Christian Klepp, Pete Fairburn

Pete Fairburn  00:00

No human being really likes to admit they don’t know something, even if you’re a naturally quite humble person, it takes, it takes something to say, I don’t know what that is, or I don’t know how to go about that, particularly if you’re a business owner or a stakeholder, that can often be seen as a sign of weakness, to say, I don’t know something. And yet, actually, when you have the courage to say that you can, you can uncover some real things, and at the end of the day, particularly if you’re employing marketing professionals or an agency to help you, the whole reason you’re doing that is because you’ve kind of already admitted you don’t really know how to do this.

Pete Fairburn  00:32

Nice to be back, Christian. Thanks for having me again.

Christian Klepp  00:32

Great to be with you. You know we’ve been talking about this second interview for quite a while on I’m glad that we’re finally getting to pull it off, right?

Pete Fairburn  00:32

It’s definitely, it’s been a while. It’s been a whole world.

Christian Klepp  00:32

Indeed, indeed. So let’s just dive in. Because, you know, this is Pete, as I said before I hit record, this is a topic that’s near and dear to me, and I think it’s something that we contend with on a daily basis. I think there’s still a lot of clients out there and potential clients that don’t quite see the value in doing this yet, and hopefully, after this conversation, perhaps we’ll, we’ll change their we’ll win them over, right, like hearts and minds, as they say, right?

Pete Fairburn  00:32

That’s the hope.

Christian Klepp  00:32

In a, B2B environment fraught with unstable markets, AI and more competitors entering the ecosystem all the time, it has become increasingly challenging for B2B companies to stand up. Unfortunately, companies in this segment have a reputation for deploying play it safe tactics when it comes to their marketing. So how can B2B marketers help their brands rise above the noise and go from bland to brilliant? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today I’ll be talking to Pete Fairburn, who will be answering this question. He’s the director and co founder of Morphsites, a company with a proven track record in helping businesses grow online by maximizing revenue potential and improving efficiency. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B Marketers Mission is. Okay, and here we are. I’m going to say, Mr. Pete Fairburn, welcome back to the show.

Christian Klepp  01:15

All right. So we’ll start with the first question, where I’m going to say that you’re on a mission to work with high growth brands that truly want to innovate and think beyond the ordinary. And I want to, like just under underline that part think beyond the ordinary, because I hope that we can talk about this at length today, right? Because for this conversation, I’d want to focus on the following topic, which is how B2B Marketers can help their brands go from bland to brilliant, right? So B2B open to interpretation, right? But let’s kick off the Let’s kick off the interview with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them, right? So first question Pete is, why do you think many companies in the B2B space struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors? And the follow up question is, why do you think this causes this risk averse mindset in most B2B verticals?

Pete Fairburn  03:06

Yes, it’s good couple of questions there. And I think most, most B2B companies that identify with this problem probably don’t have a marketing problem, or if they do have a marketing problem, it’s because the the issues started long before marketing even begins, and the they default. So they go, Okay, we’ve got similar products or similar services to these brands over here, and there’s nothing wrong with using coach brands to help you, but they’ll they may look at some in the same space as them and go, Well, that’s what they’re doing. So let’s do the same messaging, the same channels as them, because that must work, right? It must work because they’re doing it. But they’ve never really answered the question, Well, why would someone choose us over any of these competitors if price was removed? So if the only thing that differentiates you is your product, your positioning, your messaging, forget price, forget everything else. Why would they choose you? And there’s there’s two kind of camps here. If your product is genuinely desirable, genuinely distinct, the website’s job is just to create clarity around that. But if your product is not distinctive, it’s a commodity, you need to create advantage elsewhere. And many companies are in the second camp, but they operate like they’re in the first, and that’s why they struggle to differentiate.

Christian Klepp  04:37

And where do you think a lot of this risk averseness then comes from? Is it this whole like, well, we’ve never done any of this marketing before, so, you know, we’re not entirely sure what the outcome will be. And let’s, let’s, let’s play it safe. Where do you think this comes from?

