Harry Davies: The Installed Team

In B2B software as a service, buyers come into market every five to eight years and we cannot control when. If we do no marketing while they are out of market, then when they arrive we have to outspend competitors to win them. If they come into market thinking of us first, it is easier and cheaper to convert them. So my argument for more brand marketing is to reach those not in market buyers at their category entry point, when they start thinking about finance, with a consistent message about their pain points, so that when they do come in, randomly, we are first on the shortlist.

We enabled sales development reps with AI tools, which overnight saved a day a week each on research and turning call transcripts into handover documents. Then I listened to their calls. On one, the prospect asked the rep if she had left catering manufacture to join Sage. She never had, but the prospecting agent had briefed her so well on the industry that he assumed she must have worked in it. That is when I thought we should not be thinking about cutting costs, we should be thinking about driving more effective marketing with these tools, and cutting costs. You can keep quality very high while decoupling revenue growth from headcount growth.

Many B2B companies could install marketing rather than hire a team. Give an LLM your product release documents and prospect information, and it will do a better job than unqualified marketers at building value propositions, defining the ideal customer profile and choosing channels, then automate it. In FMCG, where products are near identical, you still need human creativity to differentiate. In much of B2B, especially early stage, you can automate almost all of it, and at a better than average level.

There is, but I am not sure the industry is not already doing that. I watched a brand marketer at a conference say all the right things about distinctive assets and repetition, then show a video, and I thought, I could just change the logo on that and nobody would know. Lots of people have read the Ehrenberg-Bass work and understand distinctiveness, but delivering it is really hard, partly because everyone has an opinion and distinctive assets often turn people off precisely because they do not look like the category, which is the point. AI risks being a bit bland, but it is not replacing some world where every B2B brand is already vividly distinctive.

Definitely. I like the Winning by Design bow tie: a funnel from brand awareness to the mutual commit, then retention and expansion on the right, delivering recurring impact. People get that from a sales and customer success angle, but marketing has a role across the whole thing. Keep marketing through the pipeline and you accelerate it and defend against competitors, keep marketing to existing customers and you keep driving value. Most B2B businesses treat marketing as the acquisition engine, not the recurring revenue engine, and I hope that changes.