Rethink Your B2B Marketing Strategy with Expert Advice from Bethan Vincent

Bethan Vincent (00:26.573)
It's great to be here Mike, thanks so much for having me.

Mike (00:29.052)
Pleasure. So, do you want to just talk about who are you, what do you do, and something unusual about yourself?

Bethan Vincent (00:35.21)
Yeah, sure. So I feel like a bit of an imposter on a sales podcast because I'm from the dark side of marketing. But you know, my stick about marketing is it's building relationships at scale. That's effectively what you're doing with sales as well. So hey, we can get along and be friends, right? So I run OpenVelocity. We're a marketing strategy consultancy. So we work with tech and IP rich businesses to build better marketing foundations. So in a nutshell, think of us as like marketing.

Mike (00:39.301)
Hahaha.

Mike (00:49.572)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (01:02.764)
And we can talk about building marketing foundations, what that looks like, what that involves in episodes as we go. But an interesting fact about myself. I ran as a parliamentary candidate in the 2017 general election for the Green Party. that was, yeah, it was an interesting experience. mean, lots of marketing and sales lessons in that, if I'm honest.

Mike (01:11.292)
Hmm.

Mike (01:18.022)
Wow. Yeah.

Yep, I'd imagine. Yes, definitely. Out of interest, what motivated you?

Bethan Vincent (01:28.588)
I was sick, I mean lots of people are sick of how politics is at the moment. I think I'm sharing that kind of frustration about misrepresentation and not feeling represented and you know it was a kind of if you're going to moan about something you want to do something.

Mike (01:43.602)
How do you get elected onto, how do you even get onto the kind of roster, just out of interest?

Bethan Vincent (01:47.916)
It depends on the party. So for the Green Party, you have to be elected as a candidate. So the Green Party, unlike the Labour Party, is much more devolved, or the Conservative Party. So most parties, it is you are kind of chosen and selected either by the central party or the members of your local party.

Mike (02:07.568)
Right, okay, very good. Interesting. Well, interesting. I've never had anyone as a guest who's done that. So there we are, something different. So let's start off with the questions. Got like three kind of like high level questions. The first one is half of B2B organizations are not investing in strategic marketing in your view. So kind of like, why is that? Why are we not investing in strategic marketing?

Bethan Vincent (02:30.9)
Yeah, so this is a stat from our recent research report. So, you know, just to say it does come from actual kind of evidence. I think marketing, especially in, I'd say startup or scale up businesses is seen as a bit of a luxury or it's seen as very much just the promotional aspect of marketing. So it's just advertising. It's just throwing a bunch of ads out there and seeing what sticks. And it's a lot more than that. mean, hey, right. I am, I would say that, of course, but you know, there are what

the 20 PS of marketing now there were like four back in my day, but it's not just promotion. is product, it is pricing, it is place. It is all of that kind of stuff. And you've to get those bits right because if your product is really poor, you can't out advertise it. know, yeah. So that's kind of a lot of organizations. They, they jumped to launch without.

Mike (03:14.566)
Yes, exactly.

Bethan Vincent (03:22.102)
doing any of those foundational bits and then they kind of wonder why they don't get the traction or hey sales is struggling to sell this. Well have you actually validated that a customer wants it at that price point you're offering in it? Often the answer is no.

Mike (03:34.086)
Exactly.

Yeah, precisely. So just like expand on kind of what strategic marketing versus tactical marketing, what's the kind of difference?

Bethan Vincent (03:46.516)
Yeah, sure. I mean, it strategy versus tactics is something I think people confuse a lot. But again, if I'm really reductive about it, tactics is what you're doing, right? Just doing stuff, maybe with some purpose in mind, it's thinking at a channel or an activity level. So we're going to post on social media. Strategy is actually understanding why you're posting what your

objectives are for what audience are you posting for and actually is social even the right channel? they even active on LinkedIn or X or Facebook or wherever you're posting? So it's taking that step back and connecting marketing really to the business objectives and also reducing the surface area. You know, what, what are you going to do versus what you're not going to do? So strategy is as much about deciding like, you know, it's really tempting to be like, we're to be marketing across all these channels. We're going to do outbound sales. We're going to do ABM. We're going to do all of this stuff.

