Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How B2B SaaS Companies Should Hire Freelancers, Contractors & Agencies
245 Plays2 years ago
In challenging economic times, marketing budgets are low-hanging fruit when it comes to cost cutting. In the process, many B2B SaaS companies turn to freelancers, contractors and agencies for strategic and tactical support.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Gwen Lafage (who has worked for agencies and as a B2B SaaS marketing leader) talks about how to hire and get value from top-quality suppliers.
We also talk imposter syndrome and how B2B SaaS marketers can be creative to break out of the box.
Recommended
Transcript
Challenges in Marketing Budgets
00:00:08
Speaker
In tough economic times, marketing is an easy target. When it comes to reducing budgets, marketing quickly suffers the consequences. Fewer full-time resources means marketing leaders have to be creative and agile to keep the machine legal. They often turn to agencies and freelancers for strategic and tactical help. Of course, there are pros and cons of using agencies versus doing things in-house.
Agency vs In-House Resources
00:00:33
Speaker
As full-time employees, you have dedicated resources
00:00:36
Speaker
With agencies and freelancers, you have the flexibility and the ability to turn activities on and off. I'm happy to have Gwen Lefage on the podcast to discuss the in-house versus agency slash consultant slash freelancer conundrum. Gwen is the VP of brand and content at Synch, a cloud communications platform. And before joining Synch in 2021, she spent 20 years working in agencies.
Insights from Gwen Lefage
00:01:02
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:01:05
Speaker
Thanks for having me. This is dating me a bit, right? When you said it's been 20 years in agencies. Maybe I should have said that you're an experienced marketing leader. So that was just, that would be a marketer doing marketing for a marketer if you follow my drift here. But I think what I'm getting at is that over the last 20 years in which you've been doing marketing, you've gained a lot of experience and you can't buy experience. You can't buy perspective. You can be super smart. You could go to great schools and take, take amazing courses.
00:01:35
Speaker
But having seen that, done that, sort of experienced a lot of stuff is invaluable. And that's something that I think that we lose sight of from time to time.
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing
00:01:44
Speaker
Great. Because we see a lot of, I guess, posts or like comments on social from people that maybe lack the experience, but have a lot of the beliefs, I guess, or of like sharing some advice. But it's not always based on
00:01:59
Speaker
concrete experience. I see that often with maybe consultant of people in agencies, actually, that maybe have not really been there or done it themselves, which is always quite interesting. Experience definitely helps. It helps in remembering what happened the last time, having been through similar situations before. You talked about some of the difficulties in the market right now, and it's not the first time. If you've been in this space or if you've been doing
00:02:30
Speaker
in business for more than 20 years, you've been there before, right? You know that this kind of tough times happen and sometimes they are a great catalyst for creativity and innovation, right? So I think it's sometime when you have less budget and more constraint that you can actually, well, you are forced to actually think outside of the box because your box got so small that it might be an opportunity sometimes for creativity.
00:03:01
Speaker
Just going back to that experience perspective thing.
Experience and Perspectives in Marketing
00:03:06
Speaker
One of the things that I suffer from, even though I've been in as a marketing slash journalist for more than 20 years to date myself as well, is that sometimes I suffer from imposter syndrome. I'm talking to a client and I say to myself, do I really know what I'm talking about? Do they really believe that I have the expertise? I think I suffer from the fact that I don't recognize the fact that I don't sort of appreciate the fact that I've been there, I've done that.
00:03:28
Speaker
I've seen lots of things go up and down in the business world. What I see is basic advice, marketing 101. For a lot of people, that is tremendous insight. Now, I don't want to overblow my talents or anything like that, but the things that we look at is that's just the thing you do in marketing. People don't know that. A lot of entrepreneurs, for example, don't know that, so they just see it as goals. And I think it's one thing to remember is that
00:03:54
Speaker
we've built up such a database of knowledge that a lot of people just don't have that and that's something that we can share and and that we can take advantage of or people can take advantage of. Yeah no I definitely I totally agree and it's really interesting how the imposter syndrome never goes away right like it's not because you gain more experience that you don't have
00:04:16
Speaker
that syndrome. I have it a lot as well. Maybe every single time I have to press send on LinkedIn or posting something, I'm like, is this actually something that is correct or make me look okay or am I not overthinking things? I think it happened to everyone.
