Barbie Mattie, former VP Principal Analyst at Forrester and current growth strategy consultant at Iron Horse, discusses the findings of a recent report she authored on investments that B2B companies are making in 2024. The report reveals that the top three most important outcomes for high-growth companies are efficiency, retention, and expansion.
“Content with journey-specific messaging is the most effective mechanism to get from target to ICP; optimizing that practice enables a more efficient go-to-market approach.” – Barbie Mattie
Mattie emphasizes the importance of content in achieving these outcomes, stating that content is the new ABM (account-based marketing). She highlights the need for audience-centric content and a connected buyer journey. The report also shows that high-growth companies’ top priority is investing in content marketing technology. Mattie advises CMOs to learn from the successes of high-growth companies and emulate their strategies.
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[Transcript]
Introduction
[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got an extraordinary conversation with Barbie Mattie. Now, Barbie is not only a former VP principal analyst at Forrester, but today at Iron Horse, you work with emerging growth companies on their growth strategies or go-to-market and growth strategies. You also have recently authored, which is what we’re going to be talking about today, a report that looked forward and looked at investments that B2B companies were making in the coming year.
[00:00:36] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to spend a lot of time on that report, what came out of that report, and what we can take away as CMOs running marketing in our organizations today. I’ll leave it up to you to expand on your background.
[00:00:56] Steve MacDonald: Then let’s talk about what this report is and what it does.
[00:01:00] Barbie Mattie: Thank you, Steve. Happy to be here. I joined SiriusDecisions in 2015 after 12 and a half years of working at Advanced Micro Devices, an ingredient brand that did B2B2C marketing. So it couldn’t really get any more complicated than that.
[00:01:18] Barbie Mattie: When I joined SiriusDecisions, we ran an emerging growth practice where we helped companies. Under 150 million revenue was the best proxy we had. We wanted to help clients based on maturity, but there’s no crunch-based information on company maturity. So, we developed a lot of research, content, tools, and support to teach companies how to set up the foundation for predictable, repeatable, and scalable growth and also helped with the how-to’s.
[00:01:43] Barbie Mattie: The nice thing about moving from SiriusDecisions and Forrester to Iron Horse is that I still get to do that. Except Iron Horse actually executes and activates programs as well.
[00:02:05] Barbie Mattie: So, it’s a really nice compliment to my past experience to be able to advise, strategize, and then actually help do the work and close that loop.
[00:02:17] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. And part of doing that work is obviously continuing to advise, and this report you’ve put out is a big part of that. Give us the lowdown on the report: the goals, who it was with, and what you were trying to accomplish.
[00:02:32] Steve MacDonald: That would give us a good starting point.
[00:02:36] Barbie Mattie: Sure. This was in collaboration with the Enterprise Growth Alliance, so Iron Horse partnered with Demandbase and Netline for this report. We have a whole host of other partners that we work with as well. And so the report was trying to figure out the answer to one important question: what are the most important outcomes you plan to invest in with your next annual budget?
[00:03:03] Barbie Mattie: The exact wording of the question was, what is your most important outcome that you’re trying to achieve with your next planned investment? This was a forward look at 2024, and the way we looked at the data is that it is more insightful to not look at just a lump of data.
[00:03:29] Barbie Mattie: I like to play around with the different lenses, whether it’s industry or company size. In my years as an analyst, I’ve always looked at data comparing companies that are high growth to companies that are flat to declining or maybe are not growing quite as much. In today’s economy, you really want to understand what the companies who have managed to grow did so you can emulate that because we don’t have the luxury of a lot of trial and error with limited and dwindling budgets.
[00:04:00] Barbie Mattie: The hypothesis that I continue to try to prove is that we should follow high-growth companies. And so we’re going to look at how capitalists do and emulate their spend patterns because they grew by being able to do that.
[00:04:15] Steve MacDonald: It’s so important today because the cost of funds in raising capital today is so much higher than it was just a few years ago.
[00:04:25] Steve MacDonald: So the idea and the focus on how do we achieve growth without lots of experimentation in the middle of that, where there’s going to be a lot of failures, this report lays the groundwork for. And when you said high growth companies, these were companies that went through 11 to 40 percent growth revenue growth over the past year.
