Mathew Sweezey can see the future of B2B marketing.
Mathew Sweezey is the Principal of Marketing Insights at the industry-leading CRM platform, Salesforce. This role puts Mathew and his team in charge of speaking, thought leadership, and marketing research. Basically, he and his team are in the perfect position to see into the future of account-based and B2B marketing. In addition to his work at Salesforce, he’s the author of the 2014 book Marketing Automation for Dummies as well as numerous articles about B2B marketing. With account-based marketing growing as rapidly as it is, I wanted to catch up with Sweezey to hear his insights and predictions. We recently chatted about this topic via Google Hangout — but before we explore more, let’s get to know Mathew Sweezey a bit better.
Who are the top 3 people you follow on social media?
1. Marshall McLuhan – He’s not around anymore, but I read all of his books, and I tell everyone to read his books.
2. Andrew Davis – He’s an extremely bright guy. He has great B2B marketing ideas, and he’s very forward-thinking.
3. Joseph Pine – He gets into very intellectual conversations. He talks about very high-level things that we should to consider as drivers of innovation.
Favorite movie or book?
One of my all time favorite movies is The Quiet Man. I’m a big John Wayne fan. I grew up with my grandfather on the farm watching westerns; that’s what we did with our downtime.
If you weren’t a B2B marketing guru, what would you be?
There’s lots of things I want to be. I want to throw it all away tomorrow and be a surf bum. That’s my ultimate dream: pack up my RV and hit waves all over the world.
Check out the full interview here:
Now, on to some highlights from my conversation with Sweezey:
What are your overall thoughts on the future of B2B marketing?
“We measure and look at B2B marketing in a very historical context. The historic model of business goes: build a product, market your product, and sell that product. This model has changed because of the amount of noise. This model of business was created in a time where businesses were the only creators of media. Today, consumers are the largest creators of media by a large factor. Now this idea of noise that we must break through is no longer the traditional sense of noise. We need to outrace the foundations and look at the world around us. Marketing is the primary driver of the product, and the primary product is the experience.”
[ctt template=”1″ link=”01sZI” via=”yes” ]”#Marketing is driver of the product, & the primary product is the experience.” – @msweezey[/ctt]
So you’re talking about marketers owning the customer experience?
“Completely and across the entire scope of the landscape. Marketing can’t be looked at as a silo; it has to be looked at as a factor of every interaction we have. A huge problem businesses face is inconsistent experiences across each channel. What we realize is companies that focus on experience exponentially outperform those that don’t. There is a study that shows within publicly traded companies, those that focus on experience grow 70% faster than those that don’t and also outperform the S&P 500 by 30%.”
[ctt template=”1″ link=”Je2vl” via=”yes” ]”Companies that focus on experience outperform those that don’t.” – @msweezey[/ctt]
In the future of B2B marketing, does account-based marketing play a role?
“Completely! Especially in the B2B space because of the idea of contextual relevance. Account-based marketing is essentially how to be contextually relevant to someone based on the goals that they have in their organization. We can use account-based marketing to talk to prospects about the problems that their organization faces in the most economical way possible.”
[ctt template=”1″ link=”sSZ15″ via=”yes” ]”#ABM is essentially how to be relevant to a company based on their goals.” – @msweezey[/ctt]
Do you feel that marketers are being more and more agile?
“This couldn’t have come at a better time. When I was in DC, we hosted an executive dinner and I was talking to one of our clients, one of the largest banks in the world. It surprised me when he said that they just completely revolutionized their entire marketing department into an agile framework. This is the first time that I’ve heard of a major organization putting agile into marketing. This is making its way into extremely large companies. I’m a huge fan of agile, and it’s getting really good adoption.”
What do you see as the future of account-based marketing?
“I think what we’re going to start seeing is marketers moving towards the idea of interactions outside of advertisements. We’ll see people moving from serving advertisements within an account to finding individuals in accounts and then how to have meaningful engagements across many channels.”
[ctt template=”1″ link=”UfSdC” via=”yes” ]”#ABM = serving meaningful engagements across multiple channels,” says @msweezey[/ctt]
I completely agree. Mathew Sweezey surely knows his stuff about the future of marketing, from agile frameworks to ABM. Now I want to hear your predictions! Let me know in the comments what you see as the future of account-based marketing and whether you agree with Sweezey.