Well, you probably don't have the resource unless you're a matter of organization to do that properly. So what what are absolute must haves? And I'm a big believer in, you know, good marketing focuses often on a small set of channels and activities that are highly targeted, well kind of, you know, aligned with the audience, nail those and then look at other channels, you know, maximize as much value as you can get out of that channel, and then go on to the next thing.

Mike (04:58.555)
Yes.

Mike (05:04.132)
Exactly. So we hadn't prepared this kind of like topic, but as you're on the topic of strategic marketing, we may as well talk about it, which is positioning and differentiation. So in this market, think, I mean, you know, I work with a lot of marketing agencies, very difficult, very, very difficult in the marketplace now to differentiate between one and the other. You ask an agency, not always clearly, but you you ask some agencies, well, what makes you different?

And then it's like, well, there's a methodology. Well, unfortunately, everyone's got a methodology. Yours is different, sure, but everyone's got a methodology. So that's not a differentiator. People, we've got great people. Yeah, everyone's got great people, or else they wouldn't be in business with their clients. So that doesn't actually turn into a differentiator. So it's really hard in a services -based business to define, know, assuming you're not at like 20 ,000 people scale.

Assuming you're like, you know, a hundred people, a bit less, a bit more. How do you, in your experience, just some ideas or thoughts, how do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace?

Bethan Vincent (06:11.648)
Yeah, so if we go back to kind of what positioning actually is, and I really love kind of how April Dunford describes positioning, which is making your value obvious to the group of people who care the most about it. And what that's saying is be really clear on who your target audience is. And that's why I think, know, especially my experience working as a client of agencies, they kind of get it wrong. They have a kind of our positioning is, you know,

Often industry focused is where agencies go down. We're to just be the marketing agency for automotive firms, for example. And that is an audience for that audience, you know, working with a, you know, BMW versus a local dealership. So global beer is so different. So you've got to be really clear on who your audience is to begin with, where is your best fit audience and actually what did they care about?

Mike (06:49.308)
Yes, exactly.

Bethan Vincent (06:58.196)
And I think a lot of agencies don't drink their own cool age because the foundation of good marketing is understanding your customers. So go and do some customer discovery, go and speak to your ideal customer profile. You what are they looking for from an agency? And don't revert back to the tropes. You know, if I hear again that we've got the most creative people, don't care about that as a client, perfectly honest, I care about you getting my job done and meeting my revenue targets. I don't care that your partner's not suppliers, you know, that's a bit of a hygiene factor for me.

as well as kind of understanding what your audience needs, it's separating out those hygiene factors, that stuff which is just bread and butter, it's expected from the actual real value add. So I'll give an example from my kind of previous career in -house. So I worked for a product consultancy, a digital product consultancy, that again, super saturated space, you're selling rented brains, you're selling services. And we realized that our really, the audience and the ICP that was best fit for us were companies that had

built software in the kind of 2000s. And they in place all this stuff that was now legacy tech. And so we then put our positioning around where the people help with that heritage transformation. So we're taking something digital transformation, which everyone talks about. It's a bit nebulous. What is that? And this kind didn't actually use the words heritage to the client because that's called quantitations. But this concept of we're taking you from this place to this place.

We're not just your bog stand of software consultancy. We're highly aligned and specialized for that specific scenario and pain points that come with it. That's effective positioning because it's super grammy, that is super pointy. Actually, we still had a really big time to go after in that. And organizations of different sizes, we weren't just slicing it down by industry vertical, which if I'm honest, doing, you just focusing on like my automotive example. Well, if that industry takes a hit, you are massively exposed from a risk perspective.

Mike (08:48.198)
Exactly.

Correct.