[00:04:45] Barbie Mattie: 11 to 40 percent growth happened in 2023, which is pretty impressive. And to your point about PE companies and funding and getting more funding, I just saw a chart from Visual Capitalist yesterday about how the PE dry powder market is 2.5 trillion. So that’s a large TAM to go after.
[00:05:12] Barbie Mattie: To go after additional funding, you need to have your act together.
The Importance of Efficiency, Retention, and Expansion
[00:05:18] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. I’m sure everybody’s chomping at the bit here to understand. Give us the top line of the key objectives for where you’re making investments. What was that in this coming year that came out of that report?
[00:05:33] Barbie Mattie: Yeah, absolutely. At Forrester, I did a lot of work around annual planning and budgeting. And I don’t use their data anymore, but conceptually, the approach to looking at budgets is pretty industry standard. You look at marketing as a percentage of revenue, and then you look at the people, programs, and technology required to do everything the company is asking marketing to do.
[00:05:59] Barbie Mattie: And so that was the lens. It was like, Hey, what if you’re trying to achieve an important outcome? I’ll get to what those important outcomes are in a second. With your next investment plan, you have to know what people, programs, and technology are required to support that. Now, the question that I asked, which this whole study keys off of, is the most important outcome.
[00:06:21] Barbie Mattie: It was really interesting when I looked at it through the lens of companies that were growing annual revenue by 11 to 40%. The sample size was 252. So that’s statistically significant. And then it was also statistically significant when I broke it down.
[00:06:41] Barbie Mattie: It was weird because no matter how I cut the data, the top three most important were always efficiency, retention, and expansion business. And it was to the point where there was a sample size of one that differentiated efficiency being the most important and retention being the second most important.
[00:07:03] Barbie Mattie: So those are the three most important outcomes that high-growth companies are focused on. Now that we know the outcomes, I looked at the people, programs, and tech to support that. I don’t have the specific budget numbers or budget breakdown data, but directionally, it’s very helpful in figuring out where you need to invest.
[00:07:27] Steve MacDonald: And when we say efficiency, is that efficiency in the go-to market? In acquiring new logos? And then you said right below that was retention. We tend to think a lot about acquiring a new business and the amount of effort and resources that goes into that, but you’re saying these were really neck and neck.
[00:07:47] Barbie Mattie: The easiest way for me to describe efficiency that resonates with pretty much everyone is just staying a bit of positive. That is efficiency, however else it’s defined below that. I can’t account for all the variables for how people defined efficiency. But as long as you’re even a bit of positive, you’re good.
The Role of Content in Achieving Key Objectives
[00:08:08] Steve MacDonald: Okay. Good to know. All right. So if we want to talk about the people in the programs and things that people are looking to invest in, when you reached out to me, you said, Steve, we’ve got to talk right because this report came out, and it was really all about content.
[00:08:30] Steve MacDonald: Explain that so that we can understand that. And in fact, you actually said that this was not only content, but you’re framing this as content is the new ABM. So that’s a lot to get into, but let’s open that door.
[00:08:50] Barbie Mattie: Okay, I can follow along. Those are like four questions in one, but I’m tracking.
[00:08:54] Barbie Mattie: Luckily, I have analyst experience. So, when we looked at the data for the most important outcomes, efficiency, retention, and expansion, there was a consistent pattern across all of those, with all of them being somewhere within the top three. It was either you need a content development person, or you need to have a buyer-centric or audience-centric; however you refer to your audience, you have to have audience-centric content. From a technology perspective, the number one technology planned for high-growth companies is investing in content marketing technology, so the report screams everything about content.
[00:09:38] Barbie Mattie: And what’s interesting is when you dive deep into the data from a people perspective, the top two headcounts are toggled between data and analytics and marketing ops across efficiency, retention, and expansion. Those are the top two because the actual percentage numbers reflected in the study indicated that these people were net new and that it was a role or capability that wasn’t quite fulfilled yet.
