2025 B2B go-to-market planning - preparing for challenge, change & curveballs

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On the receiving end, you're at your printer, but the fax comes through. Without anything you don't choose for it to come through. No, it just comes through. just comes through. uses your ink and your paper without you knowing. That would be illegal now. Probably. The world of B2B marketing, sales and service tech is moving fast. This podcast will come through the height of the hidden agendas and bullshit advice in search of the truth to help you make more informed decisions. We're somewhere into Q4.

Heading rapidly to the end of 2025, most go to market teams now. Sales marketing in B2B are planning for next year. It's probably a more challenging planning phase than we've ever faced before. And there's a number of reasons for that. Obviously, there's a huge amount of change in B2B. We're at the end of arguably another marketing cycle. And what I mean by that is

a cycle of activities, strategies, et cetera, that have worked. But we're now well into that sort of almost cash cow phase where we're just seeing diminishing returns to the point where probably in a year's time, a lot of what has been working really just won't be effective anymore. I love my story of the fact shop, the famous fact shop, somewhat before your time, but back in the day. I don't even know what that is, Do you know what a fax is?

A fax machine. Back in the day, you'd have an office, you'd have your print room and in the printer would be sometimes your fax would be connected to your printer. Sometimes you'd have a separate fax room, Innovators got hold of this whole kind of concept and started creating mailers that could be delivered by fax to the company's fax machine. So I will be sitting in one office, create a fax

template, you know, offering, I don't know, services, for example, and then you file onto your fax and it would be received at the other end. And you could do that across, it's like a mail merge with multiple fax numbers across multiple companies. on the receiving end, you're at your printer, but the fax comes through. anything, you don't choose for it to come through? No, it just comes through. It just comes through. uses your ink and your paper without you knowing. Yeah, That would be illegal now. Probably. Yeah. And it would be F.

FAO James Ingham. So you'd be sitting at your desk, someone was in the print machine, print room would come in, come over to your desk and then hand you this fax. And you'd be like, okay. That's okay. I might be interested in broadband services, who knows. So when we first started doing that, we were quite early to market with it and it was actually quite successful. got quite a lot.

Leads on the back of it, surprisingly. You innovated. Innovated with facts. This is a long time ago. Those two things are polar opposites. Absolutely, but it works. But the point of me telling you this story is over time, other people started to cut on to it. And eventually your inbox that used to sit on the side of your desk when we had paper. The literal version of an inbox. was an actual box. Yeah, with facts shots like that thick. Yeah.

So the point where someone else would come over the next fact shot six months later and you'd like, you'd be screwed up and thrown in the bin. And that just illustrates the point. This is what happens in marketing. Something new comes out, we'll jump on it. And as more and more people start to adopt it, it starts to become less effective. And I think we've reached that cycle. With email particularly. With inbound and it still absolutely has its place, but things undoubtedly change. And it creates problems in the planning process because

You look at what's working now and you think, well, that's probably going to continue to work for some time, but we don't know how long that's going to continue to work. And we need to think about some of the new things that are coming through. But as always, you can't turn one tap off and turn the tap on quickly enough. So you've got to keep things going in situ in parallel until you kind of you've got to maintain that level of effectiveness without seeing a dip. But it does great challenges for planning. So I think today we want to talk about

some of those trends that are impacting the old playbook. What we've said, and we've talked about this quite a lot on previous episodes of the podcast. And then we'll talk about some of the considerations that you should be really thinking about as you go into the planning process. Obviously, it's always difficult in Q4 when you've got the sales team who you really need to collaborate with in the planning phase who are focused on closing out the year as best they can.

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very limited time to spare to think about planning. They've got their own planning to do as well in terms of targets, accounts, et cetera. So, and really for marketing, you still got to continue to keep the wheels turning, even though the impact that you'll have now is gonna be more for next year in terms of any contribution to pipeline, anything significant is gonna be for 2025, where we are right now with most complex sales. So I think let's start with the trends. So what?

What are the main things that we know that are going to impact 2025 in terms of go to market? Shoot.

We have light. Yeah. So sorry for anyone that's watching the video version this podcast, we were working for the first 10 minutes. but now I can actually see you. So that's a bit better. So we were talking about trends. Yeah. So the trends that we are now faced with that are going to have an impact, more of a profound impact on planning than maybe in the past, I think.

It's not just one trend, it's an accumulation of a number of converging trends that we're seeing. So what's your take? What are the sort of main trends that you think we should be really thinking about? Well, as always, it's a little bit difficult to assess trends and how much you should be kind of putting your eggs into those baskets at this point. But I think what you do need to be aware of is the trends that are potentially coming down the line and begin to prep yourself and your teams and your tech, which we'll talk about later.

to be able to adapt to those trends as they come in. I don't believe a strategy can be fixed at the start of the year and completed as it was on paper all the way through or a plan even for that matter. So the trends which I think are already impacted marketing but certainly will do next year, the obvious one AI, now ultimately that's gonna change how you work as a team. are HubSpot partners as most people listening to this will know and we've talked at length.