Bethan Vincent (08:50.816)
So positioning and differentiation are really important, but they've got to be based on the stuff, I guess I'm saying that your customer actually genuinely cares about and resonates with, not just stuff you've made up because it sounds like good copy.

Mike (09:01.348)
Exactly. I think it's a very interesting topic. If you just switch it around look at value, you're right. mean, as an ex -buyer, the things that I really cared about was, how are you going to manage the risk of this going wrong? And risk has got different aspects to it. How are you going to drive value for us? If we measure value in gross profit or in sales growth or whatever it might be, well, I always talk about having a value waterfall.

You need buckets of value and then those buckets add up to the total value that you're going to create. Now, I don't expect that to be scientific. I expect it to be directionally correct where I can probe it bit and work out, where are the big value buckets that you're going to impact? And even that sometimes is missing, I think, in a lot of organizations.

Bethan Vincent (09:46.667)
Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (09:50.814)
Yeah, and you know, like I said, I've sat client side on the receipt of many agency pitches in my life. And so often they miss the mark because it's not necessarily what they're promoting proposing is strategically wrong or wrong, or wrongly priced. It's that they've not connected it back to the jobs I have to be done as the CMO or the marketing director. And they're talking about and this is the difference between strategy and tactics, right? They're talking about

Mike (10:11.962)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (10:16.672)
We're going to do SEO and get you loads more page views and loads more traffic. And I'm like, I don't think in traffic. I think in conversions, I think in these, I think in revenue. And you try and kind of say like, how does this connect back? And if they don't have the answer, well, they're not a good fit, right? It's not your job is to come to me with solutions. That's literally why I'm paying you and your job is to understand my business. And I think I'm kind of being mean to marketing agencies. are some amazing ones out there, but I think this is so often a mistrick. They think in channels.

Mike (10:30.78)
Correct. Exactly right.

Mike (10:36.742)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (10:46.444)
They don't think holistically about marketing with the capital there.

Mike (10:49.564)
Well, they're thinking, yeah, and the danger is they often, not often, some of them thinking activities and outputs, not outcomes. I, yeah, I care about the outcomes. care a lot about the outcomes. I care quite a bit about the output, but I don't care that much about the activities, which is ironic because a lot of brands will pay agencies based upon hours worked by grade.

Bethan Vincent (10:55.71)
Yeah, input. Yeah, at impact.

Bethan Vincent (11:16.107)
Yeah.

Mike (11:17.254)
which is insane. And yet they expect to get the outcomes. And I'm like, well, you know, as a buyer, can't, you can't mix and match as it chooses you, as it suits you.

Bethan Vincent (11:24.884)
Yeah, I think the challenge is though, you know, we've been drinking the cool load of billable hours, billable days for too long. And yeah, it is in many ways bonkers. Hey, I sell time, right? You know, yeah.

Mike (11:31.73)
That's just bonkers.

Mike (11:36.342)
Same here. No, no, because my clients, no matter what I say and how I position it and how I look at the value created, all of that, they're like, yeah, but can I buy some hours from you? And I get it. I get that at the beginning relationship, often, you don't know how much of someone you would value. You don't know how much of Mike or Bethan can genuinely change the way that your business grows. So until you find out more about working with us, it's quite hard.

Bethan Vincent (12:04.714)
Yeah, well that comes back to your comment around de -risking it as well. What can you do to de -risk the beginning of that relationship? And that again, this is going to be my broken record. It's understanding your customer, their motivations, their pain point, what risk looks like to them, because it can be different to risk to you as an agency or service supplier.

Mike (12:22.244)
Exactly. So let's move on to the next question, which was, so many B2B businesses still rely heavily on outbound sales, unsurprisingly, which made it of a short term gains, but often kind of struggles to compound growth over time. So can you dig into that in a bit more detail about the alternative strategies?

Bethan Vincent (12:44.94)
Yeah, I mean, we've spoken about this before, the outbound is a volume game, right? And you have to have you and one of the challenges is you don't have sufficient volume in your market. Let's say you're, you know, we're working with a client where literally their target market is 100 companies in the world. You don't have enough volume to do outbound effectively and to test and to iterate. So that's the first thing. Yeah. And yeah, yeah.

