Thought leadership & AI power: Harnessing content in B2B

Jon Busby: Welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. Bill, we had you on last year's episode on the Masters of B2B. It was fantastic to meet you back then. We're now a year on. We're, as you've just described, opening today's wonderful conference here in a very rainy and moist Florida. We've had a lot of disruptive weather, and I think that summarizes really what B2B has gone through over the last year.

In your view what's changed in B2B marketing over the last 12 months?

Bill Zengel: Yes. Thank you for having me back. I appreciate it. I know you're not recording. I love together. So I say that unofficially. So I'm glad you're doing this. I think a couple of things have changed and what I always try to reflect is the voice of the member.

And what I've heard from some members is that closing a sale is 33 percent harder than it was I'll say pre pandemic. And especially here in the States, there was a lot of, I'll call it COVID money that kept the economy afloat. I went to Italy last summer and it was like, Oh, you said to the tour guide, how'd you fare during COVID?

And he said, it was really hard because it was no government support. So I think here in the U S there was plenty of money floating around that kept us feeling good those couple of years. And in the real estate market, I was just reading an article that said their approach is called extend and pretend that things are going to turn around as far as like office rentals.

The rubber's starting to hit the road now and it's going to separate people. And I would say that it's one member said to me, it's 33 percent harder to close a sale, but they are closing sales and they're using technology to close those sales. And they're not using, I would say the AI we read about, which is the entire world's going to change in a heartbeat.

They're using chatbots. So I don't know whether they're powered by chat GPT, but they're chatbots. So they're down at a very basic level. But they've used that they haven't hired anybody and they haven't fired anybody, but they're using that to close the gap and I could see for ourselves I really don't like to talk about the ANA that much but we're delighted That so many people have come to the conference this year so many members.

I think we have a 430 registered, which is our pre pandemic numbers. So those New York realtors would love to have pre pandemic numbers. So we're not at our peak, but we're close. But we worked awfully hard to get everybody here. So I could draw an analogy that we worked 33 percent harder to just get to even, if that makes sense.

Jon Busby: I'd say you're working even harder given this weather and the last few days, like we're having to bus people in from Tampa and Miami are here. So it's

Bill Zengel: a great analogy for what we're going through, right? So to answer the second part of your question about let's say AI and where it's going, I think there's a tendency in our industry, right?

Because so many people come out of creative backgrounds, maybe journalism and a journalist, if you think about it, is always looking for news. And what that translates to is, follow the shiny object and the bouncing ball. And I think AI is transformational and it's going to be transformational now.

But I also think you need to be careful, not just to follow the shiny object and you need to step back and say, what am I trying to accomplish strategically? And how am I going to drive business growth? And how can this new tool or tool sets help me drive that growth? So rather than saying Oh, I just read this article.

I'm going to write my new business plan with chat GPT. I would step back and say, what is your business objective? What are you trying to accomplish? And then how can the technology empower that?

Jon Busby: Yep. I, having interviewed many CMOs on the podcast, many other marketing leaders that's the one thing that's really stood out for me over the last year is that difficulty and challenge we're going through that's being disrupted so much by technology has made us go back and think about the fundamentals.

So completely agree with you there, Bill. Take you on a more positive spin for a moment. We've just heard from some fantastic thought leaders, some research that you've been performing over the last year on the different types of businesses and the different types of market here, like which.

Thought Leader is most exciting you at this conference.

Bill Zengel: I think what I always look for is differentiated value. So what is going to differentiate my conference, not that it's mine, it's a team thing. What's going to differentiate our conference from other events, right? You can, cause you have to pick and choose where you're going to spend your time.

Almost more where you, than where you're going to spend your money. You're, you some, money's precious, but time is somehow more and more precious with each day. What I always look to is the clients who are up on the stage because we represent the clients first and I'm an ex agency person.

So all respect to the agencies and the consultants. But we represent the clients first. And so for example, Kate Rogers was up there from GE Healthcare. So I'm not saying she's the one I came to see, but that's amazing. They're not even on the stage, but there's a group of women here from Carhartt.

And they said to me, just in introductions. That some of the work they did had a 50, a 15 percent increase in unaided recall. I'm like, why aren't you up on stage? You asked me about who's on stage. So I do gravitate to the clients first. Yep. So for example, Kate Rogers from GE Healthcare that resonates with me.

