How do you make sure that your relationship bank account with prospects and customers is always positive? If your SaaS company focuses only on what it wants, it will not succeed.
Every relationship in B2B SaaS is like a bank account. This key concept from Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is especially true in marketing for software.
When you get to a point where your relationship makes it beneficial for both parties, then it's a win win.
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B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:
B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!
The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.
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Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm back with Kalungi's co-founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. Today we talk about finance. Not really. But we do talk about bank accounts.
Specifically, there's a concept in Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that says that each relationship has an emotional bank account. Positive actions build trust and basically deposit into the account, while negative actions deplete trust and essentially withdraw from the account.
While the same concept applies just as well to marketing, it is often undervalued and sometimes forgotten about in today's age of AI, channels, tactics, etc. And being as efficient as possible with your marketing dollars and bandwidth while trying to attribute all of your actions as closely to revenue as possible.
We're taking you back to one of the most core principles of marketing and discussing how to make sure your relationship bank account with prospects and customers is always positive. Let's get into it.
Stijn, thank you again for being here as always. Today we are talking about this concept of deposits versus withdrawals in the relationship, in marketing's relationship with prospects.
There's an adage in marketing that I don't have the attribution for, and I need to go find and put in the show notes. But, the concept is basically that every relationship is like a bank account in marketing, and you can either make a deposit in your interactions or you can withdraw.
You need that balance to be positive so that you can withdraw so that you can ask and have the prospect do what you want or convince the prospect to do something. When you add value, when you help make your prospect's life easier, you are depositing into the bank account.
When you ask them to do something, get on a phone call, download something, give away their information that is a withdrawal. And so, everything in marketing is a constant push and pull between deposits and withdrawals. And I wanted to talk with you a little bit about how to find the right balance there and how to add the right amount of value. So that you can make withdrawals without spending so much time adding value that you just leave money on the table.
I've seen this in a few different scenarios in the B2B SaaS space. And usually the ones that I think are the most noticeable are the ones that are just so deposit heavy. There's this thought leader and B2B marketing, Dave Gearhart and DGMG. He has spent the last probably five years depositing into the market, just with thought leadership, with his podcast.
He takes a very inbound purist approach. Just add a ton of value, gain a really big following of loyal followers. Then, whenever he has a launch, all he has to do is post a LinkedIn post and he gets, however many likes and subscribers, and he just has that captive audience ready to go whenever he wants.
Honestly you've done a great job of that with T2D3 and Kalungi in the early days. That was purely based on a lot of the attention that we got was purely based on the value that you brought with a lot of your thought leadership. With the book and that drives a lot of our demand still to this day.
Those are the really noticeable ones where you just go really Deposit heavy, but those can take a long time to build. It can take years to get that audience up and running, to get enough content out into the world, and to get credibility. You can then start to really withdraw in a meaningful way.
The other thing to just keep in mind is that as B2B marketing has progressed and technology has gotten better. Attribution has gotten better and has gotten more and more important. And it's getting, getting to the point in some scenarios. Where CEOs don't really want to consider anything that can't be tied to revenue.
How do you deposit the right way? And get enough air cover, I guess, from an executive standpoint to let yourself do that and add the value that you can then withdraw from. So that was a lot, but maybe let's start with from your perspective, What the importance of the deposit is in the grand scheme of marketing.
What do you think about adding value in that relationship? Then I have some more questions for you to get to dig deeper in.
Stijn Hendrikse: It's a great topic, Brian. The first definition we got to kind of agree on is what's the, the definition of actually Depositing and withdrawing in the kind of relationship account.
For a lot of people, giving and getting something out of a relationship means different things, depending on the type of relationship and the maturity of the relationship. When you are actually in the early stage of a relationship, when you're just starting to get to know someone, giving versus getting might actually mean very different things versus when you are in a later stage of a relationship.
Let me give you an example. When you're launching a product and you're in an early stage category, The people you're looking for to help you are usually called innovators. They're people who are not necessarily going to buy the product. They're not necessarily using it to solve a problem. They're basically confirming that they believe the same things that you believe.
They are kind of going to vote with their time because they care about the same problem. And they're going to help you almost finish the problem, which is a very different way of putting it. participation. What they would define as you giving them something is you're kind of giving them an ability to be part of it.
They're not necessarily expecting you to give them the product. They're almost expecting you to allow them to help you.
Have you ever heard the notion that the best way to make a friend is to actually ask for help, not to give help. That principle is actually at work here. That is not always the best way to make a friend is to provide help.
Sometimes because people actually don't necessarily want to be helped. They want to be relevant or they want to be useful.