Mike (12:48.838)
Yes.

Mike (13:00.016)
Right. Correct. No.

But you might do ABM. So ABM might work in that. Yeah, exactly.

Bethan Vincent (13:10.444)
Absolutely. So it's kind of it's really understanding your market dynamics. There's also that, you know, the common stat that gets bandied around, which I'm not necessarily I agree with in the precise sense, but it speaks to order of magnitude, which is that 95 % of your buyers aren't in market at any given time for your solution, only 5 % are. And that's what you're you're filtering for intent. That's how you should think about outbound sales, you're literally filtering filtering for those in market buyers. But the problem is you run the risk of pissing off that 95 % make the book up.

Mike (13:27.492)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (13:39.53)
the bulk of your market. So it's got to be done. I think it's getting a lot harder. Outbound sales is a tactic as well. know, we've seen, yeah, lead rates drop, know, we've seen email, my open rates drop, don't even bother calling people, I would say. So, you know, that's where you've got to be thinking of different channels and activities and actually getting to people before they are in market for your solution. Because, you know, again, another stat for you. But I think it's

Mike (13:39.826)
Correct. Exactly.

Mike (13:47.643)
It is.

Correct.

Mike (14:04.507)
Absolutely.

Bethan Vincent (14:09.078)
three quarters or four fifths of people have already had a contact with the vendor that they select before they start the procurement process or the selection process. So if you're not on the day one list, you're at massive disadvantage. And that's what marketing is about, being on that day one list. That's the way of thinking about it. And again, this goes back to your audience. Where are they? We've got that whole kind of marketing funnel of problem aware, solution aware.

Mike (14:19.866)
Exactly.

Correct.

Bethan Vincent (14:37.068)
So if they're problem aware, where are they going to find out potential solutions to that problem? So for marketing agencies, your problem aware client is probably thinking, Jesus Christ, my targets have been raised by 20 % next year, how am going to hit those targets? They're not searching for a marketing agency. So how do you get in front of them that you are the solution to a very specific pain point or set of pain points they have? That is the way to start thinking about marketing.

And know, I wouldn't actually, I wouldn't go into channels speaking to you here because it's so highly contextually dependent on your business, your audience. But first place to start is understanding the target market.

Mike (15:14.716)
So I was talking to a client, not even a client actually, no not client, someone that I've been building a relationship with, personal relationship with over the last three years, probably four years, really super smart guy in an agency, big agency globally. And we were just talking about conversion rates and when they get an RFP what happens. And this isn't about them as an agency, this is like I was talking about broadly what happens in the marketplace.

So in the marketplace, you look at you're an agency and let's say you're a 500 person agency and you're based in North America and let's say that you're the CMO of a challenger brand in the US that sells drinks of some kind and you go to market. It's like, right, okay, so you go to market. So how are you gonna find an agency? So you're probably gonna want, if it's an RFP, let's say it's worth half million dollars a year.

you're probably going to want to have five agencies on your list to get down to the one you want. And I was talking about how it works. So as a procurement person, you come to me and say, I need five, I need to pick an agency, we probably need five, don't we? Who are we going to pick? So I go, right, so who's the incumbent? So we've got an incumbent. The incumbent wins over 65 % of the time in any competitive bid situation, broadly. Everyone will argue about that figure, but broadly, it's broadly true.

So then you're like, God, right. So if I'm not the incumbent and I'm one of the four, then is my chance kind of like four in 35, so about 8%. Well, unfortunately not. Because the next one is the other two agencies that we picked. So now we've done number one agency. The second and third agency are, say to you, yeah, Beth, and who did you work before? Who have you worked with before as an agency? Who have I worked with before? Well, let's put them on the list. So that's another two. Okay. So they've got a slightly better chance, but nowhere near the 65%.

