#29: The 3 Big Marketing Fundamentals I've Learned in the Past Year and How They Shaped My Understanding of the Game

Marketing is just continuous conversation with buyers, find your natural channel strength, know your audience deeply, and be patient because everything takes 5x longer than expected.

All great companies have great marketing. Marketing tells a story of your company, makes people fall in love with your mission, and most importantly builds trust and shows expertise. Marketing builds brands.

In B2B, we've always put marketing as secondary, having word-of-mouth and referrals as our key channels to grow business, not realizing that early investment in marketing baked into your business model will allow you to keep this investment throughout your company lifetime.

The Julius Caesar Paradox

"Happy clients build businesses."

That's what Julius Caesar said as he first entered Rome as emperor.

Julius definitely has a point. With happy clients, we can go a long way: low churn, high retention, and LTV. This is the ultimate goal for any business.

However, what Julius didn't know back in 27 BC is that marketing is the ultimate pulse check.

Questions like:

• What's happening in the industry?

• How does our offering stand in comparison to the competition?

• Does our messaging and positioning still resonate?

• Can we still grab attention?

All of this is being calibrated by your marketing.

Marketing as Your Business Reality Check

Consider these warning signs:

People don't read our blog → They don't care what we've got to say → We don't know what to say.

People don't click on our ads → Our key messages don't work → Do we target the right pain points?

People don't register for our webinars → What we talk about, people don't care about → Are we talking to the right people?

Think about marketing like an ever-changing, fluctuating phenomenon—always taking the shape of macro and micro environments, adapting to internal changes and external offerings, like those of your competitors.

When you don't invest in marketing, it's like you build business in a silo, closed from your clients, competitors, and probably opportunities.

The Death of Blue Oceans

Even a few years ago, we had the luxury of blue and red oceans.

With blue oceans, you could kind of avoid marketing and you'd have been fine.

In red ones, you knew that you needed to push and be louder than your competitors.

Today? All oceans are deep bloody red.

So you really don't have a choice.

So What Exactly IS Marketing?

Now that we've established that philosophically marketing is essential for business, let's clarify what "marketing" actually is.

In my business understanding, marketing is the ability of companies to talk with their buyers.

Back and forth, regular conversation with buyers is a sign of great marketing.

Here's how the cycle works:

• We have something to say → we say it

• You, buyer, revert back with feedback (maybe even buy what we have to say)

• Then back again with the cycle

But here's where it breaks:

• If we don't talk → you don't buy

• Maybe you buy because you clearly have a growing pain (for now)

• But if we talk again and again about the same thing → we're clearly not on the same page

• You probably will move on to the next company

By not investing in marketing, you don't have the ability to improve your conversation, calibrate to what your buyers talk and care about, while continuing to push your agenda.

You soon become irrelevant.

The 3 Marketing Fundamentals I've Learned in 10 Years

Here are the marketing fundamentals I've learned in the last 10 years, moving from sales to business executive, now working closely with marketing leaders:

1. Conversation Develops Gradually—Like Dating

You don't marry your future wife after the first date.

2. Buyer Knowledge Is Everything

Knowledge and understanding of your buyers among your entire sales & marketing teams is key.

3. Channel Synchronization Creates Impact

Your channels must complement each other, working in sync. There are always dominant channels; the others are complementary.

Fundamental #1: The Dating Principle (Why We've Been Doing It Wrong)

Coming into the outsourced SDR industry, I didn't realize that all this time I was focusing on the "conversion" stage of the customer journey, leads that have:

• Defined buying intent

• Engage in conversation eagerly

• Defined budget

• Purchasing timeline within accepted average rates

Although there are more than one stages of buying intent development, and because most marketing leaders overcomplicate them for us sales or business people, I'll provide a simple and actionable framework of the entire spectrum:

The 5 Stages:

• Stage 1: Awareness

• Stage 2: Activation

• Stage 3: Engagement

• Stage 4: Conversion

• Stage 5: Retention

Those who really want to explore all stages, go ahead and read this comprehensive article by Belkin's team.

The 1% Problem

Everyone was pursuing the "conversion" stage, including Belkins, not realizing that we were attacking a very small percentage of the market.

Theoretically, to illustrate my point, let's say it's 1%.

So at any given moment, outreaching to 100 accounts would lead to 1-2 high-qualified deals.

The outbound method we used, with optimized subject lines, personalized emails, great phone calls, or really responsive LinkedIn messages, could open up 10x in terms of total conversations generated.

That's 10 accounts or 10 appointments booked.

