We all know that in B2B marketing, convincing and
demonstrating to a buying committee that you are the right
partner and company of choice is no small feat. It requires a
deeper understanding of a company's challenges, the demand
triggers, how they buy, how they make decisions, and their
selection criteria. So how can B2B marketers develop the right
messaging that speaks to different members of the buying
committee. Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on
a Mission podcast, and I'm your host, Christian Klepp. Today,
I'll be talking to Douglas Abbott, who will be answering
this question. He's the CEO and Founder at Contrasted, which
helps B2B companies not only generate leads, but also get the
right results. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B
marketers mission is. All right, and I'm gonna say, Mr. Douglas
Abbott, welcome to the show.
Thanks. Great to be here.
Great to have you on the show. Douglas, I'm really looking for
this conversation, because, man, this is something that I think
B2B marketing teams really need to pay more attention to. Let's
not keep the audience in suspense for too long. Let's
just dive right into the topic. If we, if we can, let's do it
all. Right, fantastic. Okay, so Douglas, you're, I'm gonna say
you're on a mission to combine strategy, execution and
proprietary AI to drive real pipeline. But for this
conversation, I'd like to focus on the topic of how B2B
marketers can develop messaging that speaks to different members
of the buying committee. And I know a lot of people, they
probably glaze over that, or they probably feel that that's
someone else's job, but I have been in situations as I'm sure
you have, where I've seen that go, all right, right, so let's
kick off the conversation with two questions, and I'm happy to
repeat them. Okay, so question number one is, why do you think
it's so important for B2B marketers to understand who the
different members of the buying committee are? And number two,
where do you see most marketing teams struggle regarding the
above?
Yeah, so you know, I think the reason it's so important is that
in most of these, you know, large B2B purchase decisions,
it's going to touch multiple departments. So you know, those
decisions to buy a product like they rarely rest with one
person. There is the buying committee. So when you talk
about the buying committee, you know each person is going to
care about different outcomes, and they're going to want
different things from a product, from a software. So, you know,
the CFO might want cost efficiency, the head of ops
might want usability. The CIO might care about how it
integrates with their current tech stack.
So and I think where I see people struggle is that they
will focus on a generic message that might be relevant to an
organization, but they're not actually speaking to the needs
and outcomes that those individual members of the buying
committee want.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's absolutely right. It's, it's
this whole, I hate to use this, because I feel it's so overused,
but like, one size fits all right. Like, it's one of these.
Like, okay, well, let's just have this very top level generic
messaging that that appeals to everybody. But yeah, guess what?
No, it does not to your point. It's the CFO. One of my favorite
people is, yeah, is going to look at something? It's going to
look at it from a different lens, as compared to somebody
who's in operations, who is in procurement. I imagine
procurement, slash purchasing. Who is in it, or the CSOs, etc,
etc, right? So...
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay. And why? Why do you think it's all so based on, based on
that and based on understanding that all of these people have
different roles and responsibilities. What role will
the marketing team have to play in investigating and finding out
who those people are and what they're looking for? As a follow
up question.
The marketing team should know who, everyone in the
organization should know who the members of the buying committee
are. If that's not happening, then you know the marketing team
should be talking to leadership, to sales, to everyone about, you
know, understanding who those people are when it comes to, you
know, marketing's role. That's where we can talk about, you
know, how to focus messaging. So I think in overall kind of
message about your company, what your product does, like one
broad message, it's okay, but when you think about how to
actually move people through the pipeline, you need to speak to
each one of those people individually. So that's where
marketing can help craft what those messages need to be to
each one of those people on the buying committee.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I'm going to move us on to the
next question, which is about these you know, if we're talking
about crafting the right messaging, right for members the
buying committee, what are some of these key pitfalls that B2B
marketers need to avoid, and what should they be doing
instead?
I would say that people are probably focusing a lot on
product led messaging. My product does this. It does that.
It can save X amount of time, X amount of money. All those
things are good, but they need to be applied to the right
person. So it should be focusing on audience led messaging. And
then, you know, later, that'll bring us into how do you segment
your audience? How do you target them differently? You'll need to
figure that out, but you can have an overall message that
goes to everyone, but you also need to supplement that with,
you know, the key benefits, values, outcomes that each
person is going to get. Who's on that buying committee?