Bethan Vincent (17:03.199)
Yep. Yep.

Mike (17:13.682)
If you're the one that's the internet search, your chance of winning is about 1%. You might win, it's possible, 2 % maybe. But the chances are we've never met you, we don't know how you work, you've got no credentials that we know of, you've got lots of references, none that we recognize, and it sounds very risky, but you've made up the numbers. And that's the reality.

So just talk to people that are listening about how do you stop becoming number four or five and start becoming number two or three, assuming you're not the incumbent.

Bethan Vincent (17:48.521)
You

Bethan Vincent (17:52.906)
Yeah, well, specifically for marketing agencies, I think it is being visible within the agency space and it is it's it's taking part in awards and we can talk about, you know, the validity of awards. But I do know that, you know, they do form part of a shortlisting process often for people that's where they'll go to find people. It is about producing, you know, people talk about producing thought leadership and content. That is part of it. I'd say that is super saturated now from an agency. mean, any any market perspective, if I'm honest, but

Mike (18:03.504)
Yeah, yeah, of course.

Bethan Vincent (18:22.826)
You've got to have something to say that is above the rest that is incredibly compelling, that is adding to the conversation that isn't just repeating what everyone else is saying. That is how you get noticed as an agency. And, you know, a lot of the agencies, if I think of kind of in my network, you know, they have really strong thought leaders within the agency who are building personal brands for themselves and they are going and speaking at conferences. You know, I know that's what I do. I go and speak with conferences, you know, it's not enough to come up.

with the content, with the media, distribution is the biggest challenge any marketeer has got at the moment. So think outside the box, new events are making a massive resurgence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you can get them done, you can get on with your day, you don't need to miss out on bedtime with the kids when you get home.

Mike (18:55.378)
Absolutely.

Mike (19:01.01)
There you are, breakfast events, breakfast events are back. People like breakfast events. Yeah, exactly.

No, that's right. And you meet other peers in your industry who have interesting views.

Bethan Vincent (19:15.308)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, it's value adds. That's, you know, I go to breakfast events where I did, but back when I was kind of CMO hat on, I went to breakfast events, not just because it was free breakfast and I got to meet the agency. I got to meet my peers. So everything you're doing, what value add is that for the person? And I went to a talk at cheering fest by Jason Miller, who's an amazing B2B marketer. what two things he said stuck with me. He was like, the future of B2B marketing is events and community. And I was like that.

Mike (19:42.93)
Huh?

Bethan Vincent (19:44.522)
That is smart. Like that is, that definitely mirrors what I'm seeing in the market and the way I am thinking about marketing as well. Access to an audience, building a first party audience that you can access, you own their data. That is the route forward. And that is why you're seeing agencies put on events, do even webinars, which still can get some cut through, but they have to be really good. The big, yeah, it's about, well.

Mike (19:54.556)
First party, absolutely.

Mike (20:04.914)
was going to say webinars are tricky, aren't they, moment? Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (20:09.022)
It's about doing everything exceptionally and that requires you not to do everything because you can't do everything you doing exceptionally. Yeah. So that's what I mean about that focus and content repurposing as well. So for example, the report I reference, you know, we've got a load of content out of that. We're repurposing across multiple different formats. And I think outbound as well seeking thinking of it as a distribution channel, not a broadcast.

Mike (20:13.564)
Yes, exactly.

Bethan Vincent (20:36.076)
not a sales lead gen channel, it's a way of building a relationship. So the first touch point is offering value. Probably the second email is offering value, the third email is offering value. And then you build to the ask, but you've built that familiarity, you've built hopefully that kind of like positive feeling towards these guys know what they're talking about.

Mike (20:40.315)
Exactly.

Mike (20:55.996)
So I don't think you've listened to the two Bobs podcast at all, Blair Enns and Richard Baker, I think it is. And they were talking, I think last week, before last, about email marketing, basically. It's that, know, if you had to, if there's only one thing you could pick, if there was only one thing you could pick, what would you pick? And, know, one of the thoughts was around, well, owning your own email database of genuinely engaged people that are engaged in your topic.

