Part 3: Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly

Learn from an accomplished four-time CMO, two-time CRO, and award-winning marketer about not only why B2B CMOs fail so quickly but the in-the-trenches advice for success that you’ve never heard before.

Part one of this series is an eBook on “Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly.” For Part 2, Click Here.

Join host Steve MacDonald in this engaging interview as he sits down with Darryl Praill, an accomplished four-time CMO and two-time CRO with an impressive track record. Darryl, a renowned content creator and respected figure on LinkedIn, delves into the captivating topic of why B2B CMOs face rapid failure and presents an array of thought-provoking strategies to tackle this issue head-on

Darryl Praill, 4x B2B CMO & 2x CRO – Follow Darryl on LinkedIn

Drawing from his extensive experience, Darryl emphasizes the critical importance of cultivating a deep understanding of external audiences and their needs. However, he also sheds light on a less-discussed aspect: the significance of internal stakeholders in ensuring a CMO’s success. Recognizing that the company’s leadership holds substantial influence over a CMO’s tenure, Darryl underscores the need to foster strong internal relationships, manage expectations, and align marketing efforts with the unique requirements of various stakeholders, from sales to the CFO, CEO, and beyond.

Moreover, Darryl highlights the undeniable value of content creation, ranking it an emphatic 12 on a 1-10 scale for both CMOs and overall company success. Beyond this recognition, Darryl provides unprecedented, in-the-trenches advice on how to effectively collaborate with internal team members, prioritize content creation for demand generation marketing, and ensure seamless integration with sales activities.

Don’t miss this captivating interview, where Darryl unravels the mysteries behind the swift failure of B2B CMOs and equips listeners with actionable insights to overcome these challenges.

Learn specifically through a series of highly action-oriented steps as Darryl paces us through the answers to reversing the failure rate of CMOs and achieving great success.

Why do B2B CMOs fail so quickly?
What should a CMO start doing?
- Step 1: Start Talking to Customers
- Step 2: Start Listening to Sales
- Step 3: Set expectations with all executive leadership
- Step 4: How to create a relationship with the head of finance
- Step 5: How to set expectations around proving marketing’s ROI and overall expectations
- Step 6: The importance of content to a CMO’s success
- Step 7: How to get sales to be consumers of your marketing content and start using it
What are the most important takeaways for addressing why B2B CMOs fail so quickly?

“You need to make content for all the people in your expanding buying committee, and they’re going to advocate for you, or they’re going to shoot you down and advocate for another alternative provider based on whether they find the answer to the pain they’re experiencing in your solution. And the only way they will find that, because they have the attention span of a gnat, is in your content.” – Darryl Praill

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 5-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

Introduction to Darryl Praill

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of B2B Marketing Perspectives. This is a continuation of the series that uncovers insights into why B2B CMOs fail so quickly. The statistic is that CMOs fail twice as fast as CEOs and faster than anyone else in the C-Suite. So today, to give us some insights on what CMOs should be doing to fix this problem, is Darryl Praill.

Darryl, you’ve been a four-time CMO. You’ve been a two-time CRO. You’re an award-winning content creator. I got a list here that I’m going to read off. Top three marketer on LinkedIn, top ten SaaS branding expert, top 50 sales keynote speaker, and award-winning podcaster. So, beyond that, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and a little bit more about you, and then we’ll get into the subject matter today.

Darryl Praill: Okay, so I’m just trying to figure something out here, Steve: why B2B CMOs fail so quickly? Are you having me on because you think I am a poster child for failing quickly? Because if you are, you would likely be right. For those who are wondering, I am Darryl Praill. I’ve been hired, I’ve been fired. I’ve raised almost a hundred million dollars, and I’ve been doing B2B all my life. I predate SaaS. There was a time when we didn’t know what SaaS would be called.

In fact, I predate the internet as far as it being a viable channel and medium to use for marketing. So that tells you that I’m old, but wise ‘cause I’ve survived. Okay. I am the Chief Marketing Officer of Agorapulse. I have been here about a year and a half. Agorapulse, for those who don’t know, for context, is a Social media management platform.

We compete against tools like a Hootsuite or a Sprout Social. I like to think that we’re like the Dr. Pepper of the Colas, right? You know Coke. You know Pepsi. But everybody’s favorite, it’s Dr. Pepper. That’s us. At my last gig for a sales engagement platform, I was the Chief Revenue Officer.

The first question I always get asked is, Darryl, why did you go from being CRO to going back to a CMO? Isn’t that stepping back? And my answer to those people is, listen, whether you’re the CMO or the CRO, your lifecycle, your shelf life, it’s always short, so I already overextended my last shelf life.

