[Podcast] B2B Marketing with Jade Tambini

How does brand interact with the discipline of marketing?

In this insightful episode, we’re joined by Jade Tambini, a B2B marketing expert and course leader at B2B Breakthrough Academy.

With a rich background in consulting and 17 years of experience in B2B, Jade has not only worked her way to director-level positions at DS Smith PLC but has also served as the Chair of the Chartered Institute of Wales.

Jade takes us on a journey through the evolution of B2B marketing, highlighting the seismic shift from traditional person-to-person sales to the current digital landscape.

In this new era, online platforms have become pivotal, transforming customer expectations from simple sales support to a demanding need for leads.

Contrary to common belief, Jade observes that online competition in B2B isn’t as saturated as one might think, presenting untapped opportunities for businesses to establish their presence in the digital space.

Jade generously shares her expertise by unveiling the four pillars of B2B marketing, offering a robust framework for businesses navigating the intricate world of B2B Marketing. Not to be missed!

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Show Notes

• Jade Tambini’s Linkedin

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of JUST Branding. We have the amazing B2B Jade with us. That is Jade Tambini, and we’ll be finding out about her in just a second.

But the first thing that we should sort of announce at the outset is that Jade is from one of the greatest nations ever to have come upon this earth. It’s the nation I am from, it is the Welsh nation, and the only other Welsh person we’ve had on is me, and I’m not really properly Welsh. So this is gonna be an exciting episode just because we’re flying the flag for Wales in this episode.

Let me tell you a quick high-level thing about Jade. She is, and has an amazing background in B2B marketing. For over 17 years, she’s sort of been in this space.

She’s worked up from the ground, even from a sales perspective, right the way through to director level positions in marketing and business development. She famously has been working for DS Smith PLC many years ago before she started on her own in 2016. She also is the chair, or was the chair, I should say, in the past of the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Wales.

And she is now, as we’ve said, she is in charge of her business, which is B2B Jade. She consults globally for all sorts of organizations. And she is a course leader at the B2B Breakthrough Academy.

So we’ve got tons of great stuff there. Jade, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. And I have to say, I’m not actually Welsh either, I was born in England, but let’s just not go there.

Me too, but don’t tell everybody that.

I feel Welsh and that’s what matters.

We could all feel Welsh in this episode. Jacob, are you feeling a bit Welsh today?

Practically there as well, halfway.

Brilliant. Well, look, Jade, let’s just kick off with a bit of a story about you. I’ve obviously pinged through some highlights there, but tell us about your journey into basically sitting before us all here today.

So I started in sales in 2006. I had left art college because I left my art folder on the bus. I didn’t run after and I didn’t care.

And I was just like, this is not for me. So I circled a few jobs in the paper. And that’s how you got jobs in 2006.

And one of them was for cold calling. Yeah. And it was just immediate love, just walking into that corporate room, that big boiler room, boiler style.

Is it boiler room style? I have hundreds of people on the phones all walking around and closing deals. And I was just like, in heaven.

There was something about it for me. So I got on the phones and I was making 100 calls a day, two or three demos a day. I guess I was in a SaaS business because we were selling access to a database.

And yeah, I just adored it. And then because I was selling to marketing directors, I just started to feel like, wow, what they’re doing is so interesting. And I was consulting them, not realizing it.

And yeah, I just wanted to work in marketing so much. And I asked the MD, I was like, hey, I want to work in marketing. I want to join that team.

I see them doing all this cool stuff in the boardroom. I want to be there. And yeah, he said, what is ROI Jade?

And I said, Republic of Ireland. And he was like, yeah, you need to go get involved with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. You’re not ready for this.

So everyone was telling me, you can’t work in marketing. You dropped out of school. You’ve got no education.

You’re just a sales girl. Don’t be stupid. Get back on the phones.

But you know, I had no money and I just turned up to these CIM events unprepared. I was just like at the door. Will you let me in if I help you with registration?

Just tenacity basically. And I think for me, that’s been the ingredient.

Yeah, tenacity, awesome. But just for clarity, CIM is the Chartered Institute of Marketing, isn’t it?

Yeah, the Chartered Institute of Marketing. That’s where it all began. And that’s kind of like who I credit all my thanks to for even being in marketing because it did feel like, you know, I was coming up against people at interview once I decided I wanted to work in marketing who had the degree, had the experience, knew what marketing was, but I was just more interested in finding out what people needed and getting it to them.

And so that’s where that’s kind of followed me through. It was like all these models and concepts. Yes, I had to learn them, but I always went back to my sales routes, which was, okay, how do I get this person?

How to understand what this person is currently doing with the problem that they have? How do I figure out if I’m the right person to help solve it? Because sometimes if I wasn’t, I’d say, yeah, it does sound like what you’re doing is actually probably pretty good for you.

And I would kind of leave it there, but it made me better at selling. So that’s where I was coming from with learning about marketing. And so, yeah, fast forward many years of, you know, supporting the Chartered Institute of Marketing, networking constantly, asking everybody I could for coffees, like getting laughed out of the room at interviews, like, are you kidding?

You’ve never even done a campaign. But I just, I’d been doing, you know, my own little projects and stuff to like, cause I was just so excited about it. And then finally, someone gave me a shot in 2009 and I was in marketing.

And it kind of, I think from there, I progressed from marketing assistant through to heading up the marketing department internationally across six years. And at the same time progressed into ending up the chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. And it was only down to like a hunger for learning.

So yeah, I did that for a while. I worked in a few businesses at director level, had a pretty rough experience where it didn’t quite work out. And I think every B2B marketer needs to go through that where like what’s expected of you and what you actually deliver is just misaligned.

Imposter syndrome comes in, I can’t do this. I’m terrible at marketing. And yeah, I just didn’t wanna work for another company.

So I set up my own consulting business in 2016. And I was more of a virtual marketing manager at that point, doing bits and pieces, social media campaigns, giving it my all. And then fast forward to today, 2023.

Fast forward to now, I have set up, I guess, my TikTok persona as a business, B2B Jade. I wanted to shift my focus away from the CEOs and more into actually enabling B2B marketers to find that tenacity, become more strategic and get the foundations in place. So I created B2B Breakthrough Academy, which is my six week marketing strategy course for the people that feel like I felt when I was out of my depth, when I was like, I don’t know how to make a strategy.

I don’t know why leadership won’t give me budget. I don’t know how to get buy-in on this or to be treated with respect. So I thought, let’s pivot, let’s help marketing managers.

And that’s where we are today.

Absolutely love it. And just in terms of just to close the loop, I think, I don’t know when I came across you, but I came across some of your content probably relatively recently. And it just spoke to me like that on a number of levels of stuff that I see when I consult and pain I hear from CMOs and people in marketing.