Absolutely, absolutely. What are some of these other pitfalls
that you think they should be avoiding, or perhaps what should
they be doing instead? Is rather understanding, like what each of
the pain points of these members of the buying committee are,
because that way they would understand, okay, so the finance
guy has a different pain point from the operations guy, which
almost sounds like table stakes, but in reality, if you dig
deeper to understand, okay, so that's what their challenge is.
That's what they're mandated to do, and therefore, that's what
they're looking for in a solutions provider, that
knowledge might be helpful, right?
Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of where research starts to come
into play. And I think that's another big area where marketing
can help.
Absolutely. And thank you for setting that up. And so please
do tell right, how can, how can they help by and how can they
lead with research? Walk us through that process.
Yeah, so I think there's, there's kind of two places to
look for research. There's internal and there's external.
When you're talking about internal, you know, your sales
team, your customer support team and your customers, there's so
much you can mine from that you know your sales team can help
understand, like, which product features or benefits can, you
know, really light up the conversation when they're doing
a demo, customer support can tell you pain points, how
they're feeling. And then you know, most importantly, like
your customers can tell you exactly how your products
helping them. And you know that can, that can be at the
individual buying committee member level. It doesn't have to
be at an organizational level. And then I think the other is
kind of the external, so that can be things like industry
trends, industry pain points, regulatory environment, you
know, all those things are there, and they can kind of help
guide you on how to position your product to solve problems.
And then you can kind of look to combine that external and
internal research into, you know, a coherent messaging
strategy, and then start to, you know, build out your messaging
matrix.
Absolutely, absolutely no, some really great points I have. I
had one or two follow up questions for you to just
talking about, like, understanding the customer's
pain points and seeing where they're at in terms of, like,
Okay, this is the challenge they're facing. This is also
perhaps what was the demand trigger right like, this is what
motivated them to look for the specific product or solution and
and based on that, they're trying to look for the right
service provider and determine which one of these service
providers then fits within their specified criteria. Would it
also make sense? And I know this is harder to do, because,
believe me, I've gone through it. But like would it also make
sense to interview, if possible, clients that perhaps turned
clients that are no longer using the product because they were
not satisfied. And I know that's a much more complicated
conversation reason why we weren't satisfied,
because it's also, it's also about the continuous improvement
So, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that that's super
important, like, even beyond the marketing use case, just in
terms of, like, how an organization's functioning, you
of said solution, right?
know, is it? Is it the customer service that was the problem? Is
it, you know, a specific feature of the product that was a
problem? There's so many things there, so really understanding
just why someone would churn would be, you know, really,
really key for the organization. And then, you know, I think you
can, you can address that through product, and then start
to work it into your marketing copy as well.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely, walk us through this
When you kind of start off and get buy in from the other
a little bit like in terms of, because we know that it's
important to do this customer research right, and it's
important to, like, determine, Okay, how do we craft this
messaging that appeals to the different members of the buyers
committee? Theoretically, that's exactly what we should do. And
yes, absolutely, you're right. Let's go ahead and get it out
there, but I from my own experience in reality or in
application, that could be a very complicated logistics
exercise, right? So walk us through just based on your
experience. How, how should marketers and the other
departments, because they need to work in tandem with other
teams, right? They shouldn't be like doing this in isolation.
Walk us through. Walk us through that process. Like, how do they,
how should they go about doing that research? How do they get
buy in from the other departments so that they feel
invested in as well, that it's not one of these? Like, oh gosh,
here, here's marketing again. What do they want this time,
right? Like, leave me alone, right?
departments, you know, take them along on the journey and make
sure they understand it's for everyone's benefit, not just for
marketing's benefit. So for sales, as an example, they, you
know, ask them when they're on calls with prospects, who's on
the calls? What's the positive things they're responding to?
What's the negative things they're responding to? And just
say, we're trying to make your sales calls actually easier,
because we're going to message the positive benefits to
prospects, and they're going to know all this coming in, and
we're going to address the things they're concerned about
before you even talk to them. So that isn't something you have to
spend time talking about. That's kind of like one example for the
sales team, but you can do that across the organization, and
hopefully everyone kind of sees the benefit in that.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Based on your
experience, how can developing the right messaging for the
different members of the buying committee? A, strategically
position companies against their competitors, and B, influence
and help members of the buying committee to make an informed
decision.
