LinkedIn B2B Institute’s
Ty Heath on Why the Best B2B Marketing Is Contrarian

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. I’m here today with Ty Heath. Ty, welcome to the pod.

Ty Heath: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

James Lawrence: We finally pinned you down.

Ty Heath: We did.

James Lawrence: I’ve been trying to get Ty on the pod for months and, with busy schedules, different days and times from America, and all that fun stuff, here we are. We did it.

Ty Heath: Excellent. Thank you.

James Lawrence: By way of introduction, Ty leads Global Thought Leadership at LinkedIn Marketing. She co-founded LinkedIn’s now very famous B2B Institute.

Ty, you’re a board member of the American Advertising Association. I’ve been lucky enough to see you speak a few times now on B2B marketing and I always love the perspective that you bring.

I went to Inbound last year in San Francisco and Ty presented an awesome session. It was definitely one of the highlights of the week. The session was called B2B Trends for the Contrarian Marketer.

I thought it would be awesome to talk through that content today. It’s always hard when there’s a presentation to distil it into podcast form, but I think there are some great themes we can explore.

Before we do, though, I think for listeners who might be less familiar with LinkedIn’s approach to content marketing and thought leadership, there is such a heavy investment in research. A lot of listeners probably know that, but some may not.

Why is that? Why doesn’t LinkedIn just take a product marketing approach to the way it generates research and thought leadership?

Ty Heath: First things first, thank you for having me again. It’s so good to talk to you and to everyone listening.

LinkedIn has some really great product marketing, so let’s start there. That is important. We need people to be clear on how to get the best use out of all the solutions, and that goes for any brand.

But I also think it’s equally important for people to understand why they’re making that investment.

Things are so complex right now. I don’t think there’s a presentation we go to where someone doesn’t open with, “As the world evolves...” or “As uncertainty increases...” That seems to be the common thread.

We need to help people think clearly so they can make better decisions, and do so in an evidence-based world.

One of the things I like to think about is that it’s not enough for content to be evidence-based, rigorous and proven. In order for it to land with people, it also needs to be accessible.

My goal is that the thought leadership LinkedIn produces helps people move through the world and make better choices for effective marketing. It should also answer the question of why and open the door to other opportunities, whether that involves LinkedIn or other investments people might choose to make.

James Lawrence: Because it does stand out, right?

This isn’t just a few people at LinkedIn creating content that vaguely pushes people towards your product. We’re talking about partnering with some of the leading marketing researchers around the world.

I’d love you to talk a little bit about that, because it adds so much to the credibility and veracity of what comes out of the Institute.

Ty Heath: I think there’s something to be said for not thinking alone.

Of course, we have our own insights and ideas, but it’s really about iron sharpening iron.

When you are thinking with some of the best thinkers or institutions, which we often do when it comes to our thought leadership, you get a stronger outcome.

It’s not just academic institutions either. It could also be leading marketers who are doing great work.

We try to bring other voices into our research. We try to have sparring partners. We try to debate to get to the sharpest principle.

There’s a story behind the term scenius. I didn’t craft it. It was coined by Brian Eno, the musician.

He came up with this idea of scenius, which is a combination of scene and genius, if I’m getting that right. It’s the collective genius of a creative society.

It’s what you get when you put people in a room, they’re pursuing the same goal, and they’re debating ideas. What comes out of that is a sharpening of principles based on discussion, and that is how you arrive at a better product.

You can 10X what you would do if you were just on your own.

So I think that’s a good principle for all of us to think about, especially if you’re doing creative work. I’m not saying that in a way that washes out the edge, because we have to be mindful of that. But it’s about thinking through how you might curate an environment or an ecosystem of thinkers that sharpens the thinking overall.

James Lawrence: It’s really cool, and we’ll link in the show notes to the relevant pages.

Ty Heath: And I hope I got that right. Shout out to Brian Eno.

James Lawrence: You’ve got to be careful when you’re talking about genius. You’ve really got to stick to the landing.

We were talking off air. I was prepping for the episode today and I was going back through my notes from last year’s Inbound. Then some notes popped up, I think from 2017 or 2018, and for five or six years after that point I was talking around this approach to content marketing and digital, trying to move clients away from this blog-daily approach to these evergreen, big-hitter pieces of content that go deeper.

I hadn’t realised that was actually yours, Ty. I’d almost propagated it and stolen it for myself.