That’s the first part. The second part was I could see the clouds on the horizon coming, having been through one or two economic downturns, and I knew that when it’s an economic downturn, there are certain investments people continue to make. They will always invest in their CRM. They will always invest in their financial accounting software.

And they will always invest in social media. So for me, it was like the next great place to go. It was, it wasn’t stepping back, it was stepping into a new adventure. But I will acknowledge and admit that not having a sales number quota over my head on a constant basis where on day 90 of the quarter you’re the hero, and on day one of the next quarter, you’re the zero.

That was kind of refreshing. So you wonder why I changed back and forth so much? That’s why. There’s only so much quota pressure I can take, Steve.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah. You’re always as good as your next number. Right? And then that number always seems to increase.

Why do B2B CMOs fail so quickly?

Steve MacDonald: I’m going to ask you just to start off just top of mind, because, full disclosure here, you didn’t know what we were even going to be talking about before today. Yes. But what’s interesting is, no matter what, the CMO and the CRO always have to team together, right? There’s got to be a united strategy for everyone to be successful.

After all that experience, why do you think CMOs fail so quickly, and what are the things that they should be doing in order to extend their success and extend their tenure inside of the companies that they’re at?

Darryl Praill: Okay, this is actually really easy, in my opinion, because if you change jobs as far frequently as I have, you have a few iterations to figure stuff out.

Why do CMOs fail so quickly in no particular order? According to Darryl, two reasons. Top of mind, immediately without hesitating, one is, they simply do not understand revenue. They have no concept of revenue they’ve never sold. You just said, Steve, sales, and marketing should be aligned. You said it without prompting.

However, most CMOs ignore their sales counterpart or view them antagonistically rather than opportunistically as a chance to align, divide, and conquer revenue. Versus the rest of the company, revenue versus development. All right, so. They have no sales experience. So we can drill down into this. But to get the second one out there, the second one out there, this is the irony. You’ll love this one. They suck at communicating. And when I say communicating, I’m already getting at it because the whole point of a marketer is to communicate all the good news, create awareness and create demand. Part of that is the communication aspect comes with expectations management.

So, in other words, they don’t know how to be an executive. As an executive, I constantly work with the principal stakeholders that control my destiny: the CEO, the CFO, and the board. And not only am I communicating with them what I’m doing, but I’m actively seeking their input, their spin, their contribution to the strategy, and, where appropriate, incorporating it into what I’m doing.

So we have a shared sense of ownership. You know, I had an example just today, where our MQL volumes had been counted wrong by revenue ops, and we had a significant correction where we thought we were just doing gangbusters. It turns out we weren’t doing so gangbusters, right? I learned that this last week, and I talked to my CFO about it and in my one-on-one with my CEO, which I have every Monday.

I said, by the way, this happened, which, even though I said it first, you knew he knew. You knew the CFO had already told him this happened. I said this is what we’re doing. Here’s the good news. Here’s the bad news. The upside is there are actually no revenue impacts so far, which means our conversion rates are through the roof.

They’re actually better than what we thought they were. But we have a plan, and here it is. In other words, I controlled the narrative. I controlled the message. Isn’t that ironic? That a marketer sucks at controlling the message to control the narrative. So that’s why we fail. We don’t communicate. We become the target because we have a big ass number on our heads, and all they see us doing is spending money.

That’s number one. That’s why you get around that by managing the stakeholders. Number two, though, is you need to do sales. You need to understand sales, so the sales leader becomes your best friend, and you sit down and you’re a team. It’s not this wall of China where I throw a lead over the top and say, there you go. I’m off the hook.

Now you’re in this together. So the only way you can truly do that is if you’ve done sales in one way, shape, form, or even if it’s just like you sat in the damn chair for a week. You went through the hell of what a sales rep goes through, and you face the rejection and the monotony of doing outbound dials and just dealing with moron prospects.

But knowing that there’s a hint in there where you have one or two good calls a day, and that’s what feeds the beast. You, you haven’t lived it. You’re going to suck as a marketer forever and ever. And when it comes down to the, you know, why do marketers get let go first, because they’re always afraid to let the salesperson go because what if that tanks or a sales number too, and we can’t let anybody else go in any of the other departments because they’re just people costs.

It’s the marketer. They had people plus programs banned. We’ll kill them, and that’s how it works. So you have to avoid that.

Steve MacDonald: What’s really interesting here is we’re talking specifically to CMOs here, but there are a lot of companies that have a VP, SVP, or EVP of Marketing. They don’t have a CMO that is reporting directly to a CRO or to a CEO.

So the role of the CMO translates beyond just a CMO title. There are a lot of us that are out there that are in charge of marketing. And this idea of aligning with sales. Sales alignment, sales enablement, right? These are tools and terms we’ve all heard before. But we’ve now got technologies now where we can listen into sales conversations, right?

