIEND
Our superb advice column from
content pioneer Ann Handley.
ALIGNING TARGETING FOR
MARKETING AND SALES
A shared view of the target
audience is the essential
starting point for effective
sales and marketing.

4 Sophisticated Marketer
 74
63

50
10
44

44 THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO 60 COULD SMARKETING 72 WHAT GETS CMOS

ABM ON LINKEDIN HAVE SAVED WILLY LOMAN? CLICKING?
How LinkedIn makes a difference Could sales and marketing Exclusive LinkedIn data
at the seven key stages for ABM alignment have meant a different on the content setting senior
programmes. ending for Death of a Salesman? marketers’ agendas.

46 SEO TRENDS FOR 2019
The search changes that matter
for B2B marketers.
50 THE SUPER BOWL PLAYBOOK
Inspiration for B2B brand
strategies from this year’s big
game ad breaks.
54 STATE OF SALES REPORT
Which sales tactics are
landing with buyers?
58 OPTIMIZING FOR
‘SALES CLOSES’
AdStage’s Pallavi Sharma
on how to make it happen.
63 SALES HASN’T CHANGED BUT
WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN HAS
Liam Halpin on blending
traditional techniques with
modern tools.
64 HOW TO CREATE AN
OSCAR-WORTHY B2B VIDEO
STRATEGY ON LINKEDIN
Your guide to video content that
works throughout the funnel.
70 BRAND SAFETY OR AD
PERFORMANCE? WHY IT’S
A FALSE CHOICE
Are the metrics you take brand
safety risks for really worth it?
74 THE SAIGON KICK
SECRET TO LIVING A
FACE-MELTING
CREATIVE LIFE, DESPITE
THE SETBACKS
Former rock god Jason Bieler
explains how he’s built one of the
most irreverent brands in music.
77 WHAT’S IN YOUR BAG
LinkedIn’s Keith Richey
spills his satchel contents.
78 CONTENT HEROES:
HOWARD ASHMAN
The tragically short story of the
content genius that saved Disney.

Sophisticated Marketer 5
6 Sophisticated Marketer
 THE BRIEF

CONTENT
OR What a violin maestro playing on
the Washington Metro should teach

CONTEXT:
us about advertising strategy

which matters more?

W0RDS BY KEITH BROWNING

At 7.51am on Friday January 12, 2007, a man in an ill-fitting jumper and baseball
cap made his nondescript way to a grimy corner of the L’Enfant Plaza metro station
in Washington D.C. He positioned himself against a wall, next to a garbage bin,
unpacked a violin and bow, opened his case ready to take donations, and started
to play. He played for 43 minutes. During that time, over 1,000 commuters passed
within a couple of feet of him. People having their shoes shined or in line to buy
a Lotto ticket listened to him perform entire pieces. In all of that time, only seven
people stopped to listen, and only twenty more paused to give him money. The lady
running the shoe shine stand considered complaining to the police about the noise.
A woman passing by wondered why people bothered busking in this way. The violin
player made just over $32.
Two weeks earlier, that same man had stood on a stage at Symphony Hall in
Boston. There was no jumper and no baseball cap. He wore a sharp black suit and
was surrounded by supporting musicians in white tie and tails. An expectant crowd,
decked in their finest, strained to hear every sound that he would make. After all,
they had paid a minimum of $100 each to hear him perform.
This was Joshua Bell. A man considered by many to be the greatest violinist alive.
A man whose playing has been described as doing “nothing less than tell human
beings why they bother to live.” In both locations, he had played the same beautiful

Sophisticated Marketer 7
THE BRIEF

classical music on the same

insanely expensive violin.
And yet the response from his
audiences could not have been
more different.

CONTEXT VS CONTENT:
A HARD REALITY TO COME
TO TERMS WITH
Joshua Bell’s twin perfor-
mances had been arranged
by The Washington Post as
an experiment into the influ-
ence of context on human
perceptions—and the findings
shocked plenty of people at
the time. Heads of National
Symphony Orchestras, in
particular, found it difficult to
come to terms with the fact that
no crowd of people formed in
response to Bell’s playing; that
people couldn’t recognize the
beauty; that, between 1,000
of them, they could detect no
more than $32 in value.
The response of music lovers
is understandable. In fact, it’s
eerily similar to the reaction of
many marketers when you try to
convince them that the context
in which their ad appears might
be more important than the ad
itself. When you are so invest-
ed in your message, it’s difficult
to come to terms with the idea
that the message itself might
not matter—or at least, that it
might matter a lot less than you
thought. More than a decade
after Bell’s DC metro gig, plenty
of advertising strategies still
assume that, provided you’re
reaching the right audience
with the right content, it doesn’t
matter where you reach them.
Advertisers’ early use of
programmatic buying was often
based on the assumption that targeting trumped context. marketing ever more efficiently around these outcomes.
Being able to target people wherever you wanted allowed However, that would be a huge mistake—and the Joshua Bell
you to reach them far more efficiently. Since ignoring context experiment helps to explain why.
lowered costs, it must be an improvement. Many strategies still
apply the same logic, especially when it comes to response. If HOW CONTEXT DOMINATES OUR RESPONSE
you can get enough people to click on an ad for a low enough TO ADVERTISING
cost then it doesn’t matter where your ad appeared, or how Context influences our response to advertising in powerful ways,
many other people saw it, in order to get that response. It’s on several different levels. It’s not just an instinctive response
tempting to use ever more advanced analytics to optimize or a conscious judgment. It’s both. Human beings use context

8 Sophisticated Marketer
in sophisticated ways to make extremely quick decisions about
the value and credibility of what’s being presented to them. As
a result, it’s impossible to consider an ad objectively, without
being influenced by where you’re seeing it. The context in
which people see your brand will have a big influence on their
judgment of your brand, both in the moment and in the future,
and this applies whether they click on it or not.
It’s tempting to write off the people in the subway station that
morning as snobs, unable to see quality if it wasn’t dressed up to
the nines, but that would be unfair. The commuters were using
a rule of thumb that reliably told them the violinist wasn’t worth
stopping to listen to. It’s the same rule of thumb that marketing
audiences have relied on for over a century, to determine what
a brand’s advertising really says about the brand.
CONTEXT AND QUALITY
Bob Hoffman, author of the fantastic blog The Ad Contrarian,
explains this superbly. He draws a distinction between what
marketers communicate in an ad (the “message”) and what
the ad actually says about them (the “signal”). According to
Hoffman, the type of ad format you are using and the place
where that ad appears contribute far more to the signal of
what your brand is really about than the content of the ad
itself. When audiences decide which brands to trust with their
time, interest and money, they automatically use context to
make the assessment. In the same way, commuters assume
with confidence that musicians who play on the subway aren’t
the best musicians in the world—but musicians who play in
expensive concert halls might be.
As Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group has
long argued, this was the real value for brands in advertising
on TV in the 1980s, and it’s still the real value in Super Bowl
ads today. Audiences know the ad slots are expensive. A brand
that pays to use them must intend to be around for a while,
in order to recoup the investment. This signals credibility and
trustworthiness far more effectively than the message of the ad
itself. Contrast this with a direct response ad that follows you
around the internet and clearly cares only about persuading
you to click as cheaply as possible. It sends a very different
signal about what the brand stands for.
CONTEXT AND RELEVANCE
Besides signalling whether a brand has quality and credibility,
context also signals whether it’s relevant. There may well
have been some classical music fans in the metro station
that morning, but they didn’t give Bell attention enough
to appreciate his playing because they were focusing on
something else: getting to work. They weren’t in the relevant
context to engage with the kind of content Bell was creating—
and therefore they didn’t engage with it.
Recent research from the University of Michigan’s Ross
School of Business confirms that the same signals of relevance
control how audiences respond to digital marketing.
Placement is an important part of how people interpret
what they encounter online, and marketers who ignore
context when planning their campaigns suffer as a result. An
insightful piece of in-depth B2B content looks more relevant,
interesting and valuable on the website of The Economist than
on The Daily Mail, in a professional environment than in a
non-professional one. I’d argue that the same applies to the
environment of different social platforms too. “We often focus
on the piece of art, but that piece of art and how we interpret
that piece of art will be influenced greatly by how it is framed,”
says Michigan Ross Professor John Branch. “In marketing, we
often focus on the message, whereas the framing, the context,
can also play a huge role.”
HOW CONTEXT CHANGES THE BRAIN —
AND THE EXPERIENCE
Signals of quality and relevance were definitely mixed in with
the sounds of Bell’s violin on that morning in the subway
station. However, it’s possible that something even more
influential was happening too; something that didn’t involve
any conscious or unconscious judgment on the part of the
passers-by at all. Researchers from the INSEAD Business
School and the University of Bonn recently discovered that a
higher price for a bottle of wine actually changes how drink-
ers experience the taste of that wine. Once they are primed
to expect to drink something of superior quality, the regions
of their brain associated with pleasure and enjoyment spark
up in advance, predis-
posing them to enjoy
WHERE YOUR AD and appreciate it more.
APPEARS CAN Researchers admit that
SIGNAL MORE a lot more studies are
needed in this area,
ABOUT YOUR but it offers a fascinat-
BRAND THAN ing insight as to just
why the influence of
WHAT'S IN THE context is so powerful.
AD ITSELF We don’t just expect to
enjoy things more in
certain situations. We actually do enjoy them more! Something
very similar might well happen when we encounter ads and
content in different environments online.
The idea that context matters in advertising is nothing new.
Marshall McLuhan first argued as much over 50 years ago in
his famous phrase, “The Medium is the Message”. If anything,
McLuhan understated his case. Research now shows that the
environment in which somebody encounters an ad doesn’t
just influence how they experience it. In fact, it can completely
rewrite its meaning, and signal something very different to
what the advertiser intends.
Digital channels provide us with a broad range of different
tactics and techniques to choose from when it comes to
targeting advertising and content. We can use these tactics
and techniques to be precise and specific about the contexts
in which we reach audiences—or to ignore that context
altogether. The maestro on the metro should remind us which
is the smarter approach.
Matched Audiences on LinkedIn enable you to reach your
chosen audiences in the most trusted context for professionals.
Find out more at https://lnkd.in/MatchedAudiences
Sophisticated Marketer 9
THE BRIEF
How do you make your
kitchen device famous?
Show it churning
out yoghurts and
smoothies? Discuss its
contribution to healthy
living? Or set about
pulverizing some of the
most sought-after tech
on the planet?
Astonishing
Tales of Content
Marketing:
BLENDTEC
Come along with us through the mists of time to the
distant past: Specifically, to October 30, 2006. President
Bush is midway through his second term. The most
sought-after cellular phone is the Motorola RAZR, with
its 2.2” screen and fashionable clamshell design. For
the first time, you don’t need to be a college student to
join Facebook. And Blendtec Founder Tom Dickson
uploads the first video in what will become a series of
viral hits on an up-and-coming site called YouTube
(which launched less than a year before).
THE FIRST VIDEO: LOSING HIS MARBLES
The first Blendtec video instantly establishes the
feel of the series. It has the on-the-cheap look of
a late night infomercial, with deliberately cheesy
titles and game-show quality music. But instead of
a slick, polished pitchman, the star of the video is Dickson
himself, looking slightly uncomfortable to be on camera.
“Will it blend? That is the question,” Dickson says, and pours
50 glass marbles into a Blendtec blender, reducing them to
powder in under a minute. When he peels off the blender lid,
finely pulverized particles swirl up like smoke. “Glass dust.
Don’t breathe this,” he deadpans.
This first video set the template for the more than 180 that have
followed. The series is remarkable for what it doesn’t have, almost
more than for what it does: There is no product pitch, no mention
of model numbers or prices. There’s no touting the benefits and
10 Sophisticated Marketer
features of the blender, no indication of
what you might more usefully use it for, nobody
even pointing out that the blender is powerful.
There’s not even a call to action. An
unconventional item goes into the blend-
er, Dickson smiles at the camera while it
blends. Then he pours out the pulverized
remains, points out that the object did in
fact blend, and scene.
That first video currently has over 6.5
million views on YouTube. Blendtec’s
more conventional promotional videos
average around 50,000–60,000 views.
MARKETING GOLD:
BLENDING APPLE PRODUCTS
Apple’s announcement of the iPhone in 2007 captured the
public’s imagination. People lined up for blocks to get their
hands on one. The iPhone was hard to find in stock, and was
amazingly expensive for a cell phone. So for some, it seemed
like an act of sacrilege for Dickson to drop it into a Blendtec
and turn it into powder and smoke. “iSmoke. Don’t breathe
this,” he quips at the end of the video, before revealing he
has a backup iPhone to keep for himself. Tech bloggers were
amused and angered in equal proportions, and the video
quickly climbed to over 12 million views.
Three years later, Blendtec scored even bigger with an
even more coveted Apple product: the original iPad. Again,
the blogosphere exploded and the video racked up more
than 17 million hits. For anyone who thought the device was
overhyped, or desperately wanted one but couldn’t justify
the expense, there was an odd catharsis in watching Dickson
smash the screen, fold it in half, and blend it into powder.
Since the success of the first two Apple videos, Dickson
has blended every new iPhone and iPad. Recently, he’s taken
to doing side-by-side
blending tests with
Android and Apple The road to over 287 million
products, to see which YouTube views (anti-clockwise from
top): the cruelty to marbles that
lasts longer in the blend- started it all, the big breakthrough
er (currently Samsung is smashing sought-after iPhones, the
leading by 5 seconds). Will it Blend? head-to-heads and
brand partnerships.

EXPANDING THE
EMPIRE
Usually a viral video
is a one-off success. It
comes out of nowhere,
hits hard, then fades into
obscurity. But Dickson
turned the success of the initial videos into a community with
over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, and a Facebook page
where fans can suggest themes for new episodes. Blendtec
responds to most comments on the Will It Blend? Facebook
page with the dry wit fans expect from the series.
While the videos were initially intended to promote
Blendtec’s product line, they are now a revenue generator in
their own right. Other brands line up to use Will It Blend? as a content marketing platform for their products. Among others,
GoPro sponsored a “blendercam” that featured an inside view
of the blending process, PayPal promoted its Bill Me Later
service with a “Man Cave” themed video, and Ford touted the
TAKEAWAYS FROM BLENDTEC: durability of boron steel, by showing it wouldn’t blend.

over-the-top approach that drew A BLEND OF PRODUCT DEMONSTRATION

Have Personality.
Part of what made the series
successful is its irreverent,
purposefully retro-feeling tone,
combined with Dickson’s dry,
folksy humor.
Get Creative.
Blendtec could have created
a series demonstrating how
to make smoothies, yogurt, or
any of the dozen things their
blenders are actually made
for. Instead, they opted for an
viewers in.
Build Community.
Blendtec expanded the Will It
Blend? brand from YouTube to
Facebook to its own microsite
on Blendtec’s website. Blendtec
interacts with the community,
accepting suggestions for videos
and replying to comments with
personality and wit.
Co-create and
Cross-Promote.
Blendtec leveraged the video
series’ success to partner
with other brands, without
compromising the format that
made them famous.
AND TOP OF FUNNEL MARKETING
More than 12 years since he blended marbles into powder,
Dickson keeps the YouTube channel going with a new video
every month. The 180-plus videos have a combined total of
over 287 million views. Dickson has become a minor celebri-
ty in his own right, bringing Blendtec blenders to the Tonight
Show and the History Channel’s Modern Marvels series.
“The campaign is all about building top-of-mind aware-
ness,” Dickson explained in a 2007 interview. “We have
definitely felt an impact in sales. Will It Blend? has had an
amazing impact on our commercial and our retail products.”
The Will It Blend? series has been steadily turning out viral
hits for over a decade—or approximately 300 years by the short
attention span of internet fame. By showcasing its product
in a unique and gleefully destructive way, Blendtec gets to
entertain millions of people, two minutes at a time. That’s a truly
astonishing tale of content marketing.
Find more Astonishing Tales of Content Marketing in
our eBook at https://lnkd.in/astonishing-marketing

Sophisticated Marketer 11
3 Sophisticated Marketer

The trouble with: Personas
Alex Rynne loses patience with personas built from hunches that go into a drawer never
to be seen again. It’s time to get serious about being a customer-centric business.
To forget one’s purpose is the
commonest form of stupidity
hen it comes to targeting strat-
W egy and persona creation, I’m
like most marketers in needing
to take solace now and then
from the famed German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche. He argued that “to forget one’s purpose
is the commonest form of stupidity,” and it’s a form
that’s easy to fall into when engaged in building a
customer composite. If you’re not careful, building
a persona can feel like an exercise in, well, building
a persona. Its purpose is its own purpose.
But what are we really building personas for?
When you consider that only 3% of buyers say
advertising is relevant to them, and that rough-
ly three quarters of marketers use personas, well,
that’s quite the gap between practice and theory.
If personas are meant to bring us closer to our
audiences then something is clearly going awry.
WHY CREATE PERSONAS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
The true purpose of persona creation is to
make buyers feel understood, but the numbers
suggest most marketers create personas to make
themselves feel as though they understand buyers.
Does that mean we should steer clear of personas?
Certainly not. But it does mean we need to remind
ourselves of the outcome we’re aiming for.
Personas exist to drive customer-centric behavior.
THE BRIEF
They’re only fulfilling their purpose if they have the
level of detail that enables businesses to take the
specific actions that customers appreciate. And for
most B2B marketers, they’re not.
“Most personas are built without data and,
when they are built with data, it is highly question-
able, obscurely assembled, third-party data,” says
LinkedIn’s Global Lead for Market Development
and Strategy, Jon Lombardo. “Most marketers
understand that the personas they’ve built don’t
accurately reflect their real customers and don’t
properly inform their marketing. I think that’s why
most marketers tell us—privately—that the perso-
nas they build end up in a desk drawer somewhere
collecting dust. Personas can be valuable, but really
only when they’re built using fresh, first-party data
and that’s just not what happens today.”
ACTIONABLE PERSONAS FROM LINKEDIN DATA
You don’t need a vast lake of data to start creating
more actionable personas. LinkedIn’s free Website
Demographics tool gives you access to anonymized
LinkedIn profile data on members that visit your
site, helping you to segment audiences with a level
of detail that you’ll be confident acting on.
We don’t need to do away with personas. But
it’s time to eliminate those built from hunches
and guesswork that are completely unsuited to the
purpose they’re meant to serve.
To learn more about the death of the
persona, visit our B2B Trends Microsite at
https://lnkd.in/personas
Sophisticated Marketer 13
4 Sophisticated Marketer
 THE BRIEF

THE RISE OF B2B

PRODUCT REVIEWS
Meghan Brockmeyer explores how B2B marketers can leverage customer voices
to drive credibility and help move buyers through the purchase journey.

oday's B2B buyers and end-users have more influence over THREE PRINCIPLES FOR GENERATING AND LEVERAGING
B2B brands than ever, with online, influencer, peer and B2B PRODUCT REVIEWS:
colleague feedback all impacting the B2B path to purchase.
In Demand Gen Report’s 2018 B2B Buyer’s Survey, 65% of
B2B buyers report that they rely on peer recommendations when researching
new vendors and solutions.
1 Actively solicit reviews and ratings from your customers and take the extra
step by freeing up comments so that other customers can establish the au-
thenticity of those reviews, and put negative comments into context. Embed
For marketers, the review ecosystem has created a huge opportunity reviews as part of the installation or customer service process, or encourage
to drive ROI and reach new customers, but with influence coming from all customers to write testimonials.
directions, it can be tricky to understand exactly how to leverage product
reviews as part of your marketing strategy.

