Interview with Paul Cash, author of Humanizing B2B [podcast]

Paul Cash, co-author of Humanizing B2B, believes that B2B marketing has lost its humanity. We can say “lost,” because, yes, it used to have humanity. In the early days, B2B marketing was done by knowledgeable, expert salespeople who made real connections with their customers. Then came the internet, minimizing the role of the salesperson, and over time the humanity leaked out of B2B. What we’re left with is the B2B marketing that many of us know today: product-centric, bland, corporate, and forgettable.

What can we do to bring it back? On this episode of Death to the Corporate Video, we talk to Paul Cash about how we got to where we are today, the state of the B2B buyer, and what we can all do to convince the C suite that things need to change.

Listen to the episode or read the transcript below to learn about:

• The history of B2B marketing and its origins as “industrial marketing”
• Why B2B buyers tend to make decisions based on FEAR, and how you can combat that as a marketer
• How to use likeability as a secret passageway to gaining trust
• Embracing a new philosophy within B2B marketing that celebrates branding, emotion, storytelling, and humanity

Learn more about Paul and Rooster Punk on their website.

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode transcript

Guy Bauer: Hey there. This is Guy. Before we start the show, just want to let you know, there's a few curse words in this episode, so earmuffs.

Paul Cash: The responsibility of marketing in an organization is to help fulfill the potential of the company. And you can't fulfill the potential of the company if all you're focusing on is one part of lead generation. Positioning and brand and strategy and building that category company and all that stuff is what marketing can do and as marketeers, we've never had more power. We've got all the data points, we've got budget, we've got access to technology. We've got access and alignment with sales and we are there, in theory, to have the ear of the customer. You put all those into the mix and marketing should be able to deliver the transformation or growth that businesses need, not just the incremental results that they want.

Hope Morley: Hello and welcome to Death to the Corporate Video. A podcast with tools and advice for how to make B2B videos that your customers actually want to watch. I'm Hope Morley.

Guy Bauer: I'm Guy Bauer.

Hope Morley: And today we're joined by a very special guest. Today, we have Paul Cash, founder of B2B marketing agency, Rooster Punk and author of the new book, Humanizing B2B, The New Truth in Marketing that Will Transform Your Brand and Your Sales, available wherever books are sold.

Paul Cash: Me and Guy are on the same page literally.

Guy Bauer: We're the hosts. We're supposed to hold it up.

Hope Morley: I read it on Kindle.

Paul Cash: Fess up.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, you're supposed to play it coy, like, "What? Book? Oh, I was just coming on here to talk."

Paul Cash: Less than a dollar on Kindle, there you go.

Guy Bauer: Paul, I forget how we met you, but somehow I remember we connected probably over LinkedIn and we were just... I think both of us were like, "Wait, I love what you're saying."

Paul Cash: No, we connected because you guys do some fucking awesome stuff on video. You know what I mean? Let's be clear this podcast is about Death to The Corporate Video and I instantly took a liking to the kind of content you were creating. We connected because I think we have the same shared vision about the opportunity to change B2B without using those trite expressions, it'd be too boring, but it's a category that's ripe for entertainment and surprise and movement and story and enjoyment and lots of emotional stuff and video's a great media to do that.

Hope Morley: Absolutely. Your book is called Humanizing B2B. Take us back, when did B2B lose its humanity? How did we get to this situation that we're in now that you need to write a book called Humanizing B2B?

Paul Cash: Yeah. Well, obviously it's part of the research for the book. I was delving into, even the phrase "B2B marketing," because before that phrase was popularized in the mid-nineties, really, it was called industrial marketing. If you go back to the fifties, the sixties or seventies, B2B marketing was effectively done because you had a charismatic sales guy and he would have a trade catalog or some kind of brochure or content and he'd walk into a client room opportunity and he'd do the traditional sales pitch.

Paul Cash: Obviously advertising was a platform, but it wasn't specifically used for B2B brands. It really was very much a sales driven approach and why that was important, it was because B2B was incredibly human in that context. A motivated, likable salesperson with all that charisma and, let's face it, they were mostly guys back in the day and they would do that heavy lifting of the emotion of a brand.

