Proof Analytics’ Chris Engman – The critical importance of brand in ABM
Where to begin with Chris Engman?
Serial founder and entrepreneur… multi-time CEO, CMO, CRO… investor in a dozen MarTech and cleantech companies.
Co-author of Megadeals, a groundbreaking book changing the way many organizations approach complex B2B selling.
He and I have recorded some #FlipMyFunnel episodes together in the past, digging into the fascinating findings from the Megadeals research and the resulting recommendations for enterprise B2B mastery.
This time, in a two-part episode, we’re talking brand.
Specifically, the critical (and often underappreciated and underfunded) importance of brand in B2B and in ABM.
Some podcast highlights:
- Sophisticated marketing mix modeling makes it clear that a great many organizations overfund the short term (at the expense of the long term), overfund lead generation (at the expense of brand), and overfund the sales force (at the expense of marketing, and brand and PR in particular).
- Contrary to conventional wisdom, brand is even more important in B2B than it is in B2C. Why? Because brand power builds trust, trust mitigates risk, and risk is at the heart of every large purchase. And the bigger and more complex the purchase, the more significant the focus on risk.
- If brand, trust and risk mitigation are so critical, does that mean small companies are doomed to fail when they compete with established global brands? No. Chris explains how to punch way above your weight.
- How to ride in the slipstream of your more established competitors with a plus one strategy (or a “yes and” approach, if you prefer) to capitalize on existing mindsets and budgets to sell faster.
- Remember Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Epic Split” video from six years ago? Remember what was being advertised? This is the jumping-off point for a really interesting exploration of multi-touch attribution vs. marketing mix modeling and much more.
- In part two we really geek out on the specifics of marketing mix modeling and how it shines a light on productive and unproductive spend in ways that other approaches, even robust multi-touch attribution models and technologies, can’t adequately measure.
Check out the full conversation, across two episodes, with Chris Engman below.