[00:10:11] Barbie Mattie: The content was consistently the third option the entire way across. So, the third most important hire for efficiency, retention, and expansion was content development. But these percentages were really low, like 13 and 14 percent. That indicates that they already have people doing content, and they’re adding more because it’s so important.
[00:10:33] Barbie Mattie: So that’s the actual people piece. The technology piece was content marketing. We called it content marketing, but it lumped in content intelligence tools and other things. So, it was just everything you can do to make your content better and more efficient.
[00:10:53] Barbie Mattie: So that was the technology piece. And then, from a demand and ABM perspective, the options came out a little weird when you think about optimizing outbound for retention business. That was a whole other podcast that I did, and we can reference it if you want to. I talked with David Fortino and Sandra Freeman from Netline and Demandbase, respectively, and they have some really good insights on why they think that is. So I would rather answer the why is content the new ABM? And that’s because it was all about building audience-centric content and creating a more connected buyer journey across the efficiency retention and expansion business.
The Need for Audience-Centric Content
[00:11:40] Barbie Mattie: When you build audience-centric content, you can make a more connected buyer’s journey, and just the fact that those were so synergistic was really cool to see in the data. All right, so now I’m going to answer your question. The content is the new ABM was a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
[00:11:57] Barbie Mattie: I was trying to be provocative. Just humor me for a second, Steve, with a mini history lesson. ABM has been around for a while, since about the 1990s. And it was more of an approach that was just marketing to applicants. When I was at AMD, we had six OEMs we worked with. That was ABM with six original equipment manufacturers.
[00:12:20] Barbie Mattie: You’re still marketing to accounts, but because it was a bit nascent back then, and we didn’t have the ABM technology to support that, it’s constantly evolving. The 90s are how many decades ago? I don’t want to count because that makes me realize how old I am. But then it became more widely adopted in the mid-2010s, and it became a standard industry practice or approach to aligning demand generation programs, content, and messaging against high-value accounts.
[00:12:41] Barbie Mattie: That’s a long-winded way of saying content is the new ABM because the same diligence that was used to target these high-value accounts needs to be applied to go beyond the targeting.
[00:13:05] Barbie Mattie: So, what I mean by that is, it’s the job of B2B sellers and marketers to work in tandem to permeate the entire account. You can target accounts, but you have to go beyond to get through to the accounts, the buying groups, and your ideal customer profile. And so, content with journey-specific messaging is the most effective mechanism to get from target to ICP; optimizing that practice enables a more efficient go-to-market approach.
[00:13:38] Barbie Mattie: It allows faster account expansion business, and that ultimately supports your retention goals. So, see how I closed-looped that?
[00:13:49] Steve MacDonald: You did. What was great was that we reached out to CMOs and asked them to look at the report and give us some of their takeaways that they had from this because so much here is very instructive to what we should be doing, where we should be investing resources and time and energy this next year.
[00:14:15] Steve MacDonald: So I wanted to read a few if that was okay. I’m going to start with a former colleague of yours, Nancy Meluso, whom you worked with at Forrester. My understanding is that you both went out as sales and marketing and did advisement with the Forrester clients.
[00:14:40] Steve MacDonald: So Nancy knows a few things about what we’re talking about here, too.
[00:14:44] Barbie Mattie: Probably more than me.
[00:14:45] Steve MacDonald: It’s about the ongoing delivery of value. And when you talked about the ABM process, the reason content is so important is that through an ABM process, we can’t just keep selling and selling.
[00:15:06] Steve MacDonald: We have to keep adding value. And so when we add value on a regular basis, that is a very instructive, important part of that ABM process. So I think what Nancy said there was fantastic.
[00:15:22] Barbie Mattie: Value is so important, especially when you start talking about the positive. Also, one of the things that we saw in the data and around the content marketing technology is that most companies have it.
[00:15:38] Barbie Mattie: And if they weren’t, they were going to buy it for the first time. But they’re realizing they’re not getting the value out of their current technology that they could. So they’re spending the time and money rather than just saying, Oh, this isn’t working.
[00:16:00] Barbie Mattie: They’re putting a very good lens on how to get more value out of it so you can have that more connected buyer’s journey that’s automated with the technology.
