How businesses buy different all over the world

In today’s globalised economy, understanding businesses' distinct purchasing behaviours and cultural nuances worldwide is crucial for B2B marketers. This episode delves into the insights shared during a recent conversation featuring industry experts discussing maintaining global brand consistency while effectively adapting to local markets. Key themes explored include the importance of cultural nuances, data-driven marketing strategies, and best practices for cross-cultural B2B marketing.

Guests

Aditi Nair, Digital Strategy Manager at Adobe

Mariana Tabrea, Marketing Operations Specialist at Confluent

Anya Slowenko, Marketing Manager at Aircall

Welcome to today's episode of B2B Marketing Futures, where we will talk about a fascinating topic of how businesses buy differently all over the world and how to market successfully across cultures. We will start by discussing how companies balance global brand consistency with the need to adapt to local markets. Move on to understanding cultural nuances in business purchasing. We will explore also how to apply data driven marketing strategies across different cultural landscapes and some of the best practices that you've seen, for cross-cultural B2B marketing. Let's start with a quick round of introductions. Ania, would you like to to give a sentence on yourself?

I'm Anya. I'm Canadian originally, but I've worked in Canada, Australia, and now here based in London. I'm background in social media marketing and now have kind of pivoted to B2B, where I've been a regional field revenue marketer for the past four and a bit years.

Thank you. Mariana.

Hey, y'all. Mariana, I'm based in Leicester, originally from, Romania. I worked in, Portugal as well. I've did, sales and marketing at the moment at Confluent. A marketing operation specialist Thank you. Aditi

Hi, everyone. My name is Aditi. I'm a digital strategy manager at Adobe. I've worked in the cross section of marketing and product for the last ten years or so. Was previously at Amazon in India, and then moved to London about seven years ago. Now worked across the India markets, the European markets, pretty much, over the last 7 to 8 years.

Thank you. Tom.

My name is Tom Gatton, and I'm the chief executive and founder of Adz Act, which is a new B2B ad platform.

Thank you. Tom. So let's start with Global versus local marketing strategies. Why this is important. What are some of the key strategies companies use to ensure brand consistency globally while effectively adapting to local markets? I've had quite a few years of experience now working with like, global campaigns or integrated marketing teams. I think the key word here is consistency, right? Because your global campaigns are going to have that generalized messaging. They're going to have your core kind of thought leadership pillars. But then it's my job or the regional marketing teams, your localization team's job to think about okay, we've got these this message consistency that we want to keep across the business. We don't want to confuse what the core focuses are. The core thought leadership pillars are. But then you want to make sure that it's relevant obviously to your areas. So for me as a regional marketer, I'm taking that global campaign overall messaging theme. So the companies I've worked for, generally it comes in the form of a research report. So whether it be a trends report or a key findings report for the year. Right. And then we've got the global one. But then we've obviously interviewed people across the world. So then we look at what data do we have that's specific to our area that we could leverage. Can we make a UK specific or an Australia specific report with examples of our customers businesses in our areas, quotes from people that work in the area, and make it more relevant and localized just as one core asset, but then also taking those themes and thinking about if I'm doing a webinar on one of the core themes that also the global team is leveraging, how can I have regional speakers? How can we bring in a customer story from that area that our audience is going to be able to relate to a lot more versus, you know, some a business in North America that they just don't even know who they are.

Sorry.

Just building on what Anya said. I think one is to just obviously take in local components and people that will make the content more relevant. But you talked about processes, work and we I think these have improved. Definitely. But I've especially at big tech companies like Amazon and Adobe, it can take a number of weeks to take a international piece of content and then localize it. We had extensive processes from a legal and policy standpoint to because, as we know, policy constraints within Europe are particularly stringent. And in relation to the US, for example. So from a content perspective, localize the content and make it relevant. But then also, from a language perspective, you know, make it go through actual, review processes to ensure that the tone of voice is relevant to local languages. And then also policy approvals, legal approvals, and at least from a big tech standpoint, those things become particularly important because it can get picked up very quickly and sort of massacred over the internet and so on. So I think those things, those processes are fundamentally important, especially for big companies. But then, the tools and technologies that we've started to use for that has definitely improved over as well.