We can understand objections and the pain points that they’re going through. What are your recommendations on the best way to align yourself with sales? Be a partner that is perceived as somebody that’s actually helping versus just throwing, as you said, MQLs over the wall.

What are some of the things that you’d recommend that we start doing?

What should a CMO start doing? Step 1: Start Talking to Customers

Darryl Praill: Okay, so some of the stuff you’ve heard before and most of you haven’t done because you’re too busy. And to that, I say that’s an excuse, and you need to change it. And I’m sorry if I’m offending anybody, but I’m answering the question.

The first thing you need to do is you need to pick up the phone and need to talk to your customers. I challenge you this week to call ten customers. Go to your head of customer success and say, who are the ten customers who fit our ICP, our ideal customer profile, and say I want a handful of customers for each persona.

So in the case of a social media tool, my persona would be the social media manager, the CMO, or VP of marketing, and it might be a rev ops person, right? And I want to talk to each of those people, and you reach out to them, and you simply say very simple stuff.

It’s like a case for marketers. It’s a case study, right? How you would approach a case study, you would say…

Before you acquired us, what were the pain points you were occurring?
How was that impacting you?
How were you dealing with it? What were the consequences?
What was the final straw that caused you to say, I need to seek a solution?
What was the process you went through to ask to evaluate solutions?
What was the shortlist?
Why did you pick us?
What’s it been like since then?
How have you measured ROI?
How’s it been received?
Would you renew with us again?

I just went through a whole case study. Life before, life during, and life after.

That’s exactly what I just did. Now I’ll get some hard, unfiltered answers, so I’m going to hear good things, and I’m going to hear bad things. But what I’m going to hear after ten customer interviews—they will have just given me the content plan for the next two quarters, minimally, of all the issues that my ICPs, my personas, are experiencing.

Plus, now I can go and talk to a sales rep, and I can name-drop the customer I’m talking to. When I do that, the rest of the leadership team goes, damn, they’re actually talking to customers. Because most marketers never do that. That’s number one. If you do that, life will be better.

Step 2: Start Listening To Sales

Darryl Praill: The second thing you do is to go to your head of sales, and you simply shut up, and you say the following:

What do you need from me?

I know you need leads, and if you haven’t got an agreed-upon understanding, a service level agreement on what a lead definition is, and what everybody’s roles are. If I give you a lead, we agree it will tick the following boxes. Maybe I know the revenue and the industry and the company size, and I’ve got the right people on the buying committee—job titles, etc.

But in exchange, you agree that you will respond to that lead within 60 minutes. You will do at least 12 touches over the course of two weeks of the following mix of channels. So, that’s an SLA (service level agreement). Get that out of the way.

But then you ask the question, what do you need from me to be successful?

And then you shut up. And they’re going to say, well, I need competitive intel, or I need battle cards, or I need email sequence writing because our people suck at writing sequences. Or I need videos, or I need tutorials, or I need demos, or I need a positive press article, or I need an analyst report. And you just put it on your list.

And here’s the funny part, marketers: everything they’re saying to you was probably on your plan anyway. Yeah. And it should be. But you’ve sought their input. So what that does is it changes the prioritization. Maybe I had a great analyst report, you know, three quarter down the way on my list, but they want something from Forrester or Gartner.

Okay. I’m going to move that up to the top three, the top five. Okay. So then you play it back to them when you deliver that analyst report, you say the following, Sally, you asked me for a report from Gartner. I heard you. And here it is. And by the way, you had given Sally updates at every step of the way.

I heard you. We’re booking a briefing. We’re now pitching our story for inclusion in this study. I heard you. Here’s a draft of the article. Okay. I heard you. And we’re launching a press release and a media pitch and working with all our influencers on a big campaign to promote our inclusion in this big study. In other words, you provided value to them (sales). And so that’s what it is. You simply ask them. What do you need from me? It’s such a simple question.

Step 3: Set expectations with all executive leadership

Darryl Praill: Everything I’ve just told you, by the way, is a thousand percent self-serving because here’s why, as I said, you got the content plan because you talked to everybody. But number two, when you are getting hammered at the executive leadership team, because maybe the lead flow isn’t hitting, or maybe the conversion rate’s not there.

And it may or may not be your fault. Maybe it’s just a bad economy, but they’ll lash out at marketing today. You know, who’s going to stick up for you? Sally, the head of sales, who’s going to say, no, no, we’re working together, we’re aligned. That’s why you do that. And by the way, we haven’t even talked about it.

You do the exact same thing with the head of finance.

Steve MacDonald: I want to get into that cause that’s interesting. But you know, what you just described, you just described understanding the pain points of your internal audiences. Right?

Darryl Praill: It’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s internal alignment.

