22 reasons you know you work in B2B marketing
B2B marketing - it’s not for everyone.
But you love it, we love it, and this is why.
We put heads together at Earnest and decided to settle this once and for all.
If for any reason you weren’t sure, here are the tell-tale signs. You know you work in B2B marketing…
1. When your Mum has no idea who any of your clients are – despite all of them being bigger than the company that makes her favourite brand of toilet cleaner
2. When the most talked about campaign in your industry features a washed up actor balancing on two trucks
3. When you’ve convinced yourself that being given a multi-million pound campaign budget to play with would be frivolous
4. When your first question is always ‘what’s the business model’ regardless of context
5. When you go to a conference and a 50-something man in a nylon suit and bad tie encourages you to ‘be the change’ while showing you a picture of Mahatma Gandhi
6. When you spend 8 hours in a workshop with a bunch of finance directors and find them inspirational
7. When you learn to respect sales people
8. When you count a highly successful campaign as generating 16 leads (okay, it did bring in £32m)
9. When you get home and your partner has given up asking ‘what did you do today?’
10. When you feel comfortable using the word ‘webinar’ in general public
11. When your extensive customer insights sometimes have to come from 2 hours of Googling (shhh, that’s a secret)
Go on, admit it, you’ve convinced yourself that being given a million pound budget to play with would be frivolous.
12. When there’s a category in your industry awards entitled ‘Best integration of sales and marketing’ that you’d actually like to win
13. When ‘business travel’ means Welwyn Garden City rather than New York City
14. When your client’s buying cycle is so long that their CMO will have moved jobs three times before any of the leads you’ve generated for them convert into sales
15. When you’ve been told to tone down the ad creative because it stands out too much
16. When you hear the name Oracle and don’t think of Teletext, you’ve forgotten HP is a brand of brown sauce and SAP no longer drips from trees
17. When you invented content marketing – and it’s good to see those ne’er-do-wells in B2C playing catch up
18. When you’ve published more white papers on behalf of your clients than the UK government churns out every year
19. When Google thinks you’re a marketing automation-loving pharmacist with an interest in data centre consolidation, Dutch air cargo logistics and OTC derivatives trading
20. When a client will ask you to get creative with their sales deck without any hint of irony
21. When you blow the equivalent of the campaign budget on the round of drinks to celebrate winning the business
22. When you’ve described yourself, on more than one occasion, as the “Don Draper of HR software”
B2B-ers, over to you… we’d love to hear yours.