So I’m really excited to kind of get you on and talk to you about some of those pinch points. Jacob, before we do that, Jacob, any thoughts on Jade’s story there?

I do. I had a question around marketing, which was mentioned many times, but when you say you work in marketing, what were the roles and like, what were you doing as a marketeer, if you will?

So when I started in 2009, I was the classic highly, highly motivated and tenacious, let me at it type marketer. You couldn’t get me away from the office. I got told off for not taking leave.

I was, I’d been so hungry for it for so long. Cause I think when you work in sales, there’s this like, wow, the marketing team, you know? So you’re just stuck on the phones, making a hundred calls a day, closing business and marketing get to create these campaigns and do all this cool stuff.

So my first role was very much the traditional marketing assistant role. And I’m so thankful for that. Cause DS Smith PLC, they are a very corporate environment, but I had this lovely balance between, we were in a division that was fairly unprofessionalized in its marketing approach, but that meant freedom of like, show us what you’ve got.

So my old boss, Tim Price, he was the Sales and Acquisitions Director, Communications and Acquisitions Director. And he was like, yeah, go for it, show us what you’ve got. And I remember like my first few projects where the website was needing repositioning really.

And I sort of, I guess I instinctively understood positioning. It was like, oh, we’re saying we want to move into this space and we want to work with these types of clients, but our current message is this. So I learned SEO, I created physical mood boards for design agencies and they were just like, people, what are you doing?

Like I was like, yeah, but this is the type of thing I want. Look how amazing this website from this other sector is. And it had just been my hobby for weeks, creating the brief for this website.

So I learned SEO, helped with the copy, you know, tried to get more leads in, did the traditional envelope stuffing, direct mail marketing, following up, logging leads. And I always remember like, cause sometimes marketers are not that hot on making sure that leads are sent through to sales in a timely fashion. I remember being obsessed if leads came in, like so excited, what happened with that one?

And I think coming from that sales background helped with it. So the first roles were more traditional. Then we moved into running campaigns, becoming the marketing manager, being responsible for hiring a team as I started progressing into a more head of marketing role that became international.

So there was a lot of travel and a significant portion of my role at that point was internal, getting internal buying, internal brand activation as well. Like this is what our positioning is at the time it was the power of less. So all our competitors were talking about delivering more and everything was complex and we were trying to strip it back.

It was a big manufacturing business. And it was really about how, what’s the internal activation of that at that time. So there was a lot of internal marketing, huge accounts.

So nurturing, creating reports with like raconteur and getting industry specialists to add weight to whatever content we were producing. So really a truly, just a head of marketing position. What happened then is once I went into a marketing director role in a company that potentially wasn’t ready for that, they wanted a more of a, you know, the kind of doing thing, like let’s do some marketing, whereas I was like positioning creative strategy, planning, get it all correct, get the budget right, get the data right, the CRM.

It was a misalignment and it was a big shock to the system to me that, you know, that a business wouldn’t want what I felt they needed, but also to respect that directors don’t always want what you think they want. So that was okay. So when I set up on my own, I would say that in 2016, I was probably less strategic than I thought.

I was more like running campaigns for people, but I was essentially meeting the needs of those audiences. Like they were telling me what they wanted and I was doing it with a strategic angle. So even though I feel a bit cringe at that point where I’m like, oh, I wasn’t that strategic compared to what I am now, I’m glad that I was able to give them better than what they might have had if they just tried it in house and stuff.

So a lot of blog writing, a lot of social posts, a lot of email campaigning, a lot of consulting, that type of stuff. But then as I’ve moved through, what I’ve found and how my business has evolved is that the TikTok account has built my business and it has ripped it to pieces, turned it inside out and made me completely rebuild. And as a result, I’m absolutely exhausted because by listening, just listening to these people, these marketing managers who are commenting on my TikTok, sometimes 1,500 comments a month, I’m not getting any respect.

I’m exhausted. I’m crying every night. They won’t give me budget.

We don’t have a plan. Sales treat me as a doormat. There’s no strategy.

I don’t understand planning. Do you have a course? Do you have a course?

Do you have a course? It’s like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna have to build a course, aren’t I? And I’m not like one of those people who, it’s not my natural skill set, not skill set.

It’s not my natural tendency to sit there and create templates. I very much consult, advise, guide, hire people, delegate, but I’ve had to really push through these painful times to go, I am making something, I’m building a product. And so the role today is much more in sort of, in your sort of area, Jacob.

I’m a community manager. I’m going back to people on TikTok. I’m interacting with them on Circle.

I’m getting them in on the course. I’m helping them. And I guess we can talk a bit about it later, but there’s a significant reason why I moved away from consulting CEOs and helping the B2B marketers themselves.

So yeah, in a nutshell, it was a very long answer. The roles have been very different, but I feel that today I’ve arrived at my role. Like this is the role I’ve been waiting for.

I’m glad I asked because we have to unpack that. There was a lot of experience there.

No, no, it’s all good, really interesting. I’ve got a question just to kind of, you know, folks will know on this podcast, we like to get into definitions, right? And the reason for that is we all can speak the same language.

So let’s get some things out of the way. We are on JUST Branding, right? And I know you talk about brand building and you mentioned strategy and planning a few times and marketing.

Can we sort of define them or can we get you to define them for us? What is brand? What is branding?

What is marketing? And what is planning? There we go.

I believe that marketing is… Like I was thinking about the other day, I was like, marketing… You know, market, what’s the market?

When you really strip back to a few hundred years ago, when like we can first start thinking about what it is, it was always about like, you know, getting something to someone. It’s an exchange, isn’t it? You know, a lot of the marketing gurus, they define it as it’s an exchange of money for something.

It’s management of the exchange process. But then there’s a lot of, what fries my head with the definition of marketing is that no one can agree on it because it’s such a new discipline when you look at it in terms of like how long economists have been around. Like marketing is fairly new and it has got that sense of like wizardry about it.

Like, oh, no one really knows what it is. I like Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition, though I think there’s more to it than this. So Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition is the process of satisfying customer needs profitably.

I like that. I don’t think it’s perfect. I like it because I think it covers off a lot of ways we could go wrong with our marketing.

So for example, satisfy customer needs. If you’re just obsessed with sales leads, you do not know about your customers and you do not know if they’re satisfied and you don’t know if you’re meeting their needs and you could be losing them to competitors, left, right and center, because all you care about is fulfilling leads for sales that may or may not be good. So it keeps you on track with that.