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on a previous podcast about how AI is going to change the way you use HubSpot, example. Search is a big change. So also kind of related to AI and the fact that AI is now embedded in lots of search engines and the old world of kind of blue links and no snippets and now, you know, ultimately no AI search, which we have today, means that naturally traffic is going to reduce to your website. And that is just a fact, you know, because

answers to questions which would normally be answered by a website, are to be answered directly in the search. And therefore, naturally, most people are going to see lower traffic. obviously, people are thinking that maybe they can offset that a little bit by understanding how AI is conducting its search, how those algorithms work. But none of us really know that. The people that built those things don't really even know that. And therefore, it's very difficult. There are, however, tools

HubSpot built one that allow you to analyze how AI perceives you as a brand, how it perceives your content, and that's a good starting point. that's called the AI search grader or something like AI search grader, something similar to that while remembered. And that's, know, those tools will develop. Ultimately, as much as people don't really understand how AI works, they can analyze its behavior and you can begin to model things like that. And HubSpot is ahead of the curve on that one.

So we've got AI, we've got changes to search. So LinkedIn over many years has been trying to keep people on platform. And these days they've got to the point whereby, you know, ultimately they're very aggressively trying to keep people on their platform. No longer is it a platform in the way that it used to be, which was a channel to share stuff, you know, across your own assets. Now it's very much a community, insular community whereby you consume everything.

that you're going to consume on LinkedIn within their platform. Obviously, they have a vested interest in that being the case. And that is very much now established. I think just to build on that point with LinkedIn, I've got some fairly strong views on LinkedIn, which I'm not going to go into. another podcast. I think it's very much forcing brands to focus on paid. It's very difficult to build a company brand on LinkedIn. You still can, organically.

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But you have to think, think of your, your tone of voice, your kind of whole business profile as something maybe different to other channels. You just look at HubSpot, their, their profile on LinkedIn is very different to how it presents itself elsewhere. They're very quirky. I think they call it the unhinged strategy that they use. So it's, they're picking out and publishing and posting very slightly weird stuff, which

is working for them. But and then on the flip side, organically, LinkedIn is rewarding those people that are seemingly obsessed with building their own personal brand. So they're posting out long comments, pictures of themselves. The algorithm in LinkedIn is really rewarding those people by extending their risk. Rightly or wrongly. And whether you can get board or not, starts to say probably around 99 % of people that are on LinkedIn are just bystanders watching all these people create their own personal brands.

But let's not go there. That's another trend, That's another trend. And all of those trends collectively are having broader impacts on the marketing function in general. So, for example, because of a lot of that happening, there's now this debate around brand versus performance and whether the pendulum is long term. Exactly. And whether the pendulum has swung back towards brand from being very performance focused in recent years is another kind of debate that's swirling around the industry that's leading a lot of people to

Well, first of all, question what they're trying to achieve. And second of all, redefine their KPIs and try and drive those changes internally as well, which is no big ass. So that's going to fall into part of the process of planning and strategy building for 2025 as are all the tactical things. It's affecting the channel selection. It's affecting the content that you create, the different types of content that you create, whether you're moving from more written words to audio and video.

It's affecting how you communicate those, that performance internally as well. You know, I've had conversations with numerous clients which are now reanalyzing based upon all of that stuff, specifically whether they should be MQL focused going forward. And there's good arguments to suggest that they shouldn't be. They should broaden their horizon in terms of marketing's impact. And therefore they should broaden the horizon on what they report on to the board. And those things are difficult changes to embed because the board naturally will be questioning that because they've, you there's this.

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Addiction to leads isn't there and that isn't just in marketing it's across the business. So when when those changes take place and people are being weaned off those MQLs, rightly so, arguably, that's going to take a lot of change. so all of this stuff is factoring into how someone should plan for 2025. But in your view, you know, where's the best place to start? think, yeah, you've got

You've got your own intuition, your own experiences that would suggest things are changing. The data that's in front of you based on the activity that you're doing, your general performance. And you've got a lot of loud voices that are saying, this is the way to go, this is the way to go, depending on what self-serving agenda they've got themselves. I think naturally, particularly marketeers, that's our sort of background. You want to have your plans locked down.