Pete Fairburn  04:53

Yeah, I think you’re on to something there. One of the big problems with marketing is it’s measured on typically short term activity, right, rather than long term advantage. You know, every agency or every marketing department creates a monthly marketing report, and it’s right to do that, but it makes you focus on just that short term rather than longer term things. And that can shoot any initiative in the foot, and I think leadership, and that could be owner operators or marketing, CMOs, directors, that kind of thing. They fear getting it wrong more than they value getting it right. So safe decisions feel easier to justify than something that’s quite out of the box. So what you get, instead of genuine movement of the needle from this risk averse mindset is you get these incremental improvements. You get cosmetic changes, maybe, maybe a brand refresh from time to time, which is important, really important, but no meaningful differentiation.

Christian Klepp  05:55

Absolutely, absolutely and based on that, like just moving on to the next question, what are some of these key pitfalls that you think marketing teams should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Pete Fairburn  06:06

Yeah, I think one of the key things, and we see this a lot, is mistaking activity for progress, so doing more more campaigns, more channels, more content, more output, without changing the underlying offer. So there’s nothing wrong with doing all those things we know, particularly for organic search. I saw a post earlier today where you know cadence of content updates and releasing of information is as it always has been, something that search rewards, and I include both organic and LLM (Large Language Model) search in that, but if you’re just doing more of that without changing the underlying positioning, the underlying offer of your product or service, you’re not actually doing anything that’s meaningful. So I think that’s a pitfall over investing in the website as a surface layer. So that kind of comes into this. Again, it’s activity design tweaks, debating over platform instead of asking what actually makes us different from a competitor. So that leads into the other pitfall, I think, is skipping the thinking phase. And what I mean by that is the deep thinking, so having a very light hypothesis and jumping straight into a build or marketing without actually validating whether the idea is worth pursuing. So most wasted spend comes from building the wrong thing or taking the wrong strategy or positioning because you’ve just not thought it through properly and thought about your clients and what your customers and what they actually want.

Christian Klepp  07:38

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I wanted to follow up on that last one, skipping the the deep thinking phase, right? Like, we see this a lot, even with some of the clients that we work with, where they say, don’t need a brand strategy, don’t need, don’t need the marketing strategy, just just implement, right? Why do you think there’s a few, I won’t say many, but, like, yeah, you there’s a few B2B companies out there that have that mindset. Like, let’s just skip the planning stage. We don’t need the research. We know who our clients are. Like, tell me if you’ve never heard that one before, right? So we don’t, we don’t need that, right? Like, yeah, yeah. What do you think that is? What? Why do they just want to skip the planning and go straight to the implementation?

Pete Fairburn  08:24

I guess it can be for a number of reasons. It’s a sense of progress. It feels like we want to just get on with this. So why would we hold ourselves up by doing that? So that fallacy of we know who our customers are is often a point on that, but I think it underlines that reason of, well, you know, there’s time involved in this. And another clear thing, I think, is a lot of people an ideal customer persona or profile on ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is something that the marketing world has talked about decades. It’s not a new concept yet. I am so often surprised at how few people know how to go about even doing a basic persona or profiling their customers. So when I think a lot of business owners or stakeholders say we know our customers, what they mean is, we’ve got a relationship with this, these accounts here, but they can’t put them into a profile. So there’s a degree of this is slowing everything up. We just want to get on with it. But there’s also a suspect, a degree of fear about, well, I don’t really know what I’m doing here, so rather than ask or get someone to help me, I’m just going to move on to the next bit.

Christian Klepp  09:41

Yeah, yeah, I think you’re going somewhere with that one. Do you find that sometimes it’s also perhaps the reason why there’s pushback there is because perhaps there’s a fear of, like, not admitting that. Look, I’ll just come clean. And we don’t actually, we don’t actually have this documented. We. Perhaps we know that there has been some change, or, like, some different market dynamics in things that have happened in the customer’s world that we’re not entirely privy to, but we’re too ashamed to admit that.

Pete Fairburn  10:13

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re all no human being really likes to admit they don’t know something, even if you’re naturally quite humble person. It takes, it takes something to say, I don’t know what that is, or I don’t know how to go about that. And particularly if you’re a business owner or a stakeholder, that can often be seen as a sign of weakness, to say, I don’t know something. And yet, actually, when you have the courage to say that, you can, you can uncover some real things. And at the end of the day, particularly if you’re employing marketing professionals or an agency to help you, the whole reason you’re doing that is because you’ve kind of already admitted you don’t really know how to do this. So you should let the agency lead, because if you want the results, they should be leading that and helping you derive that. And every time we do it, you see, it’s almost like the the blindfold comes off and this new realization of the missed opportunity that’s come from not doing customer research.

