How 90-day marketing plans drive predictable growth in B2B

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Bill Rice. He’s the principal consultant of Bill Rice Strategy Group, where he helps FinTech companies scale their sales and revenue growth by implementing lead generation strategies. He’s also the Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of KALEIDICO, a digital marketing agency that specializes in helping mortgage lenders and law firms develop effective lead generation strategies. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:36

 Okay? Mr. Bill Rice, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Bill Rice  00:40

Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure. 

Christian Klepp  00:41

Right? Great to be connected. Great to have you on the show. Because, man, we are going to talk about a topic today that I think, Well, I don’t say I think, I hope, B2B marketers out there are going to listen carefully and they’re going to take notes, or if they, if they don’t want to take notes, they’re going to, like activate their transcription software and read that afterwards, right? Because we are going to get into a topic today that I think is going to be really helpful to the audience, right? 

Christian Klepp  01:09

So, yeah, let’s dive in. Okay, right? So Bill, you’re on a mission to help B2B companies to reach their potential through innovation, collaboration and excellence. So for this conversation, as I said, let’s focus on a topic that I think is extremely useful to B2B marketers, right? And that is how to create a 90 day B2B marketing plan to achieve fast and predictable growth. Let me just repeat that in case people didn’t hear how to create a 90 day B2B marketing plan to achieve fast and predictable growth. So let’s kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So first question is, why do you think this approach is digestible and more likely to succeed? And the second one is, where do you see B2B companies falling flat with their marketing plans?

Bill Rice  01:59

Yeah, absolutely. So in my experience, I found that the 90 day plan and that time period in particular is optimal. So it’s, it’s kind of the Goldilocks scenario. It’s not too long and it’s not too short. It has some nice features to it. 90 days is something that most of us can sort of envision, and it gives us the opportunity to plan, meaning it’s a little bit too long for you to just kind of wing it and do some things and sort of be very tactical. So you do have to do a plan, but it’s also short enough that you have to be discerning, you have to be focused in order to get things done. Can’t just throw everything in the kitchen sink into the plan. 

Bill Rice  02:43

And that really goes kind of to the second question is, what are they often, you know, mistake, or how do they fall flat and and this is kind of where I came to using especially as I start engagements, making sure that we start with a 90 day plan is because oftentimes marketing organizations have a tendency to make plans too big, too large. They try to sort of achieve everything, and they don’t do a really good job of time bounding things, figuring out and understanding how much they need to kind of set up foundationally to even be effective at any of their campaigns. They often don’t actually plan out campaigns in a sort of an organized way, and so they just sort of start throwing things at the wall, start running some Google ads, or start doing some email outreach. And it’s very haphazard. 

Bill Rice  03:35

They don’t have a good understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, what the metrics might be early on to see if you’re getting traction, because ultimately, we often don’t succeed immediately. We start to look for sort of trend lines and indications of traction, and then those things we optimize, and ultimately, hopefully are able to scale. And so that’s where I think these things work together. It gives us a really sort of tight, functional, time bound way to go at what we’re trying to achieve, but at the same time sort of prevents the age old common mistake of trying to do everything at once and being too big in your planning.

Christian Klepp  04:16

Yeah, man, that last point really resonated with me, because once upon a time, I was a product marketer in a fortune 500 company, and this was one of their best practices, is to come up with a five year plan, all right. And as you can imagine, Bill, you know where I’m going with this, the five year plan was 100 slides long, all right? And we spent at least four to five months working on that plan.

Bill Rice  04:43

Yeah, and so much changes in that time period. I mean, just and I’m sure we’ll get into this a little bit, but just like AI  burst on the scene and sort of changed everything in the landscape. So there’s always these little market factors we had back and this is something that affected me personally in our agency. See, but 2007-2008 in the US, we had a financial crisis that like changed all of the assumptions. So, although I’m not against sort of having a big vision and planning forward, you know, in out years or whatever, but putting sort of too much credence in that can really be, you know, it can set you up for sakes, because all those assumptions are probably going to change on you.