WHY REVIEWS MATTER IN B2B

2 Turn any negative reviews into positives by leveraging the engagement
value that they represent. Negative reviews receive nearly two to three
times more views than positive ones, and add substantially to an
If anything, product reviews may have even audience's perception of your website's credibility. Respond
greater importance to B2B than to B2C quickly and clearly, clear up misconceptions, provide further
marketers due to the likelihood of higher insights from your brand as a next step, and thank the customer
consideration purchases being for their feedback. Once an issue has been addressed, reach out
made. Research in the consumer and grab the opportunity for an updated review.
space suggests that reviews for
lower-priced products increase
conversion rate by 190%, but
reviews for higher-priced products
3 Reviews don't have to be posted on your website to pro-
vide a B2B marketing asset. Engage with customers who
are commenting on platforms like LinkedIn, amplifying the con-
double that to 380%. Not all versation by replying to what they have to say and sharing
reviews achieve the same impact, their comments. LinkedIn also provides an effective plat-
however. B2B influencers and form for sharing customer reviews and testimonials with
decision-makers aren't looking for a relevant target audience, and unlocking the full value
a simple, "it's great!". They want for your business. Use Sponsored Content to
meaningful detail and evidence of share published reviews and point others to-
authenticity, ideally from end-users wards your review site.
rather than purchasing managers.
To leverage credible customer voices Get more insight on leveraging
effectively, B2B businesses need an B2B product reviews in our
engagement strategy that's both eBook at https://lnkd.in/
bold and open. B2BproductReviews

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF B2B PRODUCT REVIEWS

B2B customer feedback can be an asset throughout the process of developing, launching and marketing products. Here are five ways to use it:

Fix flaws in current products and develop customers care about Use reviews as a sales enablement tool
ideas for new ones Generate case studies from positive reviews to help your sales professionals refine their
Develop a responsive thought-leadership Use reviews as a source of insight for Account approach and identify the pain points that
program by responding to the issues your Based Marketing (ABM) strategies customers are looking to address

Sophisticated Marketer 15
2 Sophisticated Marketer

The trouble with:
Best practice
Jane Fleming explains why marketing loses
out when we start using ‘best practice’ to stamp out
any deviation from an orthodox approach.
B
est practice can be a great source of insight when it’s taken in the spirit in
which it’s intended. However, it can also be used to stamp out any deviation
from the orthodox. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.
The trouble is, it happens all too often. I’m party to lots of conversations
between marketers in my LinkedIn feed when quoting best practice is seen as the ultimate
mike-drop bit of ‘I told you so.’ The implication is that once something has been declared
‘best practice’, it’s a sacred rule, no matter who declared it, when or why. I believe we need
to start thinking seriously about the way that ‘best practice’ is used, in marketing and life.
THE LIMITATIONS OF BEST PRACTICE
FOR MARKETERS
I’d be a complete hypocrite if I argued best practice has no value
at all. I read it, study it and act on it a lot of the time. When I see
clear evidence that a particular way of doing things is effective, I
share it with others. I deal in best practice too.
But just because there’s wisdom and insight in best practice
doesn’t mean you can deploy it here, there and everywhere. Best
practice is not some gospel-like rulebook of eternal truths that
apply to each and every situation you might encounter. That’s
entirely the wrong approach to take if you want to be a genuine-
ly evidence-based, data-driven marketer. The fact is, every piece
of best practice should have two important limitations.
The first limitation is specificity. Best practice should always
come with a label about the particular context and marketing
objective that it applies to. Best practice for brands posting on
LinkedIn doesn’t necessarily apply to individuals looking to
build their personal brands. Audience expectations and rules
of engagement vary hugely between B2B and B2C marketing.
THE BRIEF
Just because a format, style or frequency of content works for
a particular demographic on Facebook doesn’t mean that’s the
way to go when talking to a different demographic on LinkedIn.
When LinkedIn and Buzzsumo conducted in-depth research into
the most influential social media posts across different sectors,
we found significant differences between the posts that most
engaged marketers and those that most engaged lawyers, doc-
tors or engineers. Best practice for a content marketing strategy
needs to reflect this reality. There is simply no one-size-fits-all
formula when it comes to the most effective approach.
Before you start applying best practice, you need to take
the time to study what it’s actually based on: which audiences,
which sectors, which marketing formats or strategies. You also
need to check when it was published, because as we all know,
marketing and audience behavior both change over time.
ASK YOURSELF: IS FOLLOWING THE
STANDARD ENOUGH?
The second limitaton on the value of best practice is its inevitable
standardizaton. As a rule, best practice isn’t written to help you
deliver exceptional marketing. It’s not a strategy designed for
your brand and tailored to your particular needs and objectives.
By definition, when you follow best practice, you’re following a
well-informed crowd of other marketers. There is nothing wrong
with this in as far as it goes, but it only goes so far. By definition,
best practice won’t help you break the rules in order to create
impact and differentiate yourself from others. Rather than be
bound by best practice, treat it as one approach that received
wisdom tells you will work. Then experiment and test to see if
you can find other approaches that work even better.
DON’T CONFUSE BEST PRACTICE AND
DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING
Marketers who follow best practice too slavishly will often
claim that they are being guided by data. In fact though, too
much allegiance to best practice stands in the way of being a
data-driven marketer. When you only operate within a standard
approach, you restrict the scope of meaningful testing that you
can carry out. You also restrict the capacity of data to challenge
received wisdom and move things forward. Truly data-driven
marketers aim to establish best practice rather than just follow
it, discovering for themselves what works best for their particu-
lar business and their particular audience. They are scientists
trying to expand marketing’s understanding rather than be
limited by it.
Best practice has real value for marketers, especially content
marketers who operate across a range of different platforms and
formats. It saves time, gets us up and running quickly, and gives
us a fantastic foundation from which to test, experiment – and
help to evolve that best practice. However, if you refuse to ever
step outside of the best practice comfort zone (or spend your
time criticizing others for doing so) then you’re imprisoning
your brand in the conventional way of doing things and severely
restricting your creative and strategic options. You’re also help-
ing to keep best practice itself imprisoned in the past. That’s the
last thing we need.
Sophisticated Marketer 17
THE BRIEF

GLOBAL GROWTH:
THE SMALL
The panel:

BUSINESS
MARKETING Tom Metcalfe
Senior Lead Generation
Executive, In Touch Network

ROUNDTABLE (United Kingdom)

Four small business marketers discuss their challenges,

how they’re overcoming them, and how LinkedIn is helping

W0RDS BY SEAN CALLAHAN

Lauren Stephenson
Marketing Director, Nugit
his fall, I interviewed four forward-thinking small business marketers (Singapore)

T
from around the globe—one each from Brazil, Singapore, the United
Kingdom, and the United States. The result of these conversations is
“Global Growth: The Small Business Marketing Roundtable.” Here are the
seven key takeaways from our panelists’ perspectives on the marketing
challenges and opportunities for SMBs:

1. GENERATING QUALITY CONTENT

WITH SMALL TEAMS REMAINS A CHALLENGE A.J. Wilcox
“The biggest challenges for small business marketers often Founder, B2Linked
relate to creating effective content with small teams.” (United States)

Content is the biggest hurdle for our clients.

If you put an ad that just says talk to our sales
rep, no one is going to want to click on that.
So, it’s this conversation where we say what
kind of lead magnet do you have, what
kind of content do you have that’s valuable
enough that someone is willing to give their
e-mail address in exchange for? Generally, Marina
what we recommend is go put on a Mendoca Ferreira
webinar using one of your best decks that Marketing Analyst,
maybe you already use with prospective Digital House
clients. A. J. Wilcox (Brazil)

18 Sophisticated Marketer
 2. IT’S HARD TO BALANCE
BRANDING AND DEMAND
GENERATION
“No matter what size business they
work for, marketers always struggle
to balance their spend on building
brand with their spend on driving
leads. At SMBs, the problem can
be magnified by lack of resources,
personnel, and budget.”
(Our biggest challenge) is branding.
We have been in Brazil just a few
months, so nobody knows we exist.
Marina Mendoca Ferreira
For B2Linked, definitely demand
generation is what 95% of our clients are
after. We have probably 5% of our clients
where it is a pure branding play. A. J. Wilcox
3. MARKETERS AT SMBs ARE
WORKING CLOSER WITH SALES
“Sales and marketing alignment is more than a hot term
in the business world: It’s an action item, especially
for marketers at small businesses. All of the Roundtable
panelists said that working closely with sales is a priority.”
We have weekly meetings with the head of sales and get frequent feedback on
the leads we’ve generated. We listen to feedback from sales calls and with that in
mind, I’ll look through the database and look at the origin of those leads and how
that came from our targeting on LinkedIn or other sources. Tom Metcalfe
As the Head of Marketing, I sit right next to the Head of Sales. We’re talking constantly
and aligned on the same sales pipeline goals. Both teams realize we can’t live
without each other. The sales team needs marketing content, assets and messaging
to communicate via LinkedIn. Marketing might use a different part of LinkedIn, but
it’s the same tool. We need to be working together, so when sales are reaching out, we
know that we can target those same people with ads or relevant content.
Lauren Stephenson

4. MARKETERS RELY MORE ON METRICS THAN EVER BEFORE 5. THE SIZE OF THE
MARKETING BUDGET
“SMB marketers use a variety of metrics to measure effectiveness
throughout the funnel. Like their counterparts at larger businesses, OFTEN DEPENDS
they can measure their influence on revenue generation better than ever.” ON PERFORMANCE
Our main metrics are CPL (Cost per Lead) and CPS, (Cost per Sale). Those are most While the majority of our panelists
important for us. I look at them every day, but we have a weekly report and monthly were optimistic that their marketing
report to show to all the team. Marina Mendoca Ferreira budgets would increase in the
coming year, they acknowledged
Our key marketing metric is the return on ad spend. I’ve done a lot of work on that budgeting could change
trying to drive the highest volume of leads for the most cost-effective price on a quickly and was, more than ever,
CPA (Cost per Acquisition) basis. Tom Metcalfe tied to performance.

I think the marketing budget is always

up in the air. I don’t think you’re ever

6. DIGITAL GIVES SMBs A FIGHTING CHANCE

anymore going to get a 12-month budget
to work with—particularly for SMEs. And
if you are a startup and you’re working
“The rise of the digital world, where websites make everyone a in tech, you are very reliant on sales
publisher and where social media can connect marketers to their performance. So, if all of our plans go
audiences for little to no cost, has leveled the playing field.”
ahead, if our Sales team is selling and
The thing is, the smaller the team the more agile you can be. What I’ve seen is closing and our Customer Success team
we’ve got some very small teams that are producing amazing content. Paid social media are retaining clients, then absolutely my
provides a format where it doesn’t matter whether you’re IBM or a two-person company plan is to grow the marketing budget.
that opened yesterday, you have the same ability to reach people. A. J. Wilcox Lauren Stephenson

7. LINKEDIN CAN PLAY A KEY ROLE FOR SMB MARKETERS.

“All of the marketers on our Roundtable find LinkedIn’s targeting capability a powerful asset.”
One of our key targets is executives, and with LinkedIn, we can know exactly where people are working, what people are doing,
and how long they are working. All this information helps us to find the correct people. Mendoca Ferreira

Sophisticated Marketer 19
THE BRIEF
10 Marketing experts
define Account
Based Marketing
It’s one of the most powerful trends in sales and marketing today, and the key to leveraging ABM for
greater alignment is having a clear idea of what it means. We asked these experts for their views:
“In its purest form, ABM has
been around forever.
It means that instead of fishing
with nets, we’re fishing with
spears. You identify exactly
the prospects you want to do
business with and then you
market very precisely and
narrowly to them directly.
I think we have a renewed
interest in ABM now, because
there’s an advancement in
tools and technology that make
it a little easier to execute.
However, the idea of doing
target account selling and
target account marketing is
not new.”
MATT HEINZ,
President, Heinz Marketing
20 Sophisticated Marketer
“ABM is more targeted and personalized versus spray and pray,
where you’re just trying to capture anyone in your net.
You’re being very specific about who you want to talk with, and
it’s a way for sales and marketing to align on the target.”
MEAGEN EISENBERG,
CMO, MongoDB
“Our definition of ABM is just good
marketing. If you only had one prospect
to sell and market to, you would treat
them with the same principles. It’s just “I define ABM as total
aiming at a better defined area of the marketing and sales
funnel, and treating your best buyers alignment around who the
in a much more personal way. And we’re target customers are, and the
focusing not only on the lead, but on efforts to go get them. They
the account as a whole.” align with the same outcome
in mind: to get a specific
JUSTIN GRAY
account as a customer.”
CMO, LeadMD
DAVE RIGOTTI,
VP of Marketing, Bizible

“ABM is pretty close to a silver
bullet for breaking down walls
between sales and marketing,
in that it aligns programs’ dollars
and focus behind the accounts
that the sales team cares about.
So there’s inherent buy-in.
That said, ABM is only as good as
your visibility into your highest
potential accounts and best-fit
customer segments, which gets
clearer over time. So it’s most
effective when deployed as
part of a comprehensive set of
targeting strategies.”
DAVE KAREL,
Principal, OutLeap Marketing
“Instead of leveraging a set
of broad-reaching programs
designed to touch the largest
possible number of prospective
customers, an ABM strategy
focuses marketing and sales
resources on a defined set of
targeted accounts and employs
personalized campaigns
designed to resonate with each
individual account. With ABM,
your marketing message is based
on the attributes and needs of
the account you’re targeting.”
DAVID CAIN,
CMO, PlanGrid
“ABM is thinking of the account as a market of one. It’s about being
laser-focused on their needs and deploying the most effective
marketing tactics available to nurture value-added, pervasive
conversations with key stakeholders. This is the place where marketing
and sales are at their closest, brought together by common goals
and a crystal-clear understanding of what success looks like.”
NICK PANAYI,
VP, Global Brand, Digital Marketing
& Demand Generation, DXC Technology
“ABM to me is treating a single
account as a market of one.
Within that market of one,
“ABM is a strategic we’re looking to customize our
approach that coordinates marketing activities and message
personalized marketing and in close collaboration with our
sales efforts to open doors sales team, not just down to a
buying center or persona but
and deepen engagement
right down to the individual.”
at specific accounts.”
JON MILLER, DOROTHEA GOSLING,
CEO and Co-Founder, Director, Marketing Programs,
Engagio Pursuits & ABM,
DXC Technology
“ABM is focused B2B Smarketing. I say “Smarketing” because ABM is
all about focusing on the right accounts in collaboration with sales.
ABM is not a solo activity. It’s the combination and range of activities
from advertising, direct mail, calls, emails, content, all centered
around the ideal set of accounts that you believe has the need for
your solution. It’s quality over quantity in its most basic form.”
SANGRAM VAJRE,
Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist, Terminus
Sophisticated Marketer 21
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Targeting and relevance Press & buzz impact

Pacing & Verification

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6 Sophisticated Marketer
 TOOL BOX
The LinkedIn tools, tips and tricks every sophisticated marketer should have

B2B Marketing Hot or Not

Are you dropping the right subjects onto team meeting agendas? Spending time slotting
the right platforms into your strategy? Making the right cultural references? Leveraging the right
LinkedIn tools and techniques? Decorating your office with the right stuff?
It’s tough balancing on the cutting edge of B2B. Our temperature gauge for sophisticated marketers is here to help:

HOT NOT
Audio Books Panel
discussions
Flexitarianism
Overly 'creative'
Employer spectacles
branding
Siloed learning
BMX

Content brands Data-free personas

Negroni cocktails Hoverboards
Nike Luxury team-building
The elderberry detox experiences
Audio branding Open plan offices
Cryptocurrency Mulled cider
applications Outdated
Soft skills statistics
Flexible Biohacking
working

Corduroy Skiing injuries

Sales enablement Dictatorial
strategies best practice
Pets at work Secret pay
packages

Sophisticated Marketer 23
TOOL BOX
NEW WAYS TO
5
BUILD YOUR
COMMUNITY
WITH LINKEDIN
PAGES
BUSINESSES THRIVE THROUGH COMMUNITIES:
OF CUSTOMERS, EMPLOYEES, PARTNERS AND MORE.
We’ve designed the new LinkedIn Pages to act as the hub of
your professional community on our platform. Here are five
features to help keep you connected to everyone that matters:
1. POST AND RESPOND FROM ANYWHERE
You can now post updates and respond to comments on the go,
using the LinkedIn app on your smartphone.
2. ADD HASHTAGS TO STAY ON TOP
OF THE CONVERSATION
Associate your LinkedIn Page with relevant hashtags and we’ll
keep you informed about the LinkedIn conversations you want to
be a part of.
3. SHARE CONTENT IN ANY FORMAT
In addition to video, copy and images, you can now share
PowerPoint decks, Word documents and PDFs.
4. KNOW WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE WANTS
We’ve built our new Content Suggestions feature to alert you to
the content your target audience is engaging with, so you can
target their hot topics.
5. AMPLIFY YOUR EMPLOYEES’ VOICES
Your employees can be your biggest advocates on LinkedIn. With
the new LinkedIn Pages, you’ll get alerts when they post about
your business, so you can help amplify the conversation.
24 Sophisticated Marketer
Putting your
objectives
at the heart
of the LinkedIn
advertising
experience
THE MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS HAVE CLEAR OBJECTIVES
FOR DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE MARKETING FUNNEL, whether
that’s building awareness, driving engagement and consideration, or
translating that consideration into leads and conversions. Focusing on
the role a particular piece will play doesn’t just inform your creative
approach. It drives every aspect from the format you choose to the
targeting you leverage and the way that you bid. That’s why we’ve
redesigned the LinkedIn Campaign Manager interface to organize the
experience around the results you want to achieve.
We launched the Objective-Based Advertising experience as a Beta
test in November, and it’s now available whenever you set up a new
campaign through Campaign Manager. When you choose a marketing
objective, Campaign Manager streamlines your options for creative
formats to show those that suit the objective best. Once you’ve defined
your target audience or uploaded your own data through Matched
Audiences, it suggests automated bid amounts to achieve your goals
most efficiently, and forecasts the likely results against the metrics that
are most relevant.
LinkedIn is here to help you deliver on the objectives that matter
to your business. These updates to Campaign Manager will get our
platform working harder on what’s important to you.
 In the new Campaign Manager
interface, you’ll be able to choose
your objective first, and then
forecast results against the most
relevant metrics.

7 simple tips for 3 BROADEN YOUR RANGE OF

SITUATIONAL TRIGGERS

sales reps on Scan your newsfeed for relevant signals of opportunity:

not just job title changes but recent funding events, acquisitions, or

using LinkedIn
evidence that a business might have missed a KPI.

SALES TEAMS ARE OFTEN FIRED UP BY AMBITIOUS MILESTONES

AND STRETCHING TARGETS – not just their quotas for the year, but
the commitments they make to themselves to work longer hours, book
more meetings and close bigger deals. In among those big goals, it’s
worth making time for some subtler changes. Here are seven simple
ideas for how sales reps can get more out of LinkedIn:
4 MAKE A PERSONAL CONNECTION
Do you share an interest with a promising prospect? Is
there something in your shared background that’s relevant to the
role they’re in? Do you have a view on LinkedIn posts they’ve commented on?
A human connection is invaluable, provided it feels authentic.
5 PERSONALIZE YOUR INMAIL
SUBJECT LINES
Personalized email subject lines generate a 58% higher click-

1 KEEP REFINING YOUR

CUSTOMER PROFILE
A closed deal isn’t just a closed deal. It’s also a new piece
to-open rate, and a similar dynamic plays out on InMail. Don’t just settle
for dropping a name into your greeting. Reference their circumstances, a
recent post or a mutual connection.
of data. Go back over your biggest recent closes, look for common
characteristics, and focus on finding similar-looking prospects.
6 BE MORE DEMANDING OF YOUR DATA
Make 2019 the year you hold your data to a higher

2 NURTURE THE CONNECTORS

IN YOUR NETWORK
Warm introductions can make a big difference
standard. Importing CRM data direct from the Deals feature
in LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great place to start.

when reaching out to prospects, so take some time to identify

the connections that can introduce you to the highest number of
relevant prospects. Invite them for coffee or find a favor that
7 GET STRATEGIC ABOUT
CONTENT CURATION
Curating content on LinkedIn is a simple, powerful tactic
you can do for them, and build that relationship. for signaling your credibility, and commitment to your sector.