00:04:36
Speaker
It's a very interesting thing that I think from all of my first years in business and for a long time, maybe for the first 10 years, I had this feeling of always being too young or not experienced enough. And that lasted for a really long time until the day I was like, well, not actually I'm the oldest in the
00:04:57
Speaker
you went from being like too young to becoming kind of the oldest in the room in like a couple of years. So that was quite interesting and the experience is definitely there. I think it helps in making decisions faster and sometime in
00:05:15
Speaker
seeing the big picture, right? Like I think that's the thing that maybe comes with experience is kind of seeing the big picture, the forest from the tree, right? Like we said, when you are too maybe inexperienced, sometimes you just focus on smaller details and you have the harder time taking a step back. I think that's something that comes with experience and that is hard to replicate without having worked for like many years.
Shifts in Marketing Strategies
00:05:43
Speaker
And that ties in, I think, to one of the themes of the podcast is taking a look at what is 2023 looks like from a B2B SaaS perspective. You look at the situation in Ukraine, maybe we're on the verge of a global recession, maybe not. Thousands of tech employees are being laid off right now, Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify, Slack. Many of them are marketing people because marketers are, as I said, low hanging fruit.
00:06:14
Speaker
What's your take on how the marketing landscape is going to evolve? Because we're coming off two really good years where we spend a lot of money on marketing to acquire customers and now things seem different. What do you see some of the key things, some of the more, the things good and bad that are going to emerge this year?
00:06:33
Speaker
I think that in a way having too much money, I've made some of the marketers lazy because if the only thing you have to do is just put more money on like a campaign, right? On paid search and paid ad and it's kind of an easy way to grab attention. So I think in a way we'll force different type of creativity to stand out. It's a difficult time, especially seeing all the layoffs.
00:07:03
Speaker
that's tricky and that means that teams will have that stay, right? We'll have to operate with less people, less resources, and they'll have to focus a lot more.
Returning to Basics
00:07:13
Speaker
That means that, that teams are going to be, or marketing teams are going to be forced to really look into what works and don't work for them. So I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all or like all companies should stop event or like all companies should stop like, you know, paid search because it really depends on like,
00:07:33
Speaker
market at the end and what actually worked for them today. But I think the key is looking into the data, looking into what has been working for that company and being more focused. It's a bit as well of going
00:07:48
Speaker
back to basics, I feel like there's a lot of tricks and hacks in marketing that people claim or say, by doing this, you're going to get so much more traffic and this and that. And I feel like a lot of companies maybe have been doing that and getting into that doing-doing wheel without having set some of the foundations. Of course, I come from a brand background. So for me, foundation starts with brand and establishing some of the
00:08:18
Speaker
the brand foundation in terms of visual identity, but mostly in terms of positioning and messaging. What is the message you want to convey? That has nothing to do with how much money you put on paid ads. But if you have the right message on those ads, they should be performing better. I think a bit of going back to basics, making sure that you understand
00:08:44
Speaker
Your audience is and that you have the right brand foundation. I think is probably. What a lot of marketing team are going through right now.
00:08:54
Speaker
A lot of places we can go from here. One of them that I wanted to focus on is positioning because I spent a lot of time doing positioning work for B2B SaaS companies.
Importance of Strong Positioning
00:09:05
Speaker
And sometimes I feel like I'm donkey hoity, sort of tilting up windmills. I'm advocating for positioning. No one believes me or no one thinks that it's a need to have. Maybe it's a nice to have. What I'm sensing, and I'm glad you mentioned it, is a return to fundamentals. And a lot of companies looking at their positioning and asking themselves,
00:09:24
Speaker
Do we stand out? Are we differentiated? Are we better than competitors? And when times get tough, if you haven't got that, if you haven't got that core piece in place, it's really hard for your marketing and sales to succeed because you're just like everybody else using the exact same channels as everybody else.