Christian Klepp  05:26

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the other, and I believe that was your point, too. The other problem with that is, if you spend so much time planning, that basically opens the door, especially in larger organizations and smaller ones too, it opens the door to analysis paralysis and opinionitis.

Bill Rice  05:43

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  05:44

Right? 

Bill Rice  05:44

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  05:45

Yeah, absolutely. 

Bill Rice  05:47

Yeah, no, I think you can. You can really get lost in that. You can also lose your edge, right? I mean, you’re spending so much time, and I see this a lot with marketing directors and senior level marketing folks, or even, you know folks that are new to an organization, a lot of times they haven’t done sort of the nitty gritty hands on stuff. So as they get into being strategic, because their role demands that they don’t have enough sort of tactical knowledge to know if those who are supporting them, maybe an agency or other marketing personnel are doing the right thing, right? They just don’t have a sense of that. So I think being too strategic, you can kind of lose that edge of like, what feet on the street marketing can accomplish, or should be accomplishing, or what tactics you should be using.

Christian Klepp  06:38

Totally agree, and that’s, as I mentioned before, that’s one of the objectives of the show. It’s to help the audience who are probably in that moving in that space that are a bit more on the strategic side but less of the tactical, and also serving those who are more tactical but not very strategic, right? So it’s always, it’s a bit of a balancing act, isn’t it? 

Bill Rice  07:02

For sure, for sure, it’s important to have, you know, facets of all of that in place, and as you go up, more strategic, like I said, knowing the tactical or having enough knowledge to make sure that your team, or, you know, like I said, your agency or whoever supporting you is kind of on the right track, right? Because you’re just kind of sitting in the tower and you’re hoping they get it right. You know, you could be surprised at the end of the quarter.

Christian Klepp  07:29

Yeah. I always jokingly used to call it sitting up on Mount Olympus and looking down at the land of the living right? 

Bill Rice  07:35

Yes, yes.

Christian Klepp  07:37

Yeah.

Bill Rice  07:37

Right. 

Christian Klepp  07:38

Fantastic. I’m going to move us on to the next question about key pitfalls that B2B marketers need to avoid when they’re coming up with this 90 day marketing plan and what they should be doing instead.

Bill Rice  07:51

Yeah, I think you know, as you’re building out the 90 day plan, some of the things that can kind of get you hung up on, is, what I always start with is, I think oftentimes we will lay down a plan that is very optimistic, idealistic. So I always start a 90 day plan with an inventory. So I want to inventory the organization, and again, depending on you know where you are in your role or entering an organization, if you’re if you’re new to the organizations particularly important, but even if you’ve been there for a while, a good inventory of what you’ve done before, what skill sets you have, what foundations or campaigns or platforms that you have built, and looking for the gaps. 

Bill Rice  08:40

So again, from a pitfall standpoint, it goes back to your Mount Olympus analogy, right? You don’t want to sit up there and be idealistic in your planning. And so I’ve found that a good inventory, asking a lot of questions, going cross functional, talking to your product people, talking to your sales folks, talking to your operations people, figuring out, sort of, you know what you have in detail, and then things that you’ve done before. And this is particularly true if you’re entering an organization as a new marketing executive or director, is to come in there and really don’t always try to, sort of, and I say this all the time, don’t try to defend your ego or intellect. Ask a lot of questions. See what has worked in the past, see what has been done. See if there’s any sort of analytics or metrics around what has been done. 

Bill Rice  09:29

And then one of my secret weapons, too, I talk cross functional a lot, is to talk to your sales counterparts, your operational counterparts, your product and your tech technology folks, a lot of times, those have been at other organizations, and they’ve seen some successful marketing in the context of what they do. And sometimes those can be as you’re doing this inventory, this can be really good resources, because that they most likely have seen some successful marketing strategies before on the types of things that they the reason they were brought in, the organization, the types of things they work on, and so they can be a really good resource. Again, try not to let your ego or your intellect be bruised. Go in with a lot of questions as you start to build the plan.

