Simms sees B2B brands shifting their mentalities away from being sales-first organizations. Sales teams often play a significant role within B2B organizations, sometimes limiting the kinds of marketing initiatives they invest in.
“The sales team just wants to talk about the specs and the speeds and feeds of their products and get it out there … because they’re not marketers,” Simms said. Lately, he’s observed more clients reject that overreliance on sales and instead hire CMOs.
Agencies are B2B companies, too, and the crossover means that some of them explore the same marketing strategies as their clients. Ad-tech firm MNTN marries media activation on connected TV and social with more traditional account-based marketing tactics. “As a result, more than half of our revenue comes from what you can think of as inbound leads,” said Mark Douglas, president and CEO of MNTN, which in 2021 acquired Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey’s creative and production agency, Maximum Effort.
“We need to elevate our marketing. We need to bring more consumer-level talent into what we’re doing in marketing. [Plus, we should be] hiring agencies that think in that way or bring in in-house talent,” Douglas added.
The B2B new business pipeline
In Balck’s experience, Colossus hasn’t had to recruit B2B brands or pitch them heavily—they’ve come to the agency to meet a need. ZoomInfo teamed with Colossus last year for the first brand campaign in the company’s history, but its CMO noted that creative agencies typically struggle to capture the firm’s strategy, culture and tone.
To hit the right notes for B2B clients, agencies must think differently about their data sources. Simms thinks many of his competitors are using the wrong datasets, relying on things like LinkedIn marketing or account mapping. To give Gale an edge, Simms inked a deal with Dun & Bradstreet, a data and analytics firm focused on B2B clients.
Skills are another key investment for agencies to do B2B work. Gale, which has hired about 30 individuals to work on its B2B clients, has a leg up as an agency focused on CRM. That’s because Simms sees many similarities between the fundamentals of B2C CRM and B2B marketing.
Teaching those fundamentals to existing talent hasn’t posed a challenge for the Gale team yet.