Sophisticated Marketer 25
TOOL BOX

Five tools
to help drive
greater sales
and marketing
alignment
WE’RE ROLLING OUT A NEW GENERATION OF TOOLS to help connect the experiences of marketers using LinkedIn Campaign Manager
and sales teams using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Here are some of the highlights to watch out for over the next couple of months:

1TARGETING SALES’ SAVED CONTACTS

THROUGH CAMPAIGN MANAGER
You’ll soon be able to use your sales teams’ Sales Navigator contacts
as a target audience segment in Campaign Manager, nurturing
them with relevant marketing messages to help move them
through to the close. When we piloted this contact targeting feature,
it increased InMail response rates by 20%, views of a company’s
LinkedIn Page by 196% and seller profile views by 94%.
3QUANTIFYING OPPORTUNITY WITH THE
ACCOUNT READINESS SCORE
Sales Navigator now includes an Account Readiness score that tracks engagement
with marketing content by key teams within a target account, and helps identify the
right moments for sales to engage.
4ALERTS FOR ALL POTENTIAL BUYING TRIGGERS
Alerts in Sales Navigator now keep sales teams informed whenever their contacts engage
with marketing content . It also alerts them when contacts move roles, when a target company

2CIRCLE
IDENTIFYING DECISION-MAKERS
AND INFLUENCERS WITH THE BUYER
raises funding, or when their procurement team starts checking your pricing.

FEATURE
The Buyer’s Circle feature within LinkedIn Sales Navigator
helps sales reps and their managers align on the key people
5USING LINKEDIN DATA TO KEEP YOUR CRM UPDATED
LinkedIn Data Validation matches your CRM contacts to LinkedIn profiles and
alerts you when they’ve left the business. It quickly delivers the clean, robust database
influencing a buying decision, and co-ordinate outreach efforts. you need for more effective sales and marketing orchestration.

Your checklist for integrating organic

and paid marketing on LinkedIn
WITH THE RATE AT WHICH LINKEDIN MEMBERS ENGAGE WITH CONTENT IN THE FEED DOUBLING YEAR-ON-YEAR, there’s never been a better time
to amplify and refine your paid marketing campaigns through a smart, organic strategy. Whether your budgets are limited or not, finding the right balance
between organic and paid will help to make sure you get the most from them. Here’s your quick, three-part checklist to help ensure you’re getting that
balance right, and gearing up your LinkedIn marketing to deliver results as efficiently as possible:

BUILD A COMPELLING
ORGANIC PRESENCE
Start with your LinkedIn Page, posting
regular updates that leverage rich imagery, video and
PDFs and calling out relevant parties with @mentions.
Encourage your experts, Execs and employees
to post content in different formats, sharing and
amplifying from your page. Then build an employee
advocacy program to boost reach further.
BOOST REACH AND
ENGAGEMENT WITH
PAID ADVERTISING
Sponsor the organic content that resonates
with a particular group, and use LinkedIn
targeting to maximize reach and engagement
within that target audience. Sponsored Content
and Sponsored InMail are both effective
vehicles for scaling content’s impact in this way.
CLOSE THE LOOP WITH INSIGHTS
The Content Suggestions feature will keep you
informed about the content your target audience
is engaging with, so that you can plan your ongoing organic
and paid content with those hot topics in mind.
Want more inspiration on balancing paid and organic
on LinkedIn? You’ll find it in our Paid and Organic
Playbook at https://lnkd.in/organicpaid

26 Sophisticated Marketer
 Celebrating five years of
THE SOPHISTICATED MARKETER
Believe it or not, it’s been five years since we first introduced the B2B
marketing world to The Sophisticated Marketer.

Clockwise from top: the

original Sophisticated
Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn
is updated regularly to keep
it relevant, this magazine
is part of the Sophisticated
Marketer family along with
Guides, Sessions and our
long-runing Podcast.
IT ALL BEGAN WITH
THE SOPHISTICATED
MARKETER’S GUIDE TO
LINKEDIN, the ultimate
guide to everything marketers in 2013 needed to know about using
LinkedIn to achieve their objectives. We’ve updated The Sophisticated
Marketer’s Guide every year since. We’ve also expanded our
Sophisticated Marketer brand to give advice on every aspect of B2B
marketing through eBooks, podcasts, events, our in-depth Sessions
masterclasses – and this magazine! It’s helped to transform the
visibility of LinkedIn content, but the most satisfying thing about our
Sophisticated Marketer journey is the difference we know it’s been
making to B2B marketers out there.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support,
and to promise that we’ll keep on going all-out to deliver valuable,
original and sophisticated content for you going forward.

Sophisticated Marketer 27
7 Sophisticated Marketer

7
SURPRISING STATS ABOUT THE
UNDERAPPRECIATED POWER OF
Thought Leadership
LinkedIn’s VP Marketing Solutions Penry Price introduces the latest research by Edelman and LinkedIn
into the influence of thought leadership on buying decisions. Here’s a clue: it’s greater than you think.
F
or the second year, LinkedIn and Edelman have partnered
to explore how thought leadership can be leveraged by B2B
businesses to accelerate growth and sustain long-lasting customer
relationships. Our survey of more than 1,200 buyers, marketers
and sales professionals in North America and Europe has a clear finding:
B2B brands continue to underutilize thought leadership, and don’t fully
appreciate the impact it has on driving demand, shaping perceptions,
and closing deals. There’s a gap between B2B buyers and those targeting
them when it comes to the value attached to thought-leadership content,
and if anything, that gap is growing. The bottom line is that buyers often
value this type of content far more than those creating it.
The key findings of the study:
1. Decision-makers are reading more thought leadership. This year’s survey
found that 58% of respondents read one or more hours of thought leadership
per week. That’s eight percentage points higher than last year’s survey.
2. More than half of respondents (55%) said they use thought leadership to
vet organizations they may hire.
3. Thought leadership enables access to high-value decision-makers.
Almost half (47%) of C-suite executives said they have shared their contact
information after reading thought leadership. Ironically, only 39% of sellers
said they believe thought leadership helps with lead generation.
TOOL BOX
4. Thought leadership generates RFPs (Request for Proposal). Almost half of
decision makers (45%) said they invited a producer of thought-leadership content
to bid on a project when they had not previously considered the organization.
5. Thought leadership leads directly to sales. Almost 60% of business
decision makers said that thought leadership directly led to their awarding
of business to an organization. Just 26% of sellers believe that thought
leadership can lead directly to closed-won deals.
6. Thought leadership creates pricing power. More than 60% of the C-suite
said they were more willing to pay a premium to companies that create
thought leadership with a clear vision. However, only 14% of sellers believe
their thought leadership creates pricing power.
7. Thought leadership can also drive growth with existing customers. More
than half (55%) of business decision makers said they had increased the
business they do with an organization based on their thought leadership.
Similarly, 60% of decision makers said thought leadership convinced them
to buy a product or service they were not previously considering.
The trend that we see in the LinkedIn-Edelman study should really settle the
question of whether content can make a tangible contribution to the bottom
line. B2B buyers aren’t just open to thought leadership influencing their
shortlists, RFPs and vendor selection. They crave a standard of content that’s
worthy of doing so. The challenge is to make sure you deliver it.
Sophisticated Marketer 29
TOOL BOX

Punk Block
ANNOTATED Big-Org Bottleneck asks (for a friend):
How do you overcome problems getting great content
MARKETING out the door in a large organization?
AND CAREER Dear Bottleneck
ADVICE (WITH THE This is a common issue in big companies, where
OCCASIONAL PUN) no one team handles it all from idea to creation
to execution and follow-up. One team builds
FROM ANN a gorgeous piece of content and then hands it
HANDLEY off to another for the final mile of campaign
distribution... only to have priorities change
and that great work be sidelined, abandoned,
cast out. Ugh.
What happened here? The problem comes
down to that dirty four-letter word:
S-I-L-O. And the antidote is to build
better alignment among teams.
It’s easy for me to say, comfort-
ably ensconced as I am within the
perfect-world pages of this column.
But it’s tough to do. I get that.
Here are some steps to get closer to
the holy grail of a cooperative, cross-func-
tional, un-siloed company:

Ann is a Get buy-in earlier than you think it’s needed.

Wall Street Journal
bestselling author and
the Chief Content Officer
of MarketingProfs
www.annhandley.com
for more
Share the strategic goals that underpin
your content program early. Frame the
conversation with shared business objec-
tives, not your Marketing-centric point of view:
How does this further our shared company
vision set by leadership?

A S K I N G
FOR A FRIEND
30 Sophisticated Marketer
 How early...? Way before a piece of bouncing baby content actually
arrives. And way before it’s a twinkle in your eye.
Build cross-functional relationships BEFORE you need something.
From formal (kickoff meetings; regular check-ins; progress updates) to
informal (coffee in the caf; Thirsty Thursday meetups).
Sincerely seek to understand what challenges they have that you can
help with, too. Or, at the very least, listen. Alliances with other teams are
also useful in tag-team co-managing higher-ups.
Shine light on your process. Seek input. Ask what the other teams need
from you at every step of the way. Doing so invests others in a small way
in your progress.
If you’ve done all this only to be blindsidedly blocked, then you could
always try the following terrible ideas:
A last-ditch attack meeting with the uncooperative team.
Block the door. Bring a dozen donuts. Don’t let
them out until they agree with you.
Go rogue and sneak-release it through a well-chosen
internal influencer. Conjure up mock outrage and
claim no knowledge of release: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!!!
Okay, maybe not so wise, but some days all you can do
is laugh. Know you didn’t fail: you’re just mired in a
no-win situation. Take comfort. Move along.
Direct Respect
Sick of Being Disrespected asks (for a friend):
As an MBA student who worked in marketing for years,
I keep hearing fellow students telling me that they
found the well-paying position of Finance harder than
they thought, so they’re switching focus to the “easier”
Marketing. What actions can we take to break the
stigma that marketing is easy, not a business necessity,
and deserving of a lower salary?
Dear Disrespected
Marketing has a marketing problem, as my friend and
B2B marketer Michael Brenner says. You get no respect
when you’re seen as just a go-between for pricey
agencies making massive media buys.
How can you counter that, in a cocktail-party-sized
clip? Here’s a script:
“Marketing has changed because the world has.
Technology now provides real-time access and an
overwhelming amount of information about any
company, and what people think of it.
“In the most successful companies, Marketing
owns the relationships with would-be customers
well before Sales gets a whiff of them, which is why
content and storytelling are so critical. Post-sale, it’s
Marketing that drives renewals and retention.
“Marketers change minds and change behavior.
And then Marketers continue to communicate with
customers to align them with a brand, so that they’ll
continue to love us, recommend us, and spend
money with us.”
Say all that. And then get right up in their grill
and drop your voice to a threatening whisper:
“That doesn’t sound like something unimportant
and trivial. Does. It?”
Sweet Wave
Sweet on the C-Suite asks (for a friend): What is
the single best practice that can help B2B brands
(and their content creators) cut through the noise
and reach the C-suite?
Dear Sweetie
First, what doesn’t work: sending email after email
asking for a meeting to tell me about the benefits
of this solution that will change the way my whole
team works and click this Calendly link to schedule
a time. If I don’t hear back, I’ll email you 47 more
times in the next 3 weeks... (No, I don’t want to
meet for coffee. No, I don’t want my brain picked.)
But Sweetie: That’s not you. Which is why you
asked this question. So here’s the answer:
There is no single best practice—just like there’s
never really one size fits all. (Even socks come in
different sizes.) But here are a few ideas:
Are you following your favorite execs on
Twitter? Instagram? LinkedIn?
Are you commenting on and sharing whatever
they produce?
Are you doing it in a genuine, thoughtful way?
I once agreed to go on an obscure podcast produced
by a very small vendor only because the host took
time to get to know me as a person. I liked him. I
trusted him. And, in the end, I wanted to help him.
People do business with people they trust. So
cliché. So true. And not heeded nearly enough.
All of us can smell an inauthentic opportunist a
mile away—even those of us in the C-suite.

Sign up for Ann’s newsletter at AnnHandley.

com/Newsletter, and keep an eye on the
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Sophisticated Marketer 31
LONG FORM

The secrets of
SALES AND
MARKETING
orchestration
LinkedIn’s Vice President of Marketing for Sales and Marketing Solutions,
Justin Shriber, shares the latest insights on the techniques bringing the two disciplines
closer together: building sales peoples’ brands, closing deals faster and taking
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to the next level:

THE SOPHISTICATED MARKETER: THE SOPHISTICATED MARKETER:

What is Marketing and Sales Orchestration? Why is MSO so important at the moment?

JUSTIN SHRIBER: JUSTIN SHRIBER:

I would say that Marketing and Sales Orchestration (MSO)
is the logical extension of Account-Based Marketing (ABM),
which is a term most of us are familiar with. ABM has definite
strengths, and it’s reshaped thinking around going to market.
However, it’s also got a downside. In the acronym, ‘A’ stands for
‘Account’ and ‘M’ stands for ‘Marketing.’ However, we know
that ultimately, decisions aren’t made at an account level.
They’re made at a buyer committee level. If you’re selling to
General Electric, for example, you could be calling into any
number of different buyer committees to get deals done. We
also know that marketing is only half the equation. Sales is
the other half. With MSO, we’re looking to zero in on who the
decision-makers really are, and create an orchestrated experi-
ence between sales and marketing to deliver the goods.
With ABM, what often happens is that all of the account
prioritization happens with sales. Marketing gets a phone
call: “Hey, here are the accounts in our sales strategy, can you
guys put some ABM against this as well?” And so it’s still a very
separate process, albeit focused on the account.
The key to MSO is that the teams work together to create a
prioritized list of accounts from an integrated data set. Then they
identify the buyer committee and build a strategy to access them.
Because, ultimately, it creates a better customer experience
and if customers are happy they’re much more inclined to
do business with you, not just initially but over the long term.
Once a team has come together and said, “These are the
accounts that we’re going to focus on, here are the personas
that comprise the buying committee, and here’s the strategy
that we’re going to execute,” then you actually get into the
process of reaching out to those customers and creating that
experience.
When marketing and sales can completely align on that
process, amazing things happen. On the front end, a marketer
could reach out and send a cold email and that may or may not
get traction. But if the target audience is connected via social
platforms to people at your business, those connections could
send content and information via the feed that’s going to be
relevant. And because there’s already a trusted relationship
there, the impact of that content is going to be much greater.
Now, let’s imagine you progress through the process and
now you’re trying to close a deal. Traditionally, people have
thought, “this is the work of sales, marketing doesn’t need to
engage.” But what if the person I’m talking to in procurement is
also getting content delivered from marketing that says, “Here

32 Sophisticated Marketer
LONG FORM
are a couple of case studies that talk about other
companies like you, and the benefit they’ve
achieved.” You’re reinforcing now what the
salesperson is trying to talk about as they are
negotiating the deal. It all feels very seamless,
with marketing and sales both playing a
part to achieve a greater end. When
you have greater integration at
these touchpoints, you see
sales cycle times reduce, and WHEN MARKETERS
conversion rates increase.
EXPLAIN WHO
THE SOPHISTICATED CONTENT IS
MARKETER: RELEVANT FOR AND
WHY, THAT’S A BIG
One of the challenges for
sales reps is knowing what
to do once they’ve had the ADVANTAGE
initial meeting. Is this an area
where Marketing can
contribute more?
JUSTIN SHRIBER:
This is another point where marketing and sales working
together can do things better. A salesperson gets that first
meeting, it goes great, but the classic question is always,
“where do I go from here? How do I continue to engage with
the customer and progress that relationship?” Marketers can
help if they have genuinely data-driven personas, includ-
ing data on the kinds of content that specific personas are
latching onto. They can come to the salesperson with that
next step: some great, relevant content that they can send on.
Salespeople want marketers who don’t just produce content,
but are able to explain when it’s relevant and to whom it’s
relevant. They know that extra piece of sales thinking in
marketing gives them a tremendous advantage.
THE SOPHISTICATED MARKETER:
How can sales reps make sure that they are connecting
on a human level—and how can marketers help?
JUSTIN SHRIBER:
The relationship needs to start even before that first email or
InMail goes out. It’s great to personalize that approach, but what
we’re finding is that’s not enough. Increasingly, a buyer checks
out the profile of the salesperson before they decide wheth-
er or not to respond. We always knew that salespeople were
looking at profiles of buyers, but it’s a bit of a surprise to some
people that buyers follow the same strategy. When they check
a seller’s profile, they’re looking for a couple of things. Number
one: is this salesperson demonstrating they have expertise
34 Sophisticated Marketer
that’s relevant to
me? Have they
shown over time
that they are willing
to provide service
to their custom-
ers? Can I see, for
example, an ongoing
history of engagement
on key topics that I care
about? Can I see thought-
ful responses? Can I see a set of
resources that are meaningful to me? If, as a sales-
person, I reach out and send a great personal-
ized email to you, but then when you hit my profile
you see that it’s just a billboard for how great I am, it’s game
over. I’ve already disqualified myself.
On the other hand, the reps that view the profile as a
resource center to help customers benefit from this new trend.
When you visit those profiles and see what’s going on, you’re
thinking, “wow this person is legit, they are authentic, they
are really here to serve. And I can see based on this wealth
of content that they’ve built up over time on their profile that
they mean to partner with me.” There’s an important role for
marketing in providing the type of relevant resources and
content that can build these kind of LinkedIn profiles.
THE SOPHISTICATED MARKETER:
We’ve been noticing more sellers making use of video on
LinkedIn. What are the benefits of doing this?
JUSTIN SHRIBER:
There’s a demographic shift happening, in that
the way people consume information is becoming
much more video-centric. And because of that sales
organizations that adopt that platform are going to be in a
much better position to create and build authentic relation-
ships. They can use video to connect with customers and
share value propositions in a way that’s more compelling.
The Head of Sales for our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
business has a video series that he has called, Walk to Work.
As he’s walking to work he pulls his iPhone out and records
himself sharing things that are top of mind for him. He has
generated a huge follower base through this. He’s not talking
about our solutions and why you should buy them. He’s
talking about things that a salesperson is thinking about and
cares about. Because he’s willing to show that part of himself,
and because people get to know the person behind the ideas,
he’s already generating a relationship that he can build on
when it comes time to do business with a customer.
SSoopphhi is st ti ic caat teedd MMaar rkkeet teer r 58
LONG FORM
What events
can teach digital
marketers
about
alignment
with
sales
I
recently celebrated a year as a digital marketing
manager at LinkedIn—and it’s a role I’ve loved. I’m part
of a great team with an opportunity to make a real impact
to the success of our business. My work is constant-
ly interesting, and it’s helping me to build my hybrid
marketer skills across a range of different areas. But
there’s one thing that I found I missed in my new role compared
to my old one: my relationship with sales.
You see, I spent my first year and a half at LinkedIn working in
event marketing. And there’s no getting away from the fact that as
an event marketer, you have a very different relationship to sales
than you do as a digital marketer.
When I worked on events, sales team members were close-
ly involved with everything I did: generating ideas, offering to
present at the event, working with me on the invite list. When I
presented our strategy for an event to our reps, their eyes would
light up immediately. It was a great feeling. I remember the
first few occasions when I presented my new online marketing
strategy to my sales colleagues. Things couldn’t have been more
different. I couldn’t make it through a full presentation before
my audience started challenging and pushing back. Sometimes
I would struggle to get past the third slide.
36 Sophisticated Marketer
Siobhan Waters on how an events approach
can help marketers sell their digital marketing
strategies to sales colleagues more effectively
WHAT DO EVENTS HAVE THAT DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGIES DON’T?
As marketers, it’s important to ask ourselves why this is the
case. Why does a marketer working in events often have a
more positive relationship with sales than one working on
digital marketing campaigns? And what can we learn from
the relationship between events and sales when it comes to
driving closer alignment across the business as a whole?
It’s tempting for marketers to put sales people’s preference
for events down to persistent stereotypes about their colleagues:
they are extroverts who like the limelight, love entertaining, and
only value marketing when it leads to an obvious and immedi-
ate sales opportunity. However, these stereotypes are wide of
the mark. There are valid reasons why sales teams find it easier
to get enthusiastic about events—and harder to get enthusiastic
about your digital marketing strategy.
WHY INTERNAL MARKETING NEEDS A HIGHER PRIORITY
The first is visibility. Events are high-profile projects and they
make it easy for sales stakeholders to see exactly what you’re
doing for them. As digital marketers, most of our activity
doesn’t have these natural awareness levels.
Selling the concept of an event to sales was easy because I was
always talking about objectives and benefits that had obvious
relevance to them: a self-selected audience of interested prospects,
the opportunity to demonstrate products, have a lot of relevant
conversations in a short space of time, and close deals. Digital
marketing strategies, in contrast, tend to be a few steps removed
from the results that sales are really interested in. That means we
have to work that bit harder to tie our activity to their targets.
CUTTING OUT THE JARGON AND INVITING
COLLABORATION EARLY
The vocabulary of digital marketing doesn’t help. In my first
presentations, sales colleagues would often pull me up for
using jargon that didn’t have a clear meaning and value. They
didn’t want to hear about Google Analytics or my Google
 AdWords strategy; they wanted to know what my digital
marketing activity meant to them.
Because events were so closely related to sales objectives,
it was easy to get the sales team involved in the planning of
them. When I moved into digital marketing, I found that this
kind of instinctive collaboration wasn’t there. Because there’s
less shared understanding, digital marketers tend to invite less
input from sales—and sales are less active in making sugges-
tions. As a result, sales feel they are less invested in the digital
marketing strategy and have less control over it.