Christian Klepp  10:17

Absolutely, absolutely leave the ego out the door basically, right for sure? No, I think that’s a really good point. And I’m sure you’ll agree it’s important to find, for lack of a better description, internal champions that will also advocate this, not necessarily advocate you, but if you use this more collaborative approach, where you get other members of other business units or departments involved in the process, they will feel like they have a stake in this, right? As opposed to, oh yeah, marketing is doing something, not sure what it is, right, or they’re asking for our feedback about something, right? Like, then this is, this is the more collaborative approach, where they bought in because you’re asking, you know, you’re asking for their opinions. You’re asking for their input, things of that nature. 

Bill Rice  11:06

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from small startups all the way up to, you know, Fortune 500 companies. You know, to some degree, when you’re building out these plans, there’s kind of a business development, sales element to it, right? You do want to identify the pain points, what’s, what’s making their job hard? What can you do to make it easier? What can you leverage that they’ve already done? I think that’s a really kind of important skill to hone as you go in there, to again, to figure out in a sales sort of way, you know, what, what are their pains? What’s their vision? What are they looking to do? And that can be really helpful to nurture that champion sort of and collaborative sort of mentality as you start to build these things out.

Christian Klepp  11:52

Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s move on to the topic of market research and having the right strategy. So I know you said a couple of minutes ago, that folks shouldn’t spend too much time planning. And while I agree with that, it’s important to also do your homework, right? Like do the due diligence and what have you. But again, because a lot of this is time bound, because let’s face it, 90 days isn’t an awful lot of time in the grand scheme of things, right? So speed is also the name of the game, but you got to do it the right way. So here comes the question, so how can B2B companies and their marketing teams conduct just the right amount of research to formulate a plan they can implement?

Bill Rice  12:33

Yeah, so obviously, I come from the perspective of an agency, and so we have multiple clients, so one of the things that we do right off the bat is sort of, now this is done in Notion. So it’s digital, but we create a file, right? We want to create a file that gives us context around that company. So in that file is competitive research, product information, positioning, messaging, all those sorts of things. So even as an internal marketing director or executive, I think it’s really important to have those materials at your fingertips. So as you’re building new campaigns, or you’re building new marketing plans, you have a deep familiarity, or you’ve already done the base research on the product, where it sits in the market space. You know, how the audience is resonating with it, or a position. 

Bill Rice  13:25

Because, again, in B2B, there could be a lot of different, you know, phases to where your organization and your product is, like, is the market, you know, aware of the problem? Are they aware of the solution? Opportunity? Like, where are you in that cycle? So I think it’s really important from a research perspective. And this takes a little more time at the beginning, is to sort of assemble that core base around messaging, product information, how you position, how you want to position, and then, of course, those things you gathered in the inventory, what sort of platforms do you have available in order to run your campaigns on, you know, do you have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) that will allow you to run outreach campaigns? Do you have the capabilities to run, you know, LinkedIn campaigns? Are you reliant on paid advertising? Have those sorts of things like I said, assembled in that file, I think is really important. 

Bill Rice  14:19

And then the other thing that just necessary needs to be added, is AI has changed this immensely. So I can go in and this is getting better. I mean, the ChatGPT just, I think yesterday, released a deep research tool that allows you to even do more of this. But one of the things I love to do with AI is have it as a research assistant. So not only can it kind of go out in a more efficient way than I could searching the web and doing competitive but it can now also do some reasoning and some thinking. And then my favorite application of this is to. Actually give it a role. So this could be a role inside the organization as the product manager, could be a role as a potential ICP or ideal customer profile, and then ask it questions. 

