So much more than sales support: we talk to CMO Jalin Somaiya about how B2B marketing can tell powerful stories and drive effective brand growth - all without getting stuck in the jargon.
As part of our series on B2B marketing, we wanted to speak to someone who has worked in the discipline - as well as in its B2C cousin - across many different companies. Jalin Somaiya has run and built B2B marketing departments at organisations including payments unicorn Mollie and global working SaaS Omnipresent, as well as consumer marketing teams at the Goldman Sachs-backed Trussle, and at Google, where he led the EMEA launch of Chrome.
Tom sat down with Jalin to discuss marketing’s role in sales-led organisations and the power of narratives - but first, to ask a question that has obviously been bothering us.
“If you A/B test formal versus informal language, it’s the informal language that usually converts better, because it’s easier to understand.”
Tom Pursey, Flying Object: We’ve recently written about how to make B2B work less boring - and there’s a certainly a perception that B2B marketing isn’t as fun and engaging as B2C work. Why do you think that is?
Jalin Somaiya: What you’re seeing is a default to formal, wonkish language. When you’re spending your own money as a B2C consumer, you only have to justify the decision to yourself. Whereas B2B buyers have a duty to the company whose budget they’re spending. That leads to a bias towards formalism: B2B marketers producing work that at first blush looks highly credible and in no way risky - specifically because B2B buyers are spending someone else’s money. When your buyer has to justify purchases to the business, kooky, fun work looks risky - and is tougher to justify - unless it really brilliantly speaks to business needs.
Flying Object: But does that more formal work actually deliver for the business - or is it just easier to sign-off internally?
Jalin: Interestingly, if you A/B test formal versus informal language, it’s the informal language that usually converts better, because it’s easier to understand. Less jargon means a larger addressable market of people who get it. So simpler works better. But you still have this “spending other people’s money” test - so whenever you produce something simple or provocative, you can’t have any duff notes. You need to demonstrate an understanding of the business that’s sophisticated, at the same time as using language that’s simple.
“B2B narratives can be wonkish, technocratic and default to formalism. And they’re missing a trick.”
Flying Object: B2B seems like a space where narrative plays a big role; especially as you are often looking at a multi-touchpoint sales funnel, having a consistent narrative helps connect these touchpoints together. Do you see narratives as an area where B2B marketers can be more adventurous?
Jalin: B2B narratives tend to be narrower than B2C ones: they’re often closer to product marketing than brand marketing. So B2B narratives can be wonkish, technocratic and default to formalism as we’ve said. And they’re missing a trick because bigger narratives about tectonic shifts that are happening in the world, that expand the problem-set the product’s addressing, actually work very well.
Some examples:
Stripe talk about building the “financial infrastructure of the internet” - they’re talking about making the whole online financial world better rather than just flogging merchants another payment solution. That narrative works well and they’ve stuck to it for years.
“[B2B brands] should provide a narrative that names a need in the world, and matches it to a capability in their product. That adds a lot of value relative to “we’re faster, better, cheaper”
A while back McKinsey uncovered, through some pretty detailed demographic modelling, that there just aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to meet the talent demand from companies. Their article “The War For Talent” elevated this wonkish modelling with a big narrative and sense of urgency. It had huge cut-through and the phrase has taken root way beyond them - a great sign of a narrative succeeding.
Or closer to home, I’ve just finished running marketing for a company called Omnipresent. They allow companies to hire and work across borders in a way that has major benefits for businesses, but the language around it, like “remote working,” isn’t fit for purpose. So we named what’s happening “the globalisation of teams”, and positioned it as a major new wave of globalisation. Just as the internet brought a globalisation of information, and containerisation after the second world war ushered a globalisation of trade, so video calls and Omnipresent infrastructure are hastening the globalisation of teams - and helping companies “build the best teams on earth”.
Flying Object: When you think of B2B marketing, you think of channels like events, trade expos, sales collateral. But this is a narrow perspective that overlooks a lot of very promising channels - where are the missed opportunities?
Jalin: Businesses often default to the most expensive tactics they can afford; things like in-person events or hosted dinners, where sales are having one-to-one, or one-to-few, conversations. Or expensive, multi-touch outbound journeys mixing ads, content and outreach by email and phone.
The missed opportunities here are the cheap channels: one-to-many, marketing-owned channels like compelling content that can reach lots of people and change minds. Or improving website conversion, which can easily drive double-digit improvements to conversion and growth rates while reducing CPAs. Word-of-mouth is more or less free and scales well, so it’s very powerful - but because there’s no”word of mouth” label in Google Analytics companies tend to ignore it, to their detriment.
“[Marketing] should evangelise and explain upper-funnel work internally, showing the value to the business of working on brand metrics”
Flying Object: Getting the organisation to buy into these channels, which are a lot less around sales support and more around marketing as a distinct discipline, requires marketing to assert itself internally. How would you advise B2B marketers to avoid simply becoming a sales support function?
Jalin: You’re right that B2B marketing often stands for doing lead generation for Sales, and producing collateral - pitch decks, white papers - to help the Sales team convert. To avoid being relegated to those boxes, Marketing can do a couple of things.
Firstly, it can go up the funnel beyond lead gen all the way up to awareness, and build a multistage journey from the very earliest stages. And it should evangelise and explain that upper-funnel work internally, showing the value to the business of working on brand metrics - of driving brand awareness and consideration from single to double digits, say.
Second, it should very clearly demonstrate how important its work on ‘free’ channels like website conversion, content and word of mouth is.
Finally, they should provide a narrative that names a need in the world, and matches it to a capability in their product. That adds a lot of value relative to “we’re faster, better, cheaper”.
- Find Jalin at https://www.jalinsomaiya.com/
- Read more about Flying Object’s approach to B2B here.