Steve MacDonald: You know, we do so much work at finding out the persona’s pain points, how we solve them for our external audiences, but we never apply that to our internal audiences.

Darryl Praill: And the other thing I shared, if you remember when I opened up, I said, what are the two reasons CMOs lose? I said one is I set expectations management and then communication. So in my example of Sally, she’s one stakeholder with whom I was managing her expectations and constantly communicating, and Sally felt heard.

And I will say to Sally, tell me what you want. I probably won’t be able to give you everything. But we’ll work together in prioritizing what I can give you or what my budget allows me to give you and what my resources, or lack thereof, allow me to give you. But we’ll do it together. That’s all it is.

That’s expectations management. And if that report got delayed a month because the principal writer from the analyst firm got hit by a bus, I’m going to go back and communicate to Sally saying I’m delayed by a month so that you know there is nothing for you to do here. And Sally goes, damn. Like, he hears me, he’s working on it. He hasn’t forgotten about me. I like him. Keep him around.

Step 4: How to create a relationship with the head of finance

Steve MacDonald: All right, now I want to hear about the second person you said we must do this with, the head of finance. Okay, so please talk about that.

Darryl Praill: To the head of finance, marketing is the one organization, I said this already, that has an actual budget that is not people related. So from the CFO’s point of view, that’s waste. Suppose we got rid of that. you know, just think of the margins we’d have. Our EBITDA would go up through the roof, and then our growth numbers are great. And then I look like the rockstar CFO because I trimmed the fat and I got marketing spend under control.

And that’s what happens, right? It’s sometimes the battle of the fittest. Whereas if you went to them and you said, as I did with Sally in sales, and I went and said, Mary, Miss CFO, the same question. What do you need from me? And I’m going to say they all say the same thing.

Darryl, I need to know what you’re going to spend. I need you to submit your expenses on time. I need a formal approval process in place. I need to make sure we do not have any overages that are surprises. I need you to be on budget. Okay. So, Mary, you’re saying, as long as I’m on budget and I communicate any overages, for example, as often happens, like I have this unexpected opportunity to be part of a trade show in Q2 that I hadn’t budgeted for back in Q4 of last year for this fiscal year.

And it’s a great opportunity, but I didn’t budget for it. I can go to you, Mary, and say, Mary, I need to pull some money ahead from Q3 into Q2. But don’t worry, it’s a one-quarter blip. By the end of Q3, we’ll be back on track. Are you okay with that, Mary? And Mary says, sure, I get it. No problem. Do it.

Boom. Communication alignment. But that’s what they want. And the next thing is, again, when you’re being attacked, who’s going to stand up for you? Mary, the head of finance, because you simply asked, what do you need in my case? So I came to Agorapulse. They were like, and I hear this every time, we have a really bad relationship with marketing.

We don’t want that anymore. That’s exhausting. It’s tiring. We want a good relationship. Can you just be on budget, please? And my response to them was, absolutely. But I don’t have the reports. In other words, it doesn’t help me getting a report a quarter ago, or even 45 days ago, because I could have spent a lot of money.

Since I need reports, I need alerts from your team. I need you to help me make some dashboards to give me better insights and analysis. Can we have an agreement that I’ll honor your request, but you’ll support me? They’ll always, always, always say yes. Instead, most CMOs avoid the CFO because they’re evil and they can control my purse strings.

And they ask me to prove the ROI of my campaigns. Okay, boys and girls, here’s a hard lesson if you have become a VP of Marketing or a CMO, you can’t prove the ROI of your campaigns. You are what we like to say as the Peter principle. You have been over-promoted beyond your abilities. At this point in time, you need to be able to prove your ROI.

Next thing, on a related note, when it comes to the CFO, you need to know basic SaaS finance. You need to know what is the Rule of 40. You need to know what is LTV? What is ASP? What is MRR? What is ARR? What is churn? What is net churn? If you can’t use that terminology in your conversations with your CFO to defend your budget or prove your ROI, you are dead in the water.

Step 5: How to set expectations around proving marketing’s ROI and overall expectations

Darryl Praill: And the last thing is you need to be able to negotiate. So with my CFO currently and with my CEO, I said to them, point blank, I said, I cannot prove ROI on everything. It’s physically impossible. Word of mouth. How do you do that? You can’t, right? So can we agree on what percentage of my budget I need to prove, and can we agree that the other percentage of the budget is for awareness?

Call it dark social. And for my case, we struck a deal that 50% would be dark social. So if I can measure it, that’s a bonus, if I can’t, they understood. But the other 50%, AdWords, events, content, SEO, I can measure that, and dammit, you better measure that. So you need to have those hard conversations.

