How to Live the Dream of Enterprise Marketing with True Executive Thought Leadership, Best in Class Analyst Relations, and ABM

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Cara Smith-Brown.

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She is a Chief Revenue Officer.

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Welcome to the show, thanks.

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Thanks so much for having me Appreciate you being here.

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Why don't we start by you just sharing a minute or two of context with us about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, I'm Karrison Brown and I run lead coverage.

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We are the only go-to-market consultancy that specializes in supply chain, so we are hyper-specific to a niche it happens to be a $2 trillion niche, which is pretty smart, if I do say so myself.

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So we serve as freight brokers, freight forwarders, contract logistics anything that touches a truck, a plane, a boat or a warehouse is really our jam.

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We think of supply chain as the physical movement of goods, the tech that moves those goods and the money that moves those goods, and we touch the entire supply chain really from a go-to-market perspective.

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That's really cool.

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I like $2 trillion, anitra.

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That's sweet, so we're ready to be inspired.

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Can you share a story with us about some of the best marketing that you've done in that area Marketing you're most proud of?

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Yeah.

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So in supply chain, there are three strategies that are working outside of your traditional like emails, nurture campaigns, et cetera that everyone should be doing.

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Traditional like emails and other campaigns, et cetera that everyone should be doing.

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One is true executive thought leadership, two is ABM and three is partnerships.

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So I'll tell you our favorite story I'm true executive thought leadership.

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So ETL for us is not blog posts, that is not what we're talking about.

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We're talking about Gartner, forrester, morningstar, third parties saying that you are the expert in the thing that you do specifically for B2B.

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This doesn't work for B2C at all, but in our space it works.

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So for ITF's logistics very sexy $2 billion company in Reno, nevada, who walked in and we said, hey, what do you guys do different than everybody else?

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And they said we do a drayage, which is where you take the actual TEU or the container off the boat right At all 26 ports, which is weird, that's not normal.

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Normally it's like just one coast or the other, or they have a couple, all 26.

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And we said, hey, do you have math Like analysis of all 26?

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And they were like yeah, of course.

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So we put together the very exciting, very sexy wait for it the Port Rail Ramp Index.

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Very exciting and everyone was super excited.

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But what's really sexy about it is we put it out every month and it gets picked up by CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, new York Times and Railway Age, which is where their ideal customer profile spends their time.

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So if you are in charge of Dredge for Walmart, home Depot, georgia Pacific, nordstrom, right Name any of the big companies you're actually paying attention to what's going on at the ports because it's impacting your supply chain inside of your company, and so ITS has become the expert in this over time.

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Every month it goes out like clockwork my team, we do PR and AR, so we get it picked up by these big magazines, send it through the demand gen engine, which is mostly in HubSpot, and then we are actually making the first dial.

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So if someone comes in and says, hey, I'm really interested in what ITS is doing for DRAGE, our team says, hey, are you real?

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Do you actually ship DRAGE?

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Are you Eric, who probably doesn't ship DRAGE?

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Are you my mother-in-law, who doesn't need anything about DRAGE?

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And they make sure they're real and then we pass that off to the client.

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It's a published case study so I can share with you that we have $14 million in GP, so bottom line gross profit in 2023, just from this campaign.

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So that's a great example of B2B specific super niche.

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But we track all of the ROI and attribution all the way through.

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That's amazing.

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And first off I have to say that drayage is just a fun word to say.

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It's very hot right now.

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Dray is very hot right now, let me tell you, not as hot as it was in the pandemic, but it's very hot.

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Almost as fun to say as salsa, but that's great that analyst relations and PR represents true executive thought leadership.

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Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to have an impactful program with analyst relations in PR and in today's market?

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I'm interested in that.

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Yeah.

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So AR is very specifically the use of third party analysts to talk about your firm.

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So my second favorite example is Redwood Logistics.

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So we wrote a book on this.

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It's called the Revenue Engine.

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It comes out this fall and this is a published.

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Both of these are published case studies in the book and so Redwood is known as a traditional freight broker.

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If you don't know what a freight broker is, they help companies find trucks.

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That's all they do every day, all day, and it's a huge market.

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So Redwood was a Chicago-based brokerage.

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They're pretty common.

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It's a commoditized industry, but they had a really sexy tech product they'd been building for a while.

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So they wanted to go to market not as a sort of typical freight broker but as a technology company.