WHY SALES TEAMS TRUST EVENT MARKETING

LEADS MORE
The final key difference comes down to how different types
of marketing activity flow through into leads. At events, sales
reps on the stand meet people face-to-face, so they can qualify
leads first-hand. This gives them confidence in the leads they
walk away with from an event. Contrast that with the discus-
sions sales and marketing often have about lead quality, and
you understand why sales colleagues value events so highly.
Those are the reasons why I believe that digital marketing
struggles to have the same relationship to sales as events does.
If we want closer alignment between sales and marketing then
we have to address these factors. The question is, how?

TAKING AN EVENTS APPROACH TO SELLING

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES
It starts with a more focused approach to internal market-
ing: developing a strategy for selling my strategy rather than
assuming my colleagues will simply buy into it. I’ve made
more of an effort to seek out opinions, feedback and content
ideas from sales early on in developing a marketing plan. I try
to relate everything I’m doing back to my sales teams’ targets,
and all my presentations now start with an executive summary
that explains why the success of a campaign matters.
We’ve started sharing our digital marketing campaigns
on an internal microsite, pre-launch, to ensure sales have
visibility. And we no longer expect our marketing results
to speak for themselves. Every two weeks, I sit down with
senior sales managers to review our funnel performance and
analyze the impact our activity has on both the quantity and
quality of leads.
Account-based marketing (ABM) represents another big
opportunity to involve sales colleagues in campaign planning.
Because we’re developing a list of target accounts together,
sales can have event-like levels of confidence in the value of
the opportunities we’re working towards.
There’s no point in digital marketers like me resenting sales’
apparent preference for events. It’s on us to identify the reasons

SALES COLLEAGUES DIDN’T

and work to close the gap. If anything, digital marketers can
point to stronger evidence of ROI and a longer and more
WANT TO HEAR ABOUT GOOGLE regularly flowing pipeline of leads than colleagues working
ANALYTICS; THEY WANTED TO KNOW solely in events. We need to work out how to leverage these

WHAT MY DIGITAL MARKETING

assets more strongly.
If we get it right, then events will no longer stand out for the
ACTIVITY MEANT TO THEM enthusiasm they generate among sales. That’s because we’ll be
generating the same level of enthusiasm for everything we do.

Sophisticated Marketer 37
 LONG FORM

The truth about

smarketing
THAT THE PLAYBOOKS
WON’T TELL YOU
You can’t enforce it through policies and procedures alone – if you want real sales
and marketing alignment, you have to work on professional chemistry

W0RDS BY GRACE MACDONALD

T
here’s one element of my job that fascinates SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT NEEDS
me like no other. It’s the element that will have TO BE MORE THAN A POLICY
the biggest influence over how effective I am This instinct isn’t wrong; it can be part of the solution. The mistake
as a B2B marketer, but it’s also the element that people tend to make is thinking that it’s the whole solution.
which can never be fully within my control; it’s Telling sales and marketing that they need to play nicely, and
the aspect of my job that’s perhaps the most pointing out there will be treats and rewards if they do, is certainly
difficult to plan for and the most difficult to more helpful than leaving
measure. Which is why, over the last six months or so, I’ve chosen them to go their separate
to focus more and more on sales and marketing alignment. There’s no ways. However, it’s not the
I’m a people person by nature. I love working with differ-
ent types of people, and I pride myself on the types of positive,
instruction way that authentic, endur-
ing and effective relation-
creative connections that I’m able to create. I’ve found myself manual for ships form.
drawn to an area of the marketing experience where relation- As human beings, we
ships really, really matter. Sales and marketing alignment puts a perfectly learn through life experi-
a definite value on soft skills. The more we understand about it,
the clearer it is that professional chemistry between colleagues
aligned sales ence that relationships
take almost constant
has a direct impact on the bottom line of the business. LinkedIn’s and marketing work. They don’t just
research shows that businesses with strong sales and marketing
alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more organization happen once; they need to
keep happening: reinforc-
effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue ing themselves through
as a result of their marketing efforts. common experiences, but also reinventing themselves to
All of which puts a premium on the ability to make that reflect changing circumstances.
chemistry happen. The natural instinct of any sales and market- That’s why LinkedIn’s research into sales and market-
ing organization is to do this through policies and procedures. ing alignment proves there’s no single, foolproof formula for
You realize how valuable sales and marketing alignment can making it work. There’s no instruction manual you can follow
be, so you design working practices to enforce it—like telling to produce a perfectly aligned sales and marketing organiza-
two kids at school who have very little in common that they tion every time. But, my own experience convinces me that
have to work on a project together, and hoping that they will there are mechanisms you can put in place to enable the
instantly become best friends as a result. constant evolution that all human relationships need.

Sophisticated Marketer 39
LONG FORM

HOW TO MAKE PROFESSIONAL CHEMISTRY HAPPEN
You can’t take the human factor out of sales and market-
ing alignment, but you can design the moments that enable
people’s capacity for forming relationships. It’s a fine balanc-
ing act between creating an environment where colleagues
can find common ground and discover the value in working
together—and formalizing the whole thing to the extent that it
becomes routine and the spark vanishes.
Here are some of the tactics and techniques I’ve come
across that can contribute most to getting that balance right:
SHARED OBJECTIVES
Let’s start with a principle that most people working on sales
and marketing alignment will agree with: 52% of sales and
marketing professionals report that shared Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) and objectives contribute to a more effective
working relationship between the two teams. It’s a no-brain-
er really: if you are literally working to the same goals then
the incentive for collaborating is a lot stronger than if you get
rewarded for slightly different results. If you’re serious about
the sales and marketing relationship try to identify the oppor-
tunities to align KPIs in this way. Done right, it’s the founda-
tion for sales and marketing seeing one another as comple-
mentary sets of skills working towards the same purpose. But
when this is missing, everything else is a struggle.
How can we integrate sales more fully into B2B content
creation? I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way is
to kick the whole process off with input from sales—and be
really open-minded about what this input might involve.
Sales colleagues spend the most time talking to customers
and prospects, so they’re plugged into the issues that your
audience cares about. Don’t restrict their contribution to ideas
around specific sales-related subjects. Ask them about all of
the potential content they’d like to see, and push them to share
what their contacts are talking to them about. Making this the
start of the content planning process sends a signal that sales’
contribution is valued. It also provides your marketing teams
with some great triggers for their own thinking.
YOUR MISSION: TO MAKE THE SALES TEAM FAMOUS
Making your sales colleagues famous should be a KPI for
any B2B marketing team. How can you increase the number
of posts that they publish, the impact of the comments they
make, and the engagement rate that they generate? How can
you make sure they are an active presence in the feed of their
connections? How can you increase their follower numbers?
This isn’t just about making your sales reps happy
(although that’s a definite side-benefit). It’s also about
recognizing how content flows through into value for the
business. When that

INTRODUCTIONS TO THE MARKETING TEAM FOR Working content builds the

profile and expertise
EVERY NEW SALES REP – AND VICE VERSA
The onboarding process for any new hire sends a whole host
together on of your sales team,
when it enhances
of coded signals about how the organization they are joining content is one trust and recogni-
really works. If a new sales rep’s experience only involves
meeting their sales colleagues and talking about sales objec- of the most tion, it’s increasing
the opportunity to
tives, then they will draw their own conclusions about how
important working with marketing really is. Plan introduc-
powerful turn awareness and
consideration into
tions to colleagues in both sales and marketing within the first professional conversations that
few days of a new hire joining—and make working together a
part of your employees’ experiences from the start. bonding can actually close a
deal. As a marketer, it

A CONTENT CREATION PROCESS THAT STARTS WITH SALES

experiences also gives you a real
incentive for under-
This is probably one of the most important learnings for me I know standing your sales
over the past few months. I’m closely involved in our content colleagues. The more
planning and content creation process and I know that we you can reflect their character, personality and passion in
haven’t always integrated sales as closely into that process as the content that you help them create, the more original
we would like. and impactful that content is likely to be.
This is a missed opportunity, because working together
on content is one of the most powerful professional bonding A SHARED RESOURCE CENTRE
experiences I know. It’s a great framework for sharing differ- Sharing the same resources and having access to the same
ent ideas and perspectives in a positive way with a valued insights inevitably helps to build a shared view of the custom-
outcome. If the process incorporates both sales and market- er journey. It puts you on the same page. It’s well worth the
ing, it won’t just produce better and more varied content. It effort of working with IT to remove any siloes and barriers to
will also deliver closer alignment between the two teams. making it happen.

40 Sophisticated Marketer
HAVING FUN TOGETHER
At the end of the day, the relationship between sales and
marketing is a relationship between human beings. It’s profes-
sional and focused on achieving shared outcomes, but that
doesn’t mean there’s no role for emotion in it. Make time for
your sales and marketing teams to have dinner together, go
out for drinks, play sport, explore new activities. It might seem
obvious, but it’s amazing how easy it can be to let these oppor-
tunities slide by.
WALKING IN ONE ANOTHER’S SHOES
I was very surprised when job swaps didn’t score more highly
in our research into sales and marketing alignment—with
only 14% of sales and marketing professionals agreeing that
these improve collaboration. I agree with Seth Godin that any
B2B marketer can benefit enormously from some experience
of working in sales. You’re a lot more considered and careful
with the promises that you make through marketing, when
you’ve had the responsibility of trying to keep those promises.
Walking in one another’s shoes doesn’t just help to improve
understanding between the two departments. It builds a
greater understanding of customers as well.
So why aren’t sales and marketing professionals more enthusi-
astic about job swaps? It’s a question that I think gets to the heart
of the balancing act with sales and marketing alignment. We may
have shared objectives but we don’t have shared skills; we aren’t
interchangeable. Smart marketers and sales people alike value the
differences between the two teams and the complementary roles
that they play. Any relationship depends on this type of mutual
respect. I think the push back against job swaps is, to some extent,
a defense of the important differences between the two roles.
Rather than job swaps, I’d suggest job shadowing. It’s far
more collaborative, and puts more emphasis on shared experi-
ences and talking with sales colleagues to understand the
experiences they are going through. Rotating people between
departments won’t magically deliver better collaboration. It’s
only spending meaningful time together working towards
common goals that can do that. When it comes to designing a
framework for better sales and marketing alignment, it’s these
experiences that you need to prioritize.
Sophisticated Marketer 41
LONG FORM
ALIGNING SALES
AND MARKETING
AROUND A
TARGET
AUDIENCE
Megan Golden explains how to overcome one
of the most significant barriers to effective
sales and marketing alignment.
W
e all know you can’t hit your target if your aim is off.
Yet many B2B organizations are far from the mark
because their marketing and sales teams are
misaligned when it comes to their target audience.
In a 2018 survey by InsideView, shared data on
target accounts was tied first as the biggest challenge to
sales and marketing alignment, up from fourth place two years
before, and indicating a rapidly growing issue. Only 24% of organ-
izations have an agreed definition of target segments or accounts.
Aligning around a target audience is a vital first step in better
attracting, engaging, and converting the accounts and individ-
uals that matter most to your business. If marketing is chasing
down one audience and sales is focused on another, the result
is wasted effort and missed opportunities. It’s also important to
agree on the ideal customer so everyone understands how and
why the target audience chooses to purchase. This understand-
ing ensures everyone is speaking the same language and telling
the same story as they interact with prospective customers.
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY?
This all seems pretty straightforward, right? So why is it so
difficult for sales and marketing to arrive at a shared view of
the target audience?
Most of the time, sales and marketing don’t even speak the
same language in terms of buyer movement. Sales talks about
pipelines, while marketing talks about funnels.
Dig down and the language barriers translate into differ-
ent approaches. Marketing goes for broad groups like “fleet
managers in Germany” or “CIOs in large manufacturing
firms.” Sales thinks in terms of accounts, individuals and
specific geography. So, while sales sees Reinhard from
Leipzig, marketing sees that “fleet manager who lives in a
medium-sized city in Saxony.”
LinkedIn data shows that, for the average B2B organization,
42 Sophisticated Marketer
there’s just a 23% overlap between the target audiences for sales
and marketing. How can marketing and sales close more deals
faster if they’re not even going after the same people?
Naturally marketing is going to cast a wider net because it’s
charged with generating awareness and leads. But ideally, sales’
target list should fall squarely in the middle of marketing’s target
list. Typically it’s on the outskirts, or even in the next town.
DATA DISCONNECTS
This disconnect can be traced back to the different foundation-
al systems that marketing and sales use to store and manage
critical prospect and customer-related data. Marketing relies
on a marketing automation system while sales relies on a sales
automation system (i.e. CRM).
Organizations invest to integrate these systems. However,
integration often only accelerates the lead handoff from
marketing to sales. It doesn’t make it easier for marketing and
sales to share accurate, complete data about their buyers.
HOW TO ALIGN ON TARGET AUDIENCE
There are four key stages to busting through the roadblocks
that prevent a shared view of target audience:
1. Think Users, Decision Makers and Influencers
First you need to pinpoint the typical stakeholders involved in
purchasing your solution. If you’ve already sold your solution to a
significant number of companies, review your customer database
to identify who influenced the purchase, who made the ultimate
purchase decision, and who is using the solution. Then look for
common denominators like title or role. You can also leverage
analyst reports for these insights, and check competitor press
releases and case studies to see who’s quoted.

2. Create Buyer Personas
Marketing and sales both gather important details about
prospects as they interact with and observe them. They figure
out who’s responding to awareness campaigns, which roles are
engaging and when they get engaged in the process. They even
see the kind of content each role cares about and how best to
sequence it.
By combining and sharing these insights, both groups get a
more complete, realistic understanding of buyers’ behaviors,
preferences, interests, pains, and even opinions. In turn, both
teams can better identify and engage the most promising potential
customers. You get a view of the Total Addressable Market (TAM),
not just those already in your CRM system.
Some key questions to ask when building your buyer personas:
What are their most pressing issues?
What does their typical workday look like?
What is their decision-making process?
What are their purchase motivators?
What buying signals do they usually give off?
What information do they need at each stage
of the buying cycle?
Where do they get this information?
Who do they consult for advice?
What language do they use to describe
their challenges and goals?
What are their psychographics?
What are their specific demographics?
3. Map Solutions to Buyer Pain Points
Next, you need to clarify why the target audience should
choose you. Start by mapping your ideal customer’s most
pressing issues and challenges, then identify how your organ-
ization and product can address them.
Once you’ve gone through this exercise, compare your
product attributes and value to competitive offerings. Ideally
you want to focus on the differentiating features and benefits
that set you apart. Don’t forget that sometimes buyers choose
to stick with the status quo rather than purchase a solution.
Your positioning should address this option, too.
4. Regularly Update Target Audiences
Your target audience might shift as you release new products,
services, and features. The audience makeup could change as new
stakeholders get involved and existing ones drop off. There’s no
hard-and-fast, one-size-fits-all rule for how frequently you should
revisit and update your target audience definitions. Regular discus-
sions between marketing and sales should help identify changes.
Otherwise, plan to review your target audience definitions every
six months to make sure you’re on the right track.
PUTTING A SHARED TARGET
AUDIENCE TO WORK
Imagine injecting all that target audience information into your
planning process, starting with account propensity modeling.
Based on closed deals, sales and marketing know the kinds of
companies that respond. Using lookalike algorithms, they can
identify more of those companies. At the account-planning
phase, they can apply their personas, and plan to engage those
buyer circles in a sophisticated way. A shared view of the target
audience helps marketing and sales understand what will best
influence buyers at various stages, and deliver it.
LinkedIn Website Demographics provide a great starting
point for building data-driven personas. Find out more at
https://lnkd.in/websitedemo
Sophisticated Marketer 43
LONG FORM

THE ESSENTIAL
GUiDE TO
ACCOUNT-BASED
MARKETING
ON LINKEDIN
How LinkedIn can add value at the seven key stages of an ABM program

Every B2B marketer has heard of the

value that an Account-Based Marketing
(ABM) program can deliver for their
business. However, the task of aligning
sales and marketing effectively around
the right priority accounts can seem
daunting, potentially something that’s
only within reach of larger businesses with
sophisticated analytics. Here’s why that
assumption is wide of the mark—and how
LinkedIn can add value in helping to get
any ABM program off the ground.
1 SCORING AND
SELECTING TARGETS
A rigorous, relevant and scientific approach to prioritizing
your target accounts is the foundation of effective ABM.
It depends on an approach to account scoring that both
sales and marketing can believe in. Because ABM can
take different forms, from a completely bespoke 1:1
approach to a more scalable one, there’s value in establishing
different tiers of targets based on the size and immediacy of the
opportunity. A sales intelligence tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can
help provide the data to decide which accounts to target with different
levels of marketing attention, and ensure your progam is efficient.

44 Sophisticated Marketer
2 PROFILING PRIORITY
ACCOUNTS
Once an account makes it into your ABM program, you need
to invest time in profiling it properly. The Buyer Circle feature
within LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an ideal starting point,
helping to identify all of the decision-makers and influencers
likely to be involved in a purchase decision. Alerts on personnel
changes and relevant updates (for example whether a business
secures funding or misses its targets) help to
keep that profiling accurate and up-to-date.
You can use the insights that you gain
from detailed profiling of Tier 1 ABM
accounts to develop customized
content for the job functions
and roles that are consistently
5 DESIGNING SEAMLESS
SALES HAND-OFFS
LinkedIn’s State of Sales research confirms
that buyers are far more likely to respond
to salespeople who reach out with bespoke
insights relevant to their business. One of
the key objectives for your ABM program is
ensuring that this happens. A seller reaching out
on LinkedIn feels more natural and value-adding
when it builds on the content that you’ve already
targeted an individual with—and references pieces they’ve engaged with,
shared and commented on. The PointDrive feature within Sales Navigator
enables your sales team to create a personalized content hub for each
prospect that’s perfectly suited to this type of bespoke approach.

6
involved in buying decisions,
then use this content to target SCALING THE ABM
similar businesses at greater scale. STRATEGY
As mentioned, it’s not always feasible to
apply the same level of attention to

3
every target account that you’ve
DELIVERING CUSTOMIZED identified. The value of an ABM
CONTENT program is multiplied when
you’re able to use the insights
The ability to deliver customized content is the fulcrum of any ABM that you gain from the top-
program. Everything pivots around it. The reason that LinkedIn plays priority accounts that you
such a prominent role in so many ABM executions comes down to the engage with and track in detail,
unique targeting capabilities available through LinkedIn data. and apply them more broadly.
Account targeting ensures that, when you tailor content to LinkedIn account targeting enables
fit a priority account, you’re able to deliver that content you to do this quickly and easily at
exclusively to that account. Layering in profile data scale, customizing content and distributing it to
enables you to customize content to the needs and different functions involved in purchase decisions.
priorities of different functions. And interest targeting The same insights and content can also inform a
adds a new dimension to ABM through the ability to broader marketing approach, using LinkedIn profile
target specific moments when members of a data to reach the right-sized businesses in the most
buying committee are most engaged. relevant sectors.

