Navigating the Landscape of B2B Marketing

Chandan Mishra

The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific.

Seth Godin

Introduction

Atlassian, a software company known for its project management and collaboration tools, started in 2002 as a two-man operation in a Sydney garage. With no sales team or marketing budget, the founders bootstrapped their growth by focusing on building a product developers truly loved. They actively engaged with their user community, incorporating feedback and fostering a sense of loyalty.

Their first major sales success came through a unique approach. Instead of cold calling, they offered free software licenses to universities, hoping students would adopt it and later advocate for its use in their future workplaces. This grassroots strategy led to organic adoption by major companies like NASA and Boeing, putting Atlassian on the map.

As they scaled, they continued to prioritize user experience and community engagement. They hosted user conferences, provided exceptional customer support, and created a culture of transparency and openness. This built trust and loyalty, leading to strong word-of-mouth marketing and organic sales growth.

By 2015, Atlassian had grown into a multi-billion dollar company, eventually IPOing in 2017. Their success story highlights the power of building a great product, fostering a passionate community, and prioritizing customer experience, all of which contributed significantly to their impressive sales growth

Atlassian, Is superb example of marketing well done and eventually reaching big companies/clients with word of mouth and building awareness which leads to adoption. But that’s not how it used to work when it comes to selling from big companies to clients as big companies.

Years back when I started my career in 2002 with a Telecom company my job was to sell enterprise solutions and my TG was usually the CEO, the CTO and similar people.

I used to work with my sales team who had relationships with the people in companies. Every day I will Hop on to car of one of the sales colleagues and we will drive to one or two companies for product demo and interactions.

Getting appointments was easy, meeting people was fun and interactions were great fun. When we had partners like Microsoft or Nokia the representation was even better, there were joint presentations, joint sales and interactions.  Though it took time but it was easy to ring people up, Telemarketing wasn’t a mess then and people took calls.

After a few years I joined a IT company where the core was selling IT services for Big projects, sometimes it was acting like a system integrator which will bring people and systems together for the best solutions for the client. Things were changing slightly, but not so much. The deal size was various sizes but the sales still needed people to meet up and interact with each other.

During the sales process, you could bring in partners as well, who will bring their heavy weight as well to influence the deal. Lunch meetings would happen and some regional head would fly for the final presentation with the client. This was the story with everyone around.

However, A few things were changing, there is lot of information which begin coming on the internet. The technology teams started putting all the information on the web. Now everyone  could set up their own requirements, check the possible pricing, see the possible stack of systems, configurations, hosting and so on. This was cloud computing which was knocking our doors and giving rise to something called self-serve.

There is another behemoth which was moving without much interference and this was SAAS, Software as a service. SAAS was set to democratise the software buying and it did. Now there were comparisons, choices, user based licenses, begin the day you want and no need to set up your own infra for any software requirements or needs you have.

Unless your company is on big legacy systems, Retail, Big bank, stock markets, government, you could no longer give an excuse of being a fence sitter. Today If one wants, one could begin and change all the IT software infra in matter of weeks if not days.

Today if software selling is digital and the company gets convenience to reach a large set of users in no time, you can’t complain when the buying process also is turning Digital. Now the challenge is different with selling and buying teams. There are so many players and how to choose the best possible solution. The Selling team would convince with various means and buying teams would decide by the experience.

B2B Marketing/sales is now digital and would lean towards Buying experience that a B2C product provides. Think how one checks a new product on Amazon. People would look at images, Videos are better, Pricing, Ratings, reviews, Social proof of number of people happy with the product, Competition and so on.

Now apply the same logic and experience for the B2B product in 2024. All of the sudden you may need all product specs, architecture, use cases, Demos, videos, Reviews and Ratings, Pricing, fastest delivery, Colour options (Read Personalisation), Tech specs, look and feel and so on.

Look at snowflake Story, a testament to the power of innovation and unwavering customer focus. They did exactly what a customer needed and boom today they are a force to recon with.

In the bustling realm of Silicon Valley, where innovation often thrives on disruption, Snowflake's tale stands as a testament to audacity and a sprinkle of data magic. Born in 2012, it wasn't just another data warehouse; it was a cloud-native revolution, a snowflake in a blizzard of established giants.

Their journey began with a bold vision: to break the shackles of traditional data warehouses, notorious for their limitations and