Paul Cash: And they had that likeability factor. You would work with a sales guy that you liked the most and you trusted the most. And then what changed is that we had techniques like direct marketing and better forms of catalogs and content. And then the internet came along. And all of a sudden the internet presented and created a new way for brands to turn up. But this was also at the time when the technology sector was exploding. There was this kind of, what do we do this new thing called internet? Let's just put our products on there, let's just talk about the features and benefits of our products and that will do the job. It's just a piece of brochureware online.

Paul Cash: But what's happened is that, through the evolution of B2B and specifically things like SaaS business models, we've disintermediated the expensive sales guy from the process. If you look at the stats in B2B, buyers are on that journey. They're 60, 70, 80% through the buying cycle before they even engage with an expert or a sales rep or a BDR.

Paul Cash: In the absence of somebody doing that emotional job, brands have got to step in, your content, your website, your video has to do that emotional connection, that the sales guy used to do. The humanizing of B2B is a bit of a journey. It's humanizing is a bit of a renaissance to a certain extent because B2B was incredibly human back in its early days, it got lost in the internet, to a certain extent and now we're trying to find a way to bring the human side of B2B marketing to the fore in a modern interpretation of what brands need through branding, through purpose, through storytelling, through emotion.

Paul Cash: I thought I need to write a book about it. The pandemic was a great catalyst, lots of CMOs and business leaders paused for a moment. They were kind of reflective. They couldn't do the usual product sales stuff and so they were searching for answers. And I think what scared a lot of them was the fact that they didn't want to show up in a post-pandemic world and be irrelevant.

Paul Cash: They would look into their brand and go, "Right, how can we reposition ourselves? How can we be more engaging emotionally? What are the things that we need to do to show up in a post-pandemic world?" And that as a catalyst has driven a lot more attention towards specifically brand, which I think again is a really exciting part of where B2B is evolving to.

Guy Bauer: I get it. When the internet came along, the fundamental issue was that B2B brands, they thought of it as almost a plus, added value, not really a platform to do the brunt of things, but really just auxiliary and that festered and grew on itself. And then here we are in 2021, and it's almost like, no one knows why it's this way, but it is this way, that if you're B2B, you are dry and features and benefit-y.

Paul Cash: Yeah. This is the irony of B2B. When you meet the leaders of organizations, they're incredibly bright, passionate, engaging individuals. Yet, somewhere on our journey, somebody made a decision that said, "Hey, when we do B2B marketing, we're always marketing to a rational, logical, economically driven human being, who'd turn off their personality when they enter the workplace."

Paul Cash: Now that sounds just weird, but somehow we believed in it. And at some extent, the functional marketing, and I think this was because back in the day, technology was exciting and fresh and new, and people wanted to understand this vis-a-vis and the tech kind of stuff. That was the fascination with tech, it was that new and shiny.

Paul Cash: But as we've evolved, we've not evolved the way we talk to end users. They don't just want the functional stuff. They need the emotional stuff as well. And that to me is the essence of what Humanizing is about. It's not either, or it's not saying we're ditching all the functional stuff for the emotional stuff. It's we need to find that blend, that balance of the two, working together, to be able to engage through the top of the funnel, to be able to nurture through the funnel and to create preference and action at the bottom, in favor of whichever brand is going to win.

Hope Morley: Yeah, I think a lot of, especially legacy B2B brands are in a little bit of denial that... You shared that stat, you said that people are 60% of the way through the funnel before they reach out and talk to a salesperson. There's a lot of B2B brands who still think that their sales person is the one who's going to bring the human element into the sales process. But knowing now, there's been a generational shift, millennials like me are now huge B2B buyers. We don't want to talk to somebody until we're ready to buy. We want to be able to do that research on our own.

Hope Morley: And there's plenty of research that backs that up, that we don't want to talk to anyone until the absolute last minute. People who might argue well, our salespeople just like in the olden days, they're the human part of our B2B, that's just outdated and it's not going to make it in the future.

Paul Cash: Well, I think the challenge is that most businesses have take out the expensive charismatic salespeople who can do that emotional job. And they've replaced them with, I hate to say the low level, but junior BDRs and salespeople who haven't got the experience and the maturity to be able to have conversations with clients, other than through the lens of products.