I think the strategically positioning yourself against
competitors is a really cool one. I'll just say one of the
things we're doing internally is like, we have a tool, and what
does it that kind of looks through all of the review sites,
G2, Capterra, kind of all of those like B2B review sites, and
it kind of parses the data and separates it into positive and
negative themes for the product and for customer service. So
what we do is, you know, we can run that for you can run that
for your company, and you can run it for your competitors. So
then you can kind of start to see the differences. So if you
start picking up a trend that your competitor doesn't have
very good customer service, you can start to include that in
your messaging, as you know, a real differentiator. And you
know, potentially try to try to push those competitors clients,
or if someone's deciding, you know, they can hopefully choose
you. But yeah, it can be a real strategic differentiator if you
can find something that you're particularly good at and your
competitor is not good at. And then I think you know on the
second point in terms of influencing the buying
committee, every member of the buying committee is going to
need their concerns addressed before they sign off on a deal.
So the faster that you are, you know, addressing those concerns
through your marketing materials, through your sales
teams, through your messaging, the more velocity your pipeline
is going to get and the faster you're going to close deals.
Absolutely, absolutely, you touched on something that I
wanted to go back to, like you mentioned that you have this
tool that helps to review not just a company's website, but
competitors websites as well. And it helps to separate like
positive from negative reviews and so forth when it comes to
like, research and perhaps even crafting messaging. I mean,
like, look, we are in 2025 and I can't help but ask you this
question about AI, right? How has, how has AI helped to make
this process more efficient? And I'm trying to be careful about
the way that I word this, because I'm not trying to imply,
please use AI as a shortcut, right? That's not what I'm
implying at all. But like, just from your experience, how has
that helped? How has AI helped you and your team to craft this
right messaging for the buying committee?
The thing I like about AI is when it's done right, it enables
us to do things we wouldn't have had the time to do before. So
our team would not have had the time to look through hundreds
and hundreds. If not, thousands of Capterra reviews and G2
reviews and put them into boxes and summarize and do all those
things. But AI can do that. So, you know, as long as you can
kind of get something purpose built for, you know, an AI
purpose built for something that you actually need and is going
to deliver value to you, you know, I really, really like it.
So we've been able to do that, and, you know, really do these
competitive analysis that just would have taken either too much
time or would have cost, you know, tens of thousands of
dollars to have a research firm do it. So that's, that's where I
see, I see the benefit. I think the thing you have to watch out
for is, like, the kind of, do it all AI, sort of things. Like,
you don't want to just like, go to a ChatGPT box and say, like,
Hey, can you summarize all the reviews of Capterra and on for,
you know, it's just not gonna, gonna do it right? But if it's
done with, you know, built properly, with good prompt
engineering, and it's, you know, repeated and tested, it can be a
is that you kind of trust ChatGPT, because you want to
huge value.
save some time or save some money on your messaging plan,
you get a messaging plan that's totally wrong, and then you go
spend your media dollars, sales time, sales teams time with an
incorrect message that ends up kind of costing you more money
because It wasn't properly vetted, and, you know, wasn't,
you know, wasn't the right message that your buying
committee members kind of need to hear.
And there you have it. There you have it. The other thing too is
that ChatGPT will spit out something that's quite generic
in my experience, and it's also really hard to verify, because,
you know, you can't really see the sources, right? That's the
other thing. So it might lend itself to things like
plagiarism, right? Which, which people who are not in this field
or not, who are not in this discipline probably don't really
think about much, but yeah, that is serious too, right?
Yeah. And you know, in all of the tools we use internally for
ourselves. They all have the AI tools. They all have. They cite
every source that they use to come up with something. This is
more for when we're doing research. But, yeah, you want to
verify. You definitely want to.
Absolutely, absolutely, and you know, especially in this day and
age, where I know if this has been your experience, it
certainly has been mined that the trust gap is getting bigger
and bigger. Like customers tend to be more distrustful just
because of how much information, or perhaps even misinformation,
is out there, right? So they always want to verify it, and
that's why you have these, you know, fact checkers, right? Love
them or hate them, right? Even after a press conference, fact
check what he said, right?
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it's, you know, one of the key
trends across, like, everything in life, right?
Absolutely, absolutely, if you can, can you give us an example,
perhaps even from your own company, of, like, a client that
you've helped in terms of developing this, this right
messaging for their clients, buying committee, right? And
maybe, maybe they were dealing with some kind of challenge, and
they came to you and then, and then walk us through how you
help them solve that challenge.