Ty Heath: Thank you. We love it.

Part of the reason we exist is for people to find our content and, if it’s useful, we invite everyone to take a look.

James Lawrence: I’ll give you credit next time.

So, in terms of the presentation at Inbound, it was essentially on the topic of B2B trends for the contrarian marketer.

Before we jump into the actual takeaways or themes, how did it come to be? What was the genesis of that piece?

Ty Heath: There were four of us who founded the B2B Institute. The lore is that we were all born from within the agency business at LinkedIn. We were all at LinkedIn at the same time.

At the time, we were getting requests from customers about where things were going and what the trends were. I think that’s a very natural question, especially at the beginning of every year. People tend to look for those types of things, and a lot of organisations will create and field their take on where things are going or how you should anchor your year.

At the time, my counterparts in the business and I were thinking through how to respond. We could answer the question in the same way as everyone else, or we could pivot and do something different.

There are people who may already be answering that question and may have been doing it better for a long time. So we asked, how could we do this differently?

We thought about the idea that it’s not about what is constantly changing. That is the question a lot of marketers ask, but we think it’s the wrong question.

The right question is, what is not changing that you can bet on for the long term?

That was the idea from which B2B Trends for the Contrarian Marketer was born.

The principle is that you find ideas that you can bet on for the long term that are both contrarian and right.

At the B2B Institute, we have always been obsessed with mental models. We love frameworks. We love anything that simplifies the way people think.

So the contrarian matrix is the founding principle through which we identify the best ideas that we pursue as an institution. This still holds for our thought leadership. We’re looking for things that are little practiced but deliver a lot of value.

I can break down the contrarian matrix if you want.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I’d love you to.

Ty Heath: Sure.

If you’ve ever attended B2B Trends for the Contrarian Marketer, which is like a once-a-year thing, and we just dropped some new ones by the way, you’ll hear us open by saying that you can be contrarian or consensus, and you can be wrong or right.

When you’re wrong, there’s no value there, because you’re wrong.

When you’re consensus and right, that’s where everyone is playing, so the value gets competed away.

Simply put, what you want to do is what no one else is doing and be right about it. Then you can take advantage of that opportunity.

That’s the principle behind being contrarian and right, and finding the ideas to bet on where you can get the most value.

James Lawrence: That’s awesome.

The audience to this pod is largely in-house marketers, and it’s so hard as an in-house marketer to know which direction to go.

You jump onto LinkedIn and your feed is filled with people spruiking AI, the end of the world, marketing this, marketing that. How do you actually know what to pin your hopes on?

Rand Fishkin has a great quote. I’m sure you know him. He says, “What’s happening in the marketing world is probably less important than what’s happening in your world.”

In other words, focus on your business, your goals and your targets. Don’t obsess over the million different directions you’re being pulled in.

Ty Heath: I love that principle because there are so many shiny objects and things you could keep pivoting towards day after day.

It is very reassuring to know that there are some long-term foundational things that never change, whether they have to do with human psychology or the laws of marketing, that you can bet on.

James Lawrence: It’s awesome. It’s really cool.

I’m excited by the idea that there’s new research and new takeaways to complement the session from last year.

Do we want to start with where it started last year, which was the first impression rose? That had me laughing very quickly.

Ty Heath: That’s one of my favourite ones.

This one is really about how memory works and why we need to invest in certain ways when it comes to B2B marketing.

We love pop culture. We love bringing in pop culture references. First of all, we like to have fun. Secondly, it really drives the point home.

I don’t know if you have Bachelor Nation or Bachelorette people in Australia.

James Lawrence: There’s an issue here, which is that you’re speaking to the person who would be least aware of what’s happening on Australian TV.

We probably do have it. I’m probably being shown up here to listeners.

Ty Heath: I’m pretty sure you have it, but I can share the principle.

There have been around 30 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, and I think it’s picked up across multiple countries. It’s a global phenomenon, but it’s a crazy show.

You have 30 contestants and then you have a bachelor or bachelorette. On the first day of the show, there’s this competition. The bachelor or bachelorette gets a first impression rose, and they get to hand that rose out on the first day of the competition, before they have really even spoken to anyone.

They just give this rose out. Now, here’s the science part of it.

In more than half of the seasons, and there have been a lot of seasons, the person who gets the rose makes it to the final four.

So the show looks like a competition, but because of bias and a bit of what we call availability heuristics, there is already a lot that has been decided by that principle.