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So how do you switch, how do you take the brand from a regular brokerage a good brokerage, but a regular brokerage to this technology company?

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Will you let the third party specifically for supply chain, gartner tell your story for you?

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So over the course of three years we helped Redwood identify who are the right analysts inside of Gartner, who are going to help them tell the story, get in front of them with the right briefings, the right messaging.

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What does the DEF look like?

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How are they telling the story?

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Right briefings, the right messaging.

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What does the DEF look like?

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How are they telling the story?

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Who are the Redwood customers that you're going to share with the analyst to help the analyst understand what it looks like to become a technology company?

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And then, lastly, they actually created Gartner.

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Gartner Redwood and our team at Lead Coverage created a new magic quadrant, or what will become a new magic quadrant, which is called 4PL, the modern 4PL, and we went from this 3PL which doesn't really matter what it is to your audience, but this very specific kind of stodgy brand.

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We used the Gartner infrastructure to help identify what the keywords were that Gartner wanted to see, and then we helped Gartner build this new magic quadrant.

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I'll tell you a funny story.

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So Eric, the CIO of Redwood, is a wonderful human being.

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He's just delightful.

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He's an old friend from college and he was using the word walled garden, which nobody else uses.

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So I went through personally all of the garden reports and wrote down all of the keywords the Gardner uses on index cards and I laid them out for him and I said you can pick any 10 of these words and none of them are walled garden.

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So we ended up going with different words.

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But the point was, hey, we need to use Gardner's language and reframe it for Gardner, for it to help them understand who we're trying to become.

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If you try to educate the analyst using language they're not using, the hill is just too hard for them to climb.

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So a couple of fun little stories there about using Gartner or analyst relations to really help shape your message to the marketplace.

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I think that's really the dream of a lot of B2B companies is they want to be featured in a Gardner magic quadrant, and I think what you shared is great advice is you have to identify the analysts.

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You had to build up relationships with them and you have to play into the way they think about the world, because changing the way they think about the world is pretty hard.

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It's much harder than playing into the way they think about it, and so I think that's amazing advice because, particularly for companies who want to do enterprise account-based ABM strategies, having these kinds of assets is really the holy grail.

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So I'm so glad you mentioned it.

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But we have another client who is a $4 billion inside the four walls and they have a really strong relationship with Gartner.

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They use the Gartner reprint program better than anyone else we've seen.

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So the reprint program you pay for.

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It's very expensive, but you can swap out the Gartner analyst report that you want to put on your website every month.

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So they do, and they build this into their ABM engagement platform and they use Sixth Sense and Sixth Sense actually gives you IP specific info on who is activating on your Gartner reprint program.

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So there is a very sexy.

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If you're doing all the right things, you get Sixth Sense, you have Gartner, you're doing the reprint program and it's all connecting and you can see in advance what companies are looking for.

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So my best example for ABM, which I'm glad you brought up, is Apple.

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So my big, my sort of story when I share this with executives is when Tim Cook gets on stage in 2025 and shares with the marketplace that he is insourcing his supply chain, which I believe he will have to do in order to keep his, to keep to compete with Amazon.

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In that, decision-making was showing buying signals two years before.

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There was a Tiger team in Cupertino who helped the leadership team of Apple make that decision, and if you're listening for the buying signal from that team in Cupertino, you'll be there when Apple is making their decisions on whether or not they're going to outsource their supply chain.

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If you wait until Tim Cook tells the marketplace it's happening, you're too late.

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Like the ship has sailed, the decisions have been made, the vendors that are going to help them do that have been chosen, and so getting in front of that early in the process is part of that really unique ABM or intent data angle that we like.

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I think that's a great story.

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Timing is everything.

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One of the questions I want to ask is you mentioned and this is what I have advised a lot of founders and CEOs who have come to me and said I want to get in the Gardner.

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This is a process that you're going to have to forward, invest in it is expensive in my experience Gardner, Forrester and some of the others because, like you said, with your story, you have to work with them and pay to be a member for sometimes a couple of years, before you get to this nirvana of the magic quadrant.

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You have to then also sometimes invest in and going to their events and sponsoring their events, and then you have to pay for the reprints and, once you get it, to market it.

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So my question in all this is it seems to be that this is a bit of a high stakes game of poker, right?