If you don’t do that, you’ve got like this big bullseye in your head that says, take that person out because they’re the ones spending money, and we need to save money, and their salary and program spending will get us back to profitability. Problem solved.

Steve MacDonald: What you’re describing here is reversing the natural tendency to be an introvert. I don’t know how to talk to like that alien finance person, I don’t know how to even relate to them. So I don’t. In sales, my job is to throw leads over the fence, and then they’re taking care of the rest of it. There’s a separation of church and state, right? That’s a very insular point of view.

And what you’re saying is these are strategies to partner, these are strategies to communicate, get agreements upfront. So when you say, You have to be able to prove ROI, but then you went on to say, but let’s agree that 50% of my marketing budget is going to be really hard to do that. Then everybody has that expectation. So you manage expectations extremely well, it sounds like.

Darryl Praill: That’s exactly it. I’ve learned that the hard way. There is no such thing as a CMO school, especially when I became a CMO.

And so this is what I’ve learned the hard way. I remember, true story, but this tells you about the life lessons we learned along the way and the scars we keep. The very, very, very first time I was a VP of marketing, I would go into all these meetings my first year, and I would make these great suggestions, and I would, at the executive leadership team, always get shot down.

I was so frustrated. Then my chief technology officer guy in his mid-fifties, which ironically is where I’m at now, would come in and say the exact same thing, and he would say, this is what I think. And they’d all go, oh, great idea, Dave. Here’s money. Here’s people. Go do it. And I’m like, how the hell?

So this is what I did. One day I went into my CTO’s office, and I closed the door. That was back when we were actually in the offices, folks. Yeah, but you can do it on a Zoom call. And I said I have to ask you a question. He goes, what? And I explained to him, I do this, I get shot down, you do it, and you get your way every time.

Like, what is it? And he starts laughing at me, and he goes, oh, Darryl, what you haven’t figured out yet is that the meeting isn’t really the meeting. The meeting is just where we actually anoint it and bless it. I’ve gone to every single one of my stakeholders beforehand and said, Hey, I’ve got this idea, and what do you think?

And then they give me a refinement or a tweak, and I say great idea. And I’d incorporate an element of it, which I was probably going to incorporate anyway. And then they feel ownership because now they’ve contributed so that when I finally spring it on, everybody en masse, it feels like it’s never been socialized before.

But the reality is I socialized it to every single member one-on-one. And that’s why I get instant buy-in. And I’m like, son of a gun, are you telling me I don’t just walk in? Because that’s what I assume happened at the leadership meeting. We were going to have these great conversations, and it was going to be phenomenal, but no, that’s not how it works.

Boom. Lesson learned. How did I learn that lesson? I asked somebody who was having success where I wasn’t having success why or what they were doing that I could learn from. So you’re right. Get off your introverted biases. And by the way, I’m introverted, folks. I get it. And it’s for your own success. You don’t want to be that guy who’s let go after 18 months. That sucks.

Step 6: The importance of content to a CMO’s success

Steve MacDonald: Well, this has been an incredible lesson. I want to take a right turn for a moment. So let’s do it. So, a number of the things that you said go toward your budget, right?

And content being one of them. One of the things that I love to ask on these podcasts is your opinion on the importance of content for the entire sales and marketing process. Where on a scale of 1 to 10, if one was, “not important at all to the success of the company,” and 10 being “vital to the success of the company,” where would you put content marketing on that spectrum?

Darryl Praill: 12. Okay, we broke it. Was that an option? A high 10. A high 10, Steve. But for a lot of reasons that I can tell you.

Steve MacDonald: Alright. I, but you just blew the scale wide open. Please explain why.

Darryl Praill: Okay. So I had this conversation all the time about content and about the time and effort involved and what we do. You have two schools of thought. You have that founder, CEO, who’s a tech head and wants to talk nonstop about the features and functions and why, your widget is better than everybody else’s widget.

You’ve got the engineers who wanna do the exact same thing. And then you’ve got the actual users trying to solve pains, and they don’t necessarily care about the features and functions. They want to know, does it solve a pain? And so you have this back-and-forth frustration.

So there are a couple of reasons why it’s a 12, on a scale of 10. You need to recognize that despite what you might think, there are more people in the buying committee today than there ever have been in history. So you need to make content that services every person in that buying committee. So you need, like I said, in my case, I would sell to a social media technician.

Who probably can’t even spell KPI, and I’m being tongue in cheek, but I’m not that far off. To A CMO who’s worried about budget and ROI, to a rev ops person who’s wondering about does it integrate with my stack, and can I report on this easily to prove my self-worth and embed some workflows and some processes?

And does it have a single sign-on as an example? So there are all these people in your buying committee you need to make content for, and they’re going to advocate for you, or they’re going to shoot you down and advocate for another alternative provider based on whether they find the answer to the pain they’re experiencing in your solution. And the only way they will find that, because they have the attention span of a gnat, is in your content.