00:09:44
Speaker
Exactly. I think it's like it means that right now you can't just see a problem and throw money at it, right? So you just have to be a bit more, a bit clever, I guess, on how you approach it. And yes, the positioning and the foundational work of marketing needs to happen, I think, now. And that combined with an analysis of what's been
00:10:13
Speaker
working, so I will say a lot of data analysis, but also probably a better understanding of target audiences and focusing efforts because in a time right now, you can't be anything to everyone, right? Or everything to everyone, you have to really pick your battles. And in order to do that, you need to know which battle to pick, right?
00:10:38
Speaker
So I think that's the tricky part. And I think from where I stand right now, even at Tinch, that this is kind of like the moment we are into. I think we've done a lot of work last year on positioning, on umbrella positioning, because we are a kind of newer, a new company in the sense that we've grown a lot and acquire a lot of companies. So we had to redefine what is the new story.
00:11:02
Speaker
So we've done a lot of that work. And now it's about when you're such a large company, you have so many target audiences, so many things that you could do or say that the tough part is to decide which one to focus on, right? Which one will have the biggest business impact because you can't do them all. And I think that marketing
00:11:24
Speaker
We'll have to learn to say no more often. And I say this for myself as well. I'm not the best at this, right? Like I'm a crowd pleaser, right? The thing when you come from agency and have clients your life, you have that mindset of like serving people. But I think marketing will have to say, no, we said our focus is X. Like we're not going to do this this time because we cannot do it all. And that's really hard because there's a lot of requests and expectation for marketing.
00:11:54
Speaker
from the whole organization and you got to let some people down. On my last podcast, I interviewed Andrew Orocha. He's the chief revenue officer for Drift. And not surprisingly, he leaned
Balancing Creativity and Revenue
00:12:10
Speaker
into revenue growth and optimizing marketing as a key theme. So the idea was less is more, more discipline, more structure, more focus.
00:12:20
Speaker
and everything has to drive revenue growth. Yes, that's a valid argument and it will be part of a business mix, but I also think that creativity is also important and you can't back away from creativity even when times get tough, when you're trying to tighten your purse string. Can you talk about the need for creativity in B2B, what it means to be creative and how creativity is changing a very high level
00:12:49
Speaker
esoteric question because creativity is adding everything, especially in a creative economy. What is the importance of creativity and how do companies make sure that they're balancing revenue growth with the creative side of marketing? I think like, I guess I'll start with saying that I think there is a risk in seeing marketing at just a revenue channel.
00:13:16
Speaker
It is true and especially in self-serve model, right? Like when you do digital marketing, it's a pure acquisition model in campaigns. But I think marketing is bigger than that. And we were talking about some of those foundations and they are driven by like marketing team in the strategic side and understanding customers and
00:13:38
Speaker
establishing those stories and you can't really put like a revenue number on that. And the risk was also this kind of revenue approach, which I see a lot, right? It's like everyone in marketing needs to kind of own a revenue number. And I kind of get that, but at the same time, I think it misses the point on some of the fundamentals of marketing. I think marketing is bigger than that. And when you look at
00:14:03
Speaker
brand and creativity. Again, I think you have to think long-term and those kind of revenue metrics are short-term. They're like performance-based and immediate-based, right? Like you have to see the numbers now. But with what we do, you have this long-term effect and whatever you're doing today might not
00:14:27
Speaker
really have like an effect today, but it might next year. So I think if you put that on the side, you will not kind of like achieve the same time of growth, I think. So just to go back to creativity, I think it's a way to stand out and think outside of the box. It can take a lot of shape or form. I think there is a bit of misconception that creativity is
00:14:52
Speaker
those kind of big creative ad campaign that come from consumer world and you need a TV ad, right? Like a highly produced video. Uh, and that's what you call creativity, but I don't think it is, especially with the emergence of social and like the time that people spend on social and, and especially in B2B, especially if you are like targeting marketing and sales, right? They all on LinkedIn all day.