Bill Rice  15:11

So an interview that I wouldn’t necessarily get the opportunity to do or it wouldn’t be time efficient. I can give ChatGPT, or my favorite generative AI tool a role, and then I can interview that person and get a lot of good information. And then the other sort of sizable benefit to AI is as a B2B marketer, having done this 20 plus years, I always say I’ve got my tried and true, my bread and butter that I know is going to work, and I probably is, is the thing I’m always going to do. But now I’m more open to kind of going to AI and saying, what’s the whole range of possibilities here? Like maybe I, you know, haven’t done certain types of campaigns traditionally, or I’m not as comfortable with, let’s say, Field Marketing and conference. I’m mainly sort of a digital guy, but like, are there opportunities in conference appearances? Are there opportunities in podcasting? Is there opportunities in video? Is there opportunities and again, some sort of field marketing that I haven’t thought about? AI is really good at looking broad, bringing you sort of all the possibilities, and then you can sync that up against your inventory and say, hey, well, in this particular organization, they have a real advantage, you know, they’ve got a lights out thought leadership executive team who’s comfortable on stage. And there’s a real, sort of conference opportunity or a thought leadership opportunity. So anyway, again, AI can help us sort of broaden our field of view. And so that’s kind of another little shortcut to research.

Christian Klepp  16:48

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, this wouldn’t be a podcast in 2025 if we didn’t talk about AI at some point, right? 

Bill Rice  16:56

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  16:57

No, but I mean, and I think that was your point, there is certainly a time and place for AI and that that is definitely one of those situations where it can help to expedite the process a little bit. Because, I mean, to your previous point, if you’re coming up with a 90 day marketing plan, you don’t have the luxury of conducting a six month like research, right? Because, again, it’s about speed, but it’s about doing things the right way, right? And doing things accurately, ethically, things of that nature.

Bill Rice  17:29

And you want to, you know, obviously maximize your probability for success, right? So, and in 90 days, again, with all of its advantages, the disadvantage is it’s a fairly quick period of time to get results so.

Christian Klepp  17:42

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Okay, my friend, we’re gonna come to like a very, I’m gonna say the juicy part of the conversation, right? Because this is where we start unpacking everything that you’ve that you’ve been talking about in the past couple of minutes. So walk us through this process of creating this 90 day marketing plan, specifically highlighting what the key steps are and what those key components are that need to be in this plan. 

Bill Rice  18:10

So, my framework generally has about five key components to what’s going to be in this plan, and then there’s a time component to it. So the first part you’ve already heard me talk, you know, pretty extensively about is that inventory process. I think this is an often missed opportunity to really leverage up, because, like we said, 90 days is a decent amount of time, but you’ve got to take some shortcuts. So that inventory is going to show you where you have points of leverage. 

Bill Rice  18:41

And then the second thing goes around, and at the top of every one of these programs and planning documents, if you will, there should be some very specific set of SMART goals. So we talked about Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and kind of Time bound. And time bound sort of is inherent in the 90 day plan. But I reiterate this, this sort of, that SMART framework is a good way to make sure that you, you have some goals in there that are well articulated, because too often this is where you drift off into the the Mount Olympus, and you get too lofty, and the plan becomes too big. So I think the SMART goals helps, again, keep some constraints on this, because they’re necessary. 

Bill Rice  19:25

The next section is a very specific action plan. And in this action plan needs to be who’s going to do it, and what are they going to do? So oftentimes, we’re really good at putting together lists or outlines of like, Hey, we’re going to do all these things. But then the missing component, and where we often fail is we’re not really sure who owns that. So that can be just a misstep of like, no one grabs the ball and runs with it. But the other thing that’s probably the more frequent misstep in this section, is. We don’t have the skill sets to do what we’re planning right? So we don’t have the expertise in Google ads. We don’t have a database full of excellent ICPs to run a successful email outreach. We don’t have the ability or the understanding of how to acquire audience in such a way to make a thought leadership or a social campaign work in our favor. And so the Action Plan gives us a good validation of like, do we have everything we need? And then, as I’m defining that, it becomes very clear who owns it, and this is sort of a checksum on do we have the skill set to actually execute? 

Bill Rice  20:46

Then the other thing that I like to do, because it helps the the overall team, feel a level of success, and if there’s an executive level above this plan that sort of is evaluating you as you’re executing, I like to have a section that carefully identifies the quick wins that I expect and the long term plays that I’m building. So again, that first 30 days in particular is probably going to be a little nerve wracking, because we probably got to set up some foundational stuff. And we’re probably not going to get a lot of actual action. And so to put in there some quick wins, some things that I know I can get, some sort of, you know, feel good impact is really powerful. And articulating, like, how I’m gonna do that is really important. And then for that executive level who’s kind of watching you and observing and hopefully getting and gaining trust in you. Those long term plays give them an understanding of what you’re building for and why you have to do some of these initial building steps, particularly in that first 30 days. 