Just going further on the same idea because it is I do feel it's the core of just getting to know each region that you have very close, example would be in our case, we're doing now a data in motion tour. That's events all over the world. So we start with America, Europe and Asia. And just looking at that, I can see quite clearly the differences of how we have to promote the same event, because it's literally the same thing like kind of the same agenda with. But it takes the small things that we need to change. It's like Anya mentioned getting customers from the respective country because they know what's happening there and getting them to speak at the event. That balance between keeping the global brand, but do adapt it to the country that you're in and try to like, see the cultures and all that. We use a lot of localization. We translate pages in the languages that they need to do. And in terms of, promoting it, we take into consideration holidays from the respective countries. So we do work around them rather than pushing our brand, just be like, yeah, we're going to do this. So we it's a lot of adapting. Why is so important that consistency. I'm talking from a brand perspective. We've talked about localizing messages, but why is so important to have that consistency all over different markets?

I'd personally say that it's the same with any other, like big name companies like McDonald's and all this. They have a motto that everyone knows, like the logo that everyone knows. So you got to keep that, base or at least, the motto that you have the culture is like something that makes you, who you are, why you started the company in the first place, in my opinion at least. And just sticking to that is just sticking to your core values. And then you adapt as you go. From my perspective, it's the same as being a person, just being a company and trying to represent what you want to do and have there. So yeah, in my opinion, that's why.

I think like we were saying, you as a person, it's almost like you start to lose your brand identity because it becomes muddled. If you've got one person in the German market doing something with one message and somebody else in North America talking about something completely different, it is inconsistent. Then there's no core brand identity where you're talking about the same thing. You have the same purpose, same goals, same focus. If everyone's off doing whatever they kind of think works best for their market, there does need to be something that links it together that says, this is the same company. You're obviously adapting to your market, but you're not completely changing the core messaging.

I think also from a tech standpoint, sometimes SaaS products are pretty straightforward, right. Like especially B to C products. I think the messaging is easy, but for B to B products in specific, a lot of times they tend to be complex products, at least the ones that I've worked on. And so it really depends on the kind of product messaging you want to land and make sure drives the core value of the product. And different people will have different interpretations about this, which is why the role of the product marketer becomes important in making sure that the core value that we know the product drives is distilled in those messages. And those messages, whether localized or not, have to then be consistent, because we know through our customer research that the product value is established around those specific, core messages. And I think from a product utility standpoint, adoption standpoint, and making sure customers get to those activation moments, get into habit loops with the product, it's important to have a consistent external but also internal alignment on what are those core messages. So if you go out to different messages, you also sort of confusing your GTLM teams and your sales teams, who, by the way, have to also regurgitate the same messages so that the end customer is seeing the product in similar ways. And I think utility, product usage and adoption then gets impacted if we if we're not consistent.

Yeah, and you might be selling to a company that has multiple locations as well. And of course, it helps you get then the halo effect from multiple interactions in different parts of the world. If there's some consistency and presumably, you know, you were talking about the product teams, they will also be often independently going out and understanding the use cases in specific geographies. And then the marketers in that geography will then. Also be going out and understanding their audiences and their needs. Absolutely. There's such a big divide between the product world and the marketing world, right? I feel like the messaging, the consistency you talk about working is to bring alignment between what product imagines the messaging should be and then what marketing takes to the market and hopefully what the customer understands of it. So there's a huge marketing chain here that gets all cemented together with that. That consistent messaging.

And other product is a product. Teams tend to be, as sensitive or as well resourced to understand different needs and different parts of the world as marketing. Or you think marketing is generally. I think this is one of the big problems of our times, if I'm being honest, product teams have an idea of what they think customer needs are, and at least in the companies that I've worked with, which is Amazon and Adobe, a lot of times product teams are centralized in the US and in India, and they imagine their perceptions of customer needs are limited to the customer interactions they have. As you can imagine, they're also heavily siloed with the teams that then take it to market across the world, across Europe, across India, and so on and so forth. And so the only thing that travels is the messaging is the consistent messaging. So the localization of it is like the aftermath of it. But really you have to know what you want to take them to the market in terms of the core value of the product. Which I think is the reason why the consistent messaging is so important for internal efficiency, but also so that the external audience and customers are taking what you intend for them to take of the product.

Because this is quite common to have, as you were describing, a regional marketing team, but maybe it's not quite so accepted or common to have regional product teams.

I feel like in my experience, that's been very uncommon in the companies I've worked for. We were kind of talking everything is I think in most of our examples, everything is quite centralized out of North America or wherever your hub is. And I think to add on, it's also this is where the feedback loops between your go to market boots on the ground, people in your area is so important because yes, there might be a product launch coming, but we understand our market. Is the market mature enough? Is our market actually ready for what we're talking about? Do we need then? Yes, the core messaging should be should be consistent. But potentially in Australia that market needs more education about what this actual product or feature or concept is versus going with the hard sell. So I think that's where it does take proactivity. On the regional side, the regional go to market include sales, customer success, marketing. If you do happen to have product teams to be able to create those really strong feedback loops, because it also then shouldn't fall back on regional to recreate and adapt and adapt messaging. It should be something that you're thinking global to local.