Yeah. So, you know, we go through pretty comprehensive
process where, if someone knows exactly who their buying
committee members are, that's great. We'll work with that.
Kind of do the research there, to find their pain points, find
the industry trends relevant to them, all those things. But if
they don't, we will, we will kind of start there with the
buying committee, and then we'll kind of have that. Check
internally, you know, with their sales team to make sure, like,
those are the people who are on the calls, who are signing off,
kind of getting insights there. You know, we had one, which was
one, one client of ours there, like, like, kind of, like an ERP
(Enterprise Resource Planning) solution, and, like, a really
specific technical field. And, you know, they were talking a
lot to the people who would use it on the day to day basis. But
when we came in, we kind of realized that they weren't
talking to the CFOs, and that was, you know, a potential
blocker on a lot of the deals. So we started, you know,
specifically messaging the CFOs in the relevant industry, and
they've actually turned out to be one of the biggest lead
sources, because, you know, they're on that buying
committee, and they hear, Oh, we can get more efficient, you
know, both in terms of, like, our operations time, and also
save money. So, you know, it's a really kind of appealing message
to them.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And again, it would have been
difficult to, like, find that out had you not done any due
diligence to, like, find out exactly. Okay, so what is it
that these that the specific function is dealing with and
what's motivating them, again, going back to the whole demand
trigger thing, what's, what's motivating them to go out and
find a solution, and what appeals to them that when they
see the message, they'll be like, Yeah, you know what?
That's like. That's exactly what I'm going through right now.
Yeah, exactly. And I think just, and just as important as like,
addressing their concerns up front. So if you know, a problem
in this particular example, a lot of times is like, it takes a
long time to switch. If you're switching Europe, it's like, you
know, six months or 12 months to switch. And no one really wants
to go through that, but this company is usually able to do it
in about six to eight weeks. So just like having that insight,
getting it up from the messaging can really, you know, lay a lot
of concerns, you know, before they even happen.
Absolutely, absolutely like, it's, it's like quantifying the
benefits right? Upfront, fantastic. Okay, we get to the
point the conversation where we're talking about actionable
tips, and you've given us quite a bit already, right? But again,
just imagine that there is somebody out there, a B2B
marketer that's listening to this interview, and that's
saying, You know what? This topic that Christian and Douglas
are talking about. This really speaks to me, because this is
exactly what we're going through in terms of crafting the
identifying who the members of the buying committee are, and
crafting messages specifically for them, what are like based on
everything that you've said, if you were to recap it like into
three to five points, what would you say they can do right now,
to take action?
Yeah, you know, I think one, if you aren't clear on who the
buying committee members are, raise that with you know, sales
leaders, leadership in general. You know, that's kind of a code
red, like, you know, companies should really know who the
members of their buying committees are. I think once you
know that, what I would do is try to talk to two or three
people with the job titles from those buying committee members
who are your customers. So, you know, interview them if they're
happy to do it. Maybe offer them a little something you know,
like, like discount or something you know, something if, if you
need to. But you know, try to understand what pain points your
products solving, and also, if there's any outcomes that
they've driven from the use of your product, because, you know,
that can lead to a case study, super compelling. But yeah, that
would be kind of the first thing is to talk to them. I would also
talk to sales, and I would say, Okay, we have these members of
the buying committee. Are they all on the phone with you, you
know, when you're talking, when you're trying to close a deal?
What are both, you know, what do they respond each what does each
one of them respond to, positively and negatively?
And then, are there any kind of, like features or portions of the
sales demo that kind of make the light go off, kind of get the
insights from, you know, your customers and your sales team.
If you can do that external research on, you know, industry
trends, pain points, those sorts of things, then you can start to
build a messaging matrix so you can say, Okay, this is, you
know, buying committee member, one they care about this. Our
product solves it in this way. So we should message, you know,
in this way. And then once you build that matrix, kind of audit
your current marketing materials, assets and
everything, and see kind of what you have that would, you know,
align to basically those line items. 90s, and what you would
still kind of need to build, or, yeah, need to kind of create.
And I guess it's also really important to test that
messaging, right? Like, it's not, it's not one of these,
like, I used to call them the internal high fives where, like,
everybody internally goes, Yeah, that's the right messaging. And
then you take it out, and it's like, nothing, right?
