The overwhelm crisis in B2B marketing: A survival guide

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Right, so if you're watching this podcast, you'll see that today we're starting with our coats on because Stingy Bob our Landlord has decided not to turn the heating on today. But on a more serious note, we are here to talk about marketing overwhelm or, more specifically, how marketers are increasingly overwhelmed and, to be fair, have always been overwhelmed to some degree. So we're going to look at the common reasons for that and look at some less common reasons and talk through some of the strategies you can use too. mitigate against that risk of overwhelm as well.

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Welcome to Truth, Lies and B2B Tech. The podcast that separates hype from reality when it comes to B2B marketing, sales and service technology. Join me, Craig Taylor and my co-host, James Ingham. Both of us have spent our working lives in the world of complex B2B sales. Always trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Along with our incredibly smart, special guests, we'll cut through all the bullshit to bring you proven approaches that will help improve how you go to market. Enjoy the show.

Let's be clear, we're not looking at this particular topic as observers. We've been on the client side. We've got a lot of empathy with the challenges. We know the challenges firsthand. We've had to deal with them. This is very much based on experience. However, I think right now with things the way they are, slow growth economy, we can see that organisations are under pressure.

I wouldn't ever say marketing is always the first thing to go because I think that's not right in my experience. I do think increasingly it's under pressure. With the job market being very slow as well, maybe it's lowest for some years in terms of recruitment. We've also seen redundancies in marketing and that creates obviously stress in terms of trying to find a new job.

Really focusing more on those marketers that are in post. But if they have been part of a team that's reduced, then expectations probably haven't reduced. And in fact, expectations might be even higher given the need for growth.

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Well, and naturally, obviously they're trying to do more with less resource but also they may be encouraged or feel pressured to do more or achieve more results to try and protect their own position in a challenging marketplace.

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So, we wanted to do this podcast... well whoever is listening. Maybe it's non-marketers that work with marketers, maybe just to try and understand the situation for a marketer and maybe try and give some support rather than just give them a bit of a kick, which often happens. We've certainly been on the receiving end of that, client-side. There are some common reasons for overwhelm. I think if we start... With one of the most obvious and I think that's a fundamental lack of understanding of marketing that you do find quite a lot in some leadership teams.

And what that leads to, I think, what causes overwhelm. Because ultimately, there's an underappreciation for the effort involved in a lot of marketing activities, which email's a good example. It's a really basic one, but email newsletters are a really good one and something that isn't exactly at the top of the list for many marketers. But still, nonetheless, having experienced producing and delivering those sorts of activities, a lot more effort goes into them that might be perceived by salespeople or the people in the business, the leaders of that business. And therefore it could be, you know, the sentiment is, well, it's only a quick email. You know, why has that taken two days or even longer? And if you look at that across all of the various things that marketers have been asked to do, which actually is another error of misunderstanding that a singular marketer or a team of two or three can cover all of the bases, then overall there's an underappreciation for the time, dedicated skills and difficulty of a lot of the activities that take place and therefore people are asked to do more and try to do more despite maybe lacking the resources or the skills internally to do it, which of course increases overwhelm.






(04:33) Going back to the Marketing Week research, not sure why I'm pointing over there because the research isn't sitting over there. What it did also say is out of all the functions that I think have been part of another study, which function internally felt they're going to be most under threat to be replaced by AI, guess which came out top of the list?

You can just say hi to y'all.

Pretty obvious, isn't it? Alongside trying to master all of the fundamentals and all of everything else, people are also trying to master or adopt AI to its full potential. Which is a skill set that most people don't have in the marketing field. And I suppose that's another thing we touched on earlier is that there's a lack of understanding of the specialism of marketing. I think people think that you can have a marketing manager that's going to do it all in one story of a job.

Post that I saw recently was quite insightful, eye-opening, let's say. The list of responsibilities of that marketer, and it was clear that they wanted that person to not just oversee those functions but deliver them, was quite reflective of that misunderstanding. For example, that CV had the fact that they wanted to oversee websites.

Updates not development to be fair but you know overseeing the website and all of the updates that happen through the same content including SME interviews making sure HubSpot's fully optimised that these are all developing.

(06:19) Strategy, supporting the sales team. Yeah, I mean, I think what some organisations do is go, right, we can afford to get a marketer. Yeah, one person, but we need to do all these things in marketing. So we need to find a superstar that's skilled in all these different areas. They don't exist. It's such a specialist discipline that you can't have someone that can possibly be right up in terms of knowledge, capability, experience in all those different areas.

One person.

(14:17) Accept a job like that and you, you... you go in on that basis based on CV like that, you're going to struggle to push. You're going to fail for the reasons we talked about earlier, but no doubt you're going to get overwhelmed in the process because you're going to try and meet that really unrealistic goal of trying to do all of those things and importantly do them all well, which is obviously what we.

You set yourself up for a call,

(14:40) Talked about earlier. I think inevitably with marketers there's a feeling of imposter syndrome. Back to your point about mastering AI, I think just because AI suddenly becomes under the, partly under the remit of marketing, leadership suddenly expects you to have mastered those skills.

So another thing about AI is not just the fact that it's been, people are being asked to master it and that add into their workload and the stress levels and the overwhelm that comes from that. It's also putting pressure on the more with less kind of thing. A story that we can tell around this, which is to be fair was more of a client agency relationship. Not with us, but with another that I've been told.

Not with us.

(15:34) Was that AI is seen as this massive opportunity to become more efficient, really scale with less resources, and that pressure is also then put on the team. So there's a misconception as well, and this story kind of emphasises that, where not us, but a friend of an agency was...

Yeah.