Content Marketing as the Best Bang for Your Buck
[00:16:13] Steve MacDonald: Very good. Here’s another from CMO Karen Scott. Karen said her big takeaway was that the best bang for the buck today is content.
[00:16:27] Barbie Mattie: Yeah. First of all, it’s a great soundbite. And it’s true. I like that so much because one of the things that I looked at when I was really spelunking in the data is the pattern of the people, the process, and the technology across retention, efficiency, and expansion business.
[00:16:52] Barbie Mattie: And there were very distinct patterns when I held everything together. So, getting the biggest bang for your buck with content. You can grow through retention and expansion business and by being more efficient if you really focus on content, meaning people adding more people to your current content base, building audience-centric content from a program perspective, and making a more connected buyer journey.
[00:17:21] Barbie Mattie: And to what I said earlier about extracting more value out of your content marketing technology, whether you have it or you’re thinking of buying it, think of it more than just in as a point solution. Think about holistically how it can integrate. That’s absolutely getting more bang for your buck across people, programs, and technology to drive efficiency, retention, and expansion.
Moving Beyond MQLs and Focusing on Value
[00:17:45] Steve MacDonald: I love it. So here’s another one. This was from a CMO, Jessica Zall, and she said that we, as a company, are hyper-focused on increasing efficiency and decreasing CAC.
[00:17:59] Barbie Mattie: I love that she’s not talking about more MQLs. That is a positive sign that the measurement by which marketing contributes to the business is the customer acquisition cost, which really puts the lens on adding more customers rather than just the lead angle.
[00:18:22] Barbie Mattie: Forrester has a whole bunch of research on how leads are dead, and it’s all about opportunities. So, I defer back to Forrester, Terry Flaherty, and Amy Hawthorne for those subject matter experts. But, yeah, starting with the appropriate and important metrics, especially around your efficiency and your contact, using it, how to capture and engage your customers, and then calculating that to decrease CAC to be more efficient, that’s how content is the best bang for your buck today.
[00:18:54] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. And it’s interesting because Forrester has written a lot on the MQL is dead. There are a lot of CMOs that don’t even count MQLs anymore because they’re not qualified enough. They’re not ready for that conversation to say, let’s go to the next level.
[00:19:12] Steve MacDonald: So really important. This is one of the best takeaways from the CMOs we shared this with. This is from Kevin Bobowski, a three-time B2B CMO currently at a company called Aware. He said that with the focus on efficiency in 2024, each new piece of content produced needs to absolutely deliver: no missing the mark, no mass production of content by an army.
[00:19:38] Steve MacDonald: Be precise and remain laser-focused on the needs of your ideal customer profile.
[00:19:45] Barbie Mattie: I love everything about that. I love that content will now have, for lack of a better term, a P&L. I love that we can’t miss the mark—just that affirmative statement.
[00:20:03] Barbie Mattie: I love how we don’t need a team, an army of people creating content if we’re targeting the ICP to begin with. I love everything about that. The only thing I would need to augment that, but it’s an amazing quote, so I wouldn’t try, is to make sure you’ve got that connected buyer experience through all of this.
[00:20:21] Barbie Mattie: And that’s the glue that holds all of those amazing statements from that quote together over the years.
The Impact on Sales Cycles and Brand Building
[00:20:33] Steve MacDonald: So we’re talking a lot about content here, but over the years, as you’re making these recommendations, you’re now executing these recommendations with companies.
[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: In terms of content, that’s a big category. But a quote from a Forbes magazine article said content marketing solves problems, thought leadership sparks conversations. So when we talk about content and the creation of content, all the content has to work hard for us.
[00:21:05] Steve MacDonald: Especially in an environment where the B2B buyer is trending more and more towards a self-service buyer’s journey. Our goal is to move up earlier in that buyer’s journey with them to spark those conversations earlier, which places even more emphasis on marketing and content. That thought leadership content.
[00:21:28] Steve MacDonald: It has to be a greater portion and impact on the whole sales process. So, I wanted to hear your thoughts on the kinds of content that CMOs should be thinking about and creating to spark those conversations. Not only get beyond an MQL but get into a conversation-ready lead.