Bill Rice  21:54

And then the last piece is, kind of the tools and resources section. So again, oftentimes, especially in sort of the modern era where a lot of this is digital or takes place in a sort of a virtual way, we need to make sure that we have the correct tools and resources. I mean, just simple things, if we’re going to run an outreach campaign, do we have a scheduling tool? Is that scheduling tool allow us to fully use our sales team, you know? Or is it like I’ve seen this before, is like one scheduling tool and then somehow we’re de conflicting, like, five sales people schedules, right? And so we don’t have the proper tool, or we haven’t set it up. So tools and resources are really important. Resources often goes to budget, too like, what are we going to have to be sort of resourceful in this plan and kind of use what we have at our disposal, and what are we going to sort of ask for, or try to expand to or capture some budget? And so I think that’s really important. So that’s kind of my five step framework to actually building out the plan and the steps I need to go through to make sure that the plan is viable at the end.

Christian Klepp  23:06

Wow. Just give me a second here. I think my hand is a little bit sore from all that writing. Well, fantastic framework, and just for the benefit of the audience, let me just repeat the five key components. Yeah. So Part one was the inventory process, which I totally agree with, right? I mean, sometimes you don’t have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel. There are assets in place. Some of them might be hidden and buried in some ancient archive, but, you know, there’s something there to work off of. Right? 

Christian Klepp  23:37

Number two, SMART goals, absolutely, because, and I think you really hit the nail on the head, let’s not, let’s not get too like, you know, all the way up there with, um, you know, we aspire to be the most innovative B2B tech company, and, you know, all of that kind of, like, fluffy language, right? Like, really, have something that, have something, I always say, have something that people can grab hold of right? 

Christian Klepp  24:03

Third one is a specific action plan, and I’m all about that, right? Because it’s, it’s really spelling out, like, Okay, so you’ve got the goals. Now, what exactly are you going to do? Who’s going to do it? Right? So, and also, what outcomes are you expecting, right? 

Bill Rice  24:20

Yeah, totally. 

Christian Klepp  24:21

And that, that next bit was, um, I hope I’m formulating this prof up properly, but it’s being able to manage expectations from the get go in terms of, these are the quick wins, and this is more long term. So people actually see that there is a, there is an end game here, right? 

Bill Rice  24:42

Absolutely. And that’s what gives you a little bit more room, you know, to maneuver in the than the plan.

Christian Klepp  24:48

Correct, correct. And then the last one being tools and resources. And I did have a follow up question on Part Five, because there is a temptation. And I’m sure you know what I mean by this, there’s. A temptation to like, okay, let’s just have a tool for everything, right? Because that’s just gonna make the work so much easier. And what sometimes ends up happening is, you’ve got too many tools, and all of these tools somehow don’t sync with each other, or, you know, the software is not they’re not talking to one another, and it ends up being this big mess. How do you in your experience? How do you prevent that from happening?

Bill Rice  25:25

Simplicity, you know, is often kind of the best solution, right? Is like, what is the simplest test we can do? What is the simplest campaign we can run to see the initial traction? What’s kind of the most reasonable investment we can make to see if this is going to work, probably in the B2B space. One of the more specific example of this, which is almost always a disaster, is in the CRM space, right? So oftentimes we’re running some sort of outreach campaign, or we’re leveraging our customer base, or a series of list, pipelines. 

Bill Rice  26:10

And so in comes the marketing. Hey, we’re going to do these kind of campaigns. Our CRM won’t let me do like what I’m familiar with. So let’s throw out the CRM system. Let’s implement a new one that’s got all these bells and whistles. We had this great demo. They say they can do everything for us. And the fact of the matter is, you know, in the CRM marketplace in particular, which I think in this stat, I think is still accurate, it is the largest meaning, the most solutions in a software space, by like, exponential amount. So there’s so many different solutions, but they’re roughly all, you know, parity. You know, they’re all about the same, right? 