Paul Cash: And you just said that, Hope as well, once you've done that self-service bit, when you want to speak to somebody, you want to speak to an expert. You want to speak to somebody who's going to give you value and be able to answer questions that you can't find answers to online. You don't just want to speak to all of the juniors.

Paul Cash: I do think that the personal brand of that person you interact with, is really important. Their individual story, that credibility, why they're even going to talk to you, is part of the narrative of sales. But for the most part, if you're only 23, then unless you've got an amazing story to tell, it becomes hard. It's a balance between what's economically efficient to do, from a sales point of view, vis-a-vis, what you actually need to do to be able to show up in a way that's going to influence people to emotively feel like they want to work with you or buy from you.

Guy Bauer: In the book you brought up Rory Sutherland's line about B2B buyers, not necessarily being motivated by succeeding, but by not failing. And there's this inertia inside the organization, and I've always felt it, and I've always struggled to label it, but I thought your acronym, FEAR, F-E-A-R is perfect. I think it was just the exact number of letters and each letter meant something. I also hate when acronyms are way too long, but I would love for you to explain FEAR and what those letters mean and how they're significant?

Paul Cash: Yeah. Rory Sutherland's done a great job of bringing this notion of behavioral science into B2B. And obviously one of the things he talks about is this loss aversion bias. We're more scared of making the wrong decision as we are of making the right one and how that is a driver of B2B and you've got the whole, no one ever got fired for buying IBM, that kind of stuff is a great example of that.

Paul Cash: My experience of B2B, which I talk about, is most buyers live in this FEAR zone. The FEAR is, the F is for frustration. Generally speaking, most buyers and decision-makers are frustrated with their role, they're frustrated with a lack of budget, frustrated with a lack of talent, frustrated by many things going on within their business. They are generally evasive.

Paul Cash: They've learned over time that kind of counter surveillance skill to be able to avoid approaches from vendors and suppliers. They'll use ad blockers, they'll not answer their phones, they'll do whatever they can do to be evasive because they don't want to be approached unless that approach is absolutely specific and pinpoint and has some value.

Paul Cash: They are generally apathetic. I think over the period of time they've been a buyer or decision maker, generally they've been unimpressed and fatigued by the general approaches they get from companies and that just breeds apathy.

Paul Cash: And then this risk aversion, which is, again, back to this loss aversion bias, which is, in B2B, there's lots at stake, your career, your personal development and these things all come together in this thing I call FEAR.

Paul Cash: And what most businesses do is that they market to that fear, they do same old, same old, boring stuff. They drive more apathy, they create more evasiveness, they create more frustration and they don't do anything to balance off that risk aversion. What do you do in that context? The antidote to FEAR, I talk about, is this notion about BRAVE. And again, it's another acronym, which is B for buyer emotion, R for recognition, A for appreciation, V for value and E for engagement.

Paul Cash: And it's about how to kind of use that as a way to be able to break through that FEAR zone and just do things slightly differently. It was a bit of a methodology. It's something that I've tried and tested and it works but it's not universal, it's not easy to apply to every context or every situation, but as a framework or a mental model, it can be useful.

Hope Morley: In the book, you give five principles that you walk through of humanizing B2B. Can you walk us through that here?

Paul Cash: Yeah. Again, I think it was important just to try and put some constructs down around this phrase, "humanizing," because it's not necessarily a new phrase, the B2B, it's been around in a B2C context for probably 10, 15 years and like all good parts of B2B, we inherit or take the good stuff that B2C is doing and see if we can mold it into a B2B context.

Paul Cash: Humanizing is nothing new and it's definitely gained traction over the years, but the way that I try to codify it is that, it's first of all, about this shift away from products to people. And what I mean by that is having an audience centered view of the world, not a product centered view of the world. It's about not just having a purpose as a business, but having a purpose that's actioned.

Paul Cash: The hard yards are seeing that purpose in the real world and being able to create stories and content around that, that has meaning. It's about putting emotion at the core of your marketing. And again, there's loads of great research from Binet and Field, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, that talk about the value of emotion in B2B marketing and how we can tip the needle in your favor, through advertising or direct marketing or other forms of content.

Paul Cash: The fourth one is something that is relatively nascent to the industry. And I talk about this thing called likeability. And it's about trying to recognize that in this world of B2B, where we've always sought out trust as being the thing that need to create in our brands, but trust is a funny word. It's like the word cool, it has to be implicit rather than explicit. And the way to earn trust, to me, is by being likable.

