If you’re a B2B marketer trying to cut through the noise, this peek into PathFactory’s value-first approach is a must-read.
I sat down with Pete Lorenco, VP of Marketing at PathFactory to get a behind-the-scenes look at how his small and creatively driven marketing team actually gets customers.
We’ve all heard the ‘turn your marketing team into a media company’ bit, and while PathFactory fits right in with multiple content streams, they’re taking a different approach–Quality over quantity, where value is everything.
I can’t wait for you to apply these insights to your own company.
What you’ll read here are words. Some Pete’s. Some mine.
— Brendan
Below, we’ll explore:
- How creativity enables brands to win.
- How building relationships now can pay dividends later.
- Why you should treat display ads like a billboard where the value is in the ad, not a click.
1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?
I don’t think planning marketing is a hard fast rule, so it evolves with every role. And the model I’m going to describe works for me with a small team.
The way I approach it is in a few buckets:
- Business goals and requirements → which help me understand what the near-term expectations are, and helps us to comfortably allocate budget for longer-term plays.
- Budgeting → When I build a budget, I work with finance to build an annual skeleton plan that mixes brand, tech, and program spend against goals. From here, I closely manage against a 6-month budget aligned to prioritized buckets – like brand spend and ad spend. I like to stick to 6 months, so I don’t make bets and then 3 months in, crippled our team because priorities shifted and budget needs to adjust.
- Deliverables in 3-month sprints → These are adjusted sometimes monthly and always quarterly. I like to work in sprints focused on key priorities. Get those done, and move on. I try to keep a 6-month view of the key bets we’re making and then focus the team in that quarter, month, and week on executing based on what needs to get done.
Once I have these buckets mapped out, I’ll sit down with the team and say, “Here’s where I believe the priority should be, do we agree, or what should we adjust/change?” Once aligned, we move on to the next steps.
We then set a percentage of our efforts directly to pipeline, and a percentage on bets and experiments (usually at least 10%), to ensure we’re always trying new things and trying to push the envelope.
At the end of each quarter, I do a little self-exercise where I look back and pick out the top one or two things that were the most creative.
In my mind, if you’re not doing things that are creative or unique, especially in today’s day and age where messages and channels are so heavily saturated, you’re likely going to struggle.
I don’t care how good the marketer is or how good their execution is, I think we’re all going to struggle.
So that’s the other thing I think about when it comes to planning – I’m not perfect at this yet. I’m not sure anyone is. So in trying to create the perfect science, I create a brainstorming doc with the team.
Just a place for us to put ideas down, review them, agree on the ideas we like best, and then try to implement them as experiments.
Again, not a perfect science, but the idea is how do we force ourselves to become more creative?
The creativity is what I believe enables brands to win.
2. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?
This depends on how seasoned the team is.
If I have a really skilled team that’s been working together for a long time, that’s when I can step back and let the team drive more of the strategy and plan. My job then is to apply the guardrails and remove barriers
In this role, I need to help drive the plan, support execution, and provide those guardrails. So it’s my job to provide a starting point that the team can build upon, which goes back to the buckets. Once the priorities are in place, we execute.
Once we align on the buckets, then I’m the type of leader who likes to step aside and let them run.
I hate meetings. I try hard to limit meetings. I do meet with my team one-on-one, where my direct reports can talk about what they think is working and what’s not, and how I can support them. We do these every week.
Otherwise, I try to limit meetings by providing business updates via Slack or videos to the team.
When we do have team meetings, its typically for alignment on a project or to problem solve.
3. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?
We have 4 people on our marketing team right now.
I have one person leading our demand generation efforts. This individual is focused on how we distribute our content, offers, and messaging to our target audience, at the right time, via the right mix of channels..
To support our demand team, we’re working with external resources like Tim Davidson on our LinkedIn strategy, figuring out how we drive better website conversions, and how we effectively distribute content, etc. In addition, we have a content marketing resource. Content is critical to our marketing engine. We also have a customer marketing resource for supporting customer advocacy, retention, and product adoption.
And rounding out the team, we have a creative resource that helps us manage the look and feel of the brand, design, and creative support. As an extension of my team are BDRs and revenue operations, which support my team in areas like reporting and technology management & optimization.
We don’t have a stand-alone ABM team. To me, ABM is a sales & marketing alignment approach focused on ensuring we’re targeting the right audience. And then mapping out the mix of strategies, messaging, content, and offers we’ll use to reach this audience. It’s marketing. And for us, we align against plays, which aligns our teams and the audiences we want to go after. And we then build the plan and execute. So an ABM approach is built within the plays we design and execute but without a dedicated team.
4. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?
First, I would estimate I spend about 30% of my time on recruiting. My goal is to build a list of target people I’d like to work with.
Maybe there’s someone who I don’t know, who seems really cool, has great ideas, makes great posts, has a cool resume… Let me just start reaching out now. I might not ever have a role for them now, but I’m building that relationship for when the time comes.
Am I great at this? No. I could still probably be 100x better, but I can tell you, my career has done exponentially better since I’ve committed to it.
As for talent management, we’ve all had managers we love and managers we hate, right?
I try to be a manager I’d love to work for.
For some reason, I believe we often treat people like they’re children. We’re all adults here, so I like to treat people like they are.