Cause I think it resonates with our members. It's unbiased. She has no business outcomes. She's trying to influence. She's just really here to share. I think what's interesting is who's in the audience. And I hope you've gotten a chance to network. So the folks from Carhartt, I can tell you that a few years ago, I was at an event and everybody in our business gravitates to the top title and the top brand.

Oh, the CMO from such and such is going to be on the stage. And I think agencies say, Hey, we're in a considered sale and it takes 18 months and it's a group purchase. Yet when you come to the conference, let's meet the rock star. Yet I can tell you a few years ago there were two, two gentlemen from, I think it was Sweden and nobody knew who they were and nobody had heard of their company.

It was a Novo Nordisk and it was five years before Ozempic launched, right? Three years ago we had two women, I would say junior level, and that's probably maybe not fair, but I think most of the agencies who come to network probably wouldn't have even said hello to them because they weren't on the agenda, but they're at Home Depot and they were coming here to learn because Home Depot had decided two, three years ago, They were going to move big into b2b and six months ago that story hit ad age but we had it two years early.

So when you say who's the most One that I'm most interested in on the stage I would say I would make sure if I was here to talk to the people in the audience something you can't do virtually I completely agree.

Jon Busby: I mean We had the pleasure of, again, talking last year. You were one of the last guests I got to interview then and we got to talk about how wonderful the 2023 conference is.

I'm personally looking really forward to the 234 conference. But one thing that really stuck with me is your passion about this and the clients. If you, how would you summarize your, what is it that gets you up in the morning about this? So what is it that, that excites you about everything that we do here at the ANA?

Bill Zengel: I was a copywriter for 15 years. And I was a good copywriter. I'm embarrassed to tell you that I was a great account executive because I put on the suit and went to the dark side. But I am insatiably curious. So I and I meet people and I'm instantly interested in what they're doing. Who are they?

Why are they here? That's what gets me up. Like my curiosity just goes on forever and you meet such diverse people here. So I talked to a manufacturing company, I won't tell you who, and they had a channel marketing problem and it, I was like, okay, I'll make a mental note of that. And then the first person up on the stage, I think it was Dave Edelman from Harvard was like this is what makes B2B more complex because it's a channel marketing.

And I'm going, wow, like I could not have planned this better. So I love people. I love advertising. I think it's fascinating. I love marketing. And this is a great place to be if you feel that way.

Jon Busby: Let's talk about one of your passions, which is creating great thought leadership content. Something which I'm hoping you're, this conference is an example of.

Bill, how can you tell good thought leadership from bad thought leadership?

Bill Zengel: ANA B2B just launched our first project this year. And when we started last summer I asked the people who were working for me to research that very question what makes great thought leadership? And they came back to me and they said it's got to be provocative.

It's got to challenge, the status quo of thinking. I'm lucky enough to be friends with our CEO, Bob, and there's a couple other bills at our company, Bill Tucker and Bill Duggan. And I talked to them about great thought leadership. And what Duggan said to me was You know, Bill, he was ex agency too it was like thought leadership is unique to the ANA in this regard.

You couldn't do this when you're at an agency. So he worked at Gray, he was an account person. I was a writer at Saatchi. You couldn't drive great thought leadership to those companies at that time. So it's a unique benefit of the ANA. And I think where we're uniquely capable of delivering it well is we're like Switzerland.

We, we have no point of view. I don't know if you saw the work we presented today, but somebody said to me we're not trying to put a man on the moon. We're trying to put a monkey in space. So we're tackling the problem that people don't even realize they have because before the man could land on the moon, you had to put the monkey into space.

And I was like other people are tackling this issue. And the same person, it was Mike Linton, said to me, yeah, but this issue is like a healthcare problem. A lot of people are going to come at the problem and a lot of people are going to have unique perspectives, but the ANA does three things really well.

We're unbiased. The second thing is that we bring people together. And the third thing is we have no investment in the outcome. So we just bring forward the story and then it's up to you to decide they could resonate with you.

Jon Busby: So how would you break down the key components of a thought leadership strategy?

Bill Zengel: A couple of years ago, we had the CMOs in the room. It wasn't my meeting. And the folks who were running the meeting just said, Hey what's your most important KPI? And we got 200 different answers from 200 different people. Clearly there was something there. You wouldn't end up with 200 different balance sheets.