4 REAL-TIME ALERTS
AND LEAD SCORING
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides real-time alerts whenever
7 GENERATING THE RIGHT
employees at target accounts engage with your brand’s content.
This helps to build up an engagement score for different
members of the buying committee that you can use to identify
the right moments for sales to reach out. Equally, if your content
is failing to engage key influencers and decision-makers,
you can act on that insight. Look for clues to their
interests and priorities in the content they engage
with, or leverage the content suggestions
feature in LinkedIn Pages to identify hot
topics for people in these roles.
METRICS TO TRACK VALUE
LinkedIn delivers a lot of the numbers that you need to
help demonstrate Return on Investment (ROI) for
your ABM program, by combining metrics from
marketing and sales. Engagement with content
takes on far more significance when you
can confirm that it’s relevant members of
the buying committee who are engaging.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) mean
more when you can track how they flow
through into call connects for sales, booked
meetings and active opportunities. Tracking this
data helps you to optimize your approach in real-time,
while integration with your CRM systems confirms the value of the ABM
program and what you’re trying to achieve.

Sophisticated Marketer 45

O f all the disciplines
in marketing, search
engine optimization (SEO)
is the one that involves the
most constant change—and
this can make it intimidating.
Nobody knows exactly how
the rankings on search engine
results are decided (or at least,
nobody outside of Google, Bing
and other search engines), but
everyone knows that those algorithms
and formulas evolve. What worked
as an SEO strategy five years ago won’t
work today. In fact, what worked last year,
probably won’t work in quite the same way
this year. If you’re a B2B marketer looking
to keep your content visible and build its
authority, then keeping up with SEO trends
isn’t just fashionable—it’s essential.
There’s a lot of technical-sounding discus-
sion of SEO: Google updates named things like
Penguin, Panda and Possum, latent seman-
tic indexing, quality score algorithms, and
more. Beneath this though, SEO trends tend
to involve general principles that it’s relatively
easy to get your head (and your content strate-
gy) around. it’s well worth doing so.
This is a summary of the search stuff that
you need to know this year, as a B2B market-
er. Applying these principles will help your
content rank as highly as it should on search
engine results pages (SERPs). It will build
your visibility, impact and credibility. Just as
importantly, it will provide the guidelines for
a strategy that stays focused on the informa-
tion your audience is looking for—because
that’s what good SEO marketing is about.
Here are the key trends in search for
2019, the technical, strategic and the
forward-thinking stuff that it’s worth start-
ing to build your approach around today:
46 Sophisticated Marketer
THE B2B CONTENT
MARKETER’S GUIDE TO
TRENDS
FOR 2019
The key developments in search that B2B
marketers should pay attention to
W0RDS BY JANE FLEMING
SEO trends—the technical stuff
In order to rank pages, a search engine needs to be able to analyze the
content effectively. How your pages are built can therefore have a big impact
on how visible your content is on a SERP. The reason why websites tend to
be built on JavaScript and HTML platforms rather than Flash these days
is because Google and other search engines struggled to read Flash sites
effectively. However, making your content visible to search engine spiders
isn’t the only technical issue affecting your ranking. Because search engines
prioritize better user experiences, they are also very interested in how your
page loads on different devices.
In March 2018, Google announced that it would start treating the mobile
versions of websites as the primary versions of those sites. That means it’s
vital to check the mobile experience of the content you create and work with
your technical teams to make sure the site is responsive on mobile. You need
to check that all relevant content appears on mobile versions too. You’re
likely to lose out if you’re investing in rich content that doesn’t display well
in the mobile version of your site.
Google has always paid close attention to how fast pages load, but there
are indications that the way it ranks speed is changing. Google added
mobile page speed, which is based on actual, real-life users’ experience
of your mobile site, as a ranking factor in July 2018. SEO experts say that it
doesn’t seem to be exerting a big influence on where pages rank in search
 LONG FORM

results—yet. However, since it’s a new tool
in Google’s toolbox, that could change. The
upshot? Keep a close eye on how quickly
your content loads on smartphones.
SEO trends—the strategy stuff
It used to be that creating content for SEO
meant stuffing the right paragraph of copy
with the magic number of keywords. However,
search has evolved a long way since then. The
SEO trends that matter today invite you to be
far more creative and audience-focused. Here
are the areas that SEO experts say you should
be focusing on in 2019:
Focus on intent, not just keywords
User intent is one of the buzz phrases in
SEO at the moment. That’s great news for
content marketers, because it basically
involves trying to imagine what a user really
wants when they type a particular keyword
into a search engine. And let’s face it, that
type of empathy is what we pride ourselves
on. Focusing on intent involves envis-
aging what the ideal journey for a
searcher looks like. What problem
are they trying to solve? What type
is an SEO buzz
phrases like ‘B2B marketing’ and research ones that have clearer intent behind
them, like ‘demonstrate the ROI of B2B marketing’. This could have the effect of
future-proofing your SEO approach as well, since voice search tends to involve
longer and more specific questions.
Once you start focusing on intent, you can go further and try to anticipate the next
question your searcher is likely to ask. If you can develop content that answers that as
well, you’ll increase your dwell time, and improve your search ranking in the process.
How do you know how well you’re doing at anticipating and delivering
against your audience’s intent? Try using Google Analytics to detect signals
that visitors are finding the content they were looking for. Did they scroll down?
Click on links? Interact with other elements on the page? Optimize your content
around indicators of deeper engagement like this.
Plan for content depth, not just breadth
Recent updates to Google algorithms suggest 2019 could be the year that
rewards in-depth content like never before. It’s still important to have a good
breadth of content, covering different aspects of a subject and responding to
specific questions. However, you have to balance that with sufficient depth
in each piece to deliver real value to readers—and signal that value to search
engines. If you’re managing your company’s blog (the fulcrum of good SEO and
content strategies), don’t rush out endless posts that just skim the surface of
issues. There’s a trick to balancing how you split content
between posts to make sure you’re not lumping too
many diverse subjects together and only lightly
User intent touching on them. Aim to publish content that
always has a reason for someone to link to it as a

of content are they most likely to phrase, and that

find valuable? What format will be
most usable and useful for them?
should be great
It can help to shift your focus from news for content
competing for general keyword
marketers

Sophisticated Marketer 47
LONG FORM

source of authority. A long-form content strategy, investing in posts

that you can promote with enthusiasm and which others will want
to share, is more important than ever.

It’s all about the numbers (the ones on your page)

Backlinks (when others link to your content) are one of the
most important factors in determining the success of your SEO
strategy—and there are few more credible authorities on the subject
than Brian Dean, who runs the Backlinko blog. When Brian comes out
and announces that the quality of the stats in your posts will be
one of the big factors determining how they perform on SEO
this year, it’s worth listening to him. Think about the types of The quality of
statistics that are most likely to persuade a respectable blogger
or website to link to your page. Don’t drown every piece of
stats in your posts
content with numbers. Instead select the most relevant, will be one of
impactful and robust ones you can access. Then put them
into a format (like Infographics) that’s visible and shareable.
the big factors
determining how
E-A-T like an academic
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness, the
they perform on
qualities of content that Google now pays closer attention to SEO this year
following a highly publicized algorithm update last year. And
Google isn’t alone. Bing has been making noises about rewarding
E-A-T as well, awarding authority to the type of pages that a sensible human through the featured snippets that search
being would recognize as credible when they tried to read them. engines select. The role of these snippets
How do you signal E-A-T to both your website visitors and the algorithms that is likely to increase in a voice search world,
help bring them to you? A good rule of thumb is to think like an academic when where the best answers don’t involve
you’re planning, sourcing and creating your content. Pick credible, current sources having to visit a website.
for the claims that you are making in your posts and include links to those sources How do you plan for zero-click search-
to signal to both audiences and search engines that you’re not just making them up. es? Try to incorporate concise answers to
Take a similar approach to authorship. Inviting recognized external experts specific questions within your content. A
to post on your blog is a great way to boost its authority. Building up the brand a short summary of steps in answer to a
of your own internal authors is another. Cultivate different employees and inter- ‘how-to’ question, or a concise definition of
nal experts as regular contributors, help them to deliver the kind of in-depth a key concept for your sector.
content that search engines increasingly value, and then promote their posts on
social media platforms like LinkedIn, to help build their brands. Get serious about B2B video
The days of any old video boosting SEO are
Brand—the best kept SEO secret gone. However, relevant, valuable video
Google and Bing both admitted last year that it’s not just backlinks that determine that helps to answer specific questions
the authority of your site in search rankings. They pay attention to mentions of definitely has value. Video makes the most
your brand and content on different platforms, whether there’s a link involved or effective SEO contribution when audienc-
not. Their machine learning algorithms will be seeking out signals of what those es know why they’re watching it (signal
mentions imply about your reputation and credibility. Think of brand mentions this through headlines and page content),
as ‘linkless backlinks’. Whenever people talk about your content or ideas, they’re when it adds enough value to keep them
building your authority for SEO—or potentially undermining it. watching (increasing dwell times), and
This is basically a call for marketers to take a more holistic approach to their when they want to share it.
content strategy. Aim to genuinely set the agenda, share original ideas, and
build content brands that get people talking . It’s not just about Google
The Google algorithm is a great starting
SEO trends—the future-facing stuff point, but audiences increasingly use
SEO isn’t just an exercise in optimizing for the way things work now. It’s also an different search experiences to access
exercise in anticipating the future. There are three key emerging trends that it’s different types of content. You’ll need to
worth finding ways to incorporate into your content strategy in 2019: consider what influences rankings on
Apple, Amazon and Bing if you’re promot-
Planning for zero clicks ing podcast content, online buying, or if
Clicking through to a site is no longer the only way searchers find answers. you want to reach searchers talking to the
A growing proportion find all of the information that they need on the SERP Alexa or Cortana virtual assistants.

48 Sophisticated Marketer
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Sophisticated Marketer 9
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 W0RDS BY JANE
FLEMING

SMART B2B MAR

K
STRATEGIC INSPIR ETERS WILL HAVE FOUND PLENTY
ATION IN THE BIG OF
GAME’S AD BREA
KS

50 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r
 LONG FORM

s a B2B marketer, it’s tempting to spend the

week after Super Bowl Sunday tut-tutting about
consumer brands frittering away $5 million a pop
on 30-second TV ads. We can smugly observe
that they’ll never be able to tie all that spend back
to impact on the bottom line and a sensible ROI.
The media coverage helps. Catering to the public’s annu-
al surge in interest, newspapers and ad industry experts
race to declare Super Bowl advertising winners and losers.
Who scored a touchdown? Who fumbled? Who’s got to
explain to the CFO what’s happened to their investment?
It’s fun—but it tends to miss the point.

The Super Bowl itself may have only one winner, but that’s not the case when
it comes to Super Bowl advertising. This is no longer just a one-shot TV adver-
tising opportunity. It’s a multi-channel, brand-building opportunity—the
biggest and most upper-funnel focused opportunity on the planet. Not only
do entire families gather around a TV screen, actually discussing ads; they also
watch those ads on digital channels and share them on social in the weeks
leading up to the game—and keep sharing and discussing them in the hours
and days afterwards. Brands rarely have a better opportunity to talk to people
interested in what they have to say. The Super Bowl doesn’t deliver a captive
audience; it creates an audience that voluntarily hands itself in.
On this one particular occasion, the net effect of a lot of brands compet-
ing for attention isn’t to fragment that attention, but to multiply it. That
creates a lot of space and opportunity for marketers to plan different routes
to delivering the results they want. Super Bowl LIII advertising made full use
of that space in a way that previous years haven’t. The most striking thing
about it wasn’t the relative dearth of celebrities (something we heard a lot
about in the run-up to the game). It was the sheer diversity of the advertising
strategies on display. It brings home just how broad the options for market-
ers looking to build a brand now are. They stretch across social, PR, online
video, content marketing and more.

Why B2B marketers should watch Super Bowl ads

Smart B2B marketers know the value of upper-funnel brand campaigns.
A growing focus on revenue-based metrics has seen to that. We need
higher quality leads that convert at a faster and higher rate, and deliver
loyal customers when they do. We need a platform for speaking not just to
B2B decision-makers but to the broader buying committees operating within our
target accounts. There’s no better foundation for these things than a strong brand.
That’s why Super Bowl LIII couldn’t have come at a better time. It presents
us with a hugely varied playbook of potential brand strategies, which are as
applicable to B2B brands operating on digital channels as they are to big
consumer brands buying very expensive TV ads. Here are seven that stood
out, and which demonstrate what brand-building can involve today.

Sophisticated Marketer 51
LONG FORM

1 Skittles: creating exclusive content; 2 Bud

Light: partnering with Game of Thrones; 3
Verizon: showcasing the work of emergency
response teams; 4 Wix: celebrating women
2 with tech entrepreneur, Karlie Kloss.

1. The exclusive brand
content play
Called by: Skittles
Arguably the most interesting Super
Bowl brand strategy of all didn’t involve
a Super Bowl TV ad. For that matter,
it didn’t involve a TV ad of any kind.
Skittles took a slice of the budget it could
have spent on a 30-second ad and spent
it instead on writing and producing a
30-minute Broadway show, running
on Super Bowl Sunday only, for an
audience of fewer than 1,500 people. It
starred Michael C. Hall of Dexter fame,
it cost between $30 and $205 a ticket,
with proceeds going to the Broadway
Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. It satirized
the advertising industry in its script
and musical numbers, and it was, by all
accounts, hilarious.
This is a fascinating play on sever-
al levels. Skittles put its faith in owned
content and an owned media experi-
ence rather than buying part of someone
else’s media opportunity. It traded the
mass reach that only the Super Bowl
can provide for a tiny audience and
the intrigue and fascination that comes
through limiting availability. It calculat-
ed that exclusive content can produce
a far bigger brand effect than the reach
of the content itself, especially if you
spin-off video clips of the cast singing
the best bits of the soundtrack. There’s
inspiration in there for any market-
er looking to build credibility through
content on a limited budget.
2. The brand partnership play
Called by: Bud Light,
Game of Thrones
We don’t tend to think of brand partner-
ships as creative opportunities. They’re
the behind-the-scenes deals that make
commercial and strategic sense, but
don’t send audiences heading for the
water-cooler the next morning with a
“wow” look on their face.
At least, that was the case prior to
the Bud Light / Game of Thrones brand
mash-up. It saw the beer brand’s estab-
lished Bud Knight brand mascot brutally
dispatched by the Gregor “The Mountain”
Clegane from the HBO show, before a
passing dragon laid waste to pretty much
the entire cast. It was shocking, unexpect-
ed and arguably the most talked-about
ad of the entire broadcast. B2B brand
partnerships might not have the same
shock value—but there’s definitely value in
bringing complementary content expertise
together. It sheds new light on your brand
and drives impact and consideration
where it might not have existed before.
3. The brand purpose play
Called by: Microsoft,
Verizon, Washington Post
Brand purpose can divide marketing
opinion when it stretches too far from an
audience’s actual experience or comes
across as a distraction from what a
business actually does. However, nobody
complains when it aligns authentically
and powerfully with the difference that
a company makes to people’s lives. And
nobody was complaining about the three
stand-out brand purpose plays in this
year’s Super Bowl.
The Tom Hanks-narrated Washington
Post ad won plaudits for celebrating the

52 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r
immense importance of journalism to
freedom and democracy, not just of its
own reporting, and for honoring the sacri-
fices made by all journalists, not just those
writing for its pages.
Verizon’s simple but extremely moving
film linked the NFL to the work of emergen-
cy response teams with an appropriately
humble reference to its own role. It judged
exactly where to put the spotlight.
Microsoft’s brand purpose play took
a different approach. It focused not
on an overarching mission, but on a
product. By spotlighting the impact that
its adaptive controller has on the lives of
those with disabilities, it sent a powerful
signal about where and why the business
invests in technology. That authenticity
shone through in the performance of the
young, disabled gamers in the film; and
it’s why this ad created such a power-
ful emotive impact before and after the
game. The purpose message was delib-
erately understated, and all the more
powerful as a result.
4. The gender diversity play
Called by: Bumble,
Verizon, Wix.com
Apparently, fewer Super Bowl LIII ads
featured women than during last year’s
game. However, it didn’t feel that way.
There was the empowering message
Serena Williams expressed for the dating
app, Bumble, the role model that Wix.
com featured (Karlie Kloss appearing as
a tech entrepreneur rather than a super-
model), and the line-up of first respond-
ers in the Verizon film. The treatment of
women in these ads showed that brands
have a greater impact when they avoid
lazy assumptions about their audience.
In today’s data-driven brand building
environment, there’s no excuse for only
appealing to half your available market.
5. The sponsorship
activation play
Called by: Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz had more skin in the
game than most Super Bowl advertisers,
for the simple reason that it sponsors
the stadium where it was being played.
Combining this with a fast-moving, witty
ad that cleverly drew attention to its logo
multiplied the impact.
6. The celebrity
signaling play
Called by: Amazon, Bubly,
Stella Artois, Hyundai
The impact of brand advertising doesn’t
just come from what you say, but where
and how you say it. Any Super Bowl ad is an
exercise in brand signaling. In demonstrat-
ing that you can afford to pay $5 million for
a 30-second ad, you show that you are a
serious player in your category, who’s going
to be around for a while (to recoup the
investment from that ad) and is, therefore,
credible and trustworthy.
However, within the context of the
Super Bowl itself, there’s another form of
brand signaling that goes on. The bigger
celebrities you can afford to feature, the
bigger your brand.
Amazon’s latest Alexa ad featuring
Harrison Ford arguing with his dog and
Forest Whittaker trying to listen to his
toothbrush didn’t just work because it was
funny. It worked because it had the biggest
5 Mercedes-Benz: amplifying
its sponsorship; 6 Pepsico:
using celebrity signaling to
promote Bubly; 7 Michelob
Ultra: delivering an
unforgettable audio experience
celebrities in it. Michael Bublé did a superb
job of signaling that Pepsico’s new Bubly
sparkling water is already a major player
in soft drinks. While Jeff Bridges and Sarah
Jessica Parker did the job for Stella Artois,
and Jason Bateman nailed it for Hyundai.
Celebrities may not be essential for effec-
tiveness in every area of branding, but
paying attention to the unconscious signals
you send certainly is.
7. The audio branding play
Called by: Michelob Ultra
Aside from Skittles, Michelob Ultra’s
creative strategy was arguably the most
innovative of the entire game. That’s
because it deliberately focused on a differ-
ent sense to most. People don’t just watch
NFL games and the ads that accompany
them. They also listen to them. Michelob
Ultra’s ad featuring the actress Zoe Kravitz,
in a calm jungle setting, pouring a glass of
beer while accentuating every sound, was
apparently designed to produce a calming
autonomous sensory meridian response
(ASMR). As such, it was an exercise in audio
branding—owning a relaxing experience,
delivered through the ears, that is perfectly
aligned with your brand and the moments
when it’s consumed.
Were Michelob Ultra to follow through
on this, it could be a savvy brand invest-
ment for an era of virtual digital assistants
and voice search, when audiences speak
to the internet rather than just watching
and reading it.
6
7
Sophisticated Marketer 53
LONG FORM

STATE OF SALES

208 The State of

Sales Report 2018
reveals that sales tech
is more important
than ever, the sales
and marketing divide
is diminishing and
that trust remains
a top priority for
sales success

As a sales professional, your skills are in demand more than ever.