They won’t download the product 9 times out of 10 and play with it. Unless you’re literally at the bottom of the funnel, and they finally have to do due diligence. And it’s a short list of two or three vendors max.

So that’s also how they find your content in SEO. So yes, I’m appealing to these buyer personas, but you know, what is your number one and number two, and number three, driver of traffic to your website? I will contend it will probably be this order, but I could be wrong, but it’s going to be a variation.

The number one driver of traffic to your website will be direct traffic. They heard about you somewhere, and they’re going there.
The number two driver of traffic to your website will be organic.

They searched, and that’s going to be like through the charts, one and two, like they’re going to be neck and neck more than likely.

Number three, and usually, at this point, you’re dropping off 50%, it would be something, depending on your budget, it would be something like paid ads, pay-per-click, etc.

And then it’s just random after that. So in my example, I just gave number two, which was organic.

First off, you need the content to get indexed to get found by each individual persona because you don’t know who’s sponsoring you into the deal. Is it the Rev Ops person bringing you into the deal? Is it the user bringing you into the deal? Is it the CMO bringing you into the deal? Who’s hooking you? You have to have content for all of them.

Second, you also need great content that’s compelling, that’s published frequently so you rank high in the search engine results. If you’re not doing that on a regular basis, if you’re not optimizing your content for SEO to get found, you’re never going to rank. You’re never going to get that organic traffic.

Third, they’re going to share the content. It could be an actual handoff, Hey, check out this PDF, or it’s going to more likely be a verbal. “I just read something the other day from Agorapulse. You should check them out. I think they can solve your problem.” This goes to my number one input. Direct traffic. How did the direct traffic get there? Probably word of mouth, which probably came from a piece of content. Now, when I say content, most people think of content as being written, which could be an ebook. More than likely, it’s a blog. The reality today is that most content is not middle of the funnel or further down. Most content that’s getting you the inbound traffic is coming from a podcast or a webinar. Social media, a live stream. So think about Twitter began life at what? 140 characters. It was a microblog when it began.

It’s not different. I could go to Twitter, I go to Instagram, I could go to LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter. I’m having micro content so I could have content on social media. For example, when I make a lot of content that’s inspired by my blogs, I’ll pull one or two items into the blog, I’ll riff about it, and then I’ll link to the blog.

So they may never read the blog, or I could send a lot of people to the blog, but meanwhile, I still got compelling content that’s getting found. Because it’s indexed and it’s on LinkedIn, it’s everywhere else. There’d be YouTube. Video is through the roof—different kinds of content. Content is massive.

He looks at where you are in the funnel. The top of the funnel is where most people get stuck. They feel like there’s too much noise. The reality is, I will tell you this. Ah, you need creators. I call them corporate creators. You can call them influencers. You need them because people buy from people, they don’t buy from companies, right?

Uh, I would buy from Steve. I wouldn’t buy from his company because I like Steve. I don’t even know what his company’s called. Who the hell knows ContentStrategies.io? I don’t know that. So, you know, if I see Steve’s content, I like him. I can see him, I trust him. And that’s how it all begins. So, content is number one by far.

Best of all. When you make killer content in a classic hub and spoke model, this is so scalable and, for you CMOs, also so freaking cheap and affordable. I can go to a webinar, I can get two or three panelists on there that have amazing brand reach. I can have them on a webinar for 45 minutes to an hour.

Or a podcast or a live stream. I transcribe it. I give it to a writer on Fiverr who I vetted, and they take the transcription, not the video. They take the transcription, they turn it into a blog post, they turn it into a social media post, they turn it into case studies to turn it into eBooks, and get what that cost me to produce? Nothing other than my time, right?

The last thing is the content needs to speak about the pain, which is how we began. The features are irrelevant. The features happen at the demo stage. Do you have this problem? I do have that problem. Great. Let me hook you up with my sales rep, who will actually do the mouse clicks and show you how it works and how to make that problem go away. So too many people focus content solely on their product. Stop pitch-slapping us, and speak to the persona of your ICPs. In other words, when I’m selling social media, I’m having conversations about what the CMO is doing and what’s the budget and how you have success.

You’re going to tell me, well, that has nothing to do with social media. My point is I’m just establishing credibility. This is something that a lot of people are looking for. I know when Steve made this ebook that, he researched it. I know he has to optimize. I know it’s going to get found.

When they look it up, they’re probably going to find this episode. They’re going to find me, they’re going hear me. They’re going to say he’s credible. Hey, he competes with a Hootsuite and Sprout Social. I think our Sprout Social subscription’s coming up. I heard them bitching the other day about certain features and how expensive it is.

