Speaking at a meeting of the Business Marketing Association (BMA) this morning, Peter Zaballos said the practice of marketing has changed dramatically in the past five years. “It’s completely transformed,” said the VP of Marketing and Products at Minneapolis-based SPS Commerce, which runs a supply chain cloud service for retailers. And a lot of that
transformation has to do with “how businesses buy,” according to Zaballos, citing the advent of the iPad as but one example in recent years. “My largest spend is technology, not media,” he said. “Marketing organizations have had to retool.”
Zaballos joined SPS (NASDAQ: SPSC) just two and half years ago, and the company has seen its revenues double in that time. (For the full year of 2014, the company expects revenue to be in the range of $125.7 to $126.5 million.) What undoubtedly surprised attendees at the meeting was learning that, before Zaballos joined, the company had no marketing department — only a group of top-performing sales people who each kind of did their own thing. But SPS realized it had to formalize the marketing function if it was to achieve the aggressive growth plans its management and board had laid out. Today, the firm continues to expand and add employees, Zaballos said, ”and we’re now the largest cloud service in Minnesota.” It reported recently that its retail sourcing community exceeds one million items and 7,000 retail members.
The topic of today’s meeting of the Minnesota Chapter of the BMA, attended by some 80 members and guests, was “Success Stories: How Marketers Overcome Their Greatest B2B Challenges.” After Zaballos gave his opening talk, he moderated a panel of marketing execs from local firms. (Left to right in the photo below: Zaballos; Audra Wendt, Cargill; Guy Wray, MOCON; Britta Iwen, Ecolab; and Judy German, Cachet Financial Solutions.) He led off the panel with his take on marketing today: “It’s about affecting change, including getting sales to adopt new tools” — citing a challenge all the others on the panel went on to talk about, among other topics.
It was a lively discussion, with panel members openly sharing their experiences navigating the new world of B2B marketing and the challenges they specifically have faced at their respective companies. Some of my takeaways:
• When the panelists were asked what was the one medium each of them relied on the most, invariably “content” was the word that quickly came out of each panelist’s mouth — whether it was about developing it, sharing it, repurposing it, or “leveraging it across all channels.”
• It seems social media is at the top of every B2B marketer’s mind these days, too (much related to the above), and is only becoming more important. At least one panelist mentioned the CEO pushing to do more with it. One reason: compared to older, traditional methods, it’s just much easier today to segment and identify prospects with social media — for example, by advertising on LinkedIn. “I can spend $125 (targeting certain titles or functions) and get 35,000 impressions.”
• The new product management is “growth hacking,” said Zaballos — meaning iterating improvements, and trying new things, or “failing fast.” When the panelists were asked how they encourage that, they all had good answers. At Cargill, it’s recognition — a “Fail Fast Award.” At MOCON, a heavily engineering type environment, it fits the culture to simply call them “experiments.” Ecolab encourages employees to talk about what they learned. At Cachet Financial, the youngest firm in the group, one concludes it’s just sort of built in to the culture, in what is more of a smaller, startup environment. (And, by the way, kudos to BMA for having an early-stage firm on the panel of an organization that’s more populated with large firms, including many of our local Fortune 500 giants. I say mix it up more with startups, and everyone benefits!)
• Asked about the technology they use — what and how much — it was not surprising to hear the word “data” mentioned most. As in analytics.
On that last point, I hope we get to hear more voices from the local BMA chapter speak at the “Marketing Analytics” conference I’m helping to plan this fall, being put on by the MinneAnalytics organization, on whose board I serve. I’m very happy to say that SPS’ Zaballos has agreed to speak about how his firm leverages its considerable customer data to obtain insights previously unavailable — arguably one of the most significant of those transformations happening in the world of marketing today. (Watch for more on that upcoming conference soon on Minnov8.)
>>> Here’s a video interview I did of Peter after the meeting. <<<
And be sure to check out more great events upcoming from the BMA Minnesota Chapter this fall as well. If you have anything at all to do with B2B marketing, you really should follow the organization on Twitter (@BMAMinnesota) and consider becoming a member!