Stijn Hendrikse: People want to have meaning. People want to have a role to play. They want to be relevant. So if you think of the customer journey or the buyer's journey or the journey in kind of a marketing context of a prospect or a suspect, making sure that you're not providing almost too much help where it becomes preachy.
You're not telling people what to do, but you're almost providing too much help that it becomes a little bit, the people don't feel that they're in charge anymore. That's a tricky balance to strike. On the other hand, if people are really specifically asking, like they just want to know what the price is or something, you actually just get the answer.
You have to tell them what the price is. Don't beat around it. Don't kind of lead people into different directions. So it's tricky. This is a very long way of saying the definition of depositing into the relation or communication bank account and withdrawing from means very different things depending on where you kind of are in the journey and asking yourself, what is this person going to define as getting something versus giving something?
Sometimes giving something versus getting something is, can be the same thing. Contributing content, for example. Or answering a question can in some context mean that they're giving something and in other context means that they're getting something. Does that make sense, Brian?
Brian Graf: Absolutely. A lot of our conversations always revert back to this, but it's about knowing your ideal customer profile and your prospects and what they care about.
If those prospects are, we're talking about really like crossing the chasm and the market maturity almost, but if those are early in the curve then Yes, it shouldn't, You should be basically just opening the door to be a part of what you're working on. And that gives them almost the bug to get in there and play around and build an amazing solution, which is what they want.
If, of course, they're more mature, then they're more skeptical and they will require you to kind of Yes, just an educated buyer who's trying to find the cheapest version of a certain solution or they find they know that out of five people Products they notice only two or three that are going to really check all the requirements that they need and out of those they want to just get the best one right and they're very Particular on how much time they want to spend evaluating the options.
You have to deposit into that relationship by providing the right information and providing it relatively friction free. And it's a very different trade off that you're making there. Because also those people, you can ask for something in return. If you do that really well, you do it very fast.
Then you can ask them for a reference and for, to help you make the content better and all that. But not if you do not help them also get what they want.
Brian Graf: To your point, we've talked about the type of deposit you can do, but also the more valuable the deposit, the quicker you can turn around and say, okay, now let me ask for something basically not to make all relationships into pure transactions, but we can talk about cold emails, because everyone gets buried by those every single day.
Everyone has read the cold email that they read the subject line and they know that somebody's just trying to sell them something without actually thinking about them, and they don't get past the third word. I think all of us have read that email that is very clearly not trying to sell them something, and actually has something very interesting to say.
To give them, whether it's a free copy of a book or a template to solve a problem that they haven't been able to solve for years, or an introduction to someone. That would be a worthwhile conversation. Then of course you'll read the email and you'll click. I think everyone always gets so hung up on channels and tactics and testing, which are all obviously important, but sometimes they can lose the forest through the trees and that like.
At the end of the day, what really matters and what's going to get somebody to click or to convert or to change, is the actual value that you are proposing and does it line up with what they want. Does that make sense?
Stijn Hendrikse: Absolutely.
Brian Graf: Yes.
Stijn Hendrikse: And it also is about genuine interest in the success of your project.
This only works if you believe that there's a one and one is three type of transaction possible where the sum of the parts can and that's what product market fit really is Brian. Product market fit really means that between the things you have to offer and the challenges that your audience faces, that if those two things come together, value gets created for both parties that wasn't there before.
The communication between those parts to establish that product market fit, to establish that transaction and that ongoing relationship can only be positive. And then finding the right way to establish that transit. That's really where this, this kind of depositing and withdrawing in the way you communicate and the way you do whatever your marketing campaign, et cetera, becomes really easier.
Do you actually know who you're trying to reach? How are you going to be relevant for that audience and how will they be relevant for you?
Brian Graf: It's almost like the magic powder that you can put on a marketing team or even a company.
If you look at it from a Gantt chart perspective or an initiatives perspective. All of this stuff, like the campaigns, would probably look the same. And the, the, even the assets types would look the same when you're looking at it from the top down. But the, it's really that, Yes, like you're saying, that viewpoint of, I really care about my prospect.
I want to make their life easier and everything that I do in terms of product, building the product, building my campaigns, the types of content that I build has to be, With that goal in mind. And if it is, then I feel like magically, campaigns perform better. And people click more. And conversations are better.
And they'll convert more. But if not then you just have a team that's both on product and sales and across the board, across the revenue board that's just going through the motions and they'll run the same campaigns, they'll run the same content types. But they won't get the conversions.
Because it won't actually be valuable for the reader or the prospect.
Stijn Hendrikse: And then do the things that are not easy. Because I have actually responded to cold emails or to cold outreach and then not gotten any engagement. Because sometimes I get a cold outreach which is actually something I might actually be interested in.
