It’s not so complicated: Marketing operations in B2B companies

Stefan Repin: Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Stefan Repin. I’m a Fractional CMO. I work mostly with B2B companies and assemblies. And I consult on ABM differentiation, and go to market strategies. Super happy to be here with Spyros, as a guest, myself, so I’ll give the microphone to Mr. Spyros.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Welcome, welcome. We are excited to discuss with you today about marketing operations in B2B companies. So before we get in any deep questions, can you please tell us something that we don’t know about marketing operations in B2B companies?

Stefan Repin: Yes, of course, I’ll just drop a line in the sand saying that marketing operations, what do they require? They require work? Yes, they require prioritizations. They require a lot of people. No, this is not true. can start a bit an enterprise just because of its operations? Yes. So you can be the big company with limited resources? Absolutely, you can do that. And I’ve done that a few times with smaller company. So if you want, if you want to debunk the first myth, that there is there is never enough resources, but costly sources actually a benefit for your marketing operations. So that’s the one secret that I want to tell you.

Spyros Tsoukalas: That’s actually interesting. I’m running marketing operations for Growth Mentor, and you helped me identify pain points that I’m facing. So what are the most common problems that you observe around marketing operations?

Stefan Repin: Yeah, the my, the biggest problems I see is the lack of focus, and the met crazy desire to achieve everything all at once. And, you know, it’s very interesting, but sometimes money, too much resources is a burden. Especially when you have well funded startups that have raised funding they have, they don’t have a structure, they have some sort of a case, they don’t know, what is their ideal, who is their ideal client profile? And they’re like, let’s do this. And then let’s do a demonstration. Let’s do this and this tactic, and they don’t align on like, like goals. What do you want to achieve? What resources do you want to put in there? Like, you know, in terms of how many hours of design, how many hours of preparation, do it be like a freelancer from Upwork, and so on. So that’s, that’s the biggest problem I see. And there is proof that this can be done well, for example, my friend, Emilia Korczynska, from Userpilot, member of Growth Mentor, with a team of two, three people, they produce, like 50 pieces of content every month. And it’s just a matter of brief and process. And the second case is that I’ve done ABM campaigns, like they were successful. And we’ve brought 80-90,000 euro in pipeline sales with one full time marketer, one product guy, basically. So this is certainly problems, I would say, alignment is the biggest issue of alignment or lack of processes, the biggest issue I see with will operations basically.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Totally understood, I guess, from what you say more doesn’t mean better. But like, if you have to say like, what’s the ideal size of a team, or the minimum size of a team and marketing team? Like, how would you help a young startup understand how many people they need to run what they need to run?

Stefan Repin: I’m a highly practical person. So looking examples, I’ve had a startup with, which was five people. So there was no listen to this, there was no dedicated marketing, I was the only marketer there. And that was part-time as well. So we basically took resources from from product, there was a back was doing customer success and product at the same time. I took that time, we had the process, and we took five hours from sales from a guy who wasn’t in sales, the founder, actually. So basically, that was the resources we had and we ran to ABM programmes very successful, you know, and the idea that that for a small startup again, for let’s say, you were talking about an SME who has some funding, then ideally, I would say one dedicated person, each working child, if you say that paid, paid is a working challenge that works very well for you. If you need to dedicate one person who’s going to work on paid you can be a freelancer and be someone else but then you will have someone being paid in terms of if let’s say affiliate isn’t working, it’s a working channel for you then you will need to find a person who’s going to be managing affiliate full time part time depending on the speed of the of the execution, how fast that person who executes. And or engineer marketer. So one person just going back one person per each working channel, right, not promising channel, working channel which brings our ROI, a junior marketer, and the strategist and maybe designer copywriter. If you can have doing one, that’s great. If not these, these two have to be different people. Again, you can hire an Upwork someone or like freelancers as well.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Amazing. Thanks for the detailed answer. So I know, I know you have done that in the past. So how do you build demand? And an ABM campaign with scarce resources? You mentioned that I think something related to that, but like, could you get in a little more details?