And then the profitably bit. So there are companies I know who are obsessed with satisfying customer needs to the point where they bend over backwards and they do everything for the customer and they’re not charging enough and they’re a slave to their customer and they’re not setting up their systems and processes to be profitable. So actually you’ve got a business owner doing it 90 hours a week or something and they’re like barely making money and they’re running and it’s like that’s not gonna last and you can’t get people to join your business who will continue with that because they don’t own it.

So profitably helps a lot. And also the word profitably for me is brilliant because it’s like, okay, if we’re gonna be profitable, more profitable, what about systems? What about AI and how that can transform our business?

What are we doing manually as a business that could be made into a system or stop doing things manually? So that’s one bit. And then I also believe that marketing should be an orientation of a business.

So it’s not a function. So I don’t see like marketing and branding like that. I see, I think the way the world is going, I think the best businesses will be led by people who just are marketers.

So there’s an inherent marketing orientation. It’s not like, okay, I’ve set up my business, now I need a marketing manager. Oh, hi, marketing manager.

I never thought about our brand positioning. I never thought about getting customer feedback. Oh, well, we don’t have the budget for that.

It’s like, well, sorry, too late. You should have done it from the start. So I think with a lot of startups, it’s like, you should have been doing that from the start.

You chose to see it as an afterthought. So I think that’s kind of like how I see marketing as like an umbrella of the business, everyone together working out what do our customers need and how can we make that profitable and how can we meet their needs consistently? I could talk about that for two hours.

And then I think of brand, oh, let’s get this right now. This is a hard one. You can’t really summarize it in a sentence, in my opinion.

I think of brand as like how, like say in a B2B context, you’ve got the best person in the business who sells for that business. Let’s say that’s sometimes the owner, you get the owner in a room, they’re the best person to sell to a customer, aren’t they? I think of the brand as how you bottle that person into the outward face everywhere in the business.

So like my new website, b2bjade.com, the whole process was about how do we bottle what is happening on TikTok when I’m talking to people and somehow they’re resonating with it so that people can be buying from me and talking about me and sharing me even when they’re not with me. So that’s how I see brand and obviously how it looks is important. So people say, oh, it’s not about the logo.

Yeah, but the logo does need to be awesome. It needs to connect and resonate. The color palette is important.

So the visual identity, yeah, absolutely. That’s part of branding, but obviously the brand positioning. For me, that is here is why you choose us over the other options available, like really simple sentence.

Most B2B companies just say, we sell this and we are experts at it. That doesn’t say, here is why you choose us, not them. Like the not them part for me is branding.

Like it’s the stamp. And when you really look back to that first example of branding and like, I’m embarrassed because you guys are so much gonna know more about branding than me, but wasn’t it like, was it like where they stamped Hattel with a mark that was like the brand?

Yeah, that’s the branding iron, what it was called, wasn’t it? It was says they used to pour animals, they used to heat up the iron in the fire, didn’t they? And they used, all the farmers used to have different marks.

So you’d know that that animal belonged to Larry because it had a bell stamped in its poor back. So that’s where it started and now it comes on. But here’s the thing, here’s the thing.

I don’t know what you think about this, but like, if you take, I like the way you stripped marketing back and this is where I think I sort of resonated with a lot of what you were saying, because for me, even if you take that example of the cattle being branded, right, back in the day, what was that there for, right? That was there to manage the meaning of who owned that cow, right? So for me, my definition of brand is the management of meaning, okay?

So that embryonic state of the brand of the cow, great, that’s Larry’s, that’s the meaning that I attached to it. Obviously, as time has gone on, we’ve got way more sophisticated. And as she pointed out, we’ve got to now think of positioning against competitors, why choose us over others?

You’ve got to think about why people would join you in terms of talent as opposed to other people. So brand for me now has become, it’s still the management of meaning. For me, it’s very strategic.

And that’s not to say that marketing isn’t strategic as well, but the two for me, it’s kind of like the brand really, as you said, sort of sits at the highest level in my humble opinion. And the marketing then is how do we take that to market? How do we activate that?

How do we make sure that we can attract the right type of customer? What channels are we using? All that more tactical stuff.

You might disagree with that. That’s kind of how I see it, but I don’t know. So in my head, simply put, just for listeners, I have brand as the highly strategic level, and then I have the marketing more as the tactical level, and I would see marketing in servitude to brand, but that’s just, I know I’m just probably upset.

That’s how it works, to be fair. My view is that a business having a marketing orientation is what sits right at the top. So that’s where it’s like getting out of the tactics of marketing, but definitely agree that you create the brand strategy before you dive into a marketing activity plan, hundred percent agree.

But I do believe that there’s a piece for businesses seeing marketing as much higher than it is in reality. Like it is an orientation of the business, because if you think of satisfy customer needs profitably, that’s like when you set up a business, should we sell something or who should we sell it to? It’s marketing.

So, I think it’s almost like a bit of both, isn’t it? Marketing has to envelope. And yes, marketing activity planning sits under branding, but I would probably say that marketing as an orientation for a business sits above branding.

The whole purpose of a business is ultimately to do what you’ve just said there, which is to satisfy customer needs profitably. As you say, who goes, do you know what? I’m going to start a business and I’m never going to satisfy a customer and I’m not going to do it profitably.

It’s just a thing. So you’re right, the orientation of business with that definition, I would 100% agree. I think it’s fascinating.

Isn’t it funny that we’re all in some form of communications and we all struggle to define what the heck we’re doing.

Like no one can, that’s what I love. Like I say to marketers when I’m coaching them or the course, it’s like, if you’re worried about what it is, don’t worry, because no one can agree. Like even the greats, like they, you know, when you read a book where it’s breaking down what Peter Doyle said or Theodore Levitt or whatever, people always say, that was great, but there’s many holes in it.

That was good, there’s many holes in it. So I never feel scared to talk about what I think marketing is, because there’ll be so many holes in it. And it’s like, go research, what do you like?

Yeah, definitely. What about planning? Oh yeah, planning, yeah.

How do you define that one?

So what I find most B2B marketers do is they’re in their job, and then they say, okay, I’m the marketer manager now. And they say, okay, what do we need to do? And then basically they get flooded with, we need a campaign, we need sales support literature, we need to do an event, we need this, we need this.

And maybe they’re a little bit in charge and that they can select what they’re gonna do. So this is just the reality, this isn’t how it should be. And then maybe they create a bit of an Excel spreadsheet gantt chart about what’s gonna happen and when and how we’re gonna do it and what resources.

And that’s what we consider to be marketing planning. But it’s broken because I talk a lot and the name of my podcast is The B2B Marketing Gap. So you may have seen me talk about this before.

On TikTok or LinkedIn. The B2B Marketing Gap is the huge void between directors of B2B companies and the marketing resource where a strategy should be. So even where you’ve got a marketing director in a B2B company, you can often have the marketing gap because they were the marketing manager who worked really hard doing millions of tasks and got promoted, promoted, promoted, but never actually learned strategy because there was no one above them to learn it from.