00:15:18
Speaker
I think there's a lot of creativity there that I think is kind of new that we didn't see before. I think there's a lot of ways to
00:15:30
Speaker
be creative when you reach someone's inbox, right? That's creativity. Like I receive sometimes messaging from SDR that are a poem or they sing me a song and I'm like, okay, that's cool. That stuck my attention, right? Like, um, and it's the same on social, right? You will see like a rap song and like people doing like good video when they share their learnings. And to me that belongs to like the,
00:15:55
Speaker
Creativity bucket it's about trying to not do exactly what everyone else is doing doesn't have to be The beautiful ad campaign which of course I love but you need budget for that so as of creative obviously I agree with everything you say about the value of creativity, but In an economic environment where a lot of CEOs and a lot of entrepreneurs are demanding leads and more leads and there's a sense of desperation out there and they're saying
00:16:24
Speaker
If we spend X, I expect Y. So if I'm going to spend, put my budget against advertising or search engine marketing, I want to get a two times return or a three times return. And as a marketer, how do you sell creativity within that context?
Delivering Immediate Results
00:16:40
Speaker
How do you say to the CEO, I want to do something interesting. I want to build something for the longterm that builds brand awareness and differentiates us from competitors who are just doing vanilla marketing.
00:16:52
Speaker
What approaches would you take as a marketing leader to get a CEO on side? It's a really interesting question and it's a difficult one. I think what's sure is that you need to take the bucks on delivering those leads before you can try to sell the bigger ideas. Because if you don't, for sure you will fail, right? Like for sure, like you're staying the company not long enough.
00:17:19
Speaker
for your activity to actually show results and they're not going to keep you right. And I think that you see that sometimes with CMO.
00:17:26
Speaker
I think very short turner, right? I can company them. They come in, change everything. Let's change the website. Let's rebrand. Let's put a new paint on the side and on the brand. And then they're gone, right? Because I think if you start that way and spend too much time doing that, you will never really get those results. So I think you need to do both. You need to first approach the tactical thing that will deliver results today.
00:17:55
Speaker
You need to have a focus on that so that you can show results, so that your CEO can trust you to do other, right? So you could probably going to have to deal with your boss or your CEO. I'm like, okay, I'm going to deliver you on this. You leave me this to kind of explore, experiment for big ideas and creativity. And I do cool stuff with that. And I would like, I want that program to not be measured in the same way because
00:18:22
Speaker
it won't be the same direct response to it. So I think it's probably a bit of a trade, but I think it's hard to just come in and do your job and just say, let's just be creative and do all this cool stuff if you can't really show any results straight away, especially right now in B2B, right? You do need to show those results. I see that firsthand with clients because I lean into the brand creative side of the house, positioning, messaging, content marketing,
00:18:53
Speaker
putting together strategic plans. And my forte is marketing foundations and setting a company up for the long term. But what I'm finding with clients these days is they want leads. And so I need to produce, help them produce leads right away. Once they see lead, then they'll let me do what I want. They'll do the positioning work. They'll build out the strategic approach because there's a sense of relief that marketing is doing what it's supposed to do. And in their,
00:19:22
Speaker
View the world it's generate leads it's a nice segue into how do you think.
Efficient Resource Scaling
00:19:29
Speaker
Brand should approach using agencies freelancers and consultants at a time when marketing budgets are being cut back so they have to be agile they have to be creative they have to think of cost effective ways of getting the work done.
00:19:44
Speaker
Where do they start if they've been leaning into in-house resources on a regular basis? And now the landscape changed and they've got a small team and they need to figure out a new way of operating. What would you advise a CMO or CEO who needs to leverage third party resources more than ever?
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's an interesting situation because in a way it is more expensive in some ways to hire external resources than having them in-house in a lot of cases. So I think it's a mistake to let go of all the designers or creative resources in-house. I believe that you need some in-house. I see the role of agencies as being a true collaboration or an extension of an in-house team.