[00:21:49] Barbie Mattie: It’s interesting when you look at that a little bit closer with the new data coming out. 6ense has some data.
[00:21:58] Barbie Mattie: You shared some data. The margin difference is 75% and 84%. The numbers that I’ve heard of people are doing their own research before they even engage with a company. So that’s why content is so important because it’s self-serve now. You don’t have that rep-assisted selling because people are almost ready to make a decision before they even engage with the company.
[00:22:21] Barbie Mattie: That thought leadership content has to be out there. You have to have tailored content, but it all goes back to making sure you’re targeting the right audience in the first place. So, it’s really important to do a go-to-market targeting exercise to determine your routes to market, your industries, and your buying groups.
[00:22:43] Barbie Mattie: Then you can hone in on your ideal customer profile and serve them exactly what they need because you have a blip in time to get in front of them because they’re doing most of their own selling process. They’re selling to themselves with their own research and discovery.
[00:23:02] Steve MacDonald: What’s so great about this research is that it leads and directs us. Another piece of research said that just having that connection with a company’s brand is as important as what that company does. So this thought leadership, the idea of positioning your company as an expert and a trusted advisor in the industry, isn’t just lofty branding we’re talking about.
[00:23:24] Steve MacDonald: There was another CMO that we didn’t read a quote from here, but she was on our podcast. She is a multiple-time B2B CMO as well. And her takeaway was that today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand.
[00:23:46] Steve MacDonald: If we do it right, it takes actual sales cycles away. For that ABM process that we were talking about here, we don’t have to rely on the sales rep to have to build the trusted advisor status 100% on their own if they’re going to be doing that throughout the ABM process.
[00:24:05] Steve MacDonald: But if we can establish as a company that the connection that somebody has to the company, that they know and they trust you as an advisor in the industry, you are building demand, you are taking away sales cycles from that ABM process.
[00:24:21] Barbie Mattie: I would actually take that a step further even and suggest that before COVID, retention wasn’t nearly as important as it is now.
[00:24:31] Barbie Mattie: And even when I was advising emerging companies, which I still do, they’re smaller. They don’t have the big paychecks to go out and do a big branding campaign. That’s not a luxury for them because they have to be scrappy. We advise them by saying, okay, why don’t we focus on customer retention? When you have happy customers, they advocate for you, which will build your brand.
[00:24:56] Barbie Mattie: And that was our door into brand building from being a little scrappy approach, which is also great because that ties back to the 2024 data about retention.
Conclusion and Future Outlook
[00:25:09] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. So I’m going to ask you something that we didn’t even talk about before. But you’re pouring through all this data.
[00:25:18] Steve MacDonald: You’re writing this report. What were some of the most surprising takeaways that you had from the data that you saw there?
[00:25:29] Barbie Mattie: Honestly, I was not expecting the consistency. That was the biggest surprise. I expected more of a variation. The people were consistent.
[00:25:40] Barbie Mattie: The programs were consistent. The technology was consistent. What surprised me was that the net new acquisition was not in the top three or even the top four most important outcomes. And there are a bunch of different views on why that is. I believe it’s because net new acquisition is longer.
[00:26:03] Barbie Mattie: It’s more expensive. You have to be better at targeting. You have to be better than your competition and differentiated. That’s just it. It’s a cost and a velocity, and cost and velocity these days need to be lower.
[00:26:26] Barbie Mattie: Now, are we saying nobody’s doing net new acquisition? Absolutely not. No. But we’re saying that as a business, we need to figure out the optimal balance between net new retention and expansion. For clarity, we lump expansion together as upsell, meaning selling more to the same person who already bought, and cross-sell, which is selling more to a new buyer within an account that’s already bought.
[00:26:55] Barbie Mattie: We lump those two together in expansion.
[00:26:59] Steve MacDonald: That makes perfect sense. One of the things that I thought was interesting in the same vein that you’re talking about there is because I interview CMOs and CROs all the time for this podcast, probably over 70 just this year. And the mentality is always around how we close more business.
[00:27:21] Steve MacDonald: What is in our pipeline? Revenue marketers’ marketing is focused on pipeline development. That’s typically the net new.