Availability heuristic just means that people tend to go with what is most familiar to them.

James Lawrence: Are you guys the only people to use the term availability heuristic and The Bachelor in the same sentence?

Ty Heath: It goes together. Whether people knew it or not.

But B2B buying works the same way.

We want to be a brand that gets the first impression rose, because most buyers, 86 percent of buyers, already start with a shortlist of just three brands.

They ask themselves, “What do I already know that solves the problem I have?” They do the search engine in their mind to figure out the answer to that question.

Even in high-consideration B2B decisions like banking, where you put your money, 92 percent of people still end up choosing one of the three brands from that list.

So the question for us as marketers becomes, how do we get on that day-one list? Because if we’re not there, we’re probably not going to get chosen.

That is why we invest in brand. We invest in memory generation. We invest in being recalled for specific buying situations, so we can get on that day-one list and get the rose.

James Lawrence: I was so happy to see those stats at the conference because it confirms what I think a lot of in-house marketers already know.

But it has been a challenge to get good data. There was a Harvard Business Review article, maybe five to 10 years ago now, but it was only in SaaS and it was quite a limited study. We used that a lot to arm in-house marketers with this information.

We’re a digital marketing agency, right? We do a lot of performance marketing and there’s a place for that.

But don’t come to us saying, “We’ve got to drive sales in the next quarter in a complex B2B environment.” It’s too late. The work has to be done earlier.

It’s hard to arm marketers with information to tell that story internally when you’re dealing with non-marketers.

Ty Heath: You’re right on.

That’s why we often connect this conversation to the 95/5 rule, which is another mental model that talks about how B2B buying works.

In short, you have the traditional funnel: awareness, consideration, purchase. We don’t think that’s a particularly customer-centric or finance-centric way to think about marketing.

We believe people are either in market or out market for your services.

If they’re out market, they’re not thinking about your brand. So we need a different way to have the conversation that is more customer and finance-centric.

We propose the cash flow funnel, which says you are either in market or out market. In market is your current cash flow. Out market is your future cash flow.

Five percent of your customers are in market and 95 percent are out market.

If you’re only investing in the five percent through lead gen, lead capture and capturing latent demand, you’re putting a cap on your growth.

So the 95 percent is a matter of memory generation. That was actually another B2B trend. It was one of the first trends we debuted in B2B Trends for the Contrarian Marketer.

I had a really fun shoot where I got to dress up like I was in a James Bond movie, so maybe we can share that one with folks too.

James Lawrence: Having those two stats, that 86 percent of buyers start with a list and 92 percent of the time they go with one of the brands on that list, is powerful.

If you’re not on that day-one list, you’re not making the sale. You need to invest in that 95 percent, and often it’s more than 95 percent in a complex B2B environment.

Ty Heath: Yes, that’s the thing.

The 95/5 ratio can shift depending on what’s happening in the world. In a tight economic environment, that cash flow funnel can shift from 95/5 to 99/1.

That means only one percent of your buyers are in market at that time because of the conditions people are facing. More buying gets pushed into the future.

That also means that during that time, if you can do more to invest in brand, you can still position yourself coming out of a recession to be in a better position.

I get that when budgets are tight, the last thing people tend to think of is brand. A lot of times people are like, “Let’s cut that budget.”

But you can double down on your creative. We say that great brands weigh in, not out. You can focus on your buying situations to be more clear on what they are.

There are ways to get more out of less when conditions are tighter.

James Lawrence: So in sticking with the idea of how you get more out of less and how brands can double down, where do you go next?

Ty Heath: Looking at a lot of different brands, I think the tough thing for people is the desire to keep changing things and keep evolving.

The challenge with that is we forget how human memory works. We forget that people need to recognise you, and recognise you for a particular situation.

There’s a reason why De Beers has not shifted from “A diamond is forever” for their core campaign.

In B2B marketing, there’s a lot more we can do to not only distinguish ourselves from other brands and be distinctive, but at the same time, invest in the same message so people can begin to pick it up and associate us with different entities.

Part of the work we’ve done is a study called Better Bolder Branding. It looks at the things we can invest in to be more distinctive and get more out of our creativity, because that is actually the biggest lever for growth besides the media you deploy.

You can do a lot with great creative on a small budget, which makes it one of the best levers. But we have to focus on being distinctive.

Let me ask you this, James. When you think about B2B marketing, what colour comes to mind?