So the first step is there a problem? Then I would say the second step from my perspective, and I'm not an academic. So was I wanted to validate the problem. It is what I think a problem, really a problem. So we formed the steering council and we're lucky enough that we have chief marketing officer from company XYZ chief.

And these people came together and we had a kickoff session in November and they were passionate that this was a problem. So it was no longer Bill thought there was a problem. It was that 20 CMO's told me there was a problem. And I think so few people have that convening power. That the 20 CMOs would come to the call and then tell you, they were passionate.

They're like, Bill, this isn't a little problem. It's a problem with a capital P. So then another benefit of the ANA is we have a service called ASK, which is a team of researchers or librarians. So I knew, I thought it was a problem. We had validated the problem. And then the first thing the ANA normally does is let's survey the members.

And, from that creative background, I tend to zig when other people zag. And I happen to know that there's a huge member wear out on surveys. It's like we survey, what day is it? Let's survey them, instead of surveying them, we decided to do what's called a meta study. Which is not with a company formerly known as Facebook.

It's an academic term for a literature review. So instead of trying to generate a report that would come out next quarter and die with the following quarter, and all you got to do is go to the Harvard business review. The other thing marketers seem to love is acronyms and whoever has the acronym. We do love an acronym, right?

And it's the acronym du jour. Our conference is gonna end in June. I can promise you the July August edition of Parliament Business Review will have another marketer with another acronym trying to solve the problem. So we took a step back and we said, what's already out there? So we acquired almost 600 articles.

Indeed. And we said, we're not trying to come up with one solution. Maybe there are six solutions and we approached it that way. So we tried to take a unique perspective on how to approach the member and how to find the information. And then maybe counterintuitive in the age of AI we read the 531 articles and not a lot of people have the time to do that, but we divvied them up and we each took home a hundred articles.

Then we fed them into the machine, right? Let's see semantic clustering, how they all come together. And I got to give credit to Mike Linton, who's five times CMO. And former ANA board member. And by the way, the monkey in space was his comment. And Jonathan Knowles from type two consulting, who did most of the work and guided everything.

Once we reviewed the articles, Jonathan did an economic overlay to look if what industry you're in would impact which marketing approach he is. So maybe somebody in a mining company is going to use a different approach than somewhere as software solution company might be different than a package good company.

Jon Busby: I think what stands out for me, there's a couple of things there that I'd love to dive into. Firstly, that piece of research was fantastic. I was genuinely surprised how, I think the biggest cohort from the survey in the room was product marketing, which makes me very happy because that's the world I live in.

But what I'm hearing there about just, if I take this as a meta study away from that particular piece of content you've created and talk about thought leadership as a overall is, you've got to start with a big problem, which was, And actually, when Jeff first mentioned, so I met Jeff at this conference last year, met him again about six months through the year.

So back in February now after we met at the conference and he told me about this piece of research you were doing. And since then, every single CMO or marketer that I've spoken to, you could just see this as an underlying problem. There are just, there are too many different ways that we talk about.

An MQL or what, what what performance marketing actually means or what those metrics actually are. So we need those Uber metrics that we can get behind. So from what I'm hearing, we need to start with a big problem and then you need to do the legwork to to study it. And sometimes there isn't just one solution.

Bill Zengel: Absolutely. The one thing I'd add to that is, there's a big push on, at least in the U S abound diversity. And I think it holds great promise. But as business people, sometimes people don't always do a good job of explaining why it's important.

Jon Busby: Yep.

Bill Zengel: So I would just say this just from my personal perspective as a business person that innovation drives growth and everybody's here to grow.

Yeah. So innovation drives growth, insight drives innovation and diversity drives insight. So if you have six people in the room and they all look the same, talk the same, have the same set of experiences. You're going to get a bunch of heads nodding in the same direction, but you're not really going to uncover something new.

Jon Busby: Like you say, you've got to challenge the status quo, right? So we've got to, we've got to keep pushing and saying, is this enough?

Bill Zengel: Absolutely. The insight is driven by diversity. And that's the reason, one of the reasons you want to be diverse in your approach to things, because it's going to bring new thinking to the table.

And that new thinking is going to propel you forward, especially in B2B. It's challenging. For some reason, we're in a cohort where people are focused on the widget and it's dimensions and how fast the wheel turns when at the end we're all human. So we know that B2B is the same, but different.