That’s because sales continues to be a top investment priority for businesses.
In the US alone, companies spend $15 billion each year training sales
employees and $800 billion on incentives to retain sales talent.

his investment is also opening up new opportuni-
ties for sales professionals at every stage of their
career. Sales development representative roles have
grown 5.7 times since 2012, and the compensation
for experienced sales professionals is also on the rise:
the median annual pay for sales managers is $121,060,
plus bonuses. And as more organizations appoint
a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), sales professionals
have a path to advance to the C-suite. CRO titles on
LinkedIn are up 82% since 2015.
Despite this momentum, B2B sales has never been
more challenging. Highly personalized services like
Netflix and Amazon are driving customers to expect
more from the brands they interact with, including
those with B2B sales teams. Millennials, who have
especially high expectations for personalization, are
gaining influence in the workforce and will make up
46% of professionals by 2020.
Sellers today must meet these heightened expec-
tations while building consensus among a larger
group of stakeholders: the average buyer circle is now
6.8 people. They must also team up with their market-
ing counterparts to reach each of these individuals at
every stage of the path to purchase. To be successful
in modern sales, you need to build relationships at
scale—tapping into advanced sales technology to
engage with the right contacts faster, while fostering
human connection and trust.

54 Sophisticated Marketer
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
5 KEY FINDINGS
1. TECHNOLOGY GIVES
SALES PROFESSIONALS A
COMPETITIVE EDGE.
Almost three-quarters of sales
professionals (73%) use sales
technology to close more deals. Top
sales performers see networking
platforms as “very important” to help
close deals at a 51% higher rate than
their peers.
2. DECISION MAKERS EXPECT
UNDERSTANDING AND HUMAN
CONNECTION.
Virtually all decision makers (96%)
say they’re more likely to consider
a brand’s products or services if
sales professionals have a clear
understanding of their business needs.
3. MARKETING AND SALES
ORCHESTRATION HELPS CLOSE
DEALS, BUT DATA SILOS REMAIN.
The top sales professionals are
working more closely with marketing
and seeing better results, but there’s
room for improvement. Only 20% of
sales professionals report a significant
overlap in the data used by marketing
and sales to target leads.
4. MILLENNIAL SALES
PROFESSIONALS TAP INTO
MARKETING INSIGHTS AT
HIGHER RATES.
Millennials (ages 21-38) are quicker
to implement new strategies like
marketing and sales orchestration,
which is contributing to their success
as the highest-performing age group.
5. WITHOUT TRUST,
FEWER DEALS CLOSE.
Sales professionals rank trust as the
top factor in closing deals (40%), above
Return on Investment (ROI) and price.
As for buyers, 51% rank trust as the most
important quality of a salesperson.
1. SALES TECHNOLOGY IS THE
X FACTOR FOR CLOSING DEALS
Businesses are increasingly investing in sales technology. Sales teams are turning to
cloud-based software, in particular, to accelerate productivity, gather contextual details
about customers and automate tedious tasks.
Three-quarters of sales professionals (73%) use technology to close more deals.
Of this group, 97% consider sales technology “very important” or “important.”
The majority of sales professionals (59% overall and 65% of top performers) say
they’re spending more time using technology, too; 93% are using sales technology
just as much or more than in 2017. With sales tech on the rise, it’s no surprise
that companies are pouring more resources into equipping their salesforces with
these tools. Since 2016, planned investment in sales technology has grown by
53%. Over half (55%) of sales professionals expect this trend to continue next year.
HOW IMPORTANT ARE THESE
SALES TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS
IN CLOSING DEALS?
70%
of sales professionals say they’re
Sales professionals who rely on sales
technology outperform their peers. Here’s most active on LinkedIn for
how top sales professionals differ from business purposes, compared to
their peers when rating the technology social media platforms like
platforms they consider “very important” Facebook (64%), Twitter
or “important” to closing deals.
(43%), YouTube (41%), and
Instagram (39%).
Top sales
professionals TECHNOLOGY USAGE IS UP ACROSS
Networking
89% MULTIPLE PLATFORMS:
platforms
Others 79% 64% of sales professionals
use CRM applications like
Salesforce and Microsoft
Top sales Dynamics (up 28% from 2017)
professionals
94% Collaboration
62% use collaboration
tools
Others 91% tools like Box,Google Docs,
Microsoft Office and Dropbox
(up 6% from 2017)
Top sales
professionals
Sales
intelligence 98% 59% use networking
solutions platforms like LinkedIn and
Others 94%
Facebook (up 5% since 2017)
Top sales
professionals
40% use enterprise
Email communication platforms
92% tracking
tools (up 8% since 2017)
Others 91%
Sophisticated Marketer 55
LONG FORM

2. SALES TECHNOLOGY IS INEFFECTIVE WITHOUT A HUMAN TOUCH

Personal connection matters. B2C brands have conditioned us to expect highly personalized WHICH FACTORS MOST
recommendations, content and interactions. As a result, decision makers are more likely to INFLUENCE DECISION MAKERS
consider a brand’s products or services when the experience is personalized. IN AN INITIAL ENGAGEMENT?
For instance: if a sales professional has are more likely to engage with sales when
a clear understanding of their business introduced through a mutual connection, 52% Representing a well-
needs (96%) or their role (94%); shares particularly if the sales professional known company with a
content relevant to their role (93%); represents a strong brand. The influence
provides personalized communications of a strong brand increased by 37% since
strong professional brand
(93%); or targets the appropriate last year and is the No. 1 factor cited by
people at their company for initial decision makers when choosing to
discussions (92%). Decision makers engage with sales. 47% Providing specific
information relevant
WHICH TOP MARKETING
to their current job

44%
ASSETS MOST INFLUENCE
PURCHASING DECISIONS?

5% eBooks 41% Mentioning the sales

of decision makers say professional’s company
6% Blogs websites are a company’s and product solutions
top asset influencing
8% Webinars purchasing decisions.
39% Referencing a
10% Videos colleague they both know

28% Events 32% Having good

44% Website charisma

TO WHAT DEGREE DOES MARKETING AND

3. THE SALES AND MARKETING SALES DATA OVERLAP TO TARGET LEADS?
DIVIDE DIMINISHES
Sales and marketing are starting to work more closely together, benefiting both sales
professionals and decision makers alike. Forty-four percent of sales executives say
20% 59%
they work more closely with marketing than in past years. Overall, those who say they
Lots of Some
overlap overlap
work “very closely” or “closely” with marketing has grown 35% since the 2016 survey.

Top sales professionals have a above, while 41% of their peers

stronger relationship with their
marketing counterparts. They
are 13% more likely to say they
work “very closely” or “closely”
with marketing in prospecting
efforts than their peers.
On a scale of one (a very small
role) to 10 (a very big role), 57%
of the top sales professionals
rate marketing’s importance
in closing deals at an eight or
say the same.
Still, the data divide
remains. While many sales
17% 4%
Little No
and marketing teams are keen overlap overlap
to partner more closely, data is
often siloed in the technology
platforms used by each
function. Only 20% of sales This misalignment could contribute to the quality of
professionals say they leads sales professionals say they receive from marketing.
see significant overlap in Only 22% say leads from marketing are excellent and
the data used. 42% say they’re good.

56 Sophisticated Marketer
 4. MILLENNIALS ARE EAGER TO
ORCHESTRATE MARKETING
AND SALES EFFORTS 5. TRUST IS THE
TOP INDICATOR FOR
Millennials are quicker than other age groups to use new SALES SUCCESS
strategies and technologies. These younger sales executives
mirror the technology usage of the most successful sales It’s more important than ever for sales professionals to earn and
professionals at the highest rates. Sixty-two percent of millennials maintain trust, as consumer skepticism of big brands peaks.
(and 65% of top performers) say they anticipate spending more
time this year using sales technology; but only 56% of Generation Trust has led as a priority factor influencing deals since our
X and Baby Boomers say they anticipate doing the same. first survey in 2016. This year, 99% of sales professionals say
trust is “very important” or “important” to winning new
A tight-knit relationship has strengthened over the
business. 40% rank trust as the most important contributor
with marketing is paying off past year. Millennial sales
to closing a deal – even above ROI of the product or service
for millennials, who tend pros are 12% more likely than
(28%) and price (18%). An additional 24% rank trust second.
to outperform Generation Generation X and 24% more
Just over half (51%) of decision makers rank trust as
X and Baby Boomer sales likely than Baby Boomers to
the No. 1 factor they desire in a salesperson, followed by
professionals. spend more time working
responsiveness (42%), expertise in the field (42%), problem
Top-performing with marketing than in past
solving (37%) and transparency (34%).
millennials are 23% more years. In turn, millennials
likely to say they work “very say they see excellent
closely” with marketing than leads from marketing at
Generation X and 73% more 56% higher rates than
SALES PROFESSIONALS EARN HIGH
likely than Baby Boomers. Generation X and 115%
MARKS FROM BUYERS.
And it’s a partnership that higher than Baby Boomers. When asked how they perceive sales professionals they work with,
decision makers “strongly agree”or “agree” sales professionals are:

HOW DID 2017 SALES PERFORMANCE

COMPARE BY GENERATION?
93% 91% 91%
EXCEEDED THEIR 2017 PROJECTED REVENUE BY OVER 50% Professional Well informed Consultative
about their
Millenials 19% industry

Gen X 13%
Baby Boomers 90% 88% 87%
13% Well informed Trusted Focused on
about their advisors building
industry relationships

EXCEEDED THEIR 2017

TARGET REVENUE BY OVER 25%

Millenials 54%
66% of decision makers feel
the sales professionals
they work with are essential partners all or
most of the time (22% and 44%, respectively).
Gen X 36%
Baby Boomers 41%

In comparison to Generation X and Baby Boomers, 46% more millennials

exceeded their 2017 projected revenue target by more than 50%.
Millennials also credit a larger portion of their success to sales technology:
28% of millennials think CRM applications are “extremely critical” to their
success, compared to 18% of Generation X and 9% of Baby Boomers. Thirty
percent of millennials think sales intelligence solutions are extremely
critical, versus 22% of Generation X and 7% of Baby Boomers.
LONG FORM

WHEN MARKETING
OPTIMIZES FOR
‘SALES CLOSES’
EVERYONE WINS
Pallavi Sharma of LinkedIn’s certified technology partner, AdStage, discusses the challenges
in moving organizations from a focus on lead quantity to a robust view of quality.

I recently attended CMO conference where a speaker ity. The hurdle they ran into was the expectation to produce
shared a story that had the audience of marketing results quickly. This is the trap marketers keep falling into.
leaders nodding their heads in agreement. He talked Increasing overall web traffic by throwing money into paid
about attending a retreat where the marketing team marketing isn’t that difficult. Quick results are great, but if the
had champagne flowing as they gave each other results don’t have a positive impact on company revenue with
congratulatory high-fives for hitting their numbers. a strong ROI, they simply aren’t a good place to focus. It seems
the old adage “you get what you pay for” was playing out in the
The sales team, however, had their heads hanging in disap- paid marketing world on a grand scale. With marketing and
pointment. How could the marketing and sales teams of sales agreeing that the focus needs to shift from quantity of
the same company be having such different experiences? leads to quality of leads, the strategy in finding these leads will
He did a bit of digging, and as usual, the data also need to shift.
revealed the truth. Marketing had been measuring LinkedIn, for example, has long been known
their success based on top-of-funnel metrics like as a premium network. With its more than 600+
ad clicks, impressions, and website page views. million members, it has the capability to get
Their website traffic had never been higher. What’s marketers in front of the right decision makers.
not to celebrate? Sales, however, felt the leads were Because of this capability, LinkedIn excels in
low-quality and simply not converting at a high delivering long-term ROI metrics to marketers
enough rate. One major reason for the disconnect Pallavi Sharma is
(and, ultimately, to salespeople). The quality of
was that marketing was allocating money in their VP Marketing at the pool is more likely to result in paying custom-
paid marketing efforts to ad networks that brought LinkedIn’s certified ers, ultimately making it a highly effective ad
traffic, not necessarily the right quality of leads for technology partner, channel. By shifting your paid strategy to attract
AdStage.
their business. higher quality of leads, you might not get the
The marketing leaders I spoke with at the event instant gratification of an uptick in vanity metrics
agreed that unlike the marketers in the compa- like website visits, but you should see an increase
ny mentioned above, they were increasingly where it counts, namely paying customers.
being measured on actual business impact like In order to prove the true worth of the
revenue, not just increasing overall website activ- LinkedIn advertising investment, both agencies

58 Sophisticated Marketer
and in-house teams must be able to show the full Return on
Ad Spend (ROAS). The issue remains that many marketers are
still optimizing paid campaigns on high-level top-of-the-fun-
nel metrics because the data systems they have in place don’t
make it easy to optimize to down-funnel metrics in Google
Analytics and CRMs like Salesforce. As we’ve discussed, this
can be misleading since the vast majority of top-of-the-fun-
nel interactions don’t result in paying customers. There’s a
tremendous amount of investment that is simply wasted. The
lead generation marketers who are trying to optimize on these
metrics end up spending countless hours
using spreadsheets to manually connect
data from different systems to see the full “YOU GET WHAT
picture. This method is not only time-con- YOU PAY FOR”
suming, but also prone to errors with the
number of steps and aggregation involved. IS PLAYING
OUT IN THE
WORLD OF LEAD
GENERATION IN A
BIG WAY”
AdStage has launched AdStage Join, a technology solution
to increase marketing and sales alignment by changing the
way marketers measure and optimize their paid campaigns.
It enables marketers not only to link their paid marketing
data directly to Google Analytics and Salesforce, but to report,
optimize, and automate campaigns based on down-funnel
metrics like sales closes. This laborious process of connecting
data manually and using VLOOKUPs can now be replaced with
a more powerful solution that enables you to get and use your
data more quickly, accelerating your path to ROI. Marketers
can now look further down the funnel
to prove that premium channels like
LinkedIn can actually perform better
on ROI metrics than networks that
seemingly cost less per click or impres-
sion. AdStage Join fits in perfectly with
LinkedIn’s reputation of being a premium
source of B2B lead generation. It shows
the higher conversion rate (and lower cost
per conversion) for LinkedIn Ads.
Large agencies like 3Q Digital and
Atypical Digital are using AdStage Join
to fully close-the-loop on every ad dollar
spent. 3Q Digital’s CEO, David
Rodnitzky, commented, “With
AdStage Join we can directly
measure the impact our paid
marketing efforts have on a
client’s revenue and pipeline in
Salesforce. Not only does AdStage
help us automate an otherwise
highly manual process, but our
agency can now further differenti-
ate our offering by helping our clients
close the sales and marketing loop.”
Most marketers I’ve met are well aware
of the macro trend toward increased organ-
izational alignment between marketing
and sales. The gap has been in the technol-
ogy that will help drive both teams toward
the same goals. A solution like AdStage Join
finally enables lead generation marketers
to close the loop between paid marketing
efforts and sales pipeline or revenue data.
The revenue goals for a company,
sales team, and marketing team should
ultimately align for maximum impact.
Leading companies realize this and are
actively making changes. Technology can
help ensure those changes deliver results.
And that means more marketing and
sales teams celebrating together at their
next retreats!
Sophisticated Marketer 59
 TH OF A
DEA
ESMAN?
SAL A L I
D S
COUL MENT HAV
G N
A
N D M A
LES A E SAVED
R

0RDS BY
K
K

E IT
E
W
H
T
I
ING MAN?
L

BROWN
W
L Y
ING
LO

Did Arthur Miller’s famous play, Death of a Salesman have to end with the
death of the salesman? Could the most famous failed road warrior in literary history
have been saved? Willy Loman is a tragic character brought down by his delusions
and broken relationships. However, he’s also a victim of a complete lack of meaningful
sales and marketing support. Here’s how better alignment could have helped:

1. Willy Loman needs less
time on the road
“I’m tired to the death… I suddenly couldn’t
drive anymore”
Willy is the original road warrior—but an increasingly
ineffective, inefficient and exhausted one. His sales trips
are speculative. They deliver diminishing returns and sap
what little energy he has left. The play opens with Willy
metaphorically running on empty, cancelling a trip t and
returning home because he’s barely able to drive. His
desperation to escape from life on the road is what precipi-
tates the crisis in the play and leads to him being fired.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
By equipping Willy with a pipeline of relevant, high-quality leads. It’s lead
quality that cuts out the need for speculative meetings and ensures the
meetings sales reps do have are more focused, timely and productive.

60 Sophisticated Marketer

2. Willy Loman needs something
to sell besides charm
“Oh, I’ll knock ‘em dead next week. I’ll go to
Hartford. I’m very well liked in Hartford.”
It’s one of the great and deliberate ironies of Death of a Salesman
that at no point do we learn what Willy Loman actually sells.
There’s talk of ‘samples’, ‘merchandises’ and department stores
but the actual product—and why anybody would want to buy it
—remain anonymous. This is a profound commentary on Willy’s
selling philosophy: ultimately the product itself is unimportant; it’s
himself that he’s selling—and he’s paranoid about passing his best
before date. Is he really liked? Does he talk too much? Are his jokes
annoying? Doe he look ridiculous? Willy needs to spend more time
focusing on his customers’ needs and how his solution could help,
and less time attempting to boost his fragile ego.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
By providing relevant content that enables Willy to demonstrate expertise rather
than relying on charm. In LinkedIn’s State of Sales survey, 47% of B2B buyers say
that sales reps providing specific information relevant to their current job influ-
enced them to engage. That’s substantially more than responded to sellers’ charis-
ma (32%). The most effective modern sellers use content supplied by marketing to
showcase their understanding of how solutions intersect with a particular custom-
er’s pain points. They have a plan for being respected, not just liked.
3. Willy Loman needs a support
team that means something
“I get so lonely—especially when business is bad
and there’s nobody to talk to. I get the feeling
that I’ll never sell anything again”
Willy operates alone and with no support network; he has nobody
to consult, or turn to for advice. He’s desperate for a position
in New York that would put him at the heart of the company;
desperate for a more involved relationship with the business he
works for. Instead he’s pushed to the outside and left to make as
much commission as he can, alone.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
By targeting the right prospects and preparing the ground for sellers like Willy to
reach out more effectively. On LinkedIn, prospects who engage with marketing con-
tent from a business are 31% more likely to respond to InMails from their sales reps.
4. Willy Loman needs an
intent-based sales model
“The trouble was that three of the stores were
half-closed for inventory in Boston. Otherwise I
woulda broke records.”
Willy puts shortfalls in his performance on a sales trip down
to the stores he visited being full up with inventory and not
LONG FORM
needing any more stock. It’s symptomatic of his business’s lack
of customer focus. He’s wearing down his energy and using
up crucial goodwill selling to prospects who have absolutely
no need for the things he’s supplying. Ultimately, Willy is a
one-way sales channel driven by the product he has to shift
rather than what the customer needs.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
Through a shared view of intent signals. This enables marketers to use interest
targeting to generate more relevant leads, and enables sellers to focus their
energies on prospects who are actively looking to buy.
5. Willy Loman needs to
build new relationships
“I’m talking about your father! There were
promises made across this desk!”
Willy tours the same department stores in the same cities, lever-
aging the same old relationships. His role with his business
similarly relies on the past: in his showdown with his boss he
repeatedly harks back to promises supposedly made to him
over three decades ago. Willy has no way to reinvigorate these
relationships, and no way to open up new areas of opportunity.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
By keeping Willy in touch with developments at his key accounts through
an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programme. ABM provides a structured
framework for prioritizing the most relevant target accounts, and a foundation
for maintaining relationships through tailored marketing support.
6. Willy Loman needs
a new way of doing things
“I gotta be at it ten, twelve hours a day. Other
men—I don’t know—they do it easier.”
Willy knows that the way he sells isn’t working: he has to work
twelve hours a day to deliver the results he does, while others
seem to make their numbers far more easily. The problem and
the solution are staring him in the face all along: Willy is impris-
oned in the past, constantly talking about great salesmen he
knew in his younger years who taught him everything he knew;
bemoaning the fact that young people today have no caliber. It’s
his refusal to consider new ways of doing things and his deter-
mination to keep reliving past glories that help to destroy him.
HOW COULD MARKETING ALIGNMENT HELP?
An aligned marketing team could support Willy Loman in building a rel-
evant professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights
and building strong relationships. If he were genuinely willing to change his
ways, it would provide the ideal foundation to help him do so.
Explore the LinkedIn Sales Navigator suite of sales intelligence
and marketing alignment tools at https://lnkd.in/SalesSolutions
Sophisticated Marketer 61
10 Sophisticated Marketer