So in my experience, the way to often become a marketing director is just to do everything you’re told for ages, end up sitting on the board and still do everything you’re told and maybe hire a few agencies to do a few bits of strategy for you, but you’re probably still a bit confused. I know there’s amazing marketing directors out there, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of the time in B2B companies, it’s just like a, you’ve worked really hard, here’s a promotion progression, rather than a marketing director above you saying, okay, here’s how we create a marketing strategy that directly aligns with the business goals, and here is what I now need you to do with that. Yes, in big corporates, they will have that, but in general terms, marketers in B2B are not learning strategy and they’re taking courses, but they’re getting overwhelmed by models and they’re getting bogged down by cash cow, portless five forces, the seven Ps, the marketing mix of this, they learn it all, and then they go back to work and they go.

What can I do with this?

Yeah, and that’s where I was. So we just go back on the task wheel, just doing the tasks, doing the tasks, not getting the budget. So what needs to happen for marketing planning to work is a strategic process.

And I worked really hard on B2B Breakthrough Academy to make that simple and easy to follow. So the way that it works, that the correct marketing planning process, in my opinion, is that you start with vision, mission and business goals. Vision, where do we see ourselves as a business?

What are we working towards? Like literally, where do we envisage ourselves? The mission, what are we here to do?

And like these words get so like thrown around in a fluffy sense, but if you think of mission, you go to the shopping center, what’s your mission, right? We got to get this, this, this and this. It’s a very real mission, in my opinion.

So what is the mission we have to uphold and keep doing every day? And what is the vision we’re building towards? And then as such, what are the business goals?

What’s the business strategy? And the way I see business strategy is, what stands in our way of making sure the mission happens every day, that we deliver on the mission? And what stands in our way of being the vision?

Like, why are we not there yet? What’s in our way? So that’s the business strategy.

So a marketer should figure out, and there’s a template on the website, a marketing review template, that is basically everything they need to suck out of their finance director, out of their leaders, to ask like, okay, where are we going? What do we need to do? So marketers have to start there.

What is our profitability? What’s our average sale? Like all the numbers, like the basic numbers to understand, okay, if we need to double in size in five years, wow.

How many more customers does that mean? How much retention focus do we need? Are we losing customers?

Are we losing staff? What’s standing in our way of doubling in profits and doubling in size in five years? So they got to start with that.

So every marketer I would love, like my vision for my business is that every marketer in the world, if I said to them, where’s your business going and how you help them with that, they would be able to easily answer it, you know? And so then you move into, okay, let’s review what we’ve done in the past, what worked, what didn’t. Let’s set our marketing objectives.

So really specifically against each of the business strategy goal areas, what are we doing to support with that? Then connect it with strategy and tactics. So my template is them next to each other.

For each objectives, two or three big strategies, what big things will we do? And then into tactics is what will we actually do? And then the activity plan is the last bit.

So it’s like people start with that last bit, they start with an activity plan, but you need all the steps before. And it’s amazing when I go through this process with marketers, because sometimes it turns out, like one example, a company were struggling with their growth and they needed to get some new customers in the door, they were doing social ads, they were doing events, they were doing this, they were doing this, and when we really dug into the resources available to them and what they needed in terms of growth, we figured out that for the first year, they just needed to strip it back, re-engage all of the data they already had, get it housed in a really good CRM software, set up a very good email marketing program to nurture these people and do a bit of telephone in to get some meetings in the diary. And so they were getting like a 110% growth year on year without doing stuff like this, and then they jumped to 152% growth within six months, because they were just re-engaging people that you already had.

It’s like, we see that you didn’t work with us last year when we quoted, let’s meet up again, let’s talk again. And so that worked for them for one year, it ran out. And in the background, we had to do the brand building.

So I think it’s really about what does the business need in a nutshell. In a nutshell, like a 10 minute nutshell.

A very big nut. Not at all, we love 10 minute nut shells. The thing for me was, yeah, so aligned with the way you’re thinking, like, you know, that top bit, the vision, mission, purpose kind of side of things, business goals, that’s very much where I sort of play.

Beyond that, you know, I do, I think it’s interesting. I do look to the marketing, usually in context of my consultancy, I look to the marketing directors within the business to take that then, and then do that next bit that you’ve said. And I found that when we have got a good strategy and we’ve been clear on the goals and there’s commercial goals, as well as sort of more probably sort of less commercial, in other words, like, you know, to support the brand, but when we’ve got commercial goals, that’s been like, been a massive relief for the marketing people, because they can take that.

And then as you say, they can then justify what they’re doing and their resource spend, and they can see like, yeah, and they can explain it to their teams in a much better way. Like we’re doing this because we need X amount of leads, because you know, our close rate is X and you know, et cetera, et cetera, that’s gonna help fuel our growth. So it’s just, isn’t it just shocking that there’s a lot of businesses out there that are just not doing that at all.

And it is strange to me. You mentioned the marketing conversations that you advise your students to have. What is it that you think, why is it you think that they’re not doing that?

Is it a confidence thing generally? Is it just the way things have always been done? But they can’t have always been done like that, because as you say, when the business was founded, some of that stuff must have been happening.

So what happens, what causes this break or what has caused it in your view?

I think it all comes down to how new B2B marketing is in terms of how it operates now and how fast things have changed since the internet. So, and Gen X leaders are not getting it. They don’t get that they’re becoming like the generation before them who were fighting, typing coming in versus handwriting.

So the very people that they called old fashioned, and I’m not generalizing all Gen X, I’m just saying that many Gen X leaders are not seeing that the internet and social is not fluffy. Like I generated a one million pound pipeline on TikTok with absolutely no outreach whatsoever. It’s like, this is not fluffy stuff.

This is so how people buy now and how you build trust. But I believe there’s a reason why we’re in the state we’re in. And I’m actually quite pessimistic about B2B marketing, by the way.

I’m not that excited about it. Traditionally, let’s say 15 years ago, the way to grow a B2B company was that you have relationships with people. It was the only way you sold person to person.

So if you’re selling a consumer product, cans of Coke, whatever, you rely on advertising, marketing first, it’s always the way because you can’t have a person going up to someone on the street and saying, would you like to buy from us instead of another drinks brand? So marketing started as the support function to the business, the part of the business that generated sales, which was sales. That was how people bought.

Even when I was making 100 calls a day, generally people would take my call because they knew, if I wanna buy marketing data, I have to speak to someone like Jade, there would be no other way for me to find out about this because we didn’t really, in 2006, I was buying my holiday on teletext. There wasn’t, the internet wasn’t there for research purposes, really.