Bethan Vincent (20:58.41)
No.

Bethan Vincent (21:19.083)
Yeah.

Mike (21:25.37)
And that still has huge value.

Bethan Vincent (21:27.594)
Yeah, it's the only channel that has kind of maintained its performance fundamentals like open rate. In fact, open rates, think Fran Fishkin from Spark Toro and Moz kind of fame, in his presentation recently was talking about how open rates actually increased recently. What other channel have you seen metrics increase on? No other is the answer. and it's your audience where they're at and where they choose to consume.

Mike (21:46.02)
Exactly. Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (21:54.464)
what formats resonate with them. know for me, my inbox is a place where I can filter out a lot of noise. if you get in my inbox, you've done something right.

Mike (22:02.672)
Yes, exactly. So the third question we had, was businesses often may misdiagnose fundamental strategic issues as promotional problems. So obviously, that can lead to very costly mistakes. So can you explain about that in more detail what they should be doing about it?

Bethan Vincent (22:22.881)
Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (22:26.954)
Yeah, I'll give you an example because we're hearing this a lot from kind of clients and prospects at the moment that performance marketing. So PPC Google search is not performing as well as it did last year. And everyone's like, well, what do I do to fix that? You my CPCs have risen, my lead rate has gone down, my conversion rate has gone down, and they see it as a very like it's a channel problem. Now, there are lots of issues with PPC costs have risen, competition has massively risen. And it

It's still the only one of the few kind of linear channels where you can put money in and see very clearly metrics on the way out. That's why people love it. I mean, issues around that. Actually, sometimes the issue is, well, the markets moved on. You've had a massive competitor come in and who's launched a new product that blows your product out the water. That's not a PPC. That's not a CPC issue for you. That is literally competitive forces or

Mike (22:58.852)
Exactly. Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (23:18.774)
buyer behavior has changed. They're no longer going to Google to solve this problem because of X and Y fundamental shift. So that's where people get really locked into, well, why isn't this channel performing? Or you have a positioning problem, actually, you know, and just because competition's over risen over time, your positioning problems just become more acute over time. And now it's really come to a head. So this is where, you if you're, we're often bought in.

Mike (23:30.396)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (23:40.551)
Yes.

Bethan Vincent (23:44.768)
by clients kind of audit their marketing. And that's why we say we take a holistic view. Because if we just look at one channel, probably give you like, hey, like you probably need to improve your ad headlines or whatever, but that's not going to blow anything out the water. That's not going to solve the fundamentals for you. And I think the biggest, you know, I say this a lot, like the best thing as marketers to be marketing a good product or service that people actually want. And

Mike (23:58.972)
Correct.

Bethan Vincent (24:10.376)
There are a lot of businesses who will build, agencies sometimes do this where they build a new service line and be like, my God, like people are going to love this. They've always wanted this. They haven't done any customer research. They haven't validated it and it flops. Then they pump more money into getting out there and they're like, it's just a money issue. We just need to throw more money at promoting it. And actually no one wants it. Just really sad, which is why, you know, spend that bit of time, that bit of money upfront to not make massive mistakes later on.

Mike (24:30.524)
No one it. Exactly. Correct.

Mike (24:40.006)
Yeah, now we've just run, you know, we talked before I building an AI product with a really talented guy. So I've got a joint venture with him. And we've spent the last two or three months just building the proof of concept. So we've built the proof of concept. It's a version of what the MVP would be when it launches, but it's enough that we can get agencies on board. They can try it out. put their real data into the system. We run that real data.

and we get real outputs and then the agency can look at it and go, well, is that valuable? Is it valuable enough? And then what would you pay for that? And so even on a sample of 10 conversations and two POCs, we can see, you can start to see where the value is and what people will pay for and what they won't pay for.