00:20:35
Speaker
Like you said, I've been on the agency side for a really long time with some client that we spent years working with and as an extension to their team. And I think that kind of model works really well if you become so close to them that it's almost like you're in house. And since we have like an external, a small external studio that we work with day in, day out, right? Like they've been there for, for a really long time and they help scale the output. I think like the,
00:21:04
Speaker
the day to day. So I think that's one way for our agency, I think is to scale the work, being able to deliver more, right? And in that sense, you can externalize to potentially cheaper resources. We're in a global economy, right? So there's also great designers in a lot of different places where that could be a good good way to not spend as much but use great creative resources in other places of the world, like not
00:21:30
Speaker
especially in the US, but you can go to cheaper markets, right? But I also see the value in really creative agencies that you will bring in to bring that extra creativity. So I think there's, to me, two different type of agencies and two different ways to work with agency. One is to scale, like just the outcomes. And one is to sink out the box on kind of more
00:21:58
Speaker
bigger campaign or a specific piece of content or a piece of video that you really care about. Video is a really great one because it's really hard to have in-house video resources because you might not need them all the time, although you can argue now that you need them more and more and that you should get like video in-house. But I think for big creative or video production or animation, then it makes sense to go to external agencies. But I think
00:22:27
Speaker
Either way, what's important is to work with agencies as collaborators, right?
Collaborating with Agencies
00:22:35
Speaker
Like as not like, I'm your client, here's what you need to do, but more you're hiring them for the expertise. So trust that they will give that expertise and help you, right? I feel like sometimes you see that with clients and having been on the agency side, I've been that agency where clients just hire you and then just tell you exactly what to do. And then you're like,
00:22:57
Speaker
Why did you hire me if you don't listen to my advice? So I think it's listening to the advice and let them do what they're good at, right? Which is those cool creative ideas are sometimes a lot harder to do when you're in-house because you're so embedded into the day-to-day and the politics that you can't really think a bit wider. Agencies also have like the benefit that they work on a lot of clients. So they have a big more
00:23:27
Speaker
of an opening on what's happening in the rest of the world, right? So they can't, you can benefit from that, I think, as a company. So I like both. I like having an in-house team, but being able to work with freelancers or agencies when needed on specific projects.
Building Agency Relationships
00:23:46
Speaker
Given your experience working for agencies and now working in-house, here's a two-sided question.
00:23:53
Speaker
What are the keys to getting good work and value from agencies or consultants? And on the flip side, how can agencies and consultants show their value to clients as soon as possible? So I think one thing to get the maximum of the agency, I think is be grateful. I feel like it's a weird thing to say, but I feel like when I was on the agency side,
00:24:22
Speaker
we will categorize some of our clients on like these, the work might not be the most interesting, but they are the loveliest to work with, right? Like they are the best team and they love us. And every time we do something, they say, thank you.
00:24:35
Speaker
And then these ones, like, okay, maybe the money is good, but they never say thank you. It's always last minutes. Um, you know, they treat us really bad. When that happened, you don't give your best work because you're like, well, what does it matter? Right. They're not going to have, uh, get, they're not going to like it either way. Right. So I think being able to collaborate with the agency and sharing what you, the expectation, but let them do what they good at and.
00:25:05
Speaker
treat them well, right? I feel like it seems obvious, but it's because I've seen so many clients treating agencies so badly that I think it's really important you'll get a lot more things done and they'd be a lot nicer to you if you do, right? If you treat them more than just a supplier, I think. So that's the first part of the question. And then what was the second part again? Sorry. The second part was how external agencies and consultants can show their value to clients ASAP.
00:25:33
Speaker
In my business, what I found is I look for quick wins. Website copy that can be fixed, CTAs that can be improved, a key piece of collateral that they don't have. To me, that's gold because it shows the client that I'm being proactive and I want to deliver value as soon as possible. So what's your take in terms of how agencies and consultants can do that kind of thing, can show the value that they're bringing to the table?