James Lawrence: I think blue, Ty. I think blue.

Ty Heath: Yes. I think most people would answer that question the same way.

James Lawrence: I was going to be cheeky and say pink or bright orange or something.

Ty Heath: If you said that, I would have been like, “Really? Are you sure?”

But that’s the thing. In the Better Bolder Branding research, we ran a study where we showed the major cloud companies with the logos removed.

It’s really funny. You cannot tell them apart.

We actually have a fun audience participation slide where there are all the different blues of the different brands, and we ask people to guess which one belongs to which company. People are flummoxed. They have no idea.

James Lawrence: It’s terrifying, isn’t it?

Ty Heath: It is terrifying.

There is a challenge of misattribution there, where you are paying to build someone else’s brand.

That’s the argument for not only sticking to a message, but also being recognisable and distinctive, and investing in some things that are under-invested in, like characters.

That is one of the most distinctive brand assets you can invest in. Sonic branding is another. A lot of people are always thinking about these things.

Check out Better Bolder Branding. We also have a B2B trend called The Sea of Sameness on this very topic, which talks about how to distinguish yourself.

James Lawrence: I took a photograph of one of those slides, and the numbers are incredible.

There’s this theory that with two screens, things are often passive. You’re watching something or cooking, or watching the football, ads come on, and then you go onto your second screen.

There’s this crazy attribution effect where if you hear or see a burger ad, you think McDonald’s. If you hear soda, you think Coke. If you’re not the category leader, there’s a huge risk of misattribution.

One of the stats from The Sea of Sameness was that your ad is seen 53 percent of the time. Most ads aren’t even seen. Then the correct brand is only attributed around 30-something percent of the time.

Ty Heath: I have to pull up that slide, but it is a daunting stat to see.

You’re spending a ton of money on the work. If it’s not grabbing attention, that’s a problem. If people aren’t remembering you for the context you’re marketing in, that’s another problem.

I think there’s a slide where we show someone throwing money into a fire.

James Lawrence: By the end of it, once you account for people not seeing ads, thinking of the wrong brand, and then whether it resonates or whether they like it, only a small percentage of people are correctly attributing the ad to your business.

Ty Heath: I’m a glass-half-full person. Knowing that, I think, “Okay, what can we do about this?”

In B2B, there is still a lot more we can do. The bar to stand out isn’t actually that high. We just have to recognise that playing it safe is one of the toughest places we can stand.

James Lawrence: What do you do if you’re in an established business that has inherited blue?

In Australia, some of the banks have quite distinctive colours, but in finance, everything is blue. Anyone who starts a finance business seems to go straight to blue.

If you’re a startup, I get it. Go orange, go different, stand out.

But if you’re an in-house marketer in a business that has already inherited the blue, what practical advice do you have? Rather than leaving, what can they do to stand out?

Ty Heath: That’s totally fair.

Honestly, every time I present that content, someone says, “But LinkedIn is blue.” And I’m like, “I know.”

James Lawrence: I actually didn’t make that connection. I should have.

Ty Heath: I’m glad you didn’t think about that.

But here’s the thing. If you are working in an established brand, even if your brand is blue, more than likely you’ve picked up equity against that. You are not going to throw that equity into the trash.

The good news is that there’s a constellation of distinctive brand assets you can leverage. It’s not just colour.

Using colour alone to distinguish yourself is a terrible idea.

You want to think about the constellation. Fonts, logos, characters, sound. All of those things together, compounding, are what build memory.

I wouldn’t advise just changing to green.

There’s a fun detour here. It’s the story of Tropicana. I don’t know if the Tropicana brand exists in Australia.

James Lawrence: It’s funny because we can talk about my personal orange juice journey here.

I used to love it, and I used to spend more time in the States, so that was always my go-to. I don’t think we used to have it in Australia. I think we may have it now, but I don’t drink orange juice very often anymore.

Ty Heath: If it is there, people will recognise it from the carton.

There’s a big orange on it, with a straw stuck into the orange. That is one of the most distinctive things they have.

There was a new brand manager once who said, “Let’s change it up.” They removed the orange with the straw from the carton, and sales plummeted because people could not find the brand.

So they had to pivot back.

As marketers, we could point to any number of stories where someone overly ambitious came in and said, “We’re going to redefine this.” Then they did, and ultimately they had to switch back.