You want have a good idea what the strategy is going into next year. Every year that you've been in that situation, planning ahead, you want to be ready. I think that's really hard to do now because there's so much change. So I think you've got to go into next year almost with a plan that's going to be, you're going to need to be prepared to be agile and adapt and be flexible and not have something that's a real rigid plan.

And generally, you should always go in with a level of that. plan not to plan. Yeah. But it's almost, you know, you've to be even more flexible than ever because things are going to change during the year. And you'd be looking this year and thinking, okay, these are the things that have worked. There's definitely a case of it's not broken, don't fix it. But equally over time, if you look 12 months ahead, are the things that are working right now going to be working the same way to the level they are right now? Really hard to say. Maybe they will. But probably not.

It's unlikely. The rate of change in our space is so fast. It's quite breathtaking. I think as we are where we are now, we're not into 2025 just yet. I will be thinking first work with the business to understand what their growth ambitions are for next year. What's the sales targets? Then look at what you're contributing right now. Obviously, there's going to be

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a growth, know, if that's 10, 15, 20, 30%, depending on the ambitions of the business. And whether you're contributing X amount to the pipeline, inevitably, there's going to be a question that's going to be, okay, if we spend more money, or even if we maintain what we're spending in marketing, are we going to hit those numbers or improve them? Have those, I'll be having those conversations right now. those conversations are complicated by what I just mentioned. You know, for example, if you're looking at what marketing has contributed to the pipeline,

and that value is going to then determine what kind of budgets achieved. If you're going to go into a board and say, well, we're not focused on that anymore, we're focused on brand, your budget conversation may be a little bit more difficult than it has been in previous years. so finding that balance whilst you're having those conversations. People have got the hand around your neck or got you by the scruff of the neck and they're been aggressive. Some of the boardrooms I've been in, it's nearly been that bad.

Yeah, they're expecting you to sign up. Yeah. And to commit to certain targets and you're to be held to account through the year. So, but equally, you know, things are going to change. You don't know how they're going to change. That's quite hard to do. So it's a careful balance, but I think it's the time for honesty and be quite clear that there is a lot of change. you still fully committed, but maybe you look at targets on a more quarterly basis rather than a yearly basis. It's just build.

So, you know, ultimately if I was to build a plan now, I'd be thinking about what's going to keep the wheels turning, what is the must do's. And then I'd be building in a contingency plan for things that we can adapt through and therefore a contingency budget. Wow, that was so loud. Bless you. So what I was saying before Emma rudely interrupted us with this name was that I would be trying to convince the business to afford me some flexibility, not both in the plan that I built, but in the budget that goes with it.

almost think of it as an innovation or experimental budget. A 20 % budget on a quarter uplift would give you enough money to go out and experiment and test some of the things that we talked about. Whether LinkedIn is going to be the right platform, in what way, for example, how can you develop AI into the tools that you use, or how can you improve search based upon AI grading, for example. Those are things which

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I think are very difficult to plan for. They're very difficult to define budget for because they're new to all of us. And so building in a contingency budget almost certainly, you know, something that which I would be doing now. So, so let's try and break it down into some, sort of clear steps. So think step one, obviously the dialogue with the business, understanding the growth ambitions. Step two is really understanding where you can play with that and what you feel comfortable committing to. As part of those conversations as well, obviously budget.

And more and more and more over the years, you're being challenged to demonstrate a return on that spend. And that's where some of these complications come in. Bigger focus towards brand, harder to measure. Are you going to get the kind of commitment from the board who, you know, depending on how they are with marketing, are they going to be prepared to stump up some brand building type?

immeasurable stuff. to say, really depends on each unique business. once the budget conversation is underway, and the planning process underway collaborating with the sales team, think probably the wherever we are, fourth or fifth step is, I will be really trying to get ideas as much as possible from those that I trust in my network, whether that's the trusted partners or agencies that you work with, that's the attending

conferences, maybe you've got a small community of other CMOs or marketing directors that you speak with regularly, I'd be really trying to understand what other people are, because everyone's feeling the same problem. We know that because we're seeing the same conversations being played out with our clients. we're all facing the same challenges. And there's some solace to be going from speaking to the people that are facing the same challenge, but also ideas will emerge the more you talk it through. So I'd definitely be trying to do that.

developing a plan that is really agile, is focused more on a quarterly basis. And you've got mechanisms in there and levers that allow you to adapt quickly. And I think you've talked already about maybe running pilot programs or test and learn type initiatives. I think maybe carve out an innovation pot from your budget that allows you to experiment. gives you free rein, doesn't it? It gives you a bit of a safe...

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sandbox to play in. yeah. And again, be really, really transparent about that because of where we are. And I think, you know, never a big fan of the 30 page marketing plan that, you know, sits on a desk and gathers dust for most of the year. So think it's got to be first of all, practical, you know, the re-running your strategy with SWOT analysis every year and all that.