Bethan Vincent (25:11.115)
Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (25:29.452)
Yeah, absolutely. And you can, you know, even if you're not at the stage where you have an MVP ready, amazing if you do, right, but you can at least go and have conversations with people about the concept and do that kind of discovery. And it doesn't have to, you can do it yourself. Pick 10 people who you're ideal customer you want to go after, go and have a half hour conversation with them. I guarantee you, will come away with food for thought and interesting things to kind of directionally point you in the right way.

Mike (25:39.524)
Exactly.

Mike (25:55.994)
Exactly, correct. Of what they'll actually pay for. precisely, exactly. So, Bethan, we've covered quite a lot of topics there. In summary, if you were talking to any services provider in the services space, what are the top two three things you'd say to them to say, if you think you're struggling with marketing because you're not getting the cut through or the conversion rates, whatever it might be,

Bethan Vincent (25:58.282)
Yeah, what they value, what they don't value, what you don't need to build.

Bethan Vincent (26:07.558)
Yeah.

Mike (26:25.722)
What are the two or three things apart from bringing you and your team in? What are top two or three things you'd say to start with?

Bethan Vincent (26:33.1)
Go and speak to your customer. The winners in any market in the future will be the people who are closest to their customer and understand their motivations and how they want to buy. Just go and do 10 calls with customers. Go and do two calls with customers if you can't do 10. Secondly, think take a step back. If you think it's a channel issue, take a step back and be like, okay, what are all the factors at play here?

Mike (26:45.51)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (26:55.958)
Think about the customer journey. we covering all of that customer journey from kind of problem where suiting the where consideration and yada yada marketing funnel type of thing. So are we being holistic in the way we think about this? And number three is just the market is really quickly changing. And you can be in denial about that at the moment. think especially, especially in marketing as well, but the market is changing and you

I don't want to be that person who's like AI is a huge threat, but it is a threat to marketing agencies because clients are thinking, hmm, maybe we can reduce some costs and increase some speed here. instead of putting your head in the sand, think about, okay, where's the opportunity? Because in every age of great change, there is opportunity for those willing to embrace it and see it. And now is the time to be doing that because in two or three years it's going to be too late.

Mike (27:28.314)
Exactly.

Mike (27:36.452)
Absolutely.

Mike (27:40.89)
It'd too late. I'm completely with you. And I think really interesting about that, you know, getting ahead of the curve, you know, embracing the change. was saying to Henry, my AI business partner, that we were just saying, what we really want to do is find, just find five clients when we launch that can see the future, where it's going, want to embrace a business that's going in that direction.

Bethan Vincent (27:47.307)
Yeah.

Mike (28:09.636)
and that wants to work with us. So yes, they're going to have to pay for the service, absolutely. But you want the early adopters to be true, almost like kind of partners in your business, because they're going to give you lots of feedback, which will iterate the product, which will make it better. And then eventually you'll go onto a broader market. But just get close to five customers, five paying customers that get value out of it and work with them.

Bethan Vincent (28:18.144)
Yeah.

Bethan Vincent (28:32.564)
Yeah, everyone jumps to scale, don't they? And they don't go through the process, you know, of like figuring it out. Yeah.

Mike (28:34.962)
Exactly. It's it's bonkers. My view would be you get five and then when you've got five, then you get to 10. When you get to 10, you get to 20. And then when you got 20 customers, you might start going, there's something here. Now, which bit of this is a bit more scalable in market acquisition terms? But before that, you don't know. You've no idea.

Bethan Vincent (28:57.098)
Yeah, yeah. it Yeah, well, it is that it is that scale up gap. Interestingly, again, go back to our research report. That was the kind of chasm of confidence we encountered that startups are kind of over potentially overconfident. Yeah, scale ups confidence dips because you encounter all the issues of scale. if again, if you don't understand your customers, you've not done that foundations, you are literally throwing paint at the wall, mud at the wall. And

Mike (29:11.162)
Overconfident, they are, yeah.

Mike (29:21.819)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (29:23.552)
figuring it out by spending money. Why not spend that kind of time upfront to figure it out so you don't make costly mistakes?