As a leader, I do that by:
- Helping the team prioritize to avoid overworking and burning out
- Reducing obstacles and barriers that prevent the team from executing
- Being transparent, giving direct and honest feedback, and allowing them to give feedback right back
What I have found is by just treating people like adults and treating them with respect and with those principles in mind, it has served me well.
I also have a personal coach I work with to check me on the areas I need to improve, like my tendency to just blast my thoughts instead of presenting them better the first time. And being mindful about not just what I say, but how I say it. This is an area I’m constantly trying to improve on.
And ultimately, I want this or any role to be a resume builder for all of us.
I think we’re afraid to say that publicly, for some weird reason, but it’s not like I’ve ever gone to a job assuming it’s going to be my last job.
So, I really do try to present people with roles that are big, stretched for them, that can be resume-building for them, and selfishly for me. And the way you achieve that is by injecting creativity into your work, by being brash at times, being quick to evaluate, but then being open to feedback, good or bad.
I’ve always tried to make sure my team knows I will jump on the sword at any time for them. My job is to say when things fail, it starts with me.
5. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?
Lately, our focus has been answering, “How do we have 2-3 content streams fueling our engine and running at the same time?”
For us, one is LinkedIn, but it’s not necessarily a volume goal. Some people focus a lot on posting 3-5x a week and pumping content out there, but our focus is more on whether we have something valuable to share.
Could I make the argument that we should be posting more? Sure, I could argue that, but what I really want is when people see a post from PathFactory, they’re going to be more likely to engage with it because they’ve come to trust that the context of it is valuable.
We’re also testing a new bi-weekly live event content stream with a more regular cadence for our audience to be able to expect from us. By offering that additional content stream, we’re providing another way for people to get value while also being a feeder for everything we’re doing.
A lot of people talk about turning your marketing into a media company and PathFactory is approaching that, but in a different way.
For example, we’re not creating a podcast and just mega-phoning it all day, which quite frankly, just annoys people.
I want to inspire, educate, and entertain with everything we do. I’m just trying to discover and test different streams to do that, and let the audience tell me what works, what they enjoy, and what they want more of.
At its core, that *is* a marketing plan.
6. What were the best performing channels for you? Did that change over time?
Our budget and a lot of our pipeline the past two years were heavily skewed towards webinars, physical events, and what I would just call traditional lead gen activities.
Today, we’re most focused on LinkedIn – from a past and organic perspective – as our primary content distribution channel given our target audience (B2B marketers). We’re also prioritizing partner plays, as well as, virtual & physical events – but reimagining how we show up there (which may mean not having a physical booth). And we’re going to be exploring influencers and communities more.
And no matter the channel, we’re constantly exploring ways to drive better results or deliver a better experience.
For example, we did a webinar with Nvidia, a customer of ours. The goal was to reimagine our approach to webinars.
The value is bringing on a brand or logo that’s had an experience with us that’s unique and different, and that’s willing to talk through the pros and cons of what they’ve experienced, and how they’re driving results. Think of it like providing a playbook for others.
And it’s the type of thing where you’re going to leave the webinar saying, “shit, if Nvidia is doing this and having success, odds are we could have similar success.”
The tactic I have a love/hate with is display ads. I think they can have their place, but I think they’re often goaled wrong. I think display ads should be treated like LinkedIn posts or even like a billboard where the value is in the ad, and getting value from the ad itself, without a click. Besides, when’s the last time you clicked on a display ad on a 3rd party site…no seriously?
But that’s also me saying “How do I reimagine this channel?” instead of “This channel is stupid.”
I used to work at a restaurant for my dad. We closed at 9pm, but if people walked in my dad would always serve them. At the time, this pissed me off, but looking back the goal of a restaurant is to give people memorable experiences so that they’ll come back.
In B2B, we sometimes lose sight of that. We treat people as a transaction.
My goal with our team is to deliver memorable experiences so they come back.
7. What other questions do executives ask each other that often aren’t shared publicly?
I don’t know if I’m a good person to answer this, because the truth is, I’m so much of an open book that I don’t really hide anything.
I think my answer to your question is, I don’t act any different as an executive as I did when I wasn’t an executive.
My focus now is how to be transparent with my team in the good and bad. I think where people get it wrong is they’ll hide the fact that things aren’t going well, or they’ll hide that we’re missing targets, or they’ll hide cultural differences. But I’m going to tackle it openly.
My vision as an executive is to try to manage, lead, and learn in public.
How to use this info:
1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how PathFactory actually gets customers, and there are a few things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?” Then send her this link.
2. Meeting with your boss: “We’ve toyed around with the idea of becoming a media company for a while now, but I think I have something even better. I just got a behind-the-scenes look at PathFactory’s value-based content streams helping make PathFactory a household name. Think we can do the same? This might be worth bookmarking.
3. Linkedin Post: B2B companies have lost sight of the human aspect in marketing.
Pete from PathFactory thinks the key to success in today’s oversaturated landscape is to create memorable experiences, and I couldn’t agree more.
Check out this deep dive into how his team brings value to everything they do (and don’t forget to follow Pete).
Thanks for reading!
This is the 15th of a long series.
If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.
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