Bullshit. There's a significant waste of time. Yeah, absolutely. The kind of shit that the teacher at uni and then you never use ever again. Yeah, absolutely. Obviously I'm not trying to dis uni careers or all the university. Any of the institutions. Yeah, it's academic in any way. But trying to be too academic about building your plan and your strategies is almost, you know, wasteful. You end up in strategy kind of paralysis, don't you? Analysis, paralysis. Analysis, paralysis. Yeah.

too much of that and too little action. And I think therefore being quite pragmatic about your planning and it being very focused on what you're going to do, but also on data as much as possible, which I think is probably, you know, step seven or eight. well, I think the tech strategy and the data strategy is definitely something that is a real consideration, a big consideration or big considerations. Clearly tech has

just become part of the fabric of everything you do now. And if we go back to some of the key messages from the conference, The conference. The conference. Sorry, didn't we do that again? At the inbound conference, the real headline message was about slow growth. this is where tech comes in. It's tough enough out there as it is. We've got the sort of rough macro.

outlook. Things are tough. You know, we've got budgets, elections, all these things. It's very hard to know what's going to happen from those things, which just has an impact on business confidence. Generally, people aren't buying maybe as much, but putting things on hold, delays, delays, delays to projects, et cetera. So we're facing a period of slow growth and let's face it for the last few years, we haven't been really in a period of significant growth. You can't afford to

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move slow and be constrained by tech that is almost like quicksand. Your CRM hasn't got the right data in it or lots of different islands of data existing across your tech stack. Just tools that are just really cumbersome to work with, all these things that slow you down. You just can't afford to have that in today's climate. So tech is really, important and you don't want to be going into next year.

without a plan to evolve your tech and optimize your tech. And that is something that you can plan for throughout the year. There's gonna be certain initiatives that should be connected to your go-to-market plan that you know you're gonna need to implement to ensure that you can deliver on that. I'd say it is ultimately a foundation for any strategy. Ultimately, if you don't have the right tech and the right data in place, the best strategy will fail because you're not gonna be able to act on it. And it's as simple as that. And arguably,

people shouldn't necessarily be planning to build that into next year. They should be thinking about doing that now. Absolutely. Because, if you start, you come back from whatever, if you have a Christmas break or otherwise, but you come back into on the 1st of January, whenever it is, and you're sat there with a load of legacy tech. And a fantastic plan. Fantastic plan. Yeah. Can't, can't enact any of it. Then what's the point in that? you know, arguably I'd be, people that are listening to this and haven't, don't feel they've got that tech strategy in place.

are going to be starting probably given the implementation time that required for some of this tech to, they're to be starting off on the back foot. And yeah, that being said, that needs to be addressed at some point. So the sooner that can happen, the better and. In parallel to the data strategy as well. mean, like you say, we know, we've been there ourselves. You create a grand plan. It's very theoretical. This is what we're going to do. But you don't always think through all the

key components to that plan and what you need in place to deliver on it. often tech is an afterthought and you almost sleep what you're weighing to next year. You've got your plans, you start to execute and then there's all these barriers, all these hurdles. Our automation platform doesn't connect with CRM. We haven't got the right date. And the problem that gives you, you end up then going cap in hand because you haven't accounted for it in your plan and you have therefore don't have it included in your budget. You go and cap in hand to the CFO.

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And we've all been in those conversations that are normally very difficult. You told me last year only that this strategy was this and you needed this budget to do it. It's only March and you're coming to me and telling me you need a new marketing automation system. Then you end up in difficult situations. Whereas if you can preempt that and understand that your strategy is ambitious enough and forward thinking enough to require a better tech, you can build that into what you're going to need to do next year.

and at the very least try and start to secure a budget for it now so that you're not having to go cap in hand to the CFO. It's just an honest take on your tech as it stands right now. You're looking at that plan that is evolving. Are you really going to be able to deliver on that? Are you going to able to deliver it and are you going to be able to deliver it efficiently, quickly and ultimately not waste a load of time pissing about with shit systems? Absolutely. So in summary,

think we've got to summarize it saying, so look, those people that are planning now, make sure you consider your tech stack. Make sure you build your plan based upon data. Have a look back at the previous year, see how you performed, see whether you've met your targets. Then analyze whether those are the right targets going forward. Given a lot of the change in the industry, do you need to consider, A, changing your KPIs and your targets and how you feed those into the business? That's something you should be doing now. And do you then therefore need to build in?

some experimental budgets we talked about earlier so that you can start to test some of these new trends that coming through and try and build a use case for them. Try and at least get to grips with how they work so that they can maybe start to benefit your marketing strategy in the following year.