Bill Rice  26:55

So, on the tools front, what I often say is, how can we use the least amount of tools, the least amount of complexity? And again, it goes back to your inventory. Let’s leverage the resources and skill sets that we have, because if you have someone administering the CRM, or you have all your sales people on a CRM, and you want to do some outreach to maybe an age set of leads in that CRM. So it’s past, you know, deals that you’ve tried to work on, or clients, or you want to engage new folks, like, I bet someone in that organization who probably has is deeply seated in that CRM can help you do what you’re trying to accomplish. Or, if not, like, again, be flexible. So I think on the tools front, I think you’ve hit on a, you know, a really important problem set to try to avoid is, let’s not get too complex. Let’s not assume that any technology is going to be a panacea and do all my work for me. And let’s try to use the simplest and the least amount of complexity inside of this 90 day plan. And then from there, we’ll know exactly what we need to leverage and scale. I think, at that point of trying to scale something, that’s where technology becomes a big leverage point, and you can be a little bit more considered in sort of analyzing the technology. But most everything you need to do, especially in your first 90 day plan, you probably should be doing less with tools and technology.

Christian Klepp  27:06

Absolutely, absolutely do not be seduced by the shiny objects.

Bill Rice  28:34

For sure. 

Christian Klepp  28:35

Okay, so Bill, you’ve given us a lot now, but if there’s somebody out there who’s a B2B marketer that’s listening to this. What are three things that you think they can do right now to start creating this 90 day marketing plan?

Bill Rice  28:49

I think you know the first thing, and this helps in a lot of things in life, in your career, is start building some cross functional relationships, right? So within your organization, make sure you know you’ve got a close working relationship with the sales director, the product folks in particular, especially B2B, there’s usually some sort of product or service delivery involved here. So whoever is directly involved in developing that product or service and then interfacing with the customers, build those relationships. I can’t talk enough about the inventory, like really understand what you have available in your organization, what they do well, you know. What skill sets and talent your people have, again, cross functionally, right? Not just within your marketing department, but what you know is, is your CEO? Is your CMO, is your COO like, are they a personality? You know, is it somebody that you can leverage for thought leadership, or, again, really do a nice assessment of that. 

Bill Rice  29:56

And then I think the other thing is, like we’ve talked a lot about and why I came to this sort of 90 day plan, is try to simplify what you’re trying to accomplish. So instead of trying to boil the ocean with your marketing strategy, let’s pick some very specific, you know, well defined, things that we’re going to do that can give you some quick successes. Because again, depending on where you are in your phase or your role, whether you’re new or maybe you’ve been in there for a while and haven’t had really a big win for a while, you’re probably in some sort of trust building phase. And so getting something that is small and can be accomplished, and you have high confidence in and maybe in some degrees, you have more control of your success and your performance can be a really good way to sort of bite size some of that, get some wins, build some trust, and then from there, you can again, whether it’s your role or your campaigns or your overall marketing strategy. Once you get some of that traction and trust, then you can, of course, scale from there and do really big things.

Christian Klepp  31:07

Absolutely, absolutely. So fantastic. There was something that you said which is such a great segue into the next question about metrics. So you’ve been talking a lot about quick wins. Is there a way that you can, I wouldn’t say, quantify, but like, talk to us about metrics when it comes to quick wins, like, what should B2B marketers be paying attention to?