Sales hasn’t
changed
but what it
takes to
win has
WORDS BY LIAM HALPIN
Forget the manufactured debate of ‘social selling’ versus old-fashioned meetings and calls.
Traditional skills still matter – and modern techniques are the way to get full value from them.
2B sales will always be a contact sport. It’s a contact sport
that revolves around traditional skills of empathy and persua-
sion, and the commitment to make time for calls and meetings
that enable you to leverage those skills. These characteristics
marked out the top sales people from decades ago, and they still
characterize top sales people today. However, like all contact sports, you can
no longer win just by focusing on the fundamentals. The game evolves. You
can only get full value from your skills by evolving with it.
I believe that it’s time we stopped talking about sales as a straight choice
between the old ways of doing things and the new, as if you could some-
how choose between two different versions of the game. At LinkedIn, we’ve
stopped using the term ‘social selling’ because it implies a clean break from
the past that just doesn’t apply. The rules of sales have not been wholly re-
written by one new form of technology. What went before still matters. Any
discussion about modern selling has to start with recognizing as much.
DALGLISH VS DE BRUYNE? WRONG QUESTION…
As a casual observer of The Beautiful Game, I love launching into those debates
about whether the football teams of previous decades could still cut it in the
top flight today. How would the all-conquering Liverpool of the 1970s and 80s
match up to Guardiola’s Manchester City? It’s fun to imagine these hypothetical
head-to-heads but ask any former footballer and they’ll tell you there’s only one
winner. The modern team will always beat the historical one.
It’s not a question of greater skill, commitment, toughness or brains. It’s
an unavoidable result of the fact that the sport has evolved. The players of
today benefit from a cumulative sequence of competitive advantages that
have built upon one another over time. Sports psychology, nutrition science
and sensor-based performance analysis enable teams to get far more from
raw talent and training. They may be playing the same core game with the
same core skills, but it’s simply unfair to expect players of the past to get
the same results as those with access to the techniques available today. A far
more interesting question is how much better those great teams of the past
could be if they’d had access to the insights, data and science now available.
LONG FORM
IT’S CUMULATIVE CHANGE THAT COUNTS
That’s also the question that we should be asking of sales. Anybody who
argues that social media has made phone calls and face-to-face meetings re-
dundant doesn’t understand selling, and misses the point of what social media
actually brings to the game. The skills of a top salesperson from 20 years ago
in engaging and persuading people, and their commitment to making time
for customers, would be invaluable today. However, they need to be set up for
success with all of the same techniques and competitive advantages available
to the other sales reps out there.
Modern selling makes use of sales automation technology and machine
learning as well as sharing content and engaging in dialogue on social media.
It also depends on well-trained salespeople who make phone calls and travel
to meet customers face-to-face. Just as it always has.
EVOLVING WITH THE GAME
Setting up a sales team for success involves recognizing the different chal-
lenges they face: more people involved in customers’ buying decisions, more
matrixed organizations, self-directed buyers leveraging a proliferation of in-
formation, a demand for deep knowledge of a customer organization from the
start of the conversation. Burying your head in the sand about these issues is
the equivalent of sending your team for lunch down the pub after each train-
ing session. You’re just not giving them a chance.
That’s why today’s top sales organizations don’t just hire great talent. They
give that talent the tools to understand better what’s happening at their cli-
ents, and equip them with the data they need to win.
A lot of this data and insight comes through social media, but that doesn’t
mean sales has turned into a new game called ‘social selling’. Being great
at sharing content on LinkedIn won’t be enough to make you a great sales-
person any more than eating the right diet and having lots of Opta stats will
make you a top footballer. However, if you understand and value what selling
involves, then modern selling techniques like this will help you fulfil every
inch of that potential. As leaders of sales teams today, that’s what we should
be providing for every talented player we have on our books.
Sophisticated Marketer 63
 How to
create an
Oscar-worthy
B2B video
strategy on
LinkedIn
Want to win big at the B2B box office? Then start planning your video strategy the way a Hollywood studio would

64 Sophisticated Marketer
 LONG FORM

C
ontrary to what some best practice blog posts might claim,
there is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating compelling
and effective B2B video on LinkedIn or on any other platform.
The approach that you take, and the techniques that you
adopt, will always be guided by the particular audience you’re
targeting, the stage of the buying journey that you’re seeking
to connect with, and the type of video experience that’s going
to be most relevant to that stage.
The moving image is one of the most impactful and versatile
content formats ever invented. Plan, execute and promote your
video content the way a Hollywood mogul would and you’re far
more likely to generate the engagement levels, completed views
and measurable impact on lead quality and conversions that
a shopping trip, and cut it into a video series complete with
behind-the-scenes footage. That’s how you get creative with
B2B video and how you stand out in an increasingly compet-
itive headspace in your audience’s feeds. Video is a visual
medium, which means style is often a big part of the substance.

START WITH A SCRIPT AND A STORYBOARD

This isn’t to say that the subject of video content isn’t impor-
tant. If you don’t have a worthwhile message to communicate
then even the most creative approach to delivering it can’t
help. That’s why it’s impossible to overstate the importance of
a script. It gives you the opportunity to strip written content
down to its core and explore ways to communicate that core
message faster and more visually. It morphs naturally into a
storyboard, through which you start to match the elements of
the idea you’re expressing to images and camera angles.

add up to significant ROI.

THERE IS NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL
WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IN APPROACH TO CREATING
PRACTICE? LET’S FIND OUT: COMPELLING B2B VIDEO

CONSIDER THE CREATIVE OPTIONS It’s the scripting and storyboarding process that lays the
THAT MATTER foundation for great video content. It drives the pace and
An Oscar-worthy B2B video strategy starts out with consid- rhythm of your video, and ensures you communicate what you
ering your options around creative techniques, styles and need to in the amount of your audience’s time that it’s appro-
formats the way an arthouse film director would. That doesn’t priate to take. The shorter the creative format you’re working
just mean choosing between filming an event, a webinar or in, the greater the importance of scripting and storyboarding
a case study. Those are potential subjects for a video, sure in achieving the impact you need.
enough. However, when dealing in video, how you treat those The marketing speaker and bestselling author Andrew
subjects makes all the difference. You wouldn’t claim that Davis is one of the most successful video influencers on
Skyfall starring Daniel Craig and Johnny English Strikes Again LinkedIn at the moment, with episodes of his Loyalty Loop
starring Rowan Atkinson represent the same film strategy video series regularly generating over 10,000 views. Those
because they are both films about British spies. Your video episodes are almost always under five minutes long and they
strategy isn’t just about what you film; it’s very much about feel like they’ve been effortlessly confided to camera. In truth,
how you film it, and how you edit, distribute and promote they take around eight hours each to script and develop.
what you capture. Generally speaking, the more time and effort that you make
Start by considering the audience experience that most available for the scripting process, the better the results.
aligns with what you want to achieve. Is this going to be
a teaser that leaves them intrigued, tantalised and deter-
minedly wanting more? Is it a short-form piece that delivers
the message, blows the bloody doors off and is gone in 15
seconds or less? Is it a lovingly produced, long-form film that
persuades audiences to sit back, stop looking at the clock and
enjoy spending time with you and your brand? Is it a fly-on-
the wall, moving camera, ultra-real experience that leaves
you feeling closer to the person on-screen? When it comes to
designing a video strategy, think in these dimensions rather
than just thinking about what you’re pointing a camera at.
For instance, the creative idea isn’t the decision to film
a webinar. It’s the decision to film it in an unconventional
way, set the discussion in a restaurant, on a boat or as part of

Sophisticated Marketer 65
 LONG FORM
0-15
SECONDS
EMBRACE STRATEGY-DRIVEN CONSTRAINTS
Different B2B video formats naturally suit different points in
the buyer journey. This gives you a strategic framework for
the types of video content you need to produce in order to
achieve your objectives. Each type comes with its own creative
constraints and the real secret to an Oscar-winning B2B video
strategy is embracing those constraints like a film director
looking at his big break.
Here are the creative options that we believe you should
be constructing your B2B video strategy around. Make sure
you’re deploying these formats at the most relevant stages
of the funnel, and then challenge yourself to find creative
approaches to video content that can get relevant ideas across
quickly in the format you’re working in:
1. B2B TEASER VIDEO
(0-15 SECONDS)
Hollywood studios know all about the value of teaser video
content, especially when it comes to promoting films designed
for a younger audience whom they want to reach while they’re
scanning through their social media feeds. The Twilight Saga
and The Hunger Games are both masters of the compressed trail-
er: fast-cutting images that fill the screen for literally a couple of
seconds, communicate little more than the arrival of a film and
confirmation of who’s in it, but do that job brilliantly well.
Can similar several-second teasers play a role in B2B video
strategies? Absolutely. Any video that can communicate its entire
message in the time it would take for someone to scroll down their
screen is a powerful asset. It’s a particularly powerful asset if your
objective is to drive broad awareness of a clear, simple message
at the top of the funnel. If you’re buying Sponsored Content for
Video on a CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) basis, then
a teaser format helps to ensure that more of those impressions
represent people who’ve seen your video in full.
Using teaser video effectively for B2B involves recognizing
its strengths, but also its limitations. You can’t communicate
the depth and detail of a complex B2B solution in 15 seconds
or less (the length we'd define as teaser video); you can’t
66 Sophisticated Marketer
provide reassurance by walking through a solution in detail,
or establish authority by delivering the definitive take on a
subject. However, there’s an awful lot that you can do in that
timeframe and a lot of creativity that you can apply to doing it.
Nanographics, animations that focus on a single compelling
statistic, are a great example of using teaser B2B video formats
to communicate a single, clear idea with impact. Storytelling
in a few seconds can be challenging, but it’s certainly possi-
ble. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” and ““Wrong number,”
says a familiar voice” are just two examples of heartbreaking
six-word stories from the website of the same name; and if you
can cram that much emotion into six words, you can certainly
achieve it in a few seconds.
Of course, one of the most powerful uses of teaser B2B video
formats is to tease. We used them to fantastic effect for the
launch of our recent Read Me series of no-nonsense, straight-
down-the-line guides to LinkedIn: simple text animations that
were designed to intrigue people through oblique references to
Oasis lyrics and drive interest in content that had been designed
by the band’s art director. It worked spectacularly well, driving
our most successful launch of a content asset to date.
Teaser video content doesn’t have to be produced from scratch
of course. If you’ve invested in creating a longer video, set yourself
the creative editing task of breaking it down
into segments of a few seconds that make a
single, coherent point each. Then release
them in waves, preparing audiences for a
longer version or prompting them to click
through to watch in full.
2. SHORT-FORM B2B VIDEO
(15-60 SECONDS)
Short-form video sits in the sweetest of sweet
spots for engagement with video content
in the feed. When we surveyed LinkedIn
members about the characteristics of video
they chose to engage with, 62% replied that
they were happy watching videos up to a
 From left to right:
LinkedIn’s B2B Dinner
for Five, short-form
words of wisdom from
advertising legend
David Ogilvy, the teaser
video used to promote
the Read Me guides.

15-60 15-60
SECONDS SECONDS

minute long. That included 54% who were happy watching for extremely valuable if your audience is made up of prospects
longer than 10 seconds. Whereas teaser videos capture attention, that you know are considering your business and have a
short-form videos invite the type of conscious engagement that relevant reason for spending time with your brand.
produces more definite benefits for a B2B marketing strategy, Long-form B2B video creates the opportunity to explain
while doing so within a timeframe that most audiences regard as complex solutions in depth, establish thought leadership
reasonable and non-imposing. around important issues that can’t be fully treated in short-
The trick to making the most of this opportunity is to get the er formats, and humanize your brand by inviting prospects
value exchange right. Keep short-form video focused, deliver to spend time hearing from a relevant expert or an inspiring
a relevant reason to watch for your audience, and tighten your leader. However, you have to work hard to earn the extended
script to make sure you’re signalling that reason at the start, then attention that makes these things possible, because long-form
reinforce the value of watch- B2B filmmaking is
ing throughout. If your video the most demanding
is one minute long, challenge SHORT-FORM VIDEO IS THE format of all: it requires
yourself to find a way to hook SWEET SPOT FOR ENGAGEMENT discipline, tight script-
the audience’s attention in the ing and editing, deep
first three seconds, then engage
WITH VIDEO IN THE FEED audience understanding
your audience’s emotions over and creative verve and
the next 12. Bringing to life a problem or an opportunity in a ambition.
way that resonates should help drive engagement through the When you create long-form video content, it’s vital to
rest of your short-form running time. embed rewards as part of the script. Ask yourself: what about
This format is also inherently flexible. You can use a running your film will compel people to keep watching? Does it have
time of up to a minute to share your take-aways from a confer- a narrative arc that they’ll be driven to watch through to its
ence, or turn an infographic into an engaging animation. Make conclusion? Will you raise new questions or take things in
the brevity of the running time a focus of the content and unexpected directions throughout your runtime?
demystify a product or service by proving you can explain it in In our experience, the most memorable and successful
60 seconds. Short-form is also a natural format for a well-brand- long-form B2B videos use all of these tricks and more. The
ed video series. We developed a short-form animated series best episodes of Andrew Davis’s Loyalty Loop, for example,
exploring the wisdom of an advertising industry genius, and tell compelling and carefully scripted stories while inter-
asking the question What Would David Ogilvy Do? LinkedIn's spersing moments of humour or visual demonstrations of
VP Marketing Solutions, Penry Price, recorded his own series of ideas to keep people interested. HP’s The Wolf film series
marketing thoughts for the day while walking to work. uses cinematic production, big stars and dramatic story-
telling to communicate fairly complex technical messages
3. LONG-FORM B2B FILMMAKING around cybersecurity, without ever feeling like they’re taking
(60 SECONDS OR LONGER) up too much of your time.
As marketers, we can’t assume that audiences will automat-
ically give us their attention for extended periods of time, 4. LIVE VIDEO IN B2B MARKETING
but we can certainly aspire to persuade them to. In fact, the Live video events (or video that’s recorded as live and then
ability to drive extended engagement through video becomes distributed later) is a form of long-form video that’s worth

Sophisticated Marketer 67
LONG FORM
treating separately within your strategy. It has some signifi-
cant advantages to offer. Production costs can be lower and
production time reduced when you film an event (such as a
webinar, panel or keynote) that’s unfolding naturally.
Genuinely live video events present an opportunity for
prospects to interact with your internal experts in the crucial
middle stages of the buyer journey when many don’t yet feel
ready to reach out to a salesperson. And this has real value on
both sides. In the latest Demand Generation Report survey
of B2B Buyer Content Preferences, 48% of buyers describe
webinars as the most valuable form of content in the crucial
middle stages of the funnel. Recording live video for distribu-
tion later delivers that same feeling of interaction, addressing
customer issues and providing reassurance at scale.
However, it’s a mistake to assume that just because you
captured an event in one continual piece of footage, you
can only distribute it that way. Consider cutting keynotes or
webinars into soundbites for teaser video content, framing
them with graphics to help set the scene and add impact. Try
running these as a series, inviting audiences to click through
to watch your film in full.
HOW TO SPONSOR VIDEO CONTENT FOR
DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE BUYER JOURNEY
Because a strategic approach to B2B video involves planning
different formats and creative approaches to suit different
objectives through the funnel, it should also involve differ-
ent approaches to paid media. When sponsoring your video
content on LinkedIn, tailor your bidding approach to fit the
role that each video is designed to play.
For teaser B2B video, that you’ve created to drive brand
awareness at scale, define your target audience relatively broad-
ly. You can then bid on an impressions (CPM) basis, and consid-
er bidding relatively low in an ‘always-on’ brand strategy that
spends your budget more slowly and delivers a relevant audience
for a lower cost. If you’ve designed long-form video that address-
TAILOR YOUR BIDDING APPROACH
TO FIT THE ROLE THAT EACH
VIDEO IS DESIGNED TO PLAY
es issues in depth for a relevant audience in the later stages of the
funnel, then it makes sense to target more specifically.
You can use LinkedIn Matched Audiences to leverage your
website data for retargeting, or Interest Targeting to reach those
showing an active interest in your sector. In this context, it makes
sense to raise your bids to secure the audience that you want.
BRINGING YOUR STRATEGY TOGETHER:
THE B2B DINNER FOR FIVE
The B2B Dinner for Five is a piece of content that succeeded
by leveraging every one of the formats that we've mentioned
in this feature.
We created a piece of truly long-form video content by invit-
ing B2B marketing influencers to join us for dinner, providing
68 Sophisticated Marketer
60+
SECONDS
60+
SECONDS
Using long-form video content to Oscar-worthy effect: HP's The Wolf film series
(top) and bestselling author, Drew Davis (bottom), one of the most successful
video influencers on LinkedIn
wine and starting conversations about the hot topics for our
profession, and filming the results. We borrowed the idea from
Swingers creator Jon Favreau, who used it to get Hollywood
A-listers to drop their guard when being interviewed. It was a
format that had natural visual interest, and which kept provid-
ing new reasons to watch as the conversation took new turns,
so it ticked a lot of the boxes that we needed for long-form
content to work. The discussions were very relevant to B2B
marketers, which fitted the more involved role that long-form
naturally plays in the buyer journey. We edited it tightly into a
25-minute episode to make the most of these advantages.
But just because we had a great piece of long-form content
didn’t mean that was all that we had. We promoted our film
the way a Hollywood studio pitching to Oscar voters would.
We created a dozen short-form films, with edits focused
on specific themes, that we released in a series. We created
teaser-length ads to release in the feed and give people a taste
of what we were doing. We hosted a live video premiere, where
we reassembled the cast, talked through a showing of the film,
and took questions from a live audience. As a result, we gener-
ated over 16,000 video views, were able to link those views to
our business pipeline, and achieved a projected ROI in Year 1
alone of 966%.
That’s the kind of B2B box office you can generate when
you approach your video content the way a Hollywood studio
would: with an audience experience that’s strategically calcu-
lated, executed to relevant constraints with creative verve,
and then promoted for everything it’s worth. If you take video
content seriously, and plan your formats and buying plans
accordingly, that’s what you can deliver.
You’ll find more inspiration for leveraging video in your
strategy on our blog at https://lnkd.in/B2Bvideo
SSoopphhi is st ti ic caat teedd MMaar rkkeet teer r 11
11
 Brand safety or
ad performance?
HERE’S WHY IT’S
A FALSE CHOICE
Grace MacDonald explains why brand safety is a
growing dilemma for marketers, and how they can solve it

T
he latest research into brand safety highlights an appar-
ent dilemma for marketers. It’s clear that they are hugely
concerned about brand safety for advertising. It’s clear that
their concerns are justified. However, it’s equally clear that a lot
of marketers believe their hands are tied. When the digital adver-
tising platform Sizmek surveyed 522 advertising decision-makers
across EMEA and the US in August, 64% said that achieving brand safety for their W0RDS BY JASON MILLER
campaigns negatively impacts on performance and 71% said that it was difficult
to achieve reach while delivering ads to the right audience in the right context. At least
two-thirds of marketers have been convinced that putting their brand in risky environments
is the only way to drive the results that they need to report to the business.