Does that make sense? And Kim McNeil downs. The other thing is a manufacturer might say. Oh we believe in purpose. And they have a website where you can order nuts and bolts. But really, they're just trying to sell it to you for a penny less than a day earlier than the other person.

And at the top, it might say, Oh, we're going to donate 1 percent of sales to Girl Scout Cookies. So that's BS, right? It's not real purpose. It's like the, we would call it purpose washing. So what's really interesting with what Kim's doing, and she's going to speak about it tomorrow. If you get a chance, you should introduce yourself to her.

So Deloitte, a couple of years ago, came to our stage and shared a case on diversity and, if you've been around a while, you've heard it all, right? It's really hard and I've read some place that you only have five spaces in your brain for new information. And in my brain, three and a half are occupied because I got three kids, a dog, a mortgage.

So you really only have a limited amount of space for the other person, even though you might, smile and pretend. So Deloitte cut through that, and I was like, almost crying. It was such a compelling case, the way it was presented. I just made a mental note of it. I didn't know what to do with it.

And then this year, I don't want to jinx them, but they're up for a big B2 award with their second story that they did around the WMBA. And it's like I said to Kim and you asked me what motivates me. And this is my motivation to not just am I curious, I want to learn. In U S real estate, they say by the worst house on the best block.

I don't know if you've ever heard that expression. So that's the way I look. And when I walk into a room, I want to be the dumbest guy in a room full of really smart people and listen to them and see where, what do they have to share? What can I learn from these folks? So everybody, a lot of people, they really want to tell you what, before you finish a sentence, they're thinking how they're going to impress you.

And I'm almost like the exact opposite. I'm just thinking, what's the next question? What can I learn from you? How can I apply what you

Jon Busby: share? So I want to come back to something you mentioned a moment ago, which was around, you talked about, as marketeers, we tend to look at how many tweets we've had, or how many how many mentions, or, we get over metriced.

Like what are the best ways to measure return on investment on thought leadership?

Bill Zengel: Can I answer it in two parts? Of course you can. So I want to go back to what you said about metrics. I don't want to call them vanity metrics, but there, there will, a lot of times that what we have as marketers click opens views.

That's what we have. It's not that they really vanity metrics. But the CFO doesn't care. So we didn't, when we approached the research we're doing, we weren't trying to create a new measurement. We were trying to understand the measurement that would resonate with the chief financial officer or a company, and then tie that back to marketing, if that makes sense.

Now, let me address the core question of, how do you measure great thought leadership? So when I started on this project, I had really never done thought leadership at the ANA before. So I said let me go learn from the people who did. So I sat in annual planning and I listened to, I'll go back to Bill Duggan again.

And what I was surprised by that he talked about was press. I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting clicks, downloads, say metrics, right? That we were just talking about. And part of when you do the work is you've got to generate awareness that you've done the work. Otherwise, nobody knows, right?

The generating the awareness is something we're working to do with the work we're doing. We want to generate engagement. We don't think we have the solution. We want people to say, hey, we would like to be part of this study. Then we look at, I'll say, traditional ANA metrics. How many members downloaded it?

How many used it? And I'll just tell you, like a last metric that I didn't consider. So a woman at the ANA named Jerusha Harvey helped us with this study, and she had done a landmark study for us last year called the Capabilities Study. And I read the Capabilities Study and I said, if I'm that good, if I'm half that good, I'll be happy.

Evening. I was talking to a. Large recruiter, headhunter, I won't tell you who it was not that I was looking for a job, but I wanted them to be part of the study. And he mentioned to me in passing that he had a copy of this capability study and he referred to it and used it. And I relayed that information to Jerusha, but what she cared about was that one download because she had impacted the industry in a meaningful, material, daily way.

Jon Busby: Just having that one person say, I downloaded and found it.

Bill Zengel: Huge influencer in the business, right? Yeah. He's trying to help bring shape to this snowflake problem that we're addressing. That no two CMO jobs are alike. He's utilizing work that the ANA did, with at least one participant being Jerusha Harvey.

Jon Busby: I couldn't agree more. And I, I had the same experience just sat at a table just now. Sat down, three new people that I'd never met before. Introduce myself and they turned around and said, Oh, I know together and hang on, this isn't you like, I think just knowing that you've impacted that many lives is that many people, even if it's just one influencer that means something can be,

Bill Zengel: I want to give you credit because I think it's interesting you opened with the storm, and the, the people who are here, I'm not taking anybody away who didn't get here, but the people who were here fought their way through the storm, and they made it, right?