Paul Cash: If you're a likable person, people tend to trust you. How do we have likable brands as well? In the absence of people, what can your brand, your content, your website, your video do to make you more likable?

Paul Cash: And the final part is how can we use things like storytelling and narratives to be able to really engage users and move them towards some form of action, whether it's a vote, a subscription, a download, or whatever it would be. Those five things are the principles behind Humanizing B2B.

Guy Bauer: Okay. You've convinced me we need to be likable, we need to focus on our brand, all that stuff, but we have sales goals. Every quarter. That are dispassionate and there's levers that we can pull to meet those sales goals that we can reach these quarters' goals. And so, I don't know, maybe we'll work on brand next year.

Paul Cash: Yeah. Okay. That's another argument you hear all the time and I talk about this in my book, most businesses are set up and the directive from the CEO to marketing is, "Build me this performance marketing engine., There are all these leavers that you can calibrate and pull, using email, Google search, influencer marketing, social media, and as a marketeer, you're there trying to calibrate these leavers every month to try and spit out a better result.

Paul Cash: And that has become this lead generation marketing world, that most businesses step into. But if you were to ask the CEO, what do you really want marketing to do? The CEO will probably say, "look, we want to go on this transformational growth journey. We don't want to be number four in our category and just happy with where we are. We want to be number one. We want to shoot for the moon. We want to do all that kind of stuff."

Paul Cash: Well, if that is the aspiration of the board and the business, then performance marketing isn't the mechanic to deliver that. You then gotta start looking at these master leavers around brand and emotion and purpose and storytelling, because when you calibrate those correctly, they amplify the other performance marketing channels.

Paul Cash: It's about CMOs being brave enough to step into the C-suite and say, look, there is another way to do marketing. And my view has always been that the responsibility of marketing in an organization is to help fulfill the potential of the company. And you can't fulfill the potential of the company, if all you're focusing on is one part of lead generation. Positioning and brand and strategy and building that category company and all that stuff is what marketing can do. And as marketeers, we've never had more power.

Paul Cash: We've got all the data points, we've got budget, we've got access to technology. We've got access and alignment with sales and we are there in theory, to have the ear of the customer. You've put all those into the mix and marketing should be able to deliver the transformational growth that businesses need, not just the incremental results that they want. To me, it's about stepping, B2B marketers need to step up to win over and be more commercially minded and that means getting used to another bunch of leavers that need to be pulled.

Guy Bauer: It's so simple. It is so simple. But it's so hard to get buy-in on something so simple. My secret thought, or my theory, it's not a secret.

Paul Cash: Not anymore.

Guy Bauer: My theory is if you look at B2B brands, who's in control of, and usually it's who's in control of the marketing function too, are the sales and product people. They're very rooted in engineering. That's why I think there's a lot of inertia to not do stuff that's weird or cool.

Hope Morley: Or just not product centric.

Guy Bauer: Right. That isn't rational based. I find that the organization itself, the leadership they've gotten where they are by making rational database decisions and going in there and saying, "Hey, let's do what Drift does," which is just really cool stuff. That's really hard.

Paul Cash: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. Businesses can be amazingly successful just by following the formula and recipe of B2B, which is make a great product, talk about it, get customers onboard, get those customers to be your influencers and other companies will come along and absolutely a business can be built very successfully around that.

Paul Cash: I just think the challenge is getting harder these days to do that. The competition that's out there, the noise that's out there, there are now 10, 15 players in every category, niche or large. And when you talk to, we do a lot of work with VC funded scale-up type businesses, and the way that early stage market works is that, globally, you could take any category and there's probably 25 companies all doing something very similar. And then the money flows in with the VCs and then you go from 15 to 10. Then as acquisitions happen, you get five and then ultimately as the market matures, you've got consolidation around five companies.

Paul Cash: The journey that we see a lot of the times is that, at the beginning of it, the focus is always on the product. We talk about product fit and all the models that Silicon Valley's created for how to birth an early stage company. But what we get the phone call is, after three years where the product isn't selling, sales have dropped off, the market hasn't gained attraction, it's like, "Shit, we need a brand."