Let’s get Darryl involved here. Because, say, I kind of liked him, and he sounded kind of credible, and maybe they’ve got a better solution. And then I’m a hero because I saved this money, and it’s a shitty economy. So this is good news for everybody. That’s how content works. That’s why it’s a 12 out of 10. How did I do, what did I miss?

Steve MacDonald: Not a lot. Here’s the one thing I think you missed. Are you ready? It’s not anything you said, it goes back to the original question. A number of the CMOs that I’ve been talking to have said that one of the expectations that they’ve set coming into their role is the absolute need and focus on content.

And it’s where so many companies, you’re right, we’re insular. We know our own products, we know the features, and that’s our comfort level, right? And we want to talk about our babies, right? But that’s not what’s going to attract. The conversation is our content. That’s the conversation we need to start.

Part of that expectation of why B2B CMOs fail so quickly is probably because they suck at overall being the steward of creating really great content. And that’s a fact. If you’re reading my ebook, I point to a study that shows that B2B buyers and sales don’t even use over 60% of the content that marketing, on average, creates. But I wrote a whole follow-up on that as the B2B SaaS industry gets a C+ grade overall on content. Yet you called it a 12 in terms of how important it was. Setting those expectations and, if there’s one thing you’re going to do in the day, it’s going to be prolific at creating content and not just any content, right? Not that lower funnel feature benefit that stuff’s easy to write in comparison.

Step 7: How to get sales to be consumers of your marketing’s content and start using it!

Darryl Praill: Easy peasy. Yeah. So let me address your 60 to 70% of marketing content that sales reps do not use. And this goes back, folks, to having alignment with your CRO, your VP of Sales. Fully agree with you. So in every company I’ve been at, this is what I’ve done to overcome this.

The reason they don’t use it yet. And if you have the sales experience, remember I said a good CMO has sales experience. If you had sales experience, you would know this. The reason they don’t use it is because there’s nothing in it for them to use. If I’m consuming your content, then physically, I’m not prospecting, am I?

And by the way, I rock as a sales rep. I don’t need your stupid content. I am a sales legend. I can sell snow to Eskimos. Do you know what I’m saying? And this is the sales culture. And I’m not trying to be an ass or facetious about this. So what I’ve done is I forced them to learn it, and I’ve done it the following way.

I force the reps to, on a weekly basis, do what I call book club. And book club is where they have to pick a piece of content. It could be a podcast, it could be a blog, it could be a case study, or something we produced in the last six weeks, and they need to consume it and, within one minute, tell us what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, and how they’re going to apply it.

The reason I did that was because I needed to force their hand to know the content even exists. Yes. So when you have this one-minute book club, all of a sudden, they go, damn, that’s a brilliant ebook. I can see the wheels turning. I didn’t know about this, but now that I’ve read it, I can use this in my sales cycle, and I’m going to.

So you kind of have to lead the horse, the proverbial horse to water. And if you don’t do that, they simply won’t use it because that’s not how they’re behaviorally incentivized to act. So you understand sales, you would understand that’s how sales work.

Steve MacDonald: Well, it’s not good enough to give them a digital library of our content. Or here are some email sequences and say they’ve got it. I’ve created it.

Darryl Praill: They’ll never consume it. They’re too busy prospecting because that’s what they’re getting hammered for. I mean, when was the last time a senior sales leader went to one of their reps and said, Tell me how many pieces of content you’ve read this week, junior, right?

That doesn’t come up, right? It’s like you haven’t had enough meetings, you haven’t made enough calls. They’re getting hammered on activity. They’re getting hammered on results, not on content. You look at it, and here’s another thing, you want to trick CMOs? Here’s a great trick. Learn this many, many moons ago. When you start a new company, go to the CFO or the head of sales and ask the following question, and it’s a two-parter.

First, I want to know how your sales reps are compensated. What are their variable commissions?

Second, I want to know how my VP of Sales is compensated. I don’t need to know the numbers. I need to know he’s got a variable compensation, 10% for this, 20% for that, 30% for this, whatever.

That’s what I need to know. When you know that, you will now know why sales will ignore you or will listen to you because they are a direct by-product of how they’re financially incentivized. If you’re asking them to do something that they’re not financially rewarded for, do not be shocked if they ignore you.

So when you ask to work together, you want to spin it in a way that reflects their variable comp and what’s in it for them.

Steve MacDonald: Very important. In fact, that’s probably, you know, just as a side product here, but I recently read a study that said that 30% of a sales team’s time is spent on content creation.

Because they know how important it is, right? They know they’re constantly trying to tease and follow up on conversations and add value. They know the value of it, but there’s this chasm between what we’re creating and what they’re using. I think you’ve nailed it in terms of you’ve gotta be on the mark, but you’ve also gotta get them used to being in the regular process of consuming the content that we create, they have to know that it’s there in order to even want to use it, to begin with. Brilliant.