I think about Alex, who works with you, right? She got ANA Rising Star last year. What sets us apart is our top jury is only chief marketing officers, only members. And I used to do new business at an agency, I won't tell you where. And I always used to like to say that if I knew about the ANA, I'd still be doing new business.

And, people struggle at agencies to get, raise awareness of what they're doing. And, Alex and Together, and I love Together, and I love Alex. You all have separated yourself when we look at those entries. And the CMOs are in the room reading your best work. You could send 10, 000 emails that they'll never read, they'll never open, and they're reading your best work, and they're arguing about it with each other, because it's not just your best work, it's your competitors.

What about this? What about that? And it's just such a great dialogue. It validates everything we do. And tomorrow the jury is going to be convening in person, live here, and pick the, we call it the Member's Choice Award. It's the best in show. So I know that like next week, a lot of people are going to Cannes and that's great.

Now, if I was going to the South of France, I'm not sure I'd want to go with you. So I'd probably go on my own, just for vacation, but it's great. But there's some folks here from the UK who said a couple of years ago, they wrote an article and they were like they went to Can B2B and they didn't see themselves in it.

And it's for other people, right? And I said to that guy, I want this to be your home. You're the working B2B. You're the roll up your sleeves B2B. And I want you to feel at home at the A& A. So that's really what we're trying to put forward is all our differentiation. That it's where, it's not, when you go to the bar, it's not the award the other agencies are going to pat you on the back on.

Or grumble when you leave. It's the award that clients recognize.

Jon Busby: I wanna take us back to your history in copywriting. You mentioned you did it for 15 years, is that right? The, how do you feel with some of the emerging technology now, and we're gonna talk about AI, like how do you feel that's impacting your olds?

Bill Zengel: I think nobody cares about history and nobody cares about old. We only care about tomorrow in our industry. And I would say that it's, I think it's going to be totally

Jon Busby: liberating. I think that's a great choice of words, by the way, that I'm going to steal that. Like liberating is, we talk about it being liberating.

It's going to affect jobs. It's going to impact people's roles. We're going to, AI is going to take over the world, but liberating is a fantastic way to put it.

Bill Zengel: There's an old IBM ad that Olavi did I think in the UK where there were two guys standing in front of a hole in the ground and there was a backhoe there and they said if there wasn't a backhoe, there could be a hundred men with shovels and the other guy said, yeah.

And if they didn't have shovels, there could be a thousand guys with spoons. So the tech, whether we like it or not, the technology is coming, right? It's not so you need to embrace it. And I'll tell you what, I see the perspective changing. So pre pandemic in B2B, there were a lot of places where the role of marketing was, you make sure the banner was straight at the golf tournament and the sales guys would take the heavy lift or saleswomen, right?

It's okay, make sure that banner straight and I've got it from here and maybe there's a spot on a Sunday morning news show Or you sponsored a golf tournament and I'm sure that made your CEO happy but I'm not sure how many other people saw it and the pandemic hit and that changed everything because you couldn't leverage intent data because all the IP addresses were tied to the company.

And now I'm logging on from home with like in New York, it might be Verizon. And there were no there was no field. There were no salespeople in the field. And I think it's a golden opportunity for marketing to contribute to business growth right now. And what's accelerating and I believe truly liberating is connected TV.

So now you have this opportunity where Before it was like, okay, the chief technology officer. Okay. So we're going to go to do the golf tournament because that's what everybody does. And we're going to buy the Sunday morning news because we think they watch that. Maybe she's a fan of Bridgerton and now you could buy Bridgerton at the household level.

What caused the connected TV? And what we're seeing in the B2 awards is it's really opening up a new world of creativity that in an economical way you can really impact that person. And the other interesting thing I'd tell you about AI We had a member who said wow, you mean if I had an idea, I could instantly bring it to life through AI.

And he was really happy about that. And I was like, Oh, this is really scary because the reason you employ agencies is because most people are not idea people, right? So I used to have a company that taught kids how to make movies. And you could give a kid a stick, and that stick could be a thousand different things.

And I think that's what creativity is. And we said, okay, this is great, let's do adults for classes for adults. And you give an adult a stick, you know what it is, it's a stick. So that's why you have an agency. It doesn't matter how much technology there is. It just means that a lot of really bad ideas are going to come to life really quickly and get dismissed really quickly.