Christian Klepp  11:13

Absolutely, absolutely. So we’re gonna slowly, like, unravel and uncover what this what the secret sauce of yours is right to go from bland to brilliant, but before we do that, I think we have to make the listeners understand that this is indeed a process, right? This isn’t something where you download an app and you click submit, and then presto, you’ve got the you’ve got the massive differentiation that you’re looking for, right? So talk to us, and you touched on it now a little bit, but talk to us about the importance of conducting that customer research. So in other words, how can this research help marketers and B2B companies identify those key points of differentiation to position themselves strategically? And I know that you guys have more sites do this as well. Like you know, you do a lot of these discovery workshops with with your clients. You know, before you even start building a website or writing a single line of code, so just, yeah, just walk us through that a little bit.

Pete Fairburn  12:06

Yeah. Well, it’s about understanding, really. So ultimately, a product or service that you have typically is going to solve a pain point or pain points for a client or a customer, depending on what you’re doing, and if you understand the pain points that your product addresses. And that’s normally where business owners and marketing teams are brilliant, because they do know their products, they do know their service, and they go, these are the amazing things it does. As a company, we work out in your direction, and we work with them for a number of years. Absolutely brilliant company who brilliant company who did do this process, and they describe this product and the benefits that come from it, and you can work backwards from there and work out, well, here are the pain points that this is solving, and by doing that, first of all, it makes your customer’s life easier, because you’re able to speak their language. So we’ve all had it where we’ve landed on a website, or we’ve received a piece of marketing collateral where we’ve gone. Yeah, I really resonate with this. I want to know more, because they’ve worked out what’s important to you. So once you’ve got that, once you understand who your customers are, where they are, in terms of, you know, channels, social, that kind of thing, how they’re finding out about you. Everything becomes faster, everything becomes less risky, everything becomes more profitable, because you can then tailor your initially, your website infrastructure, your information architecture, your messaging, your positioning, to those things. And if you do that along with a brand strategy, then you’ve got this beautiful alignment of your brand messaging, but also your digital positioning as well. So you’re speaking the customer’s language, they go, yes, you’re describing me, and then they’re much more likely to take whatever the next step is that you want them to do, and that’s where the differentiation comes in. If you’ve got a great product that kind of almost sells itself, then you just need to communicate that clearly and present it in a way that the customer can see that. So for example, we got a customer who they sell stone and marble furniture, very high end, beautiful stuff. They know who their clients are, and when a client sees it, they go, Yeah, I’ll have that. They don’t even want to know how much it is, because it’s fine. But if your product is interchangeable with countless competitors, you’re a commodity. And really, you know, how many times have we had a discussion where it’s like, well, what makes you different from your competitors? Your competitors? Well, we’re great at service, or, you know, we’re the cheapest. Well, a race to the bottom on prices. No one wins there. So you have to find a way to escape your category, and you do that by looking beyond the product or service in of itself. You look at things like all. Ordering, your logistics, your usage, your integration into your clients or your customers workflow, to see, okay, what? What’s the opportunity? So when you do customer research, particularly in the commodity, the interchangeable space, you come across pain points. And when you identify those customers pain points, you can put in in place other other parts of the platform, other innovations that may not be your core offering that but make it so easy to deal with you, or make it so much easier for the customer to complete their tasks that you make yourself much more attractable. Attractable, attractive to your attractive, attractively, attractive, attractive. Always my new word of the day.

Christian Klepp  15:48

Absolutely, absolutely, you did touch on something there. And I think that’s challenge that a lot of B2B companies are dealing with, right? Like it’s if they’re in a very heavily commoditized vertical, then, then it really becomes difficult for them to differentiate themselves beyond price, right? So I guess one way of doing it is perhaps differentiation in other forms. So like perhaps the way that they work with customers. Is there anything? Is there anything that they do in their workflow that’s differentiated? Do they put out, like, thought leadership pieces, right? Is there something where they, they do take a differentiated perspective? And I just want to draw a thin, a thin line in the sand there, like, a differentiator perspective doesn’t mean contrarian, right? Because you’ve got those two right? Like?