The early stages of ChatGPT from 12, 18 months ago, the conversations that were being had were, okay, well, we've got this ChatGPT now, even when it was back in its infancy and not all that effective. How are we going to scale what we do whilst we pay you the same? And that similar pressure is applied to marketing teams because of AI. You've got AI now, so you don't need another three people to do your job.

Not the case.

Marketing is inevitably going through a change. Certain things that used to work may be not as effective as they used to be. We've talked about that a lot on previous episodes of the podcast. If you're constantly bombarded with this approach and that approach and this way of working and forget what you're doing there and that's dead and this doesn't work anymore, some of these new things, inevitably you're going to have that feeling of imposter syndrome if you've not worked in that way or you've not experienced it.

(17:01) Of doing it in that way. A lot of the time you just have to put it into perspective and realize that much of the kind of rhetoric that's out there is self-serving nonsense from people that profess to be experts, but probably not actually that expert. So I think you've got to take it with a pinch of salt and you've got to think about really making sure, going back to what we talked about earlier, sticking to the strategy.

And saying no and being strong about that and realistic about what you can achieve.

And we've talked about a lot of reasons that overwhelm happens, but ultimately that solution is the one that's going to get you through most of them. Being strong in your response, referring back to a strategy which has been agreed and got buy-in, removing activity which is either ineffective or not aligned with that strategy, effectively boils down to focusing on the right things and trying to do less.

I mean what's always worked for me was the phrase that quite a few of my clients now use and like which is the random acts of marketing and I think you I'm pretty sure I didn't matter that because it was based on random acts of kindness. But anyway, this was a long time ago. Greg Taylor. 2012 probably. So you know anything that comes on.

Pretty sure you didn't make that.

(18:22) Yeah, 2018.

(18:30) To your plate that is aside from the strategy, you badge that straight away as random acts marketing. And everyone knows that that's a familiar phrase and you can kind of, you can bat off a lot of those ad hoc requests that marketers get every day. But I think you have to be strong in an environment like this and things will improve. I think you've got to think that you're not alone. Everyone else is in the same boat. Very few marketing teams right now are really thriving.

There are exceptions. We've got some clients that are really bucking the trend and growing at exceptional rates. A lot of the time that's because they've got very effective top-performing marketers.

They are also being properly invested in. They are also teams that have got the right resources from a human resource perspective to achieve really clear, yet ambitious strategy. Everything we talked about is you can see within those clients that we see are performing. And we should also, I think, reflect on the fact that the industry itself has come a long way. We've talked a lot about the under-appreciation of marketing activity, and that's better now, I think, than it ever has been.

Yeah, it's just we're in a very difficult period right now. Absolutely.

(19:48) Yeah, you the days are gone of the make it pretty department, the party planning committee, which I think actually adds its own pressure as well. You know, some marketers may be quite happy with that badge and drawing.

Pictures and I was probably, you know, I've probably got more experience of that sort of period of marketing, if you like, when it was known as the coloring in team. There was no pressure, but you had a low sort of self-worth and feeling that you didn't really have any, you didn't really make, and I worked in some big companies then as well, which I think is even worse in some respects because you don't.

There's no pressure then though, surely.

(20:28) It was really the sales team that carried the day and you had very little impact. Played very much a supporting role. Whereas you don't in a smaller organisation, you can have far more impact. Things change really when you start to demonstrate a retail investment and people can clearly see what you're doing is effective.

That's another way to just be able to say no, isn't it? If you can track and prove what does create a return on investment, and it's a hard topic, we've covered it on a previous podcast, then the simple answer is, is this going to generate more revenue for the business? And if the answer is no, then it's another easy one to bat off.

So in summary then, I think before we freeze to death, because it's highly likely Stingy Bob's going to turn the century anytime soon. We probably need to wrap up. I think the key message for us really, yes, it's a very difficult time. And undoubtedly, most marketers are going to be feeling a level of overwhelm, probably far more than normal.

Take some solace in the fact that you're not alone. And in terms of what to do about it, it's sticking to a strategy or developing that strategy, agreeing that strategy with the business from a marketing standpoint, and then learning to say no a lot more. Stick to your guns and you'll get through it.

One final thing to add, I think, is specialize. I think if you, naturally every marketer has a strength in a particular discipline. There are far too many, as we talked about earlier, for one marketer to be a jack of all trades these days, even if they're a jack of a few of them. And if your strength is SEO, your strength is digital, your strength is HubSpot, whatever it is, apply for roles for that specialist discipline.

(22:30) I know that there are people that want to kind of have that breadth of capability, but if you are applying for a role which is specialist, then you know that that business appreciates the specialist nature of the work that you're doing. And you will be able to focus and dedicate your attention on the thing that you do best.

I think it's a topic for another podcast, I think gone are the days of having the generalist marketer that can do a little bit of everything. I think people maybe back in the day wanted to do that because it naturally led them to be more of a head of marketing or marketing director where you are across everything. I think that comes with a different skill set.

And it comes with a properly resourced team. Yeah. Now, if you're in a small business and you want to work in a small business, but you're the sole marketer or you're one of a few and you've got limited resources to work with external agencies or bring other people in, then a marketing manager, head of marketing, marketing director role even is a very different approach to one way you actually are operating is that capacity, i.e. pulling strings and...

See you there.

(23:37) You're in leadership function that's about leading your team, managing people, being very much more commercially aware, managing upwards, managing the C-suite. So it's a very different skill set that you need at that level, which those kind of skills will naturally evolve as you go through your career.

And you're applying for a head of marketing role at a business of 50 or less people, maybe even 100 or less. You know full well that that is because they want that kind of one jack of all trades. If you want to operate at that marketing manager, marketing director level, and a high level organisation, then it's completely different. You will obviously be operating in that capacity.

Yeah, bit of a long summary, but I think we got there in the end. Happy days.

Good, search at the pub.

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