That's the role that agency is going to bring. Strategic insight, strategic vision, creativity to bring things forward. That's at least how I see it.

Jon Busby: David Edelman mentioned this in his personalization talk. He ended his talk on that quote that you mentioned now is the time for marketeers to, I say, rule the roost, right?

We've, and I've often looked at a split between marketing and sales be, marketing's 20%, sales do the 80 percent and close it. Now I think that's switched the other way. I think marketing have a much, much bigger role to play. Would you say it's now time for marketeers to be incentivized in the same way that sales are?

Bill Zengel: What do you think it's IVG? So I'm a capitalist at heart, so I'm a big believer in that people who perform should get paid better. So somebody put up a slide today, I don't remember who it was, maybe it was Edelman. About, I think it was, how people are incentivized differently. I think it was him, he had, so operations is incentivized to make sure the product's on hand.

Yep. Finance is incentivized to make sure there's nothing in the warehouse. So That lack of integration on outcome is a challenge. And I think marketers, I think the opportunities there, but I think marketers have to be really careful because tomorrow we're going to put a ruler from smart technologies on the stage.

She's a chief financial officer and I don't want to don't run this until after she talks, I said, now she believes in marketing. I said, what did you think about it before you believed in marketing? And she said it was fluff. So I think it's really important that marketers not be arrogant. I think there's a seat at the table to be had, and I'll tell you why I think it's there.

I think one, a lot of creatives are just thinking about the next campaign versus truly understanding business and how are you driving business growth and speaking the language of the other people in the room who really don't have time. For our numbers that they don't care about translated for them.

Like when we started this project, we said, let's describe the brand non believer as a target audience. They have no time. They have no interest in, they've got plenty to worry about. Now tell me in 10 seconds, how are you going to help me accomplish my goals? The second thing is that the customer has changed and I'm not sure most organizations have thought about it.

So I spoke at a financial conference a couple of weeks ago, the customers changed the new customer. There were very few baby boomers left in the business world and the new customer does not want to talk to sales. The new customer wants to self serve, download the information themselves. But when you go inside a large organization, the person in charge of revenue is probably a former salesperson or current salesperson.

So it's against their grain to say, let's give that information to the customer and let them download it themselves. So the people who are giving you the money, which is why you exist, if they don't give you money, you don't exist as a business. The people who are giving you the money are saying, I don't want to talk to sales and the marketer's trying, you better be really careful how you explain that to a salesperson.

If that makes sense.

Jon Busby: It's actually something. So Lisa from Kindles joining us tomorrow. Yes. We recently had her on the podcast talking about, cause they've just started a program of incentivizing field marketeers. It's a pilot program alongside IBM. So very interested to see how that's playing out, but I think it'd be good to get a little round table together to see how that can, how

Bill Zengel: it

Jon Busby: can drive forward.

I think

Bill Zengel: it's so curious I wanted to change my opening remarks. Kindral was on stage last year and they were up there with VMLYNR. And they said one of them said it's reputation first, then relationship, then revenue. You mean? Most people want to jump to the third.

Jon Busby: Especially in today's climate.

Bill Zengel: Then, and you need to invest the time in the relationships. Imagine that conference I told you about a few years ago. You're at the conference. And you're under pressure because you paid to be at the conference and you're supposed to come back with 30 leads. And if you don't come back with 30 leads, you're not coming to the conference next year.

So because you're so worried about your short term deliverable, You don't even notice those two guys from Novo Nordisk who are about to launch the biggest game changer in the healthcare industry called Ozempic. And you never met them because you were worried about your checklist.

Jon Busby: And

Bill Zengel: I think that's a struggle.

We tell our clients that it's a long sales cycle and there are 20 people involved, but then that's not the way the agencies behave. They're like, oh, we need to grow tomorrow. Why? What makes you so different?

Jon Busby: I think this comes down to the piece of research with Jonathan and the Mike, Jonathan and Mike were presenting.

And that imagery of the intersection between Wall Street and Madison Avenue sits as the problem we have in our head. Wall Street has a lot to answer for. And how much it's impacting how creative, How creatively we can think about our campaigns because they just, we want to see that revenue first.

I think it's got a, I think it's a big problem at the moment.