I suppose if marketing can almost act the part of a product team in some sense in a particular region, a regional product team in Southeast Asia might then be forced to actually try and communicate this back to the product teams about specific needs. Really interesting things. I'm keen to hear. How does it look in practice? We've talked about regional marketing. I assume you also have a central marketing team that is dictating, what is the the marketing plan for the year? And then you adapt. How does it look in your different companies?

I think slightly similar to what Anya was highlighting earlier. Heavily dependent on where your product and engineering teams are headquartered, at least as far as tech is concerned. That's where it originates from. They obviously have an idea and premise for why they build the product, and it comes from their area of focus as far as customer bases are concerned. So it is almost a given that the messaging, the core messaging will come from the region where the product and engineering teams are headquartered. And more often than not, in my experience, that's almost certainly catering to that local market. In my case, the US. It's always like a fight between the US and and European and other teams where we know this messaging is not going to translate. And so there's a little bit of a, fight between these teams. And we do get the guidance and in some cases you have the freedom, some cases you don't. And or we'll have to fight for it and we'll have to fight for the freedom to adapt the messaging. And once we agree, however, your mechanism is to agree on the messaging. Then it's a heavily operationalized process about localization. As I described earlier, approvals, in Europe, all the policy and legal approvals can take a lot of time. So you have to budget a lot of time between the US going to market and the rest of the world going to market. I think once the messaging gets aligned, it's a process that just kicks in. The tools that have been used, as I was highlighting earlier in my experience, were really, really painful before, I think in recent years, especially in my time at Adobe, you know, I've seen marketing teams use sort of workflow related SAS related tools that make these processes easier. But yeah, I think the alignment is key. And then everything else becomes a process that can take as long or as little as the tools that you use to drive those processes.

On that point. Yeah. I see as well the regional marketing is having sometimes to like get some material from the USA, headquarters and be like, oh God, how am I going to translate this? So like, it makes no sense in my language. And I've seen that, but as well as not, here at conflict, I don't see that often. It here and there. It does come the market. I feel like in here, the market starts from the product and they do tell us like what's new, what's happening and all of this. But I guess it gets a bit filtered through what it's going as more technical and what is going as more broad messaging and all of this. I think conflict does a good job in splitting those and hitting different targets with those different messages coming from the same product, but, a bit tweaked for the targets. And. With that, I think. It does help a lot. And in. Differencing literally the very technical things that hit some people on the market and a very, just broader things that you can do. So I guess they do get filtered through once from the product to the actual field marketing. And I feel like in the region it gets filtered again, we get to like choose a little bit, of course we have our limits, but we get to choose like what material is going to go here? What is not going to go here? We launched, just for a global, point of view. And it worked in a lot of region. We launched a comic book, and that just hits everyone because it's just easy to digest. It's fun. It just springs your curiosity. And that's you can see that everywhere in the world. It's not necessarily in one region. So I guess we do have some limitation, but we have some freedom in adapting it and taking the main message that comes from the headquarters and adapting it to each country and region that we work in.

I think it's also a fine line of like, not reinventing the wheel. Like the companies that I've worked at, we have had quite like an established, like global campaigns kind of team. And we had processes then and quite good workflows. But I also think selfishly, from a regional side, I'm always thinking, how can I influence better practices and influence having them think this does need to be localised. There are a multitude of markets that I'm serving with this core messaging, so getting them to think and prioritize, like the time that we were talking about that it takes to translate and to have things approved and working that into workflows so that when you are doing these kind of repeatable yearly campaigns, you've got that thought about already, you've got the time carved out, the resources carved out to do those things so that you're not kind of scrambling and it's not falling on the regional teams to kind of do that themselves. And then you're not also creating content that's not going to be used. Or. Just kind of adding on extra workload to everybody when it could be streamlined. I think there are a lot of opportunities to create strong feedback loops and best practices that then you're doing. It's rinse and repeat.

How these adaptations are perceived by regional markets. So how this.

Cultural differences influence business purchasing decisions in various regions.

Since I've worked in.