Pete Fairburn  16:38

I think, yeah, you can be contrary. There’s a big or there has been a big push recent years, particularly on places like LinkedIn and that to just be the contrarian. For the sake of contrarian, a lot of people have jumped on that bandwagon, and again, it works for some industries, but only if you know your client or your customer and know that that will all float their boat. If not, you can just alienate a lot of people.

Christian Klepp  17:06

Absolutely and I think one of my previous guests said it, so I can’t claim to have coined the phrase, but it’s performance marketing. Get it,

Pete Fairburn  17:14

yeah,

Christian Klepp  17:14

Getting up on stage and being a performer.

Pete Fairburn  17:17

That’s not where. That’s not a natural place for a lot of people, a lot of a lot of business owners, funnily enough, are introverts. They don’t want to do that, and they that. And it shouldn’t be the case that you build something on that, that basis.

Christian Klepp  17:30

Well, not only that, but I think it’s also a short term strategy, isn’t it? Because, like, how long, how much energy, how much battery power, right? If I’m going to use that analogy? Do you have to be a professional contrarian all the time? I think it’s draining, isn’t it to a certain degree.

Pete Fairburn  17:48

Unless you’re a particular personality type, but I can’t imagine anything worse.

Christian Klepp  17:52

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You unpack that a little bit, right? But I want to unpack this, this question a little bit more, because, you know, you’ve got a lot of experience in this, in these different verticals across the B2B spectrum. So how can, how can B2B companies elevate and effectively differentiate their business? So you touched on it a little bit, but like, just walk us through it. What are some of the key steps that they need to take? Give us some examples of what they can do differently.

Pete Fairburn  18:21

Okay, so steps, first of all, you’ve got to be honest about your product. So you’ve got to say, Are we truly different, or are we actually one of many? Because sometimes you can, yeah, I’ve met businesses where they think they’re doing something quite unique. And you just like you. We meet a lot of businesses in our in our life, and it’s like this has been done before. So if you if you’re different, great, be honest. But if not, recognize that and then decide that’s your first step. But then from there, decide where the advantage comes. You know, if you’ve got a great product that is truly different, great. Is it your brand? Have you got a huge amount of brand goodwill and value? Is it the experience that you give people, or is it systems and tools that elevate the product that you do or the service that you provide to another level? So those are the first two steps. I think, then you’ve got to focus on customer pain beyond the product. And what I mean by that is, Where, where are they getting friction in their life? Where do they lose time, money, control, what would make life better for them? And then if you can build something that removes that friction, not just something that sounds good on paper, but actually has practical value and then only then communicate it, market it clearly across your website, your digital marketing, in your sales conversations once you’ve done that, because if you’ve done that work up front, it will resonate with with the right people. So some examples of that are you. For for the company I mentioned earlier, the stone and marble company, the product does the selling. You know, the website just needs to present it clearly and and it builds trust. And you know, when you’re then coming to select a platform, you don’t need anything particularly special, because the product’s doing all the work. But if you’re in a commodity space where the products don’t differentiate, we need to then look at that differently. So an example of many that we’ve done for a client is a commodity based product. They were in a race to the bottom like everyone else, but what they did is they stopped and did this customer piece. They listened to the challenges that clients were having, and they they then built systems around that, workflows that made the customer and the business’s life easier, that removed friction, that kind of locked them in because of this, what you would call a value add layer of digital services. But what that did is, not only did it lock in existing customers, but it attracted customers which they, in their own words, had no right to be going after, but the workflows that they built were powerful and made such a difference that they were able to win contracts much bigger than they could have ever dreamed, dreamed of otherwise.

Christian Klepp  21:18

Yeah, no, that’s that’s a really great example, and it almost, I would say, it’s focusing on what you do differently, but also being seen as the expert in the space. And I think that’s something that you keep hearing in B2B, right? If you are seen as the expert in the space, on the specific in the specific area, on the specific pain point, because a lot of it boils down to trust as well, right? There’s, it’s a lot, it’s, it’s almost like a trust building mechanism, right? Because if the if the prospect doesn’t trust what you say and what you offer, then there’s no, no amount of marketing is going to convert them.