Paul Cash: We've never really thought about this before. We've only had a product lens to think about. And then the engineers are a bit skeptical, but they get the concept because they understand life, they understand brands and other parts of their world. It's not just B2B they're living. They understand why they love some brands and hate some others. And I find that, invariably lots of them want to be quite brave and bold. If we're going to do this, let's do it properly. Let's not just create a position that everyone else has got, let's turn up in market. Let's believe in what we do. Let's have a tone and personality and a voice that's going to get us to the next part of our journey.

Guy Bauer: If I'm a CEO who just read the book, Humanizing B2B, by Paul Cash, available...

Paul Cash: This one?

Guy Bauer: ... Wherever fine books are sold. Say, I've just read this thing and I'm like, "Dammit, I'm motivated. I am marching in to the next meeting with the C-suite and we're doing this." What do I say?

Paul Cash: I think there's different ways to approach this. You can go all in and the way I would express that is, how can we build the most human brand in our category? What do we need to do to do that? And if we did it, does that mean we're going to be the most successful? I would have that conversation. And we'd look at the competition and go, "There's lots of brands here, we're just doing same old, same old. Building the most human brand is going to give us an identity, a space, let's just get behind that."

Paul Cash: I think you can really do it at a very strategic level, or you can go in and go, "Do you know what? This stuff sounds interesting, let's experiment." And that could be, on our next campaign, let's just see if we can put some of these principles in place and let's try to turn up the dial on the emotion. Let's try and see if we can get better results by not just talking about the products, by doing a cool video, linking it into some great content and seeing if that changes things. And if that wins then we might do something else.

Paul Cash: I think you can go strategic or tactical or somewhere in between, but it's as much about belief here, this is not a science, there's no playbook that says everybody who does this is going to be successful. This is always leadership and execution and where the rubber meets the road and how motivated you are as an organization, the quality of people and the time you've got. All those things are the factors that make any company successful or not, but it is a road. It is a direction. There is a philosophy there that I think companies can buy into that galvanizes them and gives them an opportunity to do amazing things.

Guy Bauer: I love that. I love that. I think it's more of a mindset than it is a framework.

Paul Cash: Yeah.

Guy Bauer: If there's no framework here, and everyone's looking for the secret...

Paul Cash: I think there is a bit of frame... There's some principles and I think you can codify it in certain ways, but it's a philosophy. I used to work at Hewlett Packard, my first ever job, great American company, they have a philosophy called the HP way. And that was just about the attitudes and expectations of employees and how they would engage with themselves and with their companies. And it was something that everybody in HP, who ever worked there, really felt something and part of. The samurai warriors had Bushido. That was a code of conduct by which they lived their life. And I'm just thinking if B2B's evolved so much now, but there's no philosophies or code. And I just think humanizing of B2B, it's a philosophy that you can follow and you can interpret.

Paul Cash: And there are certain principles that you can weave into your business, but there is something you can believe in as much as everything else, you said like a framework or a mental model. And I think people gravitate and organize themselves around things like that. It gives a sense of purpose.

Hope Morley: That's great. And it's also then customizable too, when you're looking at a philosophy versus a framework. It's not something you're trying to shove every brand into doing the exact same thing. It's take what works for your business, figure out what works best, do some experimenting with your next campaign and find out where it leads you.

Paul Cash: Yeah, I 100% agree. And what B2B has been guilty of in the past, and again, this is something that's very Silicon Valley-esque is, you get these early stage companies who create these amazing playbooks of how to do lead generation. And then all of a sudden, those playbooks somehow find their way onto the internet and everyone copies that playbook and copies that playbook and before you know it, everyone's getting the same LinkedIn messages from 15 different companies, because all of a sudden someone on some blog has said, 'Right, the best way to get a sale is to say, Hey, Mr. Customer, sign up on Calendly and book a meeting."

Paul Cash: For fuck sake, it's just crazy. There has to be more intelligence applied to this, what works for the first few companies, doesn't work for everybody down the bottom of the pyramid. You've got to be smart. I think people need to start looking for new ideas, finding new inspiration, doing the hard work and the effort and applying themselves, not just cookie cutting what's gone before. And that's a business challenge, whether it's B2B or B2C. This stuff is not easy. You guys run a business like I do, cookie cutting everything up is just lazy.