Sales as well and moved on to marketing now I've dealt with different countries, so I'd say there's quite a difference. First that comes with just, west of the world, central of the world and east of the world. Like, you can see clearly that there's differences. And what's easy is like with America and being so big and like, they kind of have the same mentality overall in the country, like in terms of purchasing and marketing and all of this. But when you move into Europe and Asia, things get complicated because you have different cultures. And there are like sometimes they're very different to the core of the bone. They're very different. So you have to adapt. I've seen, just a few examples that I can remember. I've seen, for example, in Israel a lot, and I'm pretty sure USA does the same thing in terms of, messaging channels. WhatsApp works. If you go in Germany, you are going to be kicked out. If you try to approach anyone through WhatsApp. Germany has a GDPR, very strict GDPR policy. So you have to work around that. How can you like find little tweaks where you can actually call people that have interest, without getting in any legal troubles? Other examples, in Portugal, where I worked in countries that are a little bit not as fast paced as UK, people tend to like take their time in listening like, yeah, what are you doing? How is it like you get a conversation. But whilst in USA and the UK, I feel like people try to be more direct. You're like, just to the point, please tell me what you have to say and I'll. I'll move on and make a decision about it. And as always, like in smaller countries, I feel like the decision makers are a little bit easier to get to rather than bigger countries. That's just a couple of examples, like kind of what I've seen around the world I would add on to what Mariana just said, seasonality. I think that's a big one that, like, is not always considered because, obviously I'm from North America when I moved to Australia, this like makes me sound so ignorant. I didn't realize it was an opposite season. So when I started in one of my jobs, my Global campaigns team was like, hey, we're running a Summer Sizzler campaign and I was like, it's winter here. We can't use this messaging. So I think that's where like seasonality, even in like buying patterns, like, the company I work for right now is headquartered out of France. And if anybody has worked with a French company before, August is a dead zone. Everyone is on holiday. That influences then in the French market. If deals are closing right, there's not much going to be really happening in the months of July and August. And then if you look at North America, things like Black Friday, like how they would I think that's more of a B2C example. But then how you're structuring kind of your sales or your promotional offers. I think there's so much nuance in country to country with like how buying decisions are made. Financial years are different, country to country, area to area. So I think those are things that you need to take into account if you're looking at campaigns or commercial offers or even, yeah, messaging, you're not going to be running a summer Sizzler campaign in July in Australia. It's just it's not going to resonate.

Aditi, before you were mentioning the importance of having processes. And so how do you incorporate feedback and having feedback loops. When trying new products or new campaigns.

I'd love to get to that in a second. But just just want to close the loop because have some experience with dealing with the manifestation because I think it's it's super important. But the other thing I wanted to add is the macroeconomic conditions that each of these regions are in their own sort of economic cycles, has such a massive impact on the way you deal with them. And I think, the US is one country where I think there is an intention for people to be sold to like they want to buy. They want to buy the best product out there. They have a willingness to buy and test the best in class products out there. And they understand that best in class requires innovation. It takes time, but they're willing to try and test and learn fast. And I've seen similar mindset in India as well, where I don't know if you're aware of this, but as an Indian, I can tell you have a very strong hustle culture, right? Like we don't care how we get to the outcome, we will just optimize for the outcome. The only thing that matters is price. Indians will bargain you till the last penny if they can. And that is something that's very true in the business world as. Well, like negotiations get to the point of haggling. Right? So that's the Indian world. But they want to get shit done as soon as possible. And then then you come to Europe, where I've been or in the UK, where I've been for the past seven years and everything sort of slows down. You're like, oh my God, how long is this going to take? But that's also a reflection of some of the seasonality effects that Mariana was alluding to, but equally a slight hesitation or reluctance to try something new. Because there is a bigger incentive for profitable growth and sort of regulated, slow, well paced growth rather than sort of getting too ahead of ourselves. And there's a deliberate pace to things, which I think as marketers and salespeople, we have to learn to respect, and something that I've had to sort of slow down and recalibrate myself to adjust to as well. So I think macroeconomic situations and local cultures of how you work in business, also dictate how buyers perceive, some of the material we throw at them. On the side of you just mentioned like having respect towards the regions and stuff. I feel like, it comes down a lot to like the culture itself and, like, respecting holidays, respecting traditions. Know when to like, if the Muslim world has a Ramadan, it probably won't be nice to invite them to a lunch or something like that. Just like just be mindful of their tradition, be respectful. And I feel like that's how you kind of gain a lot of, credibility, a lot of trust in that country as well, just trying to adapt with them rather than forcing yourself to do stuff that you worked in other countries, worked in other regions.

What.