There’s like a load of people here just like, what is teletext? But we’re expecting you later kids, it’s fine.

Yeah, just Google what is teletext holidays and you’ll be like, wow. So you didn’t get to see pictures of where you were going on holiday, you just turned up. So that’s kind of what happened.

And I remember when I worked in sales, the marketing department were there so that if someone picked up the phone and rang up, say, hi, I wanna move away from this company to yours, can I speak to someone in sales? They’d pass it through to us and they would create literature and they would make email templates for me to send out after I had spoken to a prospect. And so what has happened is that’s just stayed.

It stayed, but now people get that marketing can lead to growth, so they’re demanding leads from them. And they also don’t realize that advertising, particularly online advertising doesn’t work like it worked in 2010 or 2000, like a few years ago even. Sorry, my years won’t be perfect here, guys.

When online advertising was a bit fresher for B2B companies, it was quite easy just to pop an ad live and get loads of people engaging with it because not many people were doing it. Even to the point where in 2010, when I did SEO work on a website, I managed to like triple the traffic within not very long because just online competition wasn’t that high. So I think what’s happened is marketing teams are still being treated as the sales support team, but are being expected to be what they really should be, which is the growth engine, but they’re not being given the resources or they’re being told, look, once you generate some leads, then you can have more budget, but it’s like you’re not even giving them the budget to get off the ground with systems, with brand, with strategy, with the, I talk about four pillars of successful B2B marketing, and it’s like, until you’ve covered those off, you can’t move into like the lead gen side.

And so what we’ve got now is just most smaller B2B companies have a marketing manager who isn’t strategic, who doesn’t know how to make a plan, who’s stuck on a task wheel, just doing whatever sales tell them with no hope of getting off it. And that is what keeps me awake at night. Like, I’ll be honest, I’m kind of done with the CEOs.

I’m like, you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to invest. Don’t then, like don’t.

So I’m going to work with the marketing managers to rise up and fight for budget and change and internally educate.

I’ve got so many things I need to talk to you about. My brain’s just gone so explosive. A few things like, yeah, you just said there that back in the day, people would buy through relationships from a B2B perspective, right?

Absolutely obviously true. So peer-to-peer recommendations, word of mouth was powerful, massively powerful. Then we saw the rise of search engine optimization, digital marketing.

Everybody sort of jumped on Google. I actually think that one of my original blogs back in, I don’t know, probably quite a while ago now, I think I became number one in the world for the search for graphic design. Like not kidding.

I think I was 17 or something. Like that was crazy.

Then I knocked you off, Matt.

Yeah. Yeah. Then Jacob knocked me off and he stayed.

But yeah, like it was, as you say, a lot easier and now with the sophistication of Google and the search engine technology and everything, it becomes more localized, much more complex, very hard to compete in that space. But the other thing that I was going to sort of raise here, I know you’ve talked about this on your socials as well, so probably we’re worth sort of getting your perspective, is that since COVID, I think there’s been a shift and I’m seeing this a lot, speaking with C-suite and more senior people, if you like, just both in age and in seniority within businesses, that they are much more digitally savvy and they’re not jumping on Google and running through the sort of the, I’m going to say traditional ways of buying or the, I don’t think it even is traditional because as we say, the traditional way of buying was way back when there’s sort of this weird anomaly in say 2010 to 2020 where we just kind of forgot that that’s actually how people like to buy like through trust and genuine value that a business is offering and we just assumed we could fool them all through some sort of SEO, lead gen, inbound marketing funnel system and now they’ve sort of woken up to that. So I can talk a bit about that from my perspective, but I wouldn’t mind to, this is about you, so I’d love to hear about your thoughts on what I’ve just said and if you’ve seen a shift and what may have caused that and what that means.

Yeah, and I think it goes back to like the history of marketing again, like when marketers came along and at the time like the finance people, they believed like we’ve got these numbers, we predict things, we have numbers, like we know what’s going on, but then human behaviour came into the mix and it was like, why aren’t they doing what we predicted? And it’s because like there’s so many examples you can give where someone seems like they would buy something, then all of a sudden something happens, like, I don’t know, they’re about to buy a new car and all the signs are there that they’re going to buy a car, we can predict this person, they’ve been researching it for ages and then we don’t know, they got divorced and they need a different type of car now and they just have gone over there. So where marketers are magicians in a way is that we’re interested in human behaviour and you can’t predict that really, like you can look at big volumes of data and look at what people are doing, but in B2B, I think, you know, it’s smaller volumes of data, so you just can’t know what’s going to happen, you know, with big contracts, you’ve probably found this, people are giving all the signs, they’re like, you’ve had meetings and then bang, oh, we’re going to focus on something else now, sorry, not doing it.

It’s like, what, what, what, why? And so what I really find interesting about this whole, like, here’s how people buy, it’s like, yes, in a way, there’s definitely trends, like something I often talk about is people attack me on TikTok sometimes, then what are you talking about? People do buy from people.

I’m like, absolutely, they do. But how, you’re a person right now, but we are digitally interacting. So we’re building a relationship, but I’m not in the room with you.

And also like my TikTok, people are building a relationship with me, even though I’m not with them. So this kind of one to many idea, I could run a webinar with, with my last webinar, 500 people registered for it and I talked for one hour to them about the process of creating a marketing strategy and how B2B Breakthrough works. And I’m like, I wish these leaders saw sometimes how inefficient they are.

Like you would, you, if you, if there were 500 people interested to talk to you, which is what I generate from TikTok for that webinar, you would happily sit and talk to each one of those for one hour about the same thing. You’re happily going to do that versus a one-to-many on the intro. And then of course, a certain number of people want to take it further and bespoke it to their business.

But the mass consulting is where, is what really excites me. So I think what we need to do is, is, is realize that yes, the way people buy has changed in the sense that I believe any person, if they can find something out on through their own ways, whether that be asking a mate or Googling it or going in a community online, they will rather do that than have to have a call in their diary. So if they can find it out, great.

And like, there are a lot of product businesses like SaaS companies that are great at this. They’ve got video explainers, they’ve got tons of video demos. And then when you’ve really got three or four last questions at that point, you’re like, I need to speak to someone, where are they?

And I want them immediately. Don’t tell me three weeks away, like bang, where are you? I need you.

I think that’s where that shift is, is like, how can we serve people’s expectations of digital experience online? And like, even in the consumer world, I don’t know if you guys get this, but like, I will not book in hair salons where I can’t just do it online. I am not ringing a salon to be like, oh, hi, when can you get me in?

Tuesday, let me just chat with the kids. Oh my gosh. I want to go on your website.