The false choice on brand safety tutes ‘inappropriate’? When Digiday

If you buy into this assumption as a marketer, then you are left
wrestling with all kinds of unattractive questions: how safe
do you need your brands to be, and how much performance
are you willing to sacrifice to secure that safety? Can you risk
reporting higher costs for clicks, leads and impressions, to
prevent damage to your brand? How much of a drag on ROI
can you risk to prevent a PR firestorm?
These feel like impossible choices. I would strongly argue that
they are false choices. They’re based on a misguided valuation
of the performance that brand safety supposedly undermines.
We’ve been too quick to accept that brand safety comes at
the expense of meaningful results. I’d argue that looking past
initial vanity metrics quickly changes this view.
What does brand safety mean?
Most marketers would define brand safety as avoiding their
brand appearing in inappropriate environments or next to
inappropriate content. The question of course is, what consti-
Media and GumGum asked market-
ers to rank their brand safety concerns,
they were (in descending order): hate speech,
pornography, violence, fake news, divisive politics, disasters
and tragedies, and competing brands. Context also matters.
A sports nutrition brand might consider a news story about
performance enhancing drugs in sport to be an inappropriate
environment, but plenty of other businesses would not.
Another question for marketers to consider is how close
an association is ‘unsafe’. Does a problem only occur when
a brand appears next to hate speech, or is any environment
associated with these things unsafe? After all, appearing there
supports a platform for those views.
In an Oath survey 99% of advertising decision-makers said
they were concerned about their brands appearing in unsafe
environments, and 58% said their concern had increased
compared to a year ago. Over a third (38%) told Sizmek their
brand had definitely run ads on harmful web pages.

70 Sophisticated Marketer

WHEN YOU LOOK
CLOSELY, THE
PERFORMANCE YOU
TAKE BRAND SAFETY
RISKS FOR OFTEN
ISN’T WORTH IT
When Sizmek asked advertisers to define
what a brand safety strategy involved, 60% identi-
fied blocking the most harmful pages and 50% named
managing a blacklist of sites. However, this won’t catch every
issue. Things aren’t helped by the complexities of the digital
supply chain. That’s why 76% of advertising decision-makers
say they’re prioritizing getting more transparency from their
digital inventory.
Taking a context-led approach
Of course, the most effective way to get more transparency is to
be specific about which publishers and platforms you partner
with. In GumGum’s ranking of platforms considered brand
safe by advertisers, LinkedIn scored +45 while all other major
social platforms received double-digit negative scores. This
isn’t a surprise when you consider the consistent professional
and appropriate context that the LinkedIn feed provides. In the
THE DEBRIEF
Sizmek study, 45% define brand safety as delivering ads only on
premium publisher sites, and 85% say they are planning to scale
this form of contextual targeting.
This though, is where that assumption about safety compro-
mising effectiveness kicks in. Marketers are told they have to
worry about costs going up and performance going down as
a result of their more selective approach. Before they take the
decision to compromise on brand safety though, they need to
ask three questions about what a campaign is trying to achieve—
and how it’s trying to achieve it:
How are you measuring performance?
Is the performance that you are taking brand safety risks for
really worth it? As B2B marketers and their businesses place
greater emphasis on revenue-based metrics, it’s becoming
clear that optimizing around click-through rate (CTR) and
cost per lead (CPL) can become dangerously misleading if
you’re not also measuring the value of those leads. Most B2B
businesses are better off generating fewer leads at a higher
CPL but converting those leads to customers at a higher rate.
This delivers a lower cost per sale, a higher real Return on
Investment (ROI), and keeps sales teams a lot happier as well.
What are the targeting assumptions?
Before you decide whether it’s really more efficient to target
an audience at scale based purely on behavior, ask how
confident you are in your starting definition of your audience.
When you target people within specific environments that
you know are relevant, you have more chance of finding the
right prospects. And with this increased confidence, you can
loosen your definition of your target audience slightly, buy
at a lower CPM or CPC as a result, and find more reach and
scale cost-efficiently. The Sizmek study found that a majority
of marketers are now favouring this approach. When asked
to choose between “right person” and “right place” for their
campaigns, context takes priority.
Do contextual signals matter?
What your ad says is often seen as a less reliable indicator of
credibility, trustworthiness and value than the signal sent by
where your ad appears. The clicks you generate from unsafe
environments come at a cost that’s not included in the CPC.
Compromising on brand safety in order to safeguard
campaign performance is a trade-off that makes less and less
sense the closer you look at what you’re getting in return. If
you’re a B2B marketer aiming to deliver on metrics that mean
more to your business’s bottom line, then there’s really very
little to lose by advertising only in relevant environments
where you can be genuinely confident of safety. To do other-
wise involves taking more risks than is often realized for less
reward than is typically claimed.
Discover how buying display ads programmatically on
LinkedIn delivers accurate engagement in a premium
environment at https://lnkd.in/programmatic-display
Sophisticated Marketer 71
THE DEBRIEF
The content
captivating CMOs
We used the LinkedIn Engagement Index to analyze the most popular posts among Chief Marketing Officers,
and reveal the issues and ideas that are shaping their thinking
T
hey are one of the most important and
influential audiences in marketing,
helping to set the direction of
brands, businesses and B2B buying budgets.
Understanding the content that Chief Marketing
Officers (CMOs) seek out and consume shines a
light on the issues setting the marketing agenda.
Using LinkedIn data, we’re able to analyze that
content like never before: we can reveal the posts
WHAT GETS CMOS CLICKING? THE KEY THEMES:
What broader content themes help to explain which posts made it into our Top Ten? To find the answer, we analyzed the most
significant topics among the Top 100 posts for CMO engagement. Here are the key issues that emerged from that analysis:
72 Sophisticated Marketer
that CMOs are clicking on and engaging with, and
the ideas that are shaping their thinking.
Using anonymized LinkedIn data, we’ve
tracked all of the posts engaged with on our
platform by members in EMEA who occupy CMO
roles. By analyzing this data, we’ve been able
to identify the Top Ten posts that CMOs took the
greatest interest in during the second half of 2018.
And we’ve also gone deeper, to reveal the broader
patterns of engagement in our Top 100.
To identify the posts that are really setting
the CMO agenda, we’ve used a metric called the
LinkedIn Engagement Index. This is a measure
of engagement by CMOs relative to the overall
LinkedIn audience. In other words, it reveals the
content that CMOs are particularly interested in
because they are CMOs, and screens out posts that
are more popular generally.
Digital soul-searching:
Personalization and
AI tools impress – but
there are concerns too
CMOs are under pressure to translate new digital
technologies into bottom-line growth, and
hunting out content that can provide inspiration.
It’s a trend that drove the news story about
L’Oréal’s new marketing ROI tool to the top of our
ranking – and that piece is far from alone. CMOs
are interested both in who controls consumer
data (with Google, Amazon and Netflix of
particular interest), and how best to use that
data to drive growth (the subject of a popular
post by McKinsey on customer experience and
personalization at scale).
However, there’s another side to CMOs’ interest
in digital innovation. They are alive to the risk of
digital media and metrics undermining creativity and
branding, which is why opinion pieces like The death
of Don Draper and Targeted messaging is only one
piece of the advertising puzzle both feature in our
Top Ten. An article by legendary researcher Les Binet
on digital skewing marketers towards sales-driven
advertising also makes the Top 30.

The Top Ten pieces for
CMOs on LinkedIn:
1 6
How L’Oréal drives
marketing effectiveness
and media neutrality
The story of a new tool for the
brand that measures the ROI of
media investments in real time.
2
The death of Don Draper
Is advertising’s growing
dependence on algorithms bad
for creativity and society? That
was the argument of this feature.
3
Martin Sorrell’s New
Business Plan: Cut
Creative Agencies Out of
the Loop Altogether
Analysis of the business model
for Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4
Capital, and what it suggests
about the future structure of the
advertising industry.
4
Airbnb CMO hunt
continues as its former
top marketers unite to launch
own consultancy
News that Airbnb was still
hunting for a new CMO, a year
after the departure of Jonathan
Mildenhall.
5 Accenture’s Nikki
Mendonca: ‘There is a lot
of incompetence within the
current marketing services
industry’
The former President of OMD
Worldwide offered a critique
of the current state of advertising
and media following her move
to Accenture.
Targeted messaging is
only one piece of the
advertising puzzle
Ogilvy Group UK’s Vice Chairman,
Rory Sutherland, argues for the
importance of creativity over
message delivery.
7
The most influential
out of home (OOH)
campaigns of 2018 so far
Advertising and media experts
ranked their favorite outdoor
campaigns of the year.
8
Omnicom Agencies
Expand Strategic Teams
More news with implications
for the future of the advertising
industry model.
9
Ad firms among House of
Fraser creditors: Google
owed £1.3m, 18ft & Rising
£90k, Merkle £184k
Story revealing the advertising,
media and tech businesses in
danger of losing money due
to the retail brand entering
administration.
10 Martin Sorrell Has
A Startling Business
Plan For His Agency:
Disintermediating His
Old Firm
Another take on Sir Martin’s
next moves, and what they
might say about marketers’
changing demand for
advertising agencies.
Peering at peers: CMOs are
hungry for news about other CMOs
Our Top Ten feature on Airbnb’s ongoing hunt for a new CMO is no
outlier. The most senior marketers in EMEA actively hunt out news on one
another, with nine of the top 100 posts in our ranking featuring the term
‘CMO’ in their title. It’s an indication of a small but close-knit community
that face particular issues in evolving the role of marketing and meeting
C-suite demands around business strategy and more meaningful metrics.
Who’s winning?
Rankings come out top
Like most audiences, CMOs can’t resist a compelling list of who’s better,
who’s best and who’s outperforming whom (which we suppose, puts
this feature right on trend). The most influential OOH campaigns drove
the most engagement of these rankings, but it had close competition
from a further seven in our Top 100, including Generation Z’s favorite
brands, a brand relevance index for the UK, the best social media tools
for marketers and the top women under 30 working in digital in the UK.
Agency 2020: They keep a close
eye on their closest suppliers
Why did Sir Martin Sorrell make our Top Ten twice? In part because he’s
a marketing industry celebrity, perhaps because of the controversial
circumstances in which he left WPP, but most importantly, because his
new venture represents a challenge to the traditional agency model.
And that’s something CMOs are consistently interested in. Content
exploring how advertising and media are evolving draws a lot of chief
marketers’ attention. That’s the real interest behind Nikki Mendonca’s
take on the shortcomings of Marketing Services (also in our Top Ten)
and Omnicom’s move to prioritize strategy.
Crypto-curiosity: Blockchain
looks like the next big thing
None of them made it into our Top Ten – but the prevalence of posts
around cryptocurrency and Blockchain in our Top 100 shows the
impact that CMOs expect this technology to have. In all, 11 of our
Top 100 featured at least one of these two terms in the title. Together
they explored new developments like The European Parliament
greenlighting cryptocurrency as an alternative to money, whether
Starbucks will accept it, and how Blockchain can be used to solve
real-world problems. The most popular of these posts, though, showed
that CMO’s greatest need is for more understanding. Top books about
Blockchain and cryptocurrency ranked 34 in our list.
CMOs remain creative fans
In amid the advertising industry disruption and new tech, it’s worth
remembering that CMOs are also big fans of creativity in marketing and
advertising. It’s not just that two of our top ten posts specifically argue
for the value of brands and creative advertising. From praise for Nike’s
Colin Kaepernick campaign to criticism of Burberry’s new logo, to the
story of Kodak leveraging its brand heritage, CMOs stay attuned to the
creative zeitgeist. And they are always on the look-out for inspiration.
Sophisticated Marketer 73
 The
Saigon Kick
secret to living
a face-melting
creative life,
despite the setbacks
Rock god and alleged hand model Jason Bieler
talks to The Sophisticated Marketer about storytelling
and social media’s changing rules of engagement

ver felt kicked in the teeth by a marketing multi-platform marketer as well as a musician. From founding Bieler
career? Stymied by constantly shifting Bros. Records with his brother Aaron, to building one of the funniest and
politics at work? Sidelined by arbitrary most irreverent social media profiles out there, to finding a new way to
budget cuts? Your very existence threat- record and distribute music in the age of Spotify. He’s found new opportu-
ened by the next disruptive technology? nities everywhere he’s turned, kept his warmth and warped, wicked sense
Wondering why you keep going and of humour, combined a thick skin with constant creative thinking, and
considering whether now might be the spent a life doing the thing he loves as a result.
time to pack it all in? Jason Bieler isn't just a former rock star. He's an inspiring example of
Then you'll have a lot of empathy for a marketer succeeding in the age of disruption, and on the cruel cutting
Jason Bieler. He was the guitarist and edge that is today’s music industry. Here are four pieces of wisdom that the
songwriter for what was, very briefly, experiences have taught him:
one of the biggest bands in the world: Saigon Kick.
When he decided to write about how the band went
from wall-to-wall radio airplay to having deals and
opportunities collapse around them, it became one
of the most widely shared posts ever written about
the music business.
If you took a simplistic view, you’d say that Jason
is a musician who’s been very unlucky. Saigon Kick
were cruelly cut out of the music industry because
they’d had a huge, accidental hit with a ballad—and
in the Nirvana-inspired era of grunge that made
them a toxic property. “We pretty much killed hair
metal,” as he puts it.
Jason though, has kept finding ways to live
a creative life by embracing the need to be a

74 Sophisticated Marketer

1 3
REAL STORIES DON'T HAVE STRAIGHT-LINE TRAJECTORIES
Social media is filled with very simple and completely unrealistic
stories of success. If we’re honest, a lot of marketing falls into this
category. While we love the concept of stories, those we tell have
often had all of the potential dramatic tension edited out. Jason charac-
terizes these straight-line story trajectories as “I had a tennis lesson and
then became world champion.” In marketing, we might characterize it as “I
bought the brand and everything was instantly better, for ever.”
Because these stories don’t reflect the two-steps-forward-one-step-
back reality of most professional experiences, they are less relateable.
They make the point you want to make, but they won’t do much more.
It’s a question of what your objectives are when you tell these tales. If you
want people to take a deeper interest in you, you need to go deeper and
be more open and authentic with what you share.
2
WHOSE JOURNEY ARE YOU TAKING PEOPLE ON?
Jason refuses to answer questions about what this or that song
lyric is really all about—and that’s because it prevents an audience
taking ownership of those ideas and relating them to their own lives.
“People want to be taken on a journey, but they don’t want it to be your
journey,” he says. They want something that they can overlay onto their own
circumstance and experience. When telling brand stories consider balancing
specific details with the need to leave space for your audience's imagination.
"I DON'T SELL
THE MUSIC.
IF YOU'RE
INTERESTED
ENOUGH IN ME,
THEN I DON'T
HAVE TO"
THE DEBRIEF
FOCUS ON BEING INTERESTING FIRST
Hand model, amateur surgeon, paranor-
mal instigator, Baron Von Bielski… the real
Jason Bieler is none of these things, yet he’s
branded himself as all of them on social media.
It’s all part of a carefully considered marketing
strategy to raise awareness of the music he puts
out through Bieler Bros. Records. The way Jason
sees it, the rules of social media engagement have
changed. Audiences tend to take an interest in
people they instinctively find funny and interest-
ing. Doing the unexpected, being charismatic,
throwing the odd surreal grenade out there… it’s
the most reliable strategy that exists for building
an audience. And once you have that interest
there’s no need to promote your product directly.
As Jason puts it: “I don’t sell the music. If you’re
interested enough in me then eventually, you are
going to go there anyway.”
4
THE REWARDS OF BUILDING AN
AUDIENCE SLOWLY
Music streaming services like Spotify may
mean that professional musicians make less
money from your tracks, but Jason would rather
celebrate the fact that you can now record music,
put it in front of people worldwide, and get instant
feedback in a way that was never possible before.
The way he talks about it, today’s digital music
industry has much in common with the experience
of bands trying to break through in the 70s and 80s.
It’s about doing the hard yards of thousands of gigs
(or downloads), reaching and engaging one fan at a
time. “U2 got to be U2 because of the 8 million gigs
that they did. The problem so many acts today have
is that they haven’t got the foundation to fall back on
when their instant fame wears off.”
There’s an interesting insight in there for
marketers, even though it’s not always an easy
insight to apply. We often find ourselves under
pressure to deliver instant results . We’re accus-
tomed to think of success as building an audience
quickly, or generating as many leads as we can in
a short space of time. However, there’s a question
of depth, quality and relevance of engagement
that can easily get lost in the process. Taking time
to build an audience more slowly, through more
personalized and relevant experiences, can deliver
more sustained attention, greater loyalty, higher-val-
ue leads and greater lifetime customer value. We
just need the patience to do it – and having the right
measures of success to back us up can help as well.
Sophisticated Marketer 75
12 Sophisticated Marketer
 THE DEBRIEF

What’s in your bag?

LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Global Marketing Keith Richey talks us through
the gear that no well-travelled B2B marketer should be without.

MY MACBOOK LAPTOP
Pretty self-explanatory. Note the on-brand
WATER BOTTLE
Sophisticated Marketer sticker!
Gotta stay hydrated
when traveling. My
family would be
proud!

EARPHONES
Music is one of my biggest passions, so I
almost always have a pair of these on.

GRANOLA BAR
For refueling on long flights.

SCARF
I’m traveling in Ireland and
England at the moment, so this
pairs nicely with the weather.

SUNGLASSES
Like I said, I’m
traveling in
Ireland and
England, but
you never
know!

NEW YORKER MAGAZINES

Always edifying, cover to cover.
Make for great plane reading.

MY ID BADGE
My favorite feature is that it works
in any LinkedIn office globally.
Sounds simple but it matters!

Sophisticated Marketer 77
HOWARD ASHMAN
Howard Ashman wasn’t happy simply to
In 1987, very few
hand over the songs and take the money. He
people believed was a craftsman. And his belief in the value
Disney could ever of the content he was creating meant taking
produce another a passionate interest in how those songs
blockbuster animated were sung, who sang them, and the setting in
which they were sung. He couldn’t help but
movie. Its last big
influence the films he was contributing to. For
success in the genre The Little Mermaid that meant insisting that
had been a decade Disney hire performers from musical theater,
before. It was facing who could act when singing, and reworking
intense competition the plot so that it revolved around showpiece
songs that moved the events forward.
from rival animation After the film took more than $200 million
studios, and senior worldwide, Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg
execs warned that knew where a lot of the credit rested. He
The Little Mermaid, approved Ashman’s pitch for a musical
version of Aladdin, complete with the three
in production for half
songs he and Menken had written for it.
a century, wouldn’t
be a massive hit. Then A FINAL REQUEST
somebody decided Before production could kick off on
to persuade Howard Aladdin though, Disney had another
ask. Another animated film, Beauty
Ashman and Alan and the Beast was going nowhere as a
Menken to write the non-musical. Could Ashman fix it?
songs for The Little The timing was terrible. Ashman’s
Mermaid. And health was failing badly. He’d been
diagnosed as HIV Positive in 1988. The
everything about
development of Beauty and the Beast
the future of Disney would involve Disney animators flying out
changed. from California to Ashman’s home in New
York, where he was growing progressively
weaker. However, his determination to
78 Sophisticated Marketer
create the best possible songs and the best
possible film around them, never changed.
COMMITMENT TO CRAFT
CHANGES EVERYTHING
It was Ashman who insisted that the Beast’s
castle should be filled with friendly talking
objects—because otherwise, who would
be there to sing the songs he was writing? It
was Ashman who demanded a village full of
people to perform his opening number—and
the villainous Gaston to deliver another of his
show-stopping tunes. He cast opera singers
and Broadway performers. He demonstrated
emphatically that a commitment to perfecting
every detail delivered something so much
more than the sum of those details. Because
Ashman took such ownership of the content
he created, Disney produced a film that was
unlike any animation previously seen—and
the first to be nominated for The Academy
Award for best picture.
Howard Ashman never got to see the
final version of Beauty and the Beast. He
died in March 1991, shortly after hearing
how well the press screenings had gone.
His contribution to the studio was tragically
short—but hugely profound. Disney CEO
Jeffrey Katzenberg referred to Walt Disney
and Ashman as the two guardian angels
touching every note and frame that Disney
would now produce. Confirmation that
belief in the value of content makes you
more than just a content creator.
How are you investing
in your employees?
Providing better spaces and enabling collaboration is key
to retaining top talent and keeping your business on track.

Find out why the right workspace matters at

we.co/workspace-matters

+44 203 695 7895

14 Sophisticated Marketer