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that you're right. Like some small tactical wins is a great way to approach it. Where agencies sometimes fail is the two months of like, we need to analyze your business from, you know, floor to ceiling. And we're going to spend two months doing that and interviewing everybody in the company. And then we're going to produce this beautiful deck that no one cares about.
00:26:22
Speaker
So I think like that to me is like not the right approach. Of course, you need to understand your clients and you need to do some research. But I think if you can do that while showing some quick wins, there's a higher chance that the collaboration is going to get longer, right? Because if it comes, if it gets too long to get to actual deliverables,
00:26:43
Speaker
the clients won't have the patience for that, right? Like, I mean, we've had experience like when I joined, we started working with this agency, a content agency, and it took months before anything came out. And when it came out, it was like, well, okay, great, I have an infographic, but then what have we done for the past two months, right? Like, I think it's, you really need to like, especially when you work with fast-paced SaaS companies or tech companies, right?
00:27:12
Speaker
Things move fast. You need to show your value straight away. The other angle.
00:27:19
Speaker
is how do you identify good third party talent? There are so many options out there, so many marketing agencies and consultants that are good marketers. So they'll position themselves as shiny and sexy and irresistible and they've got these amazing track records and they do this amazing work. It's easy to get seduced by an agency that looks good and talks the talk because if you're a marketing agency, you can't do good marketing. Well, that's a problem.
00:27:47
Speaker
So if you're a CMO or a CEO, and you're looking for a marketing partner, what are some of the rules of thumb that you should follow in terms of sorting the good ones from the bad ones and making sure that you're making the right decision? That's a good question. And it's interesting. It's a bit the same when you hire people, right? You don't know until you actually start working with them. The benefit when you work with agency that you can
00:28:13
Speaker
Start working with them if it doesn't work. You can stop it when you hire someone. You kind of want to like keep them in, right? It's tough. It's like, it's hard with just a few discussions to assess. I hate agency pitches where you get an agency to like do this whole pitch and do all this work before you even start working with them. Because I've been on that side and it's like a killer for agencies, right? Like.
00:28:40
Speaker
And that's the norm in consumer agencies, right? And it also happened in B2B now. I think that's not the right approach. I personally
00:28:51
Speaker
definitely focus on track records and some of the other campaigns or work that they've done in the past, who they worked with in the past, showing out like case studies, just like you would do for like buying a software, right? Like what, what kind of customer stories do they have? What kind of other campaign that they've done that, that you see were, were good. And I care a lot about the people. So I think when, when you work with an agency, you work with a set of people.
00:29:20
Speaker
And the relationship and the people you work with is as important at the agency itself. And I think that personally, for me, I think that's why I have now a tendency to favor smaller agencies and freelancers rather than large shops, because the people that sell to you in the large company or agency, they're not the people that are going to actually work on your account. And in my career, I've done both. I've worked with inside like large
00:29:47
Speaker
agency, creative agency, and then smaller ones. And I think the work you do, the relationship you build with small agencies is stronger. And to me, that's what matters, right? It's like discuss or talk to the people you're actually going to work with, the people that are actually going to do the work on your account to see if they are what you think they are and not just what's written on the agency website.
00:30:17
Speaker
Well, we've covered a lot of ground in 34 minutes and 55 seconds, ranging from imposter syndrome to the B2B SaaS landscape to working with agencies, consultants, and freelancers. So thank you for all this great information. I think it's really valuable to marketing leaders who are trying to navigate very choppy waters. Anything they can do to help them make the right strategic and tactical decisions is very, very good advice.
00:30:44
Speaker
Final question is, where can people learn more about you and Cinch? I spend some time on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me there. I'm pretty easy to find, I think. And then on Cinch, of course, on our website, on our YouTube channel, there's a whole bunch of videos. Feel free to ask me as well any question about Cinch if you reach out. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
00:31:12
Speaker
and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and positioning and messaging development, email mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you later.