Bill Rice  31:29

I mean, I think at the highest level, I mean, ultimately, we’re trying to generally and B2B marketing, we’re trying to give sales more opportunities, right? So that’s, that’s probably our kind of overarching metric. And I think a lot of times we forget that, like we’ll do things that, like, look pretty, they feel good. The CEO likes it when he sees it online, and stuff like that. So we can, we can get sort of intoxicated with just like, the creativity of it, and doing something clever or interesting. So I think keeping a North Star of hey, we’re trying to create as many opportunities, high quality opportunities, as we can, for sale, as for sales, as that overarching, sort of, you know, metric. And then I think kind of going the opposite direction as we’re building these sort of bite-size early campaigns or things that we’re trying to do, be a little more forgiving of those metrics. So looking for things that are trend lines or that are traction so that could be our audience is growing in a particular channel or on a particular platform, or our traffic is starting to increase the and then you can, kind of, you can start to stair step it, like, Okay, I’ve got traffic and audience. Now I’m getting engagement. Okay, now I’m getting engagement, now I’m getting conversion, and now I’ve got conversion. Those are opportunities. What is the quality of those opportunities? So I think that’s kind of the other piece and metrics is be specific, oftentimes, to the channel, and what’s important in the channel that you’re running campaigns, and what are the most appropriate metrics there, and then sort of stair stepping them up to your ultimate goal, which is, again, more opportunities for sales.

Christian Klepp  33:17

Absolutely, absolutely. And I like that you kept it simple, because especially when it comes to metrics and attributes, I mean, you can go down this deep rabbit hole, yeah, right, or you just get caught up, like, measuring the wrong metrics or paying attention to the wrong metrics. I should say, right? 

Bill Rice  33:34

Yeah. Well, that’s a good like realm where we talk about starting small and building larger like, I love dashboards, and I love being able to get in there and look at the data in real time and see if we’re moving the needle. But sometimes people will start a six month program to sort of aggregate all of their marketing analytics get the right dash and again. So then you get back into that five year plan sort of scenario, and you know, you could be fired before the dashboard comes alive, right? So we’ve got to be discerning when we’re looking at these projects.

Christian Klepp  34:08

Absolutely, absolutely, all right, my friend soap box time, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why? 

Bill Rice  34:20

I think, you know, one of the status quos that I see a lot is we get stuck in just sort of the old way of doing B2B marketing. And quite honestly, a lot of B2B marketing has been a heavy reliance on heroics from our sales operations and teams, right? So I’m a big believer in collaborating very tightly. Sometimes the team now with kind of this CRO or Chief Revenue Officer thing, sometimes these teams are blended, which I’m a fan of. So as tightly as we can get for marketing supporting sales. And not forcing the sales operations to do his heroics and to even out the distribution of performers on the sales team. Because of that heroics, a lot of times you’ll see, and I hate when I see this in an organization, is like, you’ll see like 10% or maybe 5% of the sales teams are the top performers. They do 80. You know, it’s the 80/20 rule. But it doesn’t need to be like that. If we’re doing B2B marketing appropriately, and we’re giving a lot of opportunities to sales, that distribution should blend out, and we should be getting more from the whole team, sort of lifting all boats, so sort of sitting back as a B2B marketer, and just thinking that our only role is to provide beautiful sales collateral to heroic sales people, I think is probably what you see in most organizations. And it’s really a disservice to not only the sales operations, but your organization, just in general, in aggregate, not just the marketing team, is going to underperform, if that’s your approach. And I still see that as a big, pretty common model.

Christian Klepp  36:15

Absolutely, absolutely, it has to be a collaborative effort. The marketing team has to be more visible, and that’s one of the reasons why I started the show, right? Because the way that marketers, in order for marketers to initiate that change, they need to be the change. They need to evolve. They need to push themselves out there and not sit in their Ivory Tower or Mount Olympus, you know, like, pick your analogy, right? Absolutely, totally agree with that. All right, here we go. Bonus Question time. So I have it in good authority that you used to be in the Air Force, so I thought it’d be a good idea to, like, ask you some trivia questions linked to well Top Gun.

Bill Rice  37:02

Well, that’s Navy, but we won’t hold that against you, so.

Christian Klepp  37:08

Something with a plane in it, but I love it.

Bill Rice  37:11

One of my favorites. Hopefully I’ll do well. 

Christian Klepp  37:14

So I’m gonna read you a quote, and all you need to do, Bill is tell me which character said it. All right, so here we go. I’m gonna try to do it in the person’s voice, but you know, let’s see how it goes. “You’ve been busted. You lost your qualifications, a section leader three times put and hacked twice by me, with a history of high speed passes or five air control towers and one Admiral’s daughter.”