And then I reply or there's no engagement and that's the worst. Okay. And I'm actually making an effort now.
Brian Graf: Is there any difference in your mind with how value is provided with say a marketing team of one versus a marketing team of a hundred. Is there? Do you think that it's just the same mentality and it just, it just applies itself differently or is there anything that, maybe once, once the scale of the 50 plus person marketing team comes around, then you can dedicate more time to just pure value add initiatives.
Is there any difference in your mind or is it all kind of, it all comes from the same place and it has to be consistent throughout?
Stijn Hendrikse: I think there's risk involved with both, both extremes and nothing and everything in between. You have a very small team is a risk that you're trying to do too many things, which then become relatively transactional.
Maybe you run the risk of bit drawing too much. Doing things automated, not really thinking enough about the quality of the information of your outreach, of the ICP, the personas that you build. The thoughtfulness of your content calendar, et cetera. And then if the team is too big, you probably have a risk of things getting disconnected and the left side of the team not knowing what the right side does.
Maybe the quality of the people not being consistent in the team. They believe and so I don't know. Both I think come with their own challenges. I don't know if it's really large or small is better or worse.
Brian Graf: Yes, both have pros and cons. What about if a lot of this starts with the founder.
If you go back to the company's infancy, a lot of it can be the deposit culture. Can come from the founder and they start it. And then it's carried out throughout the rest of the organization. I think when the founder is really passionate about it. Like you were with Kalungi.
Then the rest follow and it is so easy to make it continue. But what about when there is a founder who maybe is an introverted head. Or somebody who doesn't want the spotlight or even doesn't have a lot to say on the topic. How, I guess if you were the, the CMO or the CRO of that, how would you, how would you push hard on the value add side of your materials?
Stijn Hendrikse: Leading by example is where it all started. Like what you're doing, you're doing this podcast. There's in the Kalungi team and making it clear that when you want to provide value and understand your audience and make sure you deposit it into the relationship bank account, that it starts with you as the leader and making that a non negotiable and being also very aware of how everybody in your team does that in their own way.
With their own dialects and their own superpowers, et cetera. But I think that's very important, Brian, and to keep doing that, even when your company grows, and I think that's the most important. and then the other, to be mindful that everybody in the team will do that in different ways.
And that there will be new ways of doing that as the founder, or at least I may not even understand. It took me a while to appreciate that TikTok might be a good channel also for me to maybe do some things on. And now I think I'm enjoying it. I don't know. It's not done very well. I think it's still not necessarily the place where my, my content and my style is best suited.
I don't think it's bad anymore. So, but it took me a while to appreciate that.
Brian Graf: Yes, it is. I like setting the right example and you just have to go for it and produce. But also I think the point of everyone will do it in their own way, I think is, is so important.
Just because when, when I first started this, are you encouraging me to start this content journey? My philosophy was like, nobody's going to want to hear what I have to say. I'm, I don't have whatever the experience or the thoughts or whatever. That would make me relevant enough to say, but you were right in pushing me in that.
And everyone else. Even a marketing manager has plenty to share about their domain and the same thing about product architect or UI. Like all these, all these people have knowledge over their own domains. And so if they can, as long as they can apply that the right way and to, and know the prospect and the customer well enough then value can be added, absolutely.
That can obviously apply to content, but it also should be very much applied to people's day to day work and how they interact with the customer.
Stijn Hendrikse: The other thing, Brian, which is really important to realize, why this topic is also important, about this kind of relationship bank account and the communication.
We are all B2B marketers. That's what we do. We communicate, we market in the context of businesses. Selling and marketing and driving decisions and customer success. But it's all in the end about people. It's really B2C. The only difference is in B2B, we say there's a lot of people who spend other people's money, but other than that, it's still people.
It's people communicating with people. And so there's individuals who want to be seen, who want to be heard, who want to be relevant, who want to feel useful. So, the other way to think about it is when you're thinking about the withdrawals and deposits into a relationship bank account. Are you making someone feel useful?
That's why also asking someone for help is actually not a bad thing. Even an outbound email, if you actually ask someone to help you, if it's in a genuine way, if it makes someone feel needed, feel special. That might actually be far more effective as providing all kinds of asks for advice.
Brian Graf: Yes, it always goes back to the core principles, but knowing your prospect, knowing your ICP, knowing what they want. And I really like the perspective of find a way to make the relationship greater than the sum of its parts. Because that's what it is at the end of the day.
If you can get to a point where your relationship makes it more beneficial for both parties, then it's a win win and it's a no brainer. And the tactics and everything else will follow, but that is the core principle that you have to get in line, before you will really see real success through your marketing efforts.
Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you for choosing to spend your time with us. As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. And if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it.
Thanks again.
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