The math is:

• 1-to-few potential deals

• Several X of that as meetings

In a traditional outbound playbook, that’s what all companies in my space, as well as most outbound-focused companies, are getting.

The 90% Gap Nobody Talks About

The two problems that come to light, unknown to inexperienced people and mistakes made by 80% of businesses, are:

Problem #1: What happens with 90% of meetings booked that don't have immediate buying intent?

Problem #2: What happens with 90% of leads that haven't been booked (haven't engaged), what happens next?

The answer to both questions: Nothing.

In 90% of cases, there is:

• No nurturing process

• No sales enablement for deals that entered the pipeline

Most sales pipelines are broken. Salespeople don't bother, don't want to, and rarely pursue deals that don't have buying intent.

That's where concern #1 happens with some Belkins clients:

"Why are we not closing deals that you guys generate?"

Because you expect all deals to have immediate buying intent.

But we cannot tackle more than one problem at a time:

• Produce higher intent → less appointments

• Produce more appointments → less intent

The 90% That Falls Through the Cracks

Secondly, to further develop the point of 90% of leads that are not booked, what happens with them?

In the best-case scenario, they are re-engaged every few months, cycled through with new messaging. But rarely are they added into any staged nurturing system, hence the same strategy focusing on the "conversion" stage.

The problem here: The limited ability of SDR teams that are pushing conversion to expand beyond the conversion stage.

Since the message is focused on "engage," SDRs are not taught to develop messaging around:

• Uncovering pain points

• Checking relevancy

• Shedding light on outcomes

The De-Aligned Marketing Reality

So in reality, we see de-aligned marketing:

SDRs/BDRs:

• Attacking the same lead list again and again

• Focusing on conversion using hooks like "let's engage"

Marketing teams:

• Running content, social, website optimization

• Very broad, not synchronized with SDR strategy

The decisions about what articles to produce, what content to write, what ads to run are made by marketing.

Meanwhile, SDRs working within sales units are struggling to figure out what messaging to write during yet another re-engagement cycle.

The Solution: Unified Journey Across All 5 Stages

The answer is developing a unified sales & marketing customer journey with all 5 stages, interconnecting outreach with other marketing channels to produce an integrated journey.

The new model:

• SDRs & sales dictate what content to create

• How to optimize pages

• What ads to run

All focused on increasing conversation for higher intent, or higher appointment-to-account penetration.

The Results You Can Expect

The results of the successful implementation of this method will result in:

✅ Increased buying intent of appointments booked (from 1-2 deals to 2-4 deals)

✅ Increased appointments to account booked (from <10 to <15)

✅ Decreased total addressable market exhaustion (many teams struggle with cleaning their TAM too fast)

✅ Personalized journey for buying committees or industries (you can build and optimize this playbook for each segment, creating a basic ABM motion)

Fundamental #2: The Unified Buyer Knowledge Problem

My second point is that whatever marketing you're building should be built around unified buyer knowledge:

• Who is our buying committee and what roles does it comprise?

• What pain points are we addressing?

• What solutions do we provide for pain relief?

• What outcomes do we care about?

Although I'm writing this, my own team is still in the journey of unifying our own internal understanding.

The fact that we haven't done that early in our playbook design now causes lots of extra work. So writing this is my way to acknowledge my own problems and the impact I've already seen when I started addressing them.

Creating Your Center of Knowledge

The way to create this center of knowledge is through initial buyer persona mapping.

Luckily, AI these days reduces the time to map everything out to hours, whereas in the past it took days and McKinsey consultants.

When the mapping is done, auditing your entire digital identity is a great exercise to uncover the discrepancies.

The worst thing is:

• Your SDRs drive conversations with messaging X

• Buyers see something different on your website

• Retargeting ads speak something entirely different

• The webinars you're planning don't even address the same pain points

Does it sound familiar?

Building and Maintaining Alignment

It also makes sense to develop a comprehensive internal document going in-depth, as well as setting up a training schedule for all people to get it right.

Then once a year, update what you know and implement changes.

You might ask: "Should we do this that often?"

My answer would be—yes, try to. Calibration is key. You definitely won't get it right the first time, so improving on your own understanding is important.

SDRs as Market Intelligence

Don't treat your SDR team as people who just bring leads, but also as a resource for market intelligence.

As John Barrows famously said when he joined me for our Sales and Marketing Alignment online event:

"SDRs have become data enrichment teams, they bring intelligence to enrich our understanding of accounts."