Darryl Praill: And the reason they need to consume it to know that it’s there comes back down to one word, which is where sales and marketing share a common attribute, which is storytelling. Marketers are top-of-funnel, and sales reps are bottom-of-funnel in its simplest sense.

What do we as humans like? We like a good story, you know, weave me a good yarn, and I’m aptly paying attention. All right, so, That’s why you want them to listen to the contents. When they say, I have this problem, they’re going to say, well, you know, actually, it’s funny you say that because of one of our customers, ABC, Inc. They just haven’t thought about this problem.

In fact, this is what happened. Bing, bing, bing, bing, boom. Sound familiar? Yeah, exactly. Hey, we’ve got a paper on that. Do you want me to send that to you? Great. Send it. You know what you did, which just happened when you sent that paper, two things happened. One, you made a connection. And they felt like you got them.

You connected on a relational level. Two, more importantly, is, you just gave the sales rep an excuse to follow up. Did you get that paper? What’d you think of it? Did you share it with anybody? Just making sure you got that. That’s because you always want to give them an excuse to reach out again and keep that conversation going.

So storytelling, folks.

What are the most important takeaways for addressing why B2B CMOs fail so quickly?

Steve MacDonald: I’ve got one last question for you. And that is based on everything we’ve already talked about here. What’s the one bit of advice that you would give any CMO or anyone acting in a CMO role in their company as a takeaway from this conversation?

Darryl Praill: Wow. So I know you asked for one. I’m going to give you two because I just will.

One is going to be to recapture how I began, and you heard us hit it over and over again, which was reach out to your stakeholders and communicate with them, see what they want, and then constantly use that as an excuse to update them and keep that line of communication opening.

When you manage people’s expectations proactively, your life, your shelf life, gets substantially longer because they view you as somebody who understands them. It’s not just the sales rep and the prospect having a relationship. It’s the CMO and the CFO, or the CMO and the VP of sales, or the CMO and the head of customer success, or the CMO and the head of development, having a relationship.

So it’s all about managing the message. Folks, just get off your butt and go ask them, and you will be shocked. They will be thrilled that you ask them because nobody before you will have ever asked them in a marketing function, guarantee it. That’s the first part.

In the second part, we talked a little bit about visibility in sales reps and content and storytelling. The one thing I will tell every CMO is this, the biggest thing holding you back is your own personal brand. If you want to influence the company and its notoriety, and its dark social impact, you need to lead from the front by example. So when you’re making that great content, or when you have a great event, or you’re having a panel with some great speakers, you need to be the one representing the brand.

You need to be prolific on social. You need to engage with the community if you do it. The rest of your team will follow suit if you think you’re too busy, or it’s not your style, or it’s not your thing you’re comfortable with, or you’re not a video person, you’ve just modeled the behavior that the rest of your team will follow.

And the problem is we live in a social world. Social Media is the number one channel according to HubSpot, according to Gartner, according to LinkedIn, based on all the research and when you think about it. Everything you do on marketing quickly gets distributed via social media.

Want to have a webinar? Do you want to join us? We’re having an event. Do you want to come to see me there? I’m going to be in Chicago. Do you want to have lunch? Hey, check out this case study. I just got it. Hey, check out this great report we just had from Gartner, all on social media. Why? Because it’s cheap and it’s effective as where everybody is. So, you need to lead from the front and lead by example.

Do that and you will reap the rewards. And here’s the funny part, when you do that, your brand becomes associated with your employer and now it’s a lot harder for them to let you go when you have that shitty quarter or two and they will work through it and then you have time to recover and you go well beyond that 18-month window that is, you know, the stereotypical duration of a CMO.

Steve MacDonald: That’s a good point. You make yourself stickier in the organization. Darryl, I literally could go on with you for another hour, but thank you so much for sharing all these insights. And if somebody wants to get ahold of you, is LinkedIn the best place to do it? Should they follow you on LinkedIn?

Darryl Praill: LinkedIn is the best place and the hit I here as much as I just told you about being on social, I am on social, which means I have a high volume of notifications. Every CMO’s life is stuck between Slack and Asana and email and other tools and social media notifications, it’s notification hell, folks. But I do get there. It may take me a couple of hours or a couple of days to respond, but please, LinkedIn.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you for being on and sharing your wisdom, and I think there are going to be some CMOs that are resting a little bit easier after this. Cheers.

Next Steps

One of the things Darryl stresses is not only how to establish relationships within the leadership of the company, but why content is a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10. To learn more about efficiently creating the type of content that opens doors and creates greater ROI from all angles, CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.