Stefan Repin: Yes, of course, the first step each time when you do when you build a dimension raising product or an ABM product, is that you have an alignment? Again, I’m actually I’m being repeat, I’m repeating myself again, but alignment is the first step you need to very, very well aligned, who’s the who’s the ideal client? You’re going after? Right? Do you have use cases, they have case studies for them for clients like that, because if you’re gonna have use cases, or case studies, it’s going to be there is going to be a less probability that you will end up working with those companies, maybe if it’s an SMB or startup, but if you’re talking as enterprises the goal that you will definitely need use cases. The first one is alignment. Second one is, that’s very something very simple. Each and every member of the C level team, meaning driven product chief of sales, chief of customer success, as opposed to LinkedIn, there is no no box, wherever I’m shy, wherever. That’s the first step. This is how the mind is created. Basically, I take ideas, you take ideas from your head, you put them on paper, I give you feedback, there is a pillar strategy that they use. And then you start posting on LinkedIn, there is no explanation, why don’t want to do that. Everyone does the first step. And the second step was record missing content. Because you post a lot of content. You can go on podcast, you can create content as well. And that content has to be repurposed. Let’s say you go on up as a guest on the podcast, you record the podcast, you get the podcast, and you cut mini series from it. You can either do it with a freelancer or you feel a bit more resources, you can go for a company such as Repurpose House, no affiliation with them, and they’ll repurpose it for you basically, and that’s going to do working amazing. Then, in terms of ABM, maybe in terms of video I usually run a small audit, which takes around four to six hours, where we basically align on all of the segments that we want to go after. Do we have use cases? Do we have case studies? Do we have? Do we have anything to show them? Right? Because it’s not about ABM is not about impressing them? Yes you do impress. But if you want to, if you want to get money from from those people from those companies, eventually you need to have a step on the ground, and then show them your work, your results and be looked like a reliable team. So in short, this is the answer for your question.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Awesome, awesome. Awesome. And I guess like theory versus practice is highly different when people try to understand online, what’s happening and when they go and execute it. But that’s a whole another topic. So So when when thinking of marketing operations, my my thoughts, my thoughts are around automation, and all these all these tools like Zapier and integrations that are very popular nowadays. So, how would you answer to a startup asking, what should we be automating? And what shouldn’t we be automating? And why?

Stefan Repin: Sure. Actually, startups do ask that sometimes, you should go to meeting your accounting, accounting first, then low level tasks that you spend more time doing them, because your time is valuable as a founder, right? So I would say anything that’s tends to be about administration, you may we can hire someone on Upwork like again, or like, freelancer, VA virtual assistant for like five $6 An hour and then the week know, your your invoice will be like $50 And you will save a lot of time. Right? So it’s all about the priorities. The question is, are you making an impact doing this task? That’s what you should ask yourself always. Now second part is automation. Yes, you should automate certain stuff. And you know, there are tools like PhantomBuster, Textile, you literally can connect like any of these two was that you can connect it to google sheets. You can connect it to your accounting software, you can connect it to your Lemlist, like cold emailing software, you can do a lot of things it’s all about your creativity. And about like, you know, sometimes I do think, actually doing that one thing manually, makes more sense because you this, you know, automation tends to break. And I do hate when Zapier breaks, and you don’t know and then things are not working in place. So you do spend more time on fixing them and actually doing it manually. So I would say, I would say that automation is there is a benefit, and also a drawback there. I will say you can automate cold outreach in a way, but you should automate it in a way that it has to feel personal. And when you ask yourself, What does it feel personal the message I’m sending, then, you know, probably it’s not personal. So it needs to be feel personal, because let’s say in B2B, there is people feel that sort of energies, they feel it then if the message was automated, so I would I would put more, put a bit more thought into that. And use tools, use wisely use use them wisely. Use expanding, you can use Lemlist, you can use Textile, PhantomBuster, but use them with think about it first before starting just mindlessly send messages here and there.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Great. I have I have a kind of a bonus question. Like you mentioned many tools. So, which  tool would you say that is your favourite, at least recently.

Stefan Repin: Which tool is my favourite recently? My recent my recent tool that I’ve been using is Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder clear be like Blitzer that let’s all consider. It’s called basically which does work companies have been on your website. And using this tool, you can assign also elite, basically companies to do your sales team. And if you are targeting enterprise, this is very useful because then you can actually that will guide your ABM strategy. If you know that Acumen Group, for example, that’s a company. They if they’re looking, they’ve been at your website, and they’ve visited your page ABCD then you can make an ABM campaign for for the leadership, and let’s lower management and create an ABM campaign and try to connect with these people because there is certainly some interest in the beginning of a great friendship, you know, like in the movie Casablanca. So, that’s the tool that I’ve been recently using was.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Stefan, thank you very much for all these amazing insights in such a short time. That’s how we want to be running the Growth Mentor podcast, and I guess it’s not so complicated when dealing with marketing operations in B2B startups or companies. Thank you very much.

Stefan Repin: Thank you. The pleasure is mine.