Everything that you sell is there, the prices. I don’t want a fussy, clunky, select a different stylist, go back. I want it to work right bang, I’m gone.

And I think that’s what’s changed. It’s not like people don’t buy from people anymore. It’s just that the time at which they want them is changed.

And there are industries where everyone’s shocking at it. And so people are still comfortable to have tons of meetings. Say like, I don’t know, the property and construction business.

If you’ve got 10 competitors who all just have meetings, old school, then the customers probably just crack on with it. But I think what an opportunity for one of them to go, do you know what? I’m going to put out loads of really helpful short form video content to help you with your decision making.

I’m going to send you really good stuff. I’m going to go live once a month to answer all your questions. That is a great opportunity to get to more people.

Oh, absolutely. And even the old school kind of event-based stuff, I think, certainly post-COVID, I’ve got a client in that exact hemisphere in the construction industry. And they had an event on in Manchester that I was party to visiting, and it was amazing, involved in.

And yeah, they got like 300 people in the room. Like, how insane is that? They weren’t there to sell.

They were not there to sell. They were there to help actually add some value in leadership. But it’s awareness, it’s relationships, it’s connection.

So just a couple of your points there, right? Because I want to follow this train of thought a little bit, right? So number one, you were saying, yes, people buy from people, okay?

That is a B2B fact. We’re human. That’s how we like to interact.

But we don’t like to almost like connect on that one-to-one basis, unless absolutely necessary, right? And businesses that think that it’s only through the one-to-one, they’re missing out because actually, in fact, there’s a whole raft of things that people would rather interact with you for. And then right at the end, in a very efficient way, maybe a couple more questions to get over the line.

So the question, I guess, for our listeners who are brand builders is, don’t forget people buy from people, but that doesn’t mean you have to have one-to-one connections with everybody. And a couple of other things that come to my mind on that, this one-to-many concept, I think, is fascinating. So little story from me, when I started consulting about five or six years ago, I was in Nottingham at the time in the UK, and I made it like my mission.

I knew that I had to grow my network. That’s one of the reasons me and Jacob ended up together because I banged on his door a couple of times and he kindly opened up and we had a few conversations. But one of the things I did is I wanted to do it physically.

That’s naturally how you used to think. So I used to try and have one cup of coffee or one meeting a week with somebody new that I’d never met before. That was my mission.

And yes, it worked. It worked really well. I’ve still got a number of contacts and friends from a period of probably about 12 months where I did that.

And they are very deep connections. But what I also realized was it’s very efficient, like you were saying, like it’s just insane. Like I drank an awful lot of coffee and had to buy an awful lot of lunches.

Whereas if I went on social media, for example, LinkedIn, and I was talking about what I was up to and what I was doing, suddenly, as you say, Jade, your exposure is much higher and you start to build trust, genuine trust over the course of months, if not years. So even though I wasn’t having a cup of tea with everybody, they knew that I was running workshops, I was doing this or that. And that builds trust long term and genuine kind of a connection.

So that now if someone contacts me, it’s not a question of like, Matt, could you do this or what do you do? They already know that because they’re following me on the socials. It’s more of a question of, Matt, the timing is right.

I need you to come in and help me with X, Y and Z. And that’s the difference. So yes, they buy one to one, but that doesn’t mean the digital side of things is fluffy, as you put it, and pointless.

In fact, it’s essential because that’s how you build trust, I would say, in those early stages before somebody’s ready to buy. And they will only contact you pretty much right towards the end of that if you’ve done your job right. What are your thoughts on that?

Do you think that’s about right? Have I analyzed that correctly?

I think it’s perfect. Yeah, I think one of the things I’m trying to get, there’s a couple of CEOs I still help, my husband being one, because it’s the family business. And I’m trying to get them to follow my model that I did, because my business became 100% inbound through TikTok and LinkedIn.

And I had to close my doors to coaching work and create the one-to-many course, because I’m not gonna be able to help everybody. It has to become one-to-many. So what I’m trying to say to people is this, yes, one-to-one selling, I’m not saying it’s dead, but let’s get you more qualified meetings in your diary through great content.

Let’s have marketing make you more efficient with your use of time. So for me, for example, a company will attack me on TikTok and go, cold outreach works amazing for us. We close all our deals off it.

I’m like, yeah, cold outreach works. It absolutely works. You got about a 2% return rate.

And if you’re too aggressive, you shrink your market. It’s highly inefficient. It’s like hand washing works, but a washing machine is more efficient.

That’s how I see it. Like, yes, do it. I’m not telling you it doesn’t work.

Of course it works, you’re closing work. But what you’re doing is you’re running around, begging people to give you their time. You’re immediately on the back foot.

Whereas when you have an inbound strategy, and this is mental, right? So I would have coaching calls turn up in my diary because everything was automated. I’ve researched through the persons before.

They would join the call and go, Jade, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you. I’m so excited for you to help me with my challenge.

And I’m like, I’ve never met you. I’ve not known your name till the booking came through and you’re thanking me for the time. That, right, is what B2B companies need to get across with this subject matter expert.

So what we want is, let’s take my husband for an example. He’s really good at what he does. He’s a property and construction consulting professional.

And when he gets on the phone with someone who has heard about him, they’re like, I need to work with you. You sound, your company sounds like everything you’ve talked about is exactly what we’re going through. You’ve absolutely nailed it.

When it comes to his marketing, he’s always like, oh no, I don’t wanna be on camera or anything like that. And I’m like, yeah, but what we gotta do is bottle that stuff. Like what you’re saying on the phone, once they’ve got on the phone to you, that needs to be bottled.

We need to get it onto like a bit of a podcast. And then we need to shorten it into short form video sound bites for your LinkedIn. And then we need to create a useful piece of something like a lead magnet or an invite to an exclusive advice clinic that happens every month.

And every post we need to be putting that in there. And then give it time and let it build so that people start to know you and start to feel confident in you and start to talk about you. And it’s just like having that confidence to give it that time whilst also obviously trying to get meetings in the traditional way.

That I think is the answer. But unfortunately, the marketers don’t have these skills to capture that type of content. Like that is a crucial skill.

Like what you guys are doing with your podcast is like that is the way marketing needs to work now. Chopping it down into short form, getting out an email, like building confidence through the subject.

But don’t you think about authenticity as well, Jade? Like, do you know what I mean? Like I think that kind of like that polished ad stuff, obviously advertising is here to stay, but like, I don’t know, in B2B space, I think it’s more about reality and that trust.

And we mentioned people buy from people. There’s something else I was gonna throw in here, but people buy from people. Let’s take your husband, for example.

Like, I don’t know anything about him, but like, if I was in that space and I wanted somebody and I came across that content, I would follow it, right? That’s the first thing I’d do. And then I’d be keeping my eye on it.