[00:27:34] Barbie Mattie: Yeah, it’s all about the pipeline. I know that.
[00:27:38] Steve MacDonald: So that’s one of the big revelations here, and it’s something that came out of other interviews I’ve done. If the company’s goal or objective is to increase revenue, then we can’t look at that without customer support of our existing customers.
[00:27:55] Steve MacDonald: And where do we have opportunities to grow the business there? And that’s a fascinating area that CMOs need to be much more focused on. That was one of my biggest takeaways outside of how important content was. We need to refocus our time and energies.
[00:28:23] Steve MacDonald: This is the time of year when we’re all planning. We’re planning for the next year. It was a great time to be talking to these businesses. We need to put serious resources and dedication into our plans to expand from within.
[00:28:40] Barbie Mattie: Absolutely. I have a great quote from Uzair Dada, the founder and CEO of Iron Horse, about the report that we’ve been talking about.
[00:28:48] Barbie Mattie: It’s really relevant to what you just said. The quote is when companies can grow through their current customer base, that’s a strong indicator of how your products and services are resonating in the market. And that makes it that much easier to attract and convert net new buyers.
[00:29:08] Barbie Mattie: So it’s all interconnected. It’s all cyclical. But if we’re talking about the fastest or least expensive, it’s not the least expensive, but it’s retention, upsell, cross-sell, then net new. That’s the order you need to think about if you want to get more money faster.
[00:29:32] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And we have established relationships. With a net new, we’re trying to create those relationships and just the amount of effort and time it takes to create a relationship. There is trust based in that relationship versus the relationships we already have where if we’re doing the job, to your CEO’s comment there, then we have the foundation to be making recommendations to expand their business and expand ours at the same time.
[00:29:57] Steve MacDonald: So what I wanted to do is ask, is there anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to make sure that we get into the conversation here around the findings, the report, or the conversations you’ve had since you’ve done webinars? You’ve had questions coming in.
[00:30:20] Steve MacDonald: Is there anything else that you’d want to be able to make sure that we said on the podcast here?
[00:30:26] Barbie Mattie: Actually, I am just about to release a new blog based on the findings of this report because I would be doing a disservice if we didn’t talk about how AI can influence efficiency, retention, and expansion.
[00:30:43] Barbie Mattie: So that is the buzz and the trend these days, and that is one thing that will make it into my next survey. The next survey I’m doing will be more around a marketer’s guide to creating sales and marketing effectiveness. I plan to ask about AI, and I will continue to ask about the evolution of content.
[00:31:07] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Then there’s only one last question I have for you today, Barbie, and that is: if there was a single takeaway that you wanted folks watching this or listening to this to have, what would that takeaway be?
[00:31:27] Barbie Mattie: The best advice I could give is to learn from others’ mistakes.
[00:31:32] Barbie Mattie: And I don’t mean mistakes as in it’s a bad thing because when you fail, you learn, right? But learn from what high-growth companies are doing. Look at companies that are growing. They’ve already done the testing. They’ve done the experimentation. That is the best guidance I can give you that applies that is industry-agnostic, persona-agnostic, and function-agnostic.
[00:31:55] Barbie Mattie: It’s just why not emulate what others have done really well?
[00:32:04] Steve MacDonald: This is like having a mentor 252 times over in learning what the most important and successful B2B organizations are doing. Why wouldn’t we try to emulate that? Yeah, exactly.
[00:32:19] Steve MacDonald: I love the conversation we’re having, and it looks like we’re going to have more conversations in the future as you do more of these reports in the blog and the findings.
[00:32:29] Barbie Mattie: But if somebody wants, I’m happy to talk about it.
[00:32:32] Steve MacDonald: Great. And if somebody has a question for you that they want answered or want to connect with you, would giving them a link to your profile on LinkedIn be a good idea?
[00:32:43] Barbie Mattie: Absolutely. I’m not on there every day, but I’m fairly responsive.
[00:32:50] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you for coming on and sharing all of these insights. There were lots of notes being taken here today, including my own. So thank you for coming on.[00:33:01] Barbie Mattie: I appreciate your time, and I appreciate you reaching out. This was just an absolutely lovely conversation.