James Lawrence: Mark Ritson, who is huge down here and now seems to be launching more heavily into America with the Mini MBA, would talk about this a lot. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but essentially, there’s almost never a reason to do a rebrand.

There are exceptions, obviously, but to change your name or throw things out when so much investment has taken place in memory and distinctive brand assets, you have to go further with what you’ve got, not jettison it all.

Ty Heath: This is a stress test for a CMO.

I think the easiest thing for a CMO or anyone new to a brand is to think, “I want to make my mark.”

But we have to think of ourselves as stewards of the brand. We’re guiding it to the next stage. There’s a lot of equity already built. Why would you torpedo that?

It’s about how we steward it to the next level and build on it.

James Lawrence: I thought the point you made in the session around characters was fascinating.

If you’re dealing with seriousness and everyone is blue, characters can really help. You mentioned colour and the different brand assets, but other levers can be bigger.

Could you talk a little bit about characters, both real-world and otherwise? In B2B, it is often a challenge to get people comfortable with real people, but characters don’t always have to be real people either.

Ty Heath: I don’t know why people tend to think of characters as fluffy or unserious. Perhaps that’s why B2B hasn’t bet as much on using characters.

But they are one of the most distinctive and recognisable brand assets you can invest in.

The insurance category certainly gets that. They’ve got multiple characters, from Limu Emu to geckos and others.

You might think to yourself, “What does that have to do with insurance?” But that’s not the point. The point is that you remember the association.

So yes, you can create a character, but your executives and the people working for you and with you can also be recognisable voices.

Some brands may choose to use a celebrity, but you can also invest in your own team. Build someone who has shown themselves to have a strong point of view and a strong voice. Think about how you empower them and build them up as a representative of the brand.

That’s a big opportunity. When you think about the body of your employees, that can expand your reach quite a bit. It’s one of the most under-invested areas.

Not to come across as salesy, but LinkedIn is a perfect place for that.

James Lawrence: I was going to say, even this conversation is a good example.

We’ve had other people from LinkedIn on the pod before, and it creates connection. It breaks through and creates a link with the brand.

It’s funny because in Australia, more on the B2C side, we don’t have as many insurance characters. But in the telco space, there was a real upstart telco that always had this quirky guy who cut through, and every ad for years had him.

They would have spent nowhere near what the big telco brands spent, but the penetration they gained from that was incredible.

There’s something about us as humans and our ability to connect with a character.

Ty Heath: Absolutely.

Especially in B2B, it’s underutilised.

We think about the halo of celebrity in B2C. In B2B, it’s a halo of credibility, but it can also be fun.

Depending on the context, you can deploy a memorable stable of distinctive brand assets, whether that’s a character or a person, to reach your goal.

That trust transference that takes place when you do that is connected to the brand.

That also goes into the creator economy conversation, which is exploding in B2B right now too.

James Lawrence: Even more with AI.

The next one I really like because, to me, it is very contrarian. Partly because of evil digital marketers like me, we’ve pushed this narrative of segmentation, over-segmentation and hyper-segmentation.

I firmly believe we’ve gone too far.

There was a really interesting section of your presentation around the search for similarities.

Ty Heath: Yes. That one owes quite a debt to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which has done amazing work around concepts called category entry points.

It’s a great way to think about how human memory works with brand associations.

What you’re pointing to is that marketers have, over time, hyper-targeted. They slice and dice, and then slice and dice again, until they are talking to Joe in Montana, or Joe in Sydney, one person.

When you think about your marketing strategy overall, part of the issue is that you’re making a lot of assumptions. When you start layering assumptions, you can get a lot of things wrong.

It also speaks to who you think someone is, rather than the situation they find themselves in.

To illustrate the point, I love sharing an example of coffee brands, but I admit I don’t know the coffee brands in Australia.

James Lawrence: We’re like the only market where Starbucks came and had to leave because we have excellent coffee.

We like to deal with little coffee shops where one person owns it. It’s fragmented, but we have very good coffee.

Starbucks has started to come back, but more in tourist-heavy, high-traffic areas. There are only a few.

Ty Heath: That’s amazing. I would love to learn more about the coffee market. I’ll need to come.

Let me share it this way.

When people think about a coffee brand in the United States, most people will say Starbucks. The biggest brand in the category tends to be named because they meet the most buying situations.

You might think about Starbucks when you’re walking down the street, when you’re meeting a friend, or in lots of other contexts.