About change over time? Like, we spend a lot of time on the podcast talking about how, in the UK and the US, there are changes in progress in the way that people respond to different formats. You know, I was speaking yesterday about, you know, web and no one comes to webinars anymore. Everyone listens to podcasts. People do this, you know, in the last three years and they don't do that. Where in the world do you see greatest changes in how businesses are buying or reacting to marketing?

Such an interesting question. I think gated content used to be really huge, like when I was doing marketing at Amazon five years ago, a lot of it was like, oh, let's send them this. Really lame if you think about it now. But there was a lot about like, let's send out PDFs on the best practices and let's put it behind a gated wall and then, you know, we'll get them to sign in and then we'll have a little email base. I'm like, who is who's going to read PDFs? Like nobody has the attention span to read a PDF, right. And so then it became websites and then it became short form content. The one thing that has surprised me is how email is still relevant. Like, I don't know why that is true. I haven't for the life of me, figured that out, but it still is. I don't know how people are managing their inboxes, but emails just continue to be relevant. It's just how do you make them more engaging and you actually get people to read the content. It's not like several rows below the fold that I think keeps innovating. But email is one channel that has stayed consistent. And then gated content and things like that I think have dramatically gotten lesser engagement in favour of things like podcasts and webinars. Absolutely. Is that everywhere or have you seen particular fast change in particular regions?

I think part of it is just in my opinion a bit psychological, like people have just reduced attention spans everywhere now. Right. The prospect of having to go through a gated wall, create a registration and then find this PDF that's probably going to tell me nothing that I don't already know. Right? Like there's not enough of an attention span to sustain that entire frictionless experience. And so how do you deliver value to the reader as quickly as possible so that they get invested in the brand and become part of your consideration set, or that your brand becomes part of the consideration set is kind of the goal, but you can't install too many friction points in this space right now just because. And I don't think this is unique to any country, right. Like attention spans have just gone down for everyone.

I think there's more factors there. The one is attention span, even though I realize that as well. But then I'm questioning myself at the time like, attention back goes down. But then now people are watching podcasts that are like an hour long. But I do think it comes more with, privacy of data. I've seen like, lately in, five years or so, whatever the whole discussion about data protection, data privacy has risen everywhere. We had the GDPR introduced in Europe, we had a lot of, lawsuits in USA with companies leaking data and all of this. So I feel like from my point of view, I think it's more of people are more aware of protecting their data. So it would be from their point, it would be nicer to just see a white paper or listen to a podcast while they run, rather than going to a webinar and having to put all the details in. You know, I think email still survives because people don't really care how many emails or like whatever they get. But if people are very reluctant to give their phone numbers, I feel like that's very personal. You can't. So it is hard to get phone.

Certainly in the UK, I mean, there was very high rates of people working from home, possibly the highest in the world, but you know, very up there anyway and, but definitely wasn't the case in the US. So I wonder if maybe telemarketing has declined less in the US than it has here. And I don't know what the effect has been in in India, for example, South America. And it's certainly, you know, regulations is absolutely geographically, specific. So you've got California and you've got Europe, but, you know, you haven't absolutely haven't seen those sorts of privacy regulations in the rest of the US I think B2B is slightly nuanced, even from like I think Mariana, you mentioned WhatsApp and some countries like. Absolutely. You can actually set up your martech to reach customers through WhatsApp in countries like India and Asia, where there's a concept of super apps and everything happens on these super apps, right? But I think there's little or no regulation that stops, a martech or a B2B company to set it up in such a way that you can get to WhatsApp and you can't you can't definitely do that, in other countries. So I think very valid point, Mariana, on sort of regional appetite to share data be protective of it.

There is this there's Yahoo and Gmail bringing in regulations to limit the volume of emails being sent. And that would be global because Gmail is so pervasive. Not completely global.

We had like, for example, one on this with the Gmail and stuff them introducing, different regulations we did had I've heard from other companies as well, just the fact that they need to avoid some words so they don't be sent to spam. So they did rules instead. So you kind of had to adapt again, try different things, see what works.

One thing I've noticed, and I think it's not specific to the UK, but I think this might be a global I guess. Correct me if you guys disagree, but people are a lot more willing and open to and like enthusiastic about face to face. I feel like we've seen a huge uptake in like face to face events, like the willingness our registration rates, people turning up. I think everyone is so zoom fatigued and we've all been working from home. Everyone's really happy to go out and meet in person. So like, I've noticed is like a much more heavy focus on community marketing. So partnering with local communities or partners in your industry and being able to co-host events or dinners where people can get together in the same room. And I think that kind of helps to compensate for where there is that hesitation. And I completely agree. Aditi what you're saying about not putting things kind of behind gated like almost like a paywall for your content or to access information. It's much more organic. People are much happier than to give you their information because there's I think it's like that really lame people buy from people. I think there's such a bigger focus right now on human connection and how.