Pete Fairburn  21:56

Absolutely, just on that is that you’re, you’re demonstrating by building trust, and that comes from you touched on earlier Christian things like thought leadership, pieces, blogs, content, if you can talk in a way that shows that you’ve come across this problem before, maybe not the identical problem, but a scenario that you have a framework for solving with your product that is business that in itself, builds builds trust. So customers want to hear, yeah, these guys, they get me because they’re already talking in this space, and I need to talk, be talking to them, or getting their product, or whatever it might be.

Christian Klepp  22:35

Well, all that, and also building on the on the trust, building mechanism pieces, the social proof, right? Like the testimonials, um, the videos, right? The case studies, proof that you’ve done this before. This isn’t your first um rodeo, as they like to say here in North America, right?

Pete Fairburn  22:55

Yeah, we say that in the UK as well. Yeah, yeah, we do, yeah, but it’s a, definitely, a borrowed one, but yeah, not my first radio and you’re absolutely right. Yeah, and a lot of people say we don’t have the time to invest in, like, video testimonials or things like that. But the reality is, you don’t need hundreds of them. You need three or four, because no one’s going to sit and watch 100 video testimonials if you’ve got three or four really compelling essentially, case studies or people talking about the process and the problems that you solve, or how great your product is that normally is enough to convince someone.

Christian Klepp  23:29

Absolutely, absolutely, just moving on to the next question, and we kind of touched upon this a little bit in the beginning, but I mean, you’ve definitely encountered this in your career. I’ve certainly like been in these situations more times than I care to count. So what am I referring to? It’s getting internal buy in, because we know sometimes, like on the topic of being risk averse, right? And a lot of that comes from senior management. It comes from the people within the organization that have to make the decisions and not to, not to blame them for, for this kind of mindset. Because, you know, at the end of the day, they are responsible for ensuring, I mean, this is like running a business, one on one, making sure the business is profitable. And if you if something comes across their desk that they don’t quite know anything about, or don’t quite understand, the knee jerk reaction is no, right? So over to you. You’ve been in these situations before. How do you get internal buy in to, you know, get out of this risk averse mindset and to to get the senior management on board with whatever the marketing team is proposing.

Pete Fairburn  24:41

Yeah, and the answer to that does depend on who in the organization you’re speaking to, obviously, if you’re speaking to decision makers, and often, as we know, can be multiple people or multiple stages now, but you’ve got that job to do. And I guess I’m coming at this really from how we would do it, but it is true in any business if, if you’re looking to innovate, don’t position it as innovation, because innovation is one of those words that’s bandied around a lot, and I see a lot of people glaze over. You know, we do, we do use that term ourselves a lot, but I’m trying to withdraw it from you some more, because it can mean so many things to different people. And a lot of people see that as spending a lot of money for no return. So you’ve got to frame it properly. You could say things like, look, we want to avoid being competing on price. So how do we do that? How do we create value that makes it expensive or challenging to switch so once someone’s locked into our system, not in some kind of Stockholm Syndrome way, but in a value based way that actually changing that, that just isn’t really an option for them. So stickiness is a really good way to think about it. We want to make it the price is not even the secondary thing. It’s right down the list of priorities because of the value we deliver. And then propose something small. So rather than going, Hey, we want to completely tear up our own our entire offering, and start again. Pilot something simple, something achievable, prove that it works, and then scale it from there. And if you do that, rather than selling an idea, and particularly business owners, hear a lot of ideas, a lot of pitches, show the impact. So if you do something small, prove it works. You can even, in some cases, do the fake it till we make it approach which is where you you you present the offering is available, see if it resonates with your target audience, and if it does, then start delivering it in some way, even if you have to do it manually for a while, while you’ve you’ve established the demand for it. But again, it all goes back to, if you’ve done your customer research, you probably don’t need to do that.