But as you identify different buying situations, other brands start to enter the conversation.

If I ask, “What coffee brand do you think about when you want to meet a friend?” other brands start to enter the picture. Some people might say Blue Bottle, or whatever neighbourhood coffee place they enjoy.

If I ask, “What coffee brand do you think about when you’re lying on your couch under a blanket on Sunday?” then in the United States, that might become Folgers or Nescafé.

The point is that context changes the brands that come to mind. That is a major opportunity for marketers.

We’re not all going to be Starbucks when we launch a brand. The key is to think about what context we could invest in and own.

What buying situations come up commonly enough to be commercially viable? What could we credibly own as a brand? Where can we actually compete?

That combination of the three Cs becomes the strategy through which you can start to think about your marketing investment.

We like to think of category entry points as capital allocation for marketers, because you can’t bet on everything. You need to decide where you are going to invest.

Once you figure that out, you can start to think about how to build from there.

That category entry points conversation is a great way to think about it, and that’s why we talk about searching for similarities. What are the situations people commonly and similarly find themselves in?

James Lawrence: I can’t remember the exact example, but there was a great example where you could be targeting big law firms, small law firms and specialist firms.

I looked at it and thought, five years ago, if we were building a digital campaign, we would have put different creative in front of big firms, small firms, specialist insurance firms and so on.

But even from a digital buying perspective, there’s a downside to that granularity. The way algorithms work these days, you’re not getting as much useful data into them, which means they don’t optimise as well.

It was probably three or four years ago that our team, partly because we lost some targeting capability in Australia compared with America, started seeing that broader but still well-thought-out campaigns often generated better results than hyper-targeted ones.

Ty Heath: For B2B, you want to try to reach all relevant category buyers to the extent you can.

The better way to think about it is, what is the situation I can pursue for those buyers?

The law example had a law firm that created a character called Lady Law, which is super fun. That character talked about various buying situations in the ad, and it was clear what that law firm did.

People will remember that character, for sure. It was a great approach.

James Lawrence: Even the way we market Rocket has changed. We used to take a more surgical approach.

We were talking about this recently. We’re happy if marketing students pick up some of our content. We’re happy if agency people engage with us, because you never know. In five years, those people might be client-side, or the students might now be in roles.

It’s not about only trying to target a very specific job title.

Ty Heath: That’s the thing.

You just don’t know who is going to be in the decision-making seat.

That also gets to one of the other trends I talked about at Inbound, which is the hidden buyers.

Not only are we failing to recognise that people who are entry-level today may be in the ultimate decision-making seat someday, and they are probably already doing the research and weighing in on what brand to buy, there are also other people in decision-making seats that we don’t realise we should be talking to.

Forty percent of B2B deals are not lost due to a competitor. They are lost because people are too afraid to make a decision, so they do absolutely nothing.

It’s indecision.

The job to be done, and the job that brand helps marketers do to a great degree, is mitigating the risk people feel by simply being known in the first place.

And not just known to the IT decision-maker if you’re selling software, but known to legal, procurement and finance, who are essentially invisible but may hold 50 percent of the decision-making power.

Your champion comes into the room and says, “I love this brand. I want to work with this brand.” Then legal says, “I’ve never heard of them. Who are they?”

That is not a good place to be.

James Lawrence: It’s just true.

No one gets fired for hiring IBM kind of thing.

You look at the big SaaS businesses now and they’ve clearly wisened up to it. They know they may be trying to reach marketers or senior technical people, but they also know someone else might ultimately sign it off.

There’s a reason they sponsor golf events, airport lounges and all those kinds of things.

If the person who signs it off has never heard of them, coming back to that first bit of research around the day-one list, they’re not going to get signed off.

Ty Heath: That’s exactly right.

It can be pretty terrifying. People think it’s just another decision, but in B2B, it’s very high stakes.

As you said, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. But if it’s a $100,000 platform and you make the wrong decision, that can matter.

James Lawrence: We have to find that poor person who did get fired for hiring IBM. Surely they exist.

Ty Heath: That would be a shocker.

James Lawrence: I’m glad you went to the hidden buyer gap because I had that as one of the talking points.

The other one I thought was fascinating was the circles of doom. It’s one of my absolute favourites.

Ty Heath: Oh my gosh. Yeah, circles of doom.

This is the ongoing issue of marketing that I pray we will somehow find a way through one day, which is sales and marketing alignment and how we work together.