Important getting that in return rather than, yeah, just a PDF which you're still lonely after you've read a PDF, but if you can. That's particularly in Europe Anya

I just noticed it since moving to the UK, like how well are like in-person events or our community events are performing and how enthusiastic and like we have feedback from customers and prospects asking, you know, when is the next one? They really enjoy coming to it. Because I do think so much of sales and B2B is relationship driven, and you can't do that behind to a degree. You can't do it the same way behind a computer that you can't in person.

Actually building on your point, Anya because this is absolutely true in this field and space that I work in right now as well. I mean, there's a B2B component as pre-sales going after these accounts and then there's marketing trying to build onto it. So obviously there's the concept of account based marketing then comes into play where you know, you're trying to marry the activities that sales teams are having with these customers, and then trying to retarget and market to the decision makers and the contacts that you've built through these events. So then it becomes a very targeted account based marketing campaign that sustains the engagement you've been able to generate through such events. And that's becoming really important as well.

Are there any other like, regional, techniques that are just working really, really well at the moment in a particular region? Like Anya was talking about the face to face events and the community focused events in the UK. Are there any other parts of the world that are going through some sort of transition or change, which means that this particular marketing technique is working really well.

I'd say it kind of, what Anya said. I think it does ripple through the world. I think it has more to do, in my opinion. What I've seen, I think it has more to do with beginning to the pandemic and everyone having to stay on the laptops, like webinars work because there was no other solution. Like that's what we did was being through the pandemic. What was webinars? And once we came out of that, I feel like people were more inclined to just like come to events. And I see in the Middle East as well. They do come, even though sometimes they have a lot of no show rates, because that's just Middle East. But we do a lot of events, lunch and learns breakfasts like we have. Since I started working for a company, I personally have seen an increase in face to face events because they just work better. And I think people feel more of a commitment to it rather than just a zoom that you can be like, oh, it can't be. I can't be ask. I need to join in five minutes, but I can't be asked actually going out and just socializing. I guess that's one of the main things that just drags people out of the house and just be like, okay, we've stayed enough in the house. Let's go socialize.

I think one other thing that maybe in the big tech world, or for the most part in the tech world, a lot of customers, a lot of brands have started getting on board with the idea of these, this one big summit that they'd have. So it makes they try to create this one moment in time where they load up all of their biggest product releases. They'll try and go out of the bank, they'll create as much PR as possible, and it'll have a ripple effect, from there on. And then you'll see at Adobe, I've seen and to some extent rhymezone as well, you'll try and again create this big moment in time in the region that you're most, heavily present in. So it'll probably be the United States. And then you create a plethora of follow up, smaller scale events in the regions that you have a presence in. And that's how I've seen a lot of tech companies operate to.

Aditi

before you were mentioning ABM and understanding what happens with self-esteem and collecting data to inform marketing team, and working to hear what kind of data you use and why it's so important in driving marketing?

This one is ABM is one of those things where it looks great on a blog post and it looks great in principle. It's just so hard to do. It's just so hard to do because it involves capturing activities that multiple teams are going through. I think this is one of those things where. The ability to set up an adaptable process becomes important, right? Like you can set up a process, but like if everybody doesn't go into Salesforce and feed in the activities that they've done and that doesn't get captured properly and then doesn't go into the scoring to then create a propensity scoring for marketing teams to then go after the right accounts and start targeting them. Like there's so much data that needs to be collected properly, and a process that needs to be easy for people to follow and feed into. That makes ABM very, very complicated. And I think there's a way to go for most brands. I haven't seen too many companies do this super well. Everybody seems to have an intention to do this. But it's just one of those things that will take some time, I think, for companies to get right, including the big ones.

Data collection, do you think is the hardest part of ABM?

I think it's the process, to be honest if you imagine there are so many different people getting in touch with so many different, especially from an enterprise B2B standpoint, there's so many touch points involved, sometimes even within the same company. We don't know who's talking to the customer. They.

Don't always have useful email addresses that end in at ibm.com. They might be speaking with someone on their personal email address or on LinkedIn or.