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Because these guys, it's not cheap, it's expensive, it takes time and you have to have the right moves in order to make that strategy work, because you had to pay for it in advance without a guarantee that they're gonna do it for you.

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So the short answer is yes.

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The long answer is if you can't afford Gartner, don't do it.

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That's it.

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If you're a billion-dollar company, two-billion-dollar company, and you're not spending on Gartner, what's wrong with you?

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That's my first question.

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If you're a small business, if you think that Gartner is going to solve your marketing problem, that's also not true.

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There is an enterprise component to Gartner right.

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Small businesses are not checking the Gartner magic quadrant.

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Enterprises are checking the Gartner magic quadrant.

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We have a client.

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They're in the quadrant and they tell us our clients do not get out of bed without checking Gartner.

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Nobody gets fired when they can hand a Gartner Magic Quadrant to a board and say we chose the top right vendor right.

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But if your customers are SMB or your customers are mid-market, it may not be the right play for you.

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Now, if you're playing an enterprise and your potential customers are Target, walmart, nordstrom, you probably need to be in a relationship with Gartner to get close to that.

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So I think it's a matter of probably degrees and your ideal customer profile.

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I think it all comes back to Eric.

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If I'm really honest, 100% of this comes back to really truly understanding your ideal customer profile, not your wishlist customer profile.

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We talk to more clients that tell us my ideal customer profile is Walmart and Target, and then we say to them who are your current customers?

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And their answer is Johnny B's Tire Shop.

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Those two things are incongruent, right?

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Johnny B's Tire Shop is not checking Gartner.

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So if you're using Gartner to try to access enterprise customers but you don't service enterprise customers today, that Gartner investment is not going to pay off what you think it is.

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It is not a one-to-one return unless you are dealing with the enterprise marketplace.

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And if you're dealing with the enterprise marketplace, then a relationship with Gardner is like a drop in a bucket, right?

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Yeah, all enterprise marketing is expensive is a fair comment, but I think that it's not for small businesses for sure.

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I think if you're targeting the Fortune 500, the Global 2000, largest companies, I agree it makes a lot of sense.

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I'm curious, how do you think about I know Forrester acquired Serious Decisions.

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It seems like they've been making some interesting strides.

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They have a whole practice studying ABM.

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I'm just curious, how do you think about Gardner, forrester and the other third-party analyst firms?

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So for my niche for a supply chain, gardner is the only name in the game.

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As a marketing practitioner I read all of the major Forrester, morningstar, former Sirius Decision Analyst, etc.

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Sangram at GTM, sam at Pavilion.

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As a practitioner I am definitely reading what the analysts are saying about the EBM and the MarTech ecosystem, but in my practice, because I am 100% supply chain Gartner is the name of the game for us.

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That's great.

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So, assuming that somebody is the right fit to be working with a gardener or forester, what are the one or two things that you recommend to be successful in the strategy of working with them, in addition to the things you've already shared?

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yeah.

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So one is you need to have referenceable customers and, ideally, enterprise.

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Back to our earlier conversation, enterprise, referenceable customers.

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So your analyst whoever is doing your briefing and your intake for what their report is going to be on you is going to ask for customer references and the hardest thing to do is to put those together or not have them right.

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So reference for customers is number one.

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Number two, I think and this is my partner, Will Haraway, who does most of this is really understanding the analysts themselves and what they're interested in.

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So get yourself a firm like ours.

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We are the only firm that does this in supply chain.

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So if you want to start a relationship with Gartner and you're a supply chain management company, we're your shop Right.

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If you're in a different, if you're in more tech or fintech or something in something different, we are not the right shop for you.

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But find that shop Right.

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Someone knows that ecosystem of analysts and they know the two people who do this very specific thing, because you can spend a lot of time and a lot of money barking up the wrong tree inside of these analyst firms and they're not necessarily going to do it for you.

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That's not their jam there.

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It might take you a year to find the right guy if you don't have a team helping.

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Shepherd you toward the right person you don't have a team helping shepherd you toward the right person.

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Yeah, I agree with that 100%.

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It's all about relationships still, so I think that's great advice.

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Thank you very much for your stories and these insights.

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Very cool, remarkable results, so thank you for sharing.

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I'm going to link to your website and the show notes so people can easily get in touch if they'd like to chat more about this.

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We appreciate you being with us today.

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This was super fun.