Mike (29:30.116)
Exactly. So I heard something else that was very interesting the other day, Bethan, see if this resonates just as we kind of close. I thought it really rang true for me. You know, we talk about the customer journey and everyone talks about the customer journey and everyone's got a customer journey map. And the guy was saying, actually, it's probably a seller's journey. It's what you think is an organization your buyers go on as a journey. And then you've turned that into one aggregate form with five steps and some gates in the way.

Bethan Vincent (29:59.019)
Yeah.

Mike (30:00.198)
But actually that's nothing like how customers really buy. What are your thoughts on that?

Bethan Vincent (30:03.658)
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, this idea of a linear customer journey is incorrect. You know, there's that famous Gartner diagram that shows that people just bounce in and out of stages. Yeah. I think bad customer journeys are seller's journeys if they're not based on any insight or any kind of research or conversations with the customer. If you've just sat down and gone, I think our customers will do this and then then it will be wrong. Then it's a seller's journey. But I would advocate the value of a proper customer journey map that is based on

Mike (30:10.832)
Yes, that's right. They bounce around. Yeah.

Mike (30:21.276)
Yes.

Mike (30:24.594)
Exactly.

Bethan Vincent (30:32.468)
insight research, all of that kind of good stuff.

Mike (30:35.142)
Yeah, within segments. Because different segments will have different journeys, presumably.

Bethan Vincent (30:36.82)
Yeah. yeah. Yeah, as well. Yeah. Yeah. Different customers. Yeah. Yeah. Not one size. Yeah. One size fits all. is, you know, well, you may find, but you have to do the work to realize this. may find actually all of your segments buy in a very similar way, but you don't know that until you've actually done the research. Like, great, great. That's less surface error for you. Wonderful. If you're in that scenario. Unlikely.

Mike (30:53.988)
Exactly.

Mike (30:59.74)
So I could carry on talking, but I've got one more question before we close. So you mentioned it before, speaking at conferences, having breakfast, just broadly, should any company selling their services to bigger brands, is that an important part at the moment, do you think, of getting your positioning right, getting in front of the marketplace, getting people to know about you?

Bethan Vincent (31:24.8)
Yeah, I'm gonna give you such a marketing, it depends answer. But yes, with the caveats are you need some good to do it. Like we've all been in those talks by boring people who are just selling, don't think of it as a sales, it's not a selling opportunity. Yeah, it is a awareness, it is an adding value. Also think about not just having one person in your organization do that, because that's a lot of dependency on one person, especially if they're an employee, not the kind of know, shareholder of the business.

Mike (31:36.782)
Absolutely. Nope. Ever. Correct.

Bethan Vincent (31:54.188)
And finally, be really, you know, a lot of events people do for vanity, be really picky about where you go and what you do, your time is precious. and yeah, exactly. Yeah, ask the organiser of any deep person conference will give you a breakdown of the audience profile.

Mike (32:00.228)
Exactly. Yes. And check that your audience is there.

Mike (32:12.582)
Yeah, exactly. And just check that those are the people that actually you're targeting and that you think want to buy from you.

Bethan Vincent (32:18.144)
Yeah, again, you've got to understand your audience though to be able to do that. All starts with audience.

Mike (32:19.972)
You have indeed. Beth, it's been fantastic. Thank you. Where can people find out more about you?

Bethan Vincent (32:24.8)
Thank you. So I'm on pretty much every social channel, including TikTok at Beth and Vincent. You also find out more about OV on our website, openvelocity .com. And we have a newsletter called the Growth Tax Newsletter, which is on LinkedIn. And you can sign up via email as well. And that explores the hidden taxes you pay in your business growth, which we've talked about some of them today already, interestingly.

Mike (32:47.154)
Very good. Excellent. Beth, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Bethan Vincent (32:49.952)
Thank you so much.

Mike (32:52.016)
Right, let me stop the recording.

Bethan Vincent (32:54.038)
Cool, that was good.