Bill Zengel: You raise an interesting point and I hope Mike listens to your podcast because that image is not everywhere, even though he said it is. Like we created that special for this. So sorry to you, Mike. What I'd say is that On Mike's show, before we recruited him, he interviewed a couple of Wall Streeters and I watched the interviews and it was really interesting because one said, I'm here for the long haul.

I'm here for five or ten years. Yeah. That's when I'm looking for my buyout. But the marketers don't behave that way because they don't understand Wall Street enough to understand the motivation.

Jon Busby: Yep.

Bill Zengel: They put a label on them. Oh, they're just money. They're just here for the minute.

And this guy was saying, no, I have a five or 10 year horizon. I need you to tell me the truth. And I'm happy to make a long bet. You just need to explain to me why. And then he had a second gentleman on who I think is like super highly respected out in Silicon Valley. And he was like, Forget it, Mike.

B2B is just about leads. It's not about branding. But I can tell you, I've worked for B2B companies as small startups, and here's the first thing they do. They borrow branding. Because they make sure what they put on their website is the biggest companies they work with. So those companies worked on branding, and really, you're just stealing it or borrowing it.

You don't even realize you believe in branding, but you're borrowing it from somebody else versus growing your own brand.

Jon Busby: You've just blown my mind a bit there, Bill one of my previous guests, a guy called Tony Condi from Zebra, or Zebra if I use my American correctly. He used to do marketing for Stephen Covey, right?

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame. So he made me go back just speaking to him made me go back and re read it and he just made me realise that as marketeers, we need that bit of habit of seek first to understand and then be understood. My view there on that Wall Street have got a lot to answer for, maybe I've been thinking about it wrong.

Maybe it's the other way round, that we've got to spend more time understanding finance and coming back to the business fundamentals. Like that's actually really made, really opened my mind up there, Bill. So I'm going to bring us to a close. We've talked about a lot of different subjects from the ANAs through to thought leadership, through to the, yeah, how potential marketers could use AI.

Let's try and look one step ahead. What's the next horizon that marketers should be looking at?

Bill Zengel: I truly believe AI is transformational but I think if you don't look at it strategically, you're in trouble. I think you need to step back. I think the next thing is the first thing. Go back to basics. Make sure you understand how your internal peers like we said that up on the stage, make sure you understand the CFO, make sure you understand the CEO. I think you saw I put my personal cell phone number out there and somebody came up to me and they were like, that's so brave.

And I'm a direct marketer at heart. There were 430 people in the room. I got three texts. Let's see how many people actually leave here. There was this great book that Jonathan put up by a guy named Tim Ambler, who used to run Grand Met. And I think it was marketing and the bottom line.

That, that book was written like in the seventies and in it, it says marketing's job is to release untapped cashflow. Okay. And out of the 430 people in this room, I think you are the only one who's going to know that. There you go. So I think we need to get that message out

Jon Busby: then that's, yeah,

Bill Zengel: I think the next thing is understand your intern, treat your internal partners as customers and treat your customers like customers.

And this is going to sound crazy. I have two business relationships personally, and one of them has all my money, and it's not that much money, but it's enough for me. And I call them, and I can't get through to anybody. And you listen to these endless recordings that I'm sure some consulting firm told them it was more effective than having someone actually answer the phone.

That's a load of crap. So I would say this other one says, Hey, Bill. You're ninth in line and we'll call you back in 18 minutes. Click. That's great. So it's not, it's how do you utilize the technology to deliver customer value, which is only going to drive your business revenue.

Jon Busby: And I'm probably gonna add to that a little bit with my own view and I, again, I think David had this up on stage earlier, but it's the same challenge we're seeing transforming, forming our business, which is AI is great, but technology is only 20 percent of the story.

Like the other 70 percent is the people that you need to get there to be able to change your operational procedures, to be able to have the change your mindset, as we talked about growth mindset before. To move that forward. I think for me, it's yes, AI is coming in disrupting a lot, but it's still just about the humans at heart and how we execute on it.

Bill Zengel: That's perfect. So free. It's about data. It's about technology. It's about measurement. It's about B2B. B2B is the growth opportunity. But at the core of that is you need to understand the other person who's going to help you drive your business forward in a way that helps you best.

Jon Busby: Thank you so much for joining me again, Bill.

Thank you. It's been fantastic to have you on the B2B Marketing Podcast.