Christian Klepp  27:05

Absolutely, absolutely. There’s some really good points that you brought up, which I’ve jotted down. And these are words that I myself, Pete, I’m trying to avoid saying, If I’m in, if I’m in a room with a client, like, for example, adding value. That’s such an overused term, and I think thanks to LinkedIn, but it’s, it’s something where I feel that the adding value piece is obvious. The reason why they’re coming to you is for your expertise. So the adding value bit is, is something that’s expected. So rather than saying adding value, I try to frame it or package it in the way that it’s like we demonstrate, you demonstrate the expertise towards the target market, and you you instill that confidence in them, that you do have the solution to their pain points and challenges, and that, I know that that’s a little bit wordier, but that sounds a little bit more, at least from where I’m sitting, more compelling than saying adding value. The second thing which you brought up, which I think is really important for marketers to keep in mind, and they probably don’t have to phrase it this way, because it can come across as condescending, but there is a bit of education involved, right? Because, let’s just assume I mean, at least in my experience, and I’m sure it’s the same in yours, 9.5 times out of 10 and B2B, the members of the senior management that you’re dealing with, none of them have a marketing background. They’re either going to be the finance related engineers, CIOs (Chief Information Officers), CTO (Chief Technology Officers), CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers), etc, right? With with little to no experience in the marketing field whatsoever. So there has to be some education there, but it has to come across as like, I’m not, I’m not doing marketing one on one with you. But it’s saying, like, Listen, this is the reason why we’re proposing this, that this is the reason why, this is why it’s in your interest to pay attention to this. And it’s about something that you mentioned earlier. It’s understanding your audience, right? So for the marketers themselves, it’s almost like internal customer service. Who sits in the Csuite on the board in the senior management. Do you know who they are? Do you know what their roles are, their responsibilities are, and you tweak those presentations based on what you know they are going to look for or what they care about, right? I think more often than not, a lot of marketers tend to fall into this trap where they start dropping all these like acronyms, and they don’t do themselves any favors with that, right? And throw throw in all this like marketing jargon that will just go past these people’s heads, right? So it’s a question of packaging it for the right audience, right? I always, always go back to that, like you got to package it the right way.

Pete Fairburn  29:47

Yeah, there’s a really good technique. Can’t remember. I learned it probably a decade ago. It may, yeah, I can’t remember who, so many people I’ve been inspired by. My time, but sometimes to do that without the target person feeling like they are being patronized with marketing 101, to frame rhetorical questions. So if we were able to do this, and we could do this, and then increase our margin on this commodity product by this much, what would that do for our bottom line, and the chances are the brain is answering that question, even if they don’t say it out loud. So again, it’s about showing impact or potential impact, rather than an idea which you’re just showing you thought it through and that you’re thinking commercially. And I think that’s what sets really good marketing teams, apart from others, I think we’ve we’ve touched on this before, is when they’ve got that commercial awareness that actually the job of marketing is to help contribute to the bottom line, rather than just vanity metrics, then you start making statements and framing things in a way that business owners and Those who are responsible for the stock of a business go, okay, they get it, as opposed to impressions, clicks without actually any impact assessment.

Christian Klepp  31:13

That’s it. That’s it. And I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s such a nice segue to the next question about metrics. And I always call this one the Love it or hate it question for marketers, because some marketers are very data driven, so they’re happy to talk about it at length, and others try to, like, walk around it, right?

Pete Fairburn  31:30

Yeah,

Christian Klepp  31:31

but in terms of, like, helping B2B companies differentiate themselves in the market and go from this bland to brilliant, what are some of these metrics? And I know we can go down a deep rabbit hole with this one, but like maybe some top three to five metrics that you would say they should pay attention to.