Yeah, every, every messaging you know, AB, AB testing is super
key, and that can be on everything from, like, just the
basic kind of text, like headline, to the asset you're
promoting, if you're promoting, like, a case study or a white
paper, or, you know, something else. Yeah, testing is always,
you know, really important.
Absolutely, absolutely. All right, sir, get up on your
soapbox. What is the status quo in your area of expertise that
you passionately disagree with? And why?
Yeah, I think I, you know, I touched on some of this already,
but I kind of want to talk about AI, and because I hear a lot of
both, AI is going to replace all marketers and AI outputs are
garbage. And to me, both of those are wrong. For me, AI
should be used for the things. AI is good at speed, scale,
repeatable tasks, but humans still need to be in charge of
the strategy, especially if that part of the strategy is telling
AI what to do. You know, again, for me, like the best AI, is
niche. It's purpose built. It's for a specific task. You know, I
don't think that there's any AI that can come in and run a
company's whole marketing right now, like, you can't just, like,
go in and say, Hey, run my marketing. That's not going to
work. But I do think it's very possible for an AI to, you know,
be great at research, or be great at looking for insights in
a data set or coming up with a content strategy, if it's given
the right parameters. So I think I am very in the middle of AI is
horrible and is going to replace everyone, and or and can do
everything. And AI is horrible because the outputs are garbage.
I am kind of firmly in the middle of, there's some good,
there's some bad. It just needs to be used the right way.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I always tell people,
like, look, there's a time and place for AI, I think to just
completely reject it is foolish, because it's creeping into every
industry, right? It's not just marketing. I mean, it's creeping
into law. It's creeping into healthcare, right? Like, yep, I
know, but I know about the US, but like a lot of the banks over
here in Canada, when you call the hotline, that's AI, how can
I help you today? And then you, you have to, you enter, I'm not
gonna say a prompt, about what it is you want to do.
And then they put you into that designated like, like channel or
waiting line, right? And then, and it takes about like 20
minutes to actually get a hold of a real person, right? So,
yeah...
Pressing zero, operator, operator, yes, correct, correct.
Or yeah, or even, like these, these chats that you see on
websites, right? Like that pop up, right? How can I help you
today? Douglas, right? And then, and then it gives you the
options, right? I mean, all of that's AI, so, I mean, I feel
for certain tasks like that, I think it's, I think it's okay,
right? But again, to your point, and I strongly believe this
true, do not like rely on AI to craft specific messaging for
members of a buying committee in a specific industry segment that
AI might not necessarily know much about, right?
You might use it to gather information that you use to
craft the messaging, but ultimately, like you need to be
the expert. So, you know, use it to help, help, you know, make
your expertise even more...
Absolutely, absolutely. So here comes the bonus question. So
rumor has it that you once were based in a place called
Singapore. And for those of you that don't know where that is.
It's a small city state in Southeast Asia, and you, you set
up your at the time, your company's office and operations
and expertise with the listeners. Please. Quick intro
there, if memory serves me correctly. So the question is,
What did you learn from that experience abroad? And how is
that? How has that influenced? How has that influenced your
life and your company?
to yourself and how folks out there can get on to you.
Totally. Yeah. So my name is Douglas. I'm the Founder and CEO
of Contrasted Marketing. We're a kind of small agency focused on
strategy execution for B2B marketing. We've kind of our own
suite of proprietary AI tools that we use. And, yeah, we're
kind of just, you know, experts on LinkedIn, Google ads, all
the, all the B2B platforms, yeah, on a personal level, I'm a
dad of two. I love playing basketball and watching English
Premier League in my spare time. Yeah, and that's that's got me.
So you can reach out to info@contrastedmarketing.com or
go to https://contrastedmarketing.com/
and fill out our form to get in touch.
Fantastic, fantastic. So who's your favorite team?
Liverpool.
Liverpool. Okay, how they've been doing lately? Like, the
last time I checked it was, yeah, they had a they had a bit
of a tragedy, didn't they, like, couple months ago?
Yeah, they did. That was very sad, yeah, but yeah, the season
just started last weekend, and yeah, currently the reigning
champion. So they're good.
Fantastic, fantastic. Once again. Douglas, thanks so much
for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Christian.
All right. Bye for now.