LinkedIn has a unique view on this because we have multiple lines of business. We have Marketing Solutions, Sales Solutions, Talent Solutions, among other things.

In our own research, we were able to see the level of overlap between the targeting sales pursued through Sales Navigator and the targeting marketing pursued through Marketing Solutions.

This won’t shock many people, but we saw only a really tiny sliver of overlap between the two.

That means the people sales is trying to talk to are often not being given air cover by marketing.

James Lawrence: Wasn’t it around 10 percent? The slide was a Venn diagram showing the businesses marketing was targeting and the businesses sales was targeting, and the overlap was about 10 percent. That’s incredible.

Ty Heath: We’ll make sure we send you the link so people can watch the videos and see it.

In a perfect world, there would be 100 percent overlap between those circles, and the marketing circle would actually be bigger because marketing is providing air cover.

Circles of doom helps people understand why that needs to happen and how you get there.

Let me speak to the results, because I think they explain why marketing and sales need to work hand in hand.

There are all sorts of cultural and business politics issues that need to be worked through to make that happen, but it is one of the best partnerships you can make.

In the research, we looked at Marketing Solutions, Sales Solutions and Talent Solutions. What we found is that in all cases, brand provided a lift.

From a marketing solutions standpoint, marketing is a growth engine for the business when it creates a bigger pipeline for sales. That’s obvious and we all understand that.

From a sales standpoint, when people were exposed to a warm brand message versus cold outreach from sales alone, they were more likely to respond to that person’s LinkedIn InMail. They were more likely to respond to a connection request. They were more likely to pick up the phone for that salesperson’s call.

Talent was actually one of the biggest areas.

We don’t often talk about the role marketing plays in opening the door for the talent side of a business.

But if you think about it, people want to work for brands they admire, recognise and trust. That’s why people often keep “ex-this” or “ex-that” in their LinkedIn profiles even after they’ve moved on from a company. They still claim that brand.

The cool thing is that when talent is exposed to a brand versus cold outreach from a recruiter, the response rate jumps. I think this was the biggest increase of them all.

I will always advocate for this because brand does not get enough credit, and the work marketers do generally does not get enough credit.

It’s really important for marketing stakeholders in the business and the C-suite to understand what an engine marketing is for the rest of the business.

It’s intangible for a lot of people to make that connection because some of these things pay off over the long term. These are long-term bets you’re making that ultimately strengthen your business from a number of different standpoints.

It mitigates risk. It increases your pricing power. It increases your growth.

For all of those reasons, I think there is more work to be done, both for marketers to articulate that, and for other stakeholders in the C-suite and the business to understand the role marketing actually plays.

James Lawrence: And that is why the work of LinkedIn and the B2B Institute is so powerful.

It gives marketers data. So often, marketers don’t get taken as seriously as they should, and sometimes that’s because marketers aren’t as data-driven. They haven’t always done finance degrees, and finance is often the language the board speaks.

Having data around the day-one list, the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and the fact that a strong brand helps outbound sales efforts is so useful.

The recruitment point is really interesting too. No one ever reaches out to Rocket and says, “We want to invest in marketing for recruitment.” But once you run a workshop with a client, it’s often the second or third thing that gets raised.

Suddenly it opens up into something much bigger, because talent is important and businesses are happy to invest there.

Maybe it’s because marketers haven’t raised it as a big enough issue.

Ty Heath: What you pointed to is our reason for existence.

We are trying to expand the conversation in the category.

For a long time, we’ve focused on the idea of underinvestment in brand. More recently, we’ve expanded into how B2B buying decisions are actually made, looking at the buying committee and how you reduce friction.

People need defensibility to come to a decision.

I hope people tap into our work to have better conversations, evidence-backed conversations, and to think about how they can speak the language of their counterparts.

Again, I’m a marketer. I think other people have to understand our language, but sometimes we also have to think about how to position what we’re doing in more financial terms.

We have other content, like Marketing to the CFO and Three Financial Drivers, that we think are a fun way for people to think about telling the story in a way that resonates more with the business.

James Lawrence: That’s awesome.

Ty, thank you so much for spending your time with us today.

We’ll include links to different parts of the website and some of those resources, because they are such good resources for B2B marketers. But I think there’s a lot in there that is just good stuff for all marketers.

Thank you so much for spending your time with us.

Ty Heath: My pleasure.

James Lawrence: Thanks, Ty.