I feel like that's still solvable, but it depends on the size of the company that you're after. Like if you're after a smaller company, you're probably going after a controllable set of contacts, and that becomes your universe of interactions. And those can very easily feed into a into a propensity score modeling that can then become the basis on which the marketing teams go after these accounts. But in the world that I've operated in these are often massive enterprise companies. We're working across the organization at multiple levels. So for us to capture the interactions, understand and assess their propensity to buy, I put this into a model, frankly, doesn't really happen in the real world or I haven't seen it happen very well. So to answer your question, I think it's the complexity increases with the size of the companies and customers you're going after in the B2B world, and then gathering those signals in a way that you can create a way to actually, make sense of those interactions and then, you know, create a scoring mechanism is probably the easier part of the process once you have those logged in.

On terms of like the processes the thing that takes the most out of it because, for example, we do have a very big account that we had a relationship with for a long time now in Germany, and everything was very nice. We do event with them. We do a whole day with them like it's great and all that. When you get to that point, when you get to like having a whole region of a company doing stuff together. But when it comes to, for example, now one of the marketers is trying to do the same thing in France and like build a relationship with one of the accounts and have all of this. And, she's struggling because there's only like five, six people. The company is huge. But I think that's the point. You got to start from somewhere to end up with, with that much knowledge about the account, so that the process and keeping the consistency and just like being by their side through the whole process, I feel like helps a lot.

I would agree actually I think to build on what Aditi was saying earlier. Like it's almost like when we at the beginning when we were talking about your global campaigns and thinking about how you can make them scalable and repeatable. I think it's very similar with your ABM operations and structure of how you capture information, feed it to sales. I think that's where it can be really tricky to make it a scalable, repeatable motion globally because I think, again, that's where you don't want it to become. You've got inconsistencies. One area doing it one way, one area doing it another. It needs to be something that globally it works. And I agree it's very tough. It's something that we're working on right now in my current role, an ABM like program. And there is so much complexity to it to make sure your tools are talking to each other, your teams are talking to each other and like, yeah, size of business obviously has a really big impact on that. And because if you've got accounts in multiple locations, you want to make sure that you're tracking that properly. So you're measuring not only account engagement but contact engagement. You're talking to the right people. It's a snowball effect. There are so many complexities to it. And I agree, I think it's really, really tough to get it right. And it's sometimes even hard to know where to get started.

Are there differences in the makeup of the buying teams and how you need to manage them as an account in different parts of the world? So are there parts of the world in which actually you don't need to do account based marketing, because there tends to be one person that makes the decisions and it's all about that person. Whereas in other parts of the world it's much more kind of people are making decisions as a group. There's no one person that's leading it. I think there's some cultural nuances to this. To be honest, I think the vast majority of the complexities, in my opinion, come from the size and the scope of the company. So is it one region? Is it many? Is it headquartered somewhere? And buying decision is somewhere? Who's the economic buyer? Who's the user? Who have you been able to build champions with? For a large business, they're likely to have people spread all over the world that are part of the buying team anyway, aren't they.

The few nuances that I've seen, are definitely around how consensus is built. So in American cultures or to some extent in India as well. I think they're slightly more hierarchical, where you do have a sense of like, you know, who your boss is and you know who their boss is. So some decisions are just delegated. And you know, right off the bat that the person you're talking to will have no influence over the buying, over the actual decision. Whereas I've seen as this especially changes in North Europe, particularly Scandinavia, where, you know, there's a lot more consensus needed quite predictably, where, it's not just going to be enough to get to the lead or the head of one group. If they have a stakeholder, you'll have to make sure that you get to the head of the partner and stakeholder teams as well, so that they can come together. And oftentimes the answer is to like probably have a workshop host them in your office someday and make sure that group consensus is created by way of just bringing these people together. And in Europe and in North Europe in particular, I've seen those, collaborative workshop exercises have worked really well too.

Because they all need to be coming to the conclusions together basically. I can imagine how that might slow things down sometimes.

That sounds like a great idea those workshops. Anya and Mariana. Do you have any other best practices, like these kind of workshops to spread and to convince? Different. Decision makers within a company.