Like I’d be a lurker, like, ooh, what’s he saying today? And you know, if it’s useful and it talks to my pain points and talks to the context that I’m in, over time, like that would be like, oh, that’s smart, that’s interesting. And I’d have that much more of a deeper relationship, even though, like you were saying, like even though that person never met you, I would build that with your husband, right?

And then at the point I’m ready to buy, then I’m ready to speak to him. And I think that for me is the future, like that’s how it works. And in reality, that’s how we all buy.

There’s one other piece of the puzzle I just wanted to throw in, and I wanted to ask you about your four pillars of B2B marketing, if I can. There’s one other small, tiny piece. And that is, if we go back pre-COVID, even pre-internet, and you look at how B2B people bought, let’s take, I live in a farming community around here, so there’s still pretty much in that zone.

So if farmer Aled around the corner wants to buy a tractor, okay, yeah, he would ask his peers in the local area, like, what tractors are great? I’m not really buying tractors often, and he would ask around, and then he’d go and look at a couple from probably from his peers first, and then he would go and based on their recommendation and then go to the store and so on and so forth, and that would be how it started. So I guess what I’m saying is it’s peer to peer.

When it comes to, if I wanted to hire, where am I going with this? If I wanted to hire some, like, buy a tractor in 2010, I think the theory is that I’d go on Google and I’d search for it, and then Amazon and people like that started bringing trust in with customer reviews and stuff like that. So we always knew it was there.

We always knew peer to peer recommendations were the thing. But since COVID, there was a whole school of people that are a lot older, who suddenly became digitally savvy, who used to buy and were used to buying through peer to peer networks, particular senior people in organizations. And now since COVID, they were overnight or over the course of in some businesses I worked in, it was like two weeks, like people were like, right, we got to get Microsoft Teams, like we were thinking about it.

Now we’re doing it, we’re investing, go, go, go. Zoom, what Zoom? Like suddenly WhatsApp, like what’s a WhatsApp group?

And people were asking their grandkids to set up WhatsApp groups for them. But now that’s all happened. Everybody understands that.

What’s this LinkedIn? What’s Slack? What are these digital tools that the young people were using?

But now like suddenly we’re forced to use them because we can’t walk around to see Jenny at her desk because Jenny’s now at home and I’m at my room. And so we have to connect via Teams. And how do I set a Teams call up?

All of those questions were now like, and now not even a thing, like it’s just obvious that that’s how we work. So I think the trend, and I’m seeing this a lot, and I’ve seen some material from you Jade around this, the trend is that those senior people still buy that. But now they have a WhatsApp group of some of their peers, and then they say, hey, does anyone know a great marketing strategist?

And then someone’s like, hey, I know someone, B2B Jade, she’s cool. And then I follow your group. And then after a while, that’s how it would potentially work.

So I think the digital nature of the world that we live in and the realities of the shift that happened over COVID demand that marketeers take seriously content generation and do that in a strategic way to support the sales, like you said. What do you think of that?

I love it. So interesting. I think you can split it out into two ways.

So people don’t like this dark social concept, but I think it’s very real. But I would split it out. So for example, WhatsApp with people you already know is not, to me, I don’t consider that dark social.

That’s just like, because I can’t be next to you in a coffee shop, I’m gonna WhatsApp you. Or our team is gonna be in a WhatsApp or a Slack group. It’s digital, but it’s still networking in the traditional sense, because it’s just talking to people you know.

What I think is quite new is this idea of like, I’m gonna Google what is the best accounting software for a business with a thousand employees in the manufacturing space. You couldn’t do that before. You could only ask your finance director friend who does the same as you, and you still do ask them.

They might say, oh, it’s Sage or oh, it’s Zero, whatever it is. And you take that, that gives you good weighting and then you research them as well. And then maybe you stumble upon an online community of finance directors where they go, everyone’s saying Sage is amazing, but look at this one, I found this one.

Oh my gosh, I’m gonna watch a demo of that. And so it’s not saying that, oh, no one asks their friends anymore. It’s just that we have more power now as buyers to not just take what our mate’s telling us.

We can also research. And dark social is the pockets of the internet that we can’t track or measure, but are highly important. So a good example of this is that I was speaking at an event recently and I was talking about dark social and one of my friends in the audience actually sent me a screenshot to say, you turned up in dark social yesterday.

Someone had said, is anyone thinking of taking the B2B Breakthrough Academy with B2B Jade? And someone said, yeah, I’m doing it. And then someone else said, oh, I’ve never heard of this.

I’ll have to look at it. And like, I don’t know if that’s going on, but they could have then gone to my podcast and then decided, oh, I sometimes get people sign up for B2B Breakthrough Academy. They’re not even on my email list.

There is zero connection, but they could have been, I could be like, oh, that Google, they did a Google search for me and they bought, but there’s always a backstory. So I think unfortunately, like, this is why I don’t feel optimistic about B2B marketing. I don’t think that the current generation of leaders, I don’t think many of them will take this that seriously.

And I don’t think they have the patience to really see it through. Like I’ve had people come to me through LinkedIn and say, Jade, I’ve been following your content for two years. Everything you’re saying is spot on.

We’re a 10 million pound organization. What should we be spending on marketing and who can we spend it with? I’m like 150 grand lead.

And you’re like, just bang out the blue. And whatever I say to them, they’re like, yeah, cool. Put me in touch with them.

I get, I have such the same experience as them.

Yeah, but these leaders, they don’t see it, do they?

And also if you think about it, and I don’t know what your thoughts on this, but no interactions with any of my posts, right?

So they don’t like it, do they?

Heard me at an event, thought this guy with a beard that looks like a bit of a Viking seems like a jolly chap. I’ll say, says a couple of useful things. I’ll follow him on LinkedIn.

And then I’ve not, no joke, had it, I think you said two years, I think it was about the same, two to three years, I’ve had CEOs contact me through that, never once interacted with, as far as I can remember, with any of my content. I call them lurkers, right? And I actually asked one the other day, I was like, so, you know, you never, like, how did you, like, you follow me and stuff?

Like, he was like, yeah, yeah, I follow, I see all of your posts, but I suppose you never liked them and stuff. But the thing is he’s like, no, because if I do that, my people see that I like that. And, you know, that indicates and says something to them.

And I don’t want necessarily their scrutiny over all the stuff I’ve got. So if you’re operating and selling to senior leaders, they’re not going to interact. They’re also not going to jump on your LinkedIn and be like, hey, really love this.

Yeah, keep the good work up.

And it’s so cool because then their people will be like, you’re an idiot. So I think you have to bear that in mind. That is the reality of the situation, particularly when you’re selling to senior leaders.