A Missed Opportunity

An example from my own experience:

Clients are working with firms like Belkins to build pipeline, but only 1/5 are using us also as an intelligence source to calibrate marketing, positioning, and messaging.

Fundamental #3: The Channel Trap

So if marketing is a conversation, then you really shouldn't care much about channels, as long as they can drive conversation, right?

That's the first mistake people make when trying to establish or grow marketing.

The most popular search phrase is: "I want to do X channel."

Like literally, the most frustrating question I've heard over the years in the outsourced SDR space offering cold email outreach was:

"We want to do cold calling."

I answered: "But you don't have many other channels. Maybe we can focus on outcomes instead?"

Focusing on channels instead of outcomes (AKA conversations) is the first marketing mistake.

Your Marketing DNA Is Your Competitive Advantage

Each business, thus marketing, has their own marketing DNA, what they've historically done best:

• Some are great at trade shows

• Some at content

• Some at social

• Some at ads

• Some at outbound

Finding your preferred conversation engine is a must, as then you can build your other channels in complementation to your strong suit.

This does sound very basic, but in reality, no one does it.

The Channel Chase Trap

Everyone wants to chase either:

Cost-effective channels ("Let me spend less")

Trendy channels ("This is cool right now")

Client preference channels ("Our clients would prefer this")

All of these lead to:

• Very poor execution

• Low engagement

• Lots of frustration

The DNA-First Approach

Instead, I propose:

1. Identify natural gravitation towards the channels you love to do

2. Focus on them deeply

3. Build out other channels as complementation to boost conversations

NOT to replace your core competency, but to improve it.

Real Examples of Finding Your Marketing DNA

Here are a few examples to illustrate my point:

Example 1: The Trade Show Revelation

A former client of Belkins worked with us for 2-3 years on an outbound project. Our team was driving 50 to 100 opportunities per year, some were closing, some not. Neither the client nor we were happy.

The client clearly needed deals and help, but didn't want to tap into their own strong suit.

Over the years, trying multiple channels:

• Outbound

• Then paid ads

• Some content

This client finally regrouped, cleaned their messaging, and identified that they are best when speaking face-to-face with clients at expos and events, building early relationships that they can grow later.

They refocused their entire strategy around shows, using other channels as supporting elements to drive needed conversations.

They found their communication-market fit.

Example 2: Belkins' Content Engine

Belkins leverages organic content as one of our core channels. We have lots of in-house expertise, and our industry always explores what's out there.

As we built our content engine, we made sure it's:

• World-class

• Written with subject matter experts

• Providing fresh perspectives

• Optimized for readers

With such play, we adopted the process of content creation and refined it over the years. For us, this channel serves as a conversation vehicle to drive our marketing forward.

Our gameplan:

• Distribution (where people can read it)

• Optimization (on-page, readability, cross-platform)

• SEO (how you can find it)

Example 3: The Social Media Natural

A competitor agency of Belkins is doing great in social. They have a founder-led content engine, sharing:

• Clay workflows

• Listings

• Other useful viral content

This allows them to gain millions of LinkedIn views.

Although Belkins might try doing it, since it's not our dominant gene, whatever we do in that regard would be awkward.

The Pattern You Can't Ignore

All three examples have a commonality:

As soon as all of these companies started leveraging their dominant genes, we started winning:

• Trade shows

• Content

• Social

If any of us would try to do the other channels because "we need these channels," our gameplay would be awkward, inefficient, probably expensive.

True skill in marketing: That's why you really need to reflect on the question "What's your marketing?" and build it out from there, complementing your core marketing expertise.

The Closing Truth Nobody Wants to Hear

Everything takes too much time. Plan 5 years ahead.

Even an experienced team like Belkins, with copywriters, SDRs, marketers, and lead sourcing specialists working together for years, struggled to launch this simple version of a stage-based full-funnel within a few months, when this was a new playbook for them.

I imagine anyone reading this who wants to try it would take months.

Which brings me to my final point: Everything takes more time than you expect. Much more time.

I think being patient in marketing is key for business leaders.

My Own Timeline Reality Check

📅 It took me 2 years working with the best marketing leaders to get to my current understanding of marketing.

📅 It took me 3 years to see results of my organic content game.

📅 It takes my clients 12 months to learn how to close deals generated by our outbound playbook.

Be Patient

Marketing isn't a sprint. It's not even a marathon.

It's building a machine while running it, calibrating while accelerating, and learning while executing.

The companies that win aren't the ones who started with the perfect playbook.

They're the ones who kept going.