Pete Fairburn  31:49

Yeah, I don’t think there’s any rocket science here. I think it’s ones that have a direct impact on commerciality. Before I list these, there is the caveat that there are times where things like brand marketing and other non attributable things are important, but that again, comes down to knowing who your audience is. I mean, for example, someone like Airbnb do a lot of brand marketing, but they can because they know who their audience is and they know where they sit. So it’s not to say other other channels aren’t important, but when it comes to metrics, it’s things like nothing surprising here, customer acquisition cost versus their lifetime value. How much does it cost you to get that client, and how much are they returning? And within that as well, is this surprises me a lot. Make sure you’re factoring into that the not just the the the raw revenue, but the margins or the markup, the cost of actually getting that truly so it’s not just the ad spend or the creation of the content. How much are you paying your agency? No, how much you paying your marketing team? Factor that in, and you can be have be honest. Because if you’re honest and you can make adjustments, conversion, quality is a good one, not just volume. So looking at, well, okay, we had this many people, I don’t know, fill in the inquiry form or download the ebook, whatever your metrics are that you know, lead to something typically, but okay, of those, how many actually were a quotable opportunity? How many of those actually completed a deal? How many of those do you retain, or do you have repeat business from? What’s the average size of your deal? What’s your sales cycle? Link those the metrics that matter, I think, as a rule of thumb, if it doesn’t connect to revenue or retention along the line, don’t, don’t necessarily just eliminate it, but question it and say, Is this a metric that is actually telling me anything that A gives me comfort or B tells me there’s a problem that I need to improve on otherwise, it’s probably meaningless,

Christian Klepp  34:03

absolutely, absolutely. So we’re talking about metrics that are linked to, like revenue, to sales, to potential conversions, right? Revenue, obviously being the being the end objective. But like, as we know, in B2B, and you just mentioned it, the sales cycles can be, can be much longer. So you know, how many, how many leads are coming into the pipeline, right?

Pete Fairburn  34:25

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  34:26

How many conversations are we having? How many of those conversations are converting, right?

Pete Fairburn  34:31

Yeah,

Christian Klepp  34:31

Versus the ones that aren’t or are dropping off, right?

Pete Fairburn  34:35

But also, I mean, yeah, absolutely, all of those things. Again, it’s, it’s having, it’s always good for any, anyone in this space, be it business owner, marketing,

Christian Klepp  34:46

yeah,

Pete Fairburn  34:46

stakeholder, to make sure they understand the business metrics that they’re working with. So revenue is one thing, but margin and profitability are absolutely key, because we’ve seen it before. Again, I’m sure you have where you have business. Is that are busy fools. They’re taking. They’re converting loads of low value deals, one offs, but they’ve never aligned on where the high revenue work is. We once had a client who were busy dealing with inquiries every day, and they were converting them, but they weren’t. They weren’t moving the needle. They were barely profitable, and yet, there were massive opportunities they were missing because a couple of key stakeholders weren’t talking about how to offer to this really high margin longer sales cycle, but really high margin stuff. But once you start understanding where your profitability lies and where your costs are, and perhaps products or services that if you just leaned on a little bit, could dramatically increase your profit line, then you start getting interesting results.

Christian Klepp  35:49

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for pointing that out. That’s absolutely paramount, right margin of profitability. Okay, for this next question, I would have asked you to get up in Hyde Park in the Speaker’s Corner, right? But in the interest of time, just what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Pete Fairburn  36:11

The belief that better marketing can fix a weak or undifferentiated offer so you can optimize endlessly, but if you’re interchangeable, you’re just competing harder for the same result. So I really feel for a lot of marketing teams, because they’re often asked to outperform competitors without being given anything structurally within the business that’s meaningfully different to say. So they’re literally they’ve got no point of difference. So it doesn’t matter how crack your marketing team is how good they are. If you are interchangeable, and there’s nothing different about you, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Christian Klepp  36:48

Exactly, exactly. You can throw whatever analogy you want at that, right, like lipstick on a pig, build a facade, right? All of that, right? But that’s that’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. Pete, once again. I mean, this is a great conversation. Loved having you on for a second time. Maybe there’ll be a third. Who knows, right? But thanks again for coming on. Please. Quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Pete Fairburn  37:12

Yeah, so I’m Pete Fairburn. I’m the co founder and one of the directors at morphsites. We build websites, platforms and integrated systems, along with supporting digital marketing, a big part of what we do, though, is focus on the thinking first. So everything that we’ve talked about today is baked in. We’ve got a proprietary process and set frameworks that help us deliver really meaningful changes. So if you want a conversation, that’s how we do things. We don’t pitch, we talk. Can help you.

Christian Klepp  37:44

Fantastic, fantastic. So once again, Pete, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Pete Fairburn  37:50

Thanks, Christian, thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp  37:52

All right. Bye, for now.