And yeah, as you say, if you’re not taking that seriously in the B2B space, you’re going to miss out.

And can I say one more thing about content really quickly? A lot of CEOs are like, oh, we’ve done all that, it doesn’t work for us. Frequency and relevance, they’re the two biggest issues.

And also editing, okay. So frequency, consistency, editing. So a lot of these companies are talking about stuff that are not the pain points.

So any B2B marketing manager’s listening now, the content on your social, is that what your best salesperson would talk about when immediately presented with a perfect prospect? Would they go, the climate report for 2026 has come out and our business, they’d be like, sorry, why are you here? But if they’re like, hey, do you know what?

If you’ve been struggling with this, this and this, it’s because of that, you’ve been trying this, it hasn’t worked, I’m here today to tell you how it can work. One, two, three, four, five helpful tip. So that’s the first one.

The second one is, it’s not enough. Every day, content every day. Like I have so little time for content, but if I was full time in a company now, I’d be doing two or three pieces of content a day.

Because if you can get the machine working, you can do that. So consistent, so that constant posting. And the third one is do not be afraid to repeat the same thing over and over and over.

People are jumping around, they’re talking about millions of things. It’s like, what are you famous for? What do you want to be famous for?

What do you help with? And edit it out. The videos I’m seeing are like…

And so another thing that we were thinking about was when it comes to… And it’s like, no, no, no, no. People are scrolling past just like, here’s six reasons why this is not working for you and what you can do about it.

And it’s like, if you get that in front of a C-suite and you are nailing the… If your people are leaving you and you don’t know why, here’s what you need to do. They’re gonna watch it.

And so it’s just the biggest skill that marketers need, I think is to be able to get their leaders to their subject matter experts to kind of give them that good stuff.

It alludes back to what you said right at the beginning about understanding the customer’s needs and solving them, right?

Yeah.

As you were talking all through this, I was reflecting on where I get my clients from and I’ve never done cold outreach or anything. Everything since I started in 2007 has been inbound either through SEO or social media, everything. And that’s because of the consistency.

It’s just putting out content and showing up more or less and being aware, making yourself aware.

That’s amazing. Since 2007 as well. That’s incredible.

Just so it just works.

Some of our listeners may not have even been born in 2007. That’s a bit of a strange thing. Is that right?

Yeah, maybe. Who knows? In fact, if you were not born in 2007…

My business started in 2007.

There you go.

Anna, can I just say, good for you for being into marketing at such a young age. You’re still a teenager. Love it.

I love it. I love it too. Right.

We’ve got to start wrapping things up, but Jade, real quick, quick fire question. You said, I just want to pick up on something. You said there’s four pillars that need to be in place for B2B marketing to be successful.

What are those four quick fire go?

Okay, right. So first of all, you have to have your brand strategy in place, so it’s like, okay, who’s the ideal client? Who are we talking to, who are we talking to?

What do they care about? What are their pain points? We need to build our brand positioning around that.

So why should they choose us, not the other options available? We’ve got to get that identity looking good too, like hit me with it, like bang in a sentence. Like mine is make your B2B breakthrough.

Like, okay, I’m interested. What is that about? And then it goes into a narrative.

So that the brand strategy, like what are we going to do who we for? Next, we’ve got to focus on having an actual marketing strategy, as in the sense of like the physical, here’s the objectives, here’s the strategy, here’s the budget, here’s what we’re actually doing. You’ve got to have that before you do any marketing.

Budget, four to 10% of sales revenue. Most companies are about 0.5% of sales revenue. So really dependent on different factors, like how aggressive the competitors are, how ambitious your growth goals are, and how established you are in your market.

So those three things will determine the budget. And then select two to three strategies and seriously go for it. People like us, we’re in a good position that we do everything our own, don’t we?

I’m the finance director, I’m the tech director, I’m the product development person, I’m the marketing person, the salesperson, I’m the deliverer. I haven’t got time for my marketing not to work. So two or three things and do them seriously well.

The third one is CRM and data. So get your CRM set up. You need one.

Like people say, oh, but it can be an Excel. It’s like, I just don’t think it can. It has to be a proper CRM, the segmented well where we have a nurture path for our audiences.

We know who they are. We lead score people when they come in. We’ve sorted out our data.

We’re emailing them. That’s the third one. And the fourth one is around serving our audiences how they wanna be served.

So there may be industries out there who do purely buy person to person. It’s a very small market town. They only sell to their local market town.

It’s all about person to person relationships. Yes, have an online presence if they wanna research you, but there may be others who are buying globally and they need to find every little detail about your business to make their decision. You need videos explaining things.

You need downloads. You need everything in the world. So find out what the preferences are for your buyers and serve them digitally and in real life.

That’s the four pillars. So in B2B Breakthrough Academy, we talk about that before we dive into, should I be doing SEO? Should I be doing Google Ads?

It’s like, have you done them first? Because they’ve got to get sorted. And then that will help you pick your two or three strategies from there.

Awesome. Awesome. Let’s just for the sake of listeners, we are going to drop a link in the notes to Jade’s course.

If you found anything that she said really interesting, which I’m sure you did, then be sure to sign up. I’m looking forward to going through it. If I get an opportunity at some stage, because it’s going to be amazing.

Final thing, if anyone wants to pick your brains or see your content or join you on TikTok, where do they go? What are the tags?

OK, so my main presence is TikTok. So I’m at B2B Jade, and I do a lot of making fun of leaders and making marketers feel in their power and just making a fool of myself, but also some helpful content to help them make their strategies. If they head to b2b, b2bjade.com, there’s loads of lovely freebies on there.

There’s a template to create the first step of your marketing strategy. So I’m all about helping people as best I can, even if they never take the course. But yeah, I built B2B Breakthrough Academy because I thought, what would I have wanted when I was a marketing manager and I couldn’t make a strategy?

So it’s six weeks of live lessons and templates with no jargon, no fancy models that aren’t understandable, live trainings with me, video recordings of me saying, here’s what to do, here’s what to ask. And bonus mindset sessions around overcoming imposter syndrome, getting confident in yourself, mental health as well, all sorts of stuff. So yeah, it’s a six week piece of work and I’m encouraging people not to see it as a course, but more a piece of work they do at work.

Like in six weeks, you will build your marketing strategy. It’s not a learning course, it’s a let’s make a strategy. So yeah, they can check it out on b2bjade.com or there’s obviously going to be a link in your show notes.

They can find out more about the course there.

Awesome, absolutely amazing. Jacob, any final thoughts from you?

That’s all, thanks.

That’s all. Thanks, Jade, you’ve been awesome. It’s been great to connect.

Thank you so much for having me on, it’s been really fun.