Guy Bauer: I have an insider, inside agency question. For B2B agencies like ours, how much longer do you think we can say, as a positioning, is we make un-boring stuff. We make stuff that's not... How long is "not boring" going to last us? And another way to ask this question is, when do you see, I guess, B2B brands making that shift? When will the shift be made?

Paul Cash: That's a really good question as well. We've all heard the label B2B boring, B to Boring, forever. To me, it's always been an argument that B2B creates dull content, blah, blah, blah. I think to a certain extent, it always will. We're not going to see a wholesale change with every piece of content, because dull contents, let's face it, it's easy to create. You have to work harder to make interesting content and you have to work even harder to make content that is fun and humorous and really drives action.

Paul Cash: There is that kind of effort-reward principle that most people are happy just doing same old, same old, getting away with all. And every now and again, CMOs will step forward and go, "We need to do something different." But they need to find the budget often to be able to make that break.

Paul Cash: I think to me, it's, it's, it's about being interesting and being relevant, not necessarily just not being boring. I think that's probably an easier position to get into, but it's a challenge, creating really interesting content that makes people laugh, smile, jolts their thinking, whatever the emotion you're trying to trigger is, can be achieved in many ways, but there's no better way to do it than video. If I'm being honest. That's not just saying what you guys do, but we've not had the luxury of working in B2C whereby we get the opportunity to do a 30 second TV spot that goes out on air to 30, 40, 200 million people and you can change the mood of a nation overnight, like you can do with the Super Bowl.

Paul Cash: B2B lives in its own little microcosms. And yes, you might get to do a video that goes on YouTube, but maybe 10,000 people see it, if you're lucky. We don't have necessarily the same reach and that creates a challenge, but definitely the mood, music, humor, language, all those things that come through video are incredibly powerful. When we started doing videos, I'm sure you did several years ago, watching a B2B marketing leader, see their brand expressed in an emotive video for the first time, makes them cry. They've never seen their business in that way. It feels like, "Wow, this is a TV spot you've captured the essence of who we are or who we want to be." And it's powerful, really powerful. And I love those moments, telling stories that never been told, making CMOs cry. That's gold, isn't it?

Hope Morley: Yeah, absolutely. Paul, do you have any closing thoughts that you want to leave with?

Paul Cash: Do I have any clothes?

Hope Morley: Do you have any clothes on? Do you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to leave today?

Paul Cash: I'd just like to say, I think we're in such an exciting place in B2B. Again, it's such a nascent industry, I think modern day B2B marketing is only really 20 years old. It's still just growing up and the road ahead is massively exciting. The fact that we're getting involved in conversations around neuroscience, behavior science, psychology, biochemistry, all this kind of stuff that understands human beings and the way we buy, our motivations and our triggers, that kind of stuff is really powerful.

Paul Cash: That's what B2C have been doing and talking about for a couple of decades now. We're getting there fast. It's just that we don't have the maturity of understanding all that kind of stuff, like they do and just applying that. I think it's an incredibly exciting place to be and just hopeful that brands today step into that ambition they have, and they want to make a meaningful difference in the world of work.

Paul Cash: And they want to be able to challenge themselves and grow and create organizations that are very people-centric and have compassion and heart and want to make sure the planet is fit for the next generation. We've seen a lot of that kind of ESG and impact stuff happening now. And I think that makes B2B a far more exciting place to be than B2C, where you're still selling Coca-Cola, been driving issues of obesity, when you could be working for a Cisco or someone else who's trying to protect the planet or whatever. B2B is the place to be. And I'm proud to be a B2B-er. There you go, can't say that after a few pints.

Guy Bauer: Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Paul.

Paul Cash: Guys, Hope, Guy. Great to meet you again. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Hope Morley: Thank you, Paul, so much.

Paul Cash: Thank you, America.

Hope Morley: Thanks for listening to Death to The Corporate Video today, you can find us across all the social medias @umault. That's U-M-A-U-L-T, and our website at umault.com or you can email us at hello@umault.com.

Guy Bauer: Yeah and the book is, Humanizing B2B, available wherever books are sold.

Paul Cash: Well, what's the book called again, Guy?

Guy Bauer: Humanizing B2B, Paul. Paul Cash.

Paul Cash: Love it, thanks guys.