I have seen this, trend now with workshops. Like, people are very interested to come and learn stuff and just do it together as well, so. But I would say, take into consideration the people that you're targeting as well. I feel like if you go higher, the hierarchy would be better to like just send a easy to digest assets. Just a leaflet, just a whitepaper, something small. If you target a lower in a hierarchy, there's more technical. Those people like to find out like what is actually doing. So I'd say go with a case studies, go with ebooks, go with more like consistent material that has reports in it and all of this. So I feel like you gotta take into consideration the target they you're going for and just adapt the same messages but just adapt it in a different form because I personally would think that the like a CEO won't have time to read your case study compared to the data engineer. That's waiting and curious about the whole of the data that you have. One thing I've seen is like, I think it's not as popular here. It's more North America is like the idea of surprise and delight. And I think it can be factored into like multiple kind of. Touch points along the buying journey. Even post sales like eGifting, like in Australia, it was used a little bit. But I know in North America it's quite a normal concept of like a gift card, you know, after a meeting, like, you know, get yourself a coffee on us or like a gift basket branded like cupcakes or something. I think that is like North Americans love free stuff. Like, I would personally love that if somebody sent me free cupcakes, but I think it's a little bit more of like there's not as much of an appetite for it I've noticed here. So I think things like that, that's again where there are cultural nuances to this. But here I think it's more of like the workshop visiting somebody in person at their office. I think that's where we're seeing kind of back where I was saying before that human connection, making time to build relationships, that's more valued.

One last thing, if I might add, which we're starting to do more of now, which seems to be helpful is especially with B2B marketing, if you imagine the life cycle or the sales life cycle, it's just getting longer and longer, and I don't know how much content is thrown at the customer across these different touchpoints. One thing that I've started to see is effective is just having a process to bring some of this content into one portal or website that is exclusively open to your big customers, whoever your economic buyer is or your champion is. If you need somebody to know that you've been consistently engaged with them, driving value for them, you kind of bring the content into one place so that whenever they think of you as a brand, they can go back to your website and look at all the content that's been shared with you in the past.

It might be super interesting for champions within a potential buyer to be able to see all the different people within their organization have interacted with your content, what they read when, because often they're doing as much selling as you are. And if this information is useful to us, the vendors, then maybe it's useful to your champions too. I think at least starting with consolidating that content so that we know it's been presented that seems to have worked a little bit.

We are coming.

To an end. And, well, first of all, I want to say thank you so much. It's been a great conversation and I would love to hear from you. What have you learned today? Something new. If you have any thoughts that you want to share, please feel free to share.

I think the idea of just making sure that personal connection is built up. I think it's understated, right? Like B2B marketing is frankly so faceless in the end. It's a PDF or a paper or a website. And I completely agree with Anya's point. We try and engineer a lot of these things, but the reality is really is that people buy from people. And we have to be not just personalised in the way that we create our content and market our content, but in just every interaction that you go that you have with the customer on a face to face level. Needs to be personalised as well, because at the end of the day, B2B marketing doesn't necessarily just happen online. It happens, you know, online and offline in both need to be as personal as possible.

Continuing on that, before I mention a couple of the the things that stood out because it was a very insightful conversation. I'd say I'd give an advice to anyone that tries to go to another region. I'd say to try and hire at least one employee that's from that country, because that's the best way, and quickest way to get the insight and how the culture works and everything. And I feel like it would be a great advantage just having someone that's literally from there that can tell you like, oh, this is not going to work, because this is how we are as people, so there's no point in you even trying. Out of the conversation, I feel like I've, the high things that I've noticed is, why we need to keep a high level branding. You do need to adapt to every country and try not to force any strategies or processes or even messaging channels. They do not work for the same channels, for every country, for every region. So I'd say take your time in getting to know the regions, to know the people, how they function, how they work, how they prefer to be approached. And, one last thing that I'd say it's, quality over quantity of come to see that. We've tried, I've seen companies that put out there so many assets and so many things and just get lost on the website and never used again. I'd say do pay attention a lot of quality over quantity because it's going to save you in the long term.

I agree, Mariana, actually, just building on what you said about, like, making sure you actually have people in that market that are from that market. And I'm saying this, I work in the UK and I'm Canadian, but like the team that I work with is there's it's there's it's diverse. But we have British people who understand the culture, who understand the nuances, the language. I think there's so much opportunity if you're in that kind of regional role where you're looking at how you can localize that content, make it seem authentic and relevant to that area. If you're not an expert in the area, research, talk to people. Talk to your go to market team. Like I think we talked a little bit about this at the beginning. Like talk to your product team. Make sure that you're not only learning, but you're informing and making sure that other people in the business are aware of the importance of localization and making things area specific, and championing that idea of like feedback loops and global to local thinking. I think there is a lot of influence you can have in being the best practice creator, but you have to have that proactivity as well to do it.

I totally agree with everything that you've said and is taking that proactivity into processes. That's something that, I learned today is the importance of having processes to standardize all the activities, the messaging, and transform it and give it back to the brand, finally, to create a stronger brand.

All right, so.

We're coming to an end. Thank you so much