Bill Rice  37:42

I’m not gonna get his name right, but it was the commander on the aircraft carrier right after he and goose did their high speed pass. 

Christian Klepp  37:51

Oh, the flyby. Yes, yep, yes. So the character’s name is Stinger. 

Bill Rice  37:55

Stinger, okay.

Christian Klepp  37:57

Played by the actor James Tolkan, who today is 92 or 93.

Bill Rice  38:03

Wow, yeah, he always played a tough guy. I like him, he is a good actor.

Christian Klepp  38:07

Yeah, and at least in Top Gun, he had the, he had the cigar in his mouth, right?

Bill Rice  38:12

Which would not have flown.

Christian Klepp  38:15

I mean, by today’s standards, I mean just the thought of smoking in an aircraft carrier, right?

Bill Rice  38:20

Like, yeah, I know I was an Air Force officer, and it was even back in the day, and I’m older, but even back in the day, it was kind of frowned on to smoke period. And then in those kind of facilities like the, and I’m not a Navy guy, obviously, Air Force, but I do know that, like, the number one, like, worst, scariest thing is a fire on a ship. So I guarantee you that was not standard protocol.

Christian Klepp  38:47

There are some clues. There are some clues. But like, you know, thank you for being such a good sport, and my apologies for mixing that up. But like,

Bill Rice  38:54

Oh no, it’s all good. Yeah, I won’t go into I’ve got some funny stories around that, so.

Christian Klepp  39:01

I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do, Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how folks thought that can get in touch with you. 

Bill Rice  39:14

Yeah, so obviously, I’m Bill Rice. I’ve been doing B2B and marketing in general for 20 plus years. I’m probably longer than that, but we won’t, we won’t fully disclose how many years. I have an interesting sort of thread as to how I got into marketing. Like you said, I was in the Air Force. I did counter intelligence and and oftentimes people are interested by like, go from Intel to marketing. But one of the things that’s always been fascinating to me, and I think is really important for B2B marketers, to try to harness a little bit, is one of the things that we did in Intel, particularly as we were starting to do what’s now sort of categorized as information warfare and some more digital sort of Intel activities, was we were constantly looking for patterns to tell us what was going on, or if something was going on. 

Bill Rice  40:04

Marketing has become more and more analytical, and so I think as you’re building plans again, looking for those trends, those patterns, as you go into your organization, using some of those, some of that pattern recognition to give you an advantage as you kind of move into a new organization, or try to kind of re-energize your organization for more success. That can be really valuable. So that’s kind of my background. As far as what I do today, I have actually two agencies that I work with. One is more B2C focused. And then, of course, what we’ve been talking about B2B focused is Bill Rice Strategy Group. And in the context of that, we help organizations come in there build those strategies at very different levels and phases, right all the way from strategic planning to full execution. And so we love it, because we get to see a lot of different use cases and examples, and in particularly, we focus generally on fintech. And so that’s a really exciting space right now. We’re seeing blockchain, we’re seeing AI, we’re seeing all kinds of, almost a full transformation of a lot of our financial services and financial institutions and infrastructure, and we’re heavily involved in that, and it’s sort of fun space to be kind of on the edge as we move forward and doing marketing for those really interesting innovations.

Christian Klepp  41:33

Fantastic. That’s a heck of a background story. But how can people get in touch with you?

Bill Rice  41:38

Yeah, so there’s really kind of two ways. Obviously, you can go to https://billricestrategy.com/, that’s our website. I encourage people to get on my newsletter, https://www.myexecutivebrief.com/ the neat thing about that is we’re constantly trying to equip executives, whether this is something, a space you’re moving into, to really give you that full view, because we’re curating, sort of the most important things and trends that you need to be on top of. And then, of course, LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn, you can find me at Bill Rice. I was early, so if you search for Bill Rice, you’re probably going to find me relatively quickly. Always involved there, doing both video and content, to try to give back as much as I can. I love the education portion of what I do, so you’ll definitely find me and can interact with me on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp  42:27

Fantastic, fantastic. Bill, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Bill Rice  42:33

All right. Awesome. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. 

Christian Klepp  42:36

Thanks. Bye for now.