Executive interview on customer-first B2B marketing, brand storytelling, dynamic content, and global campaign strategy to build trust and drive pipeline growth.
Ricky, with over two decades of experience in B2B marketing and leadership roles across various industries, how has your professional journey shaped your approach to building customer-first, growth-driven marketing strategies today?
I think the key thing for me has always been in focusing on the customer and being outcomes based. Whether that is driving outcomes for our clients or outcomes on behalf of our clients for their customers. I started in sales and then made my way to marketing all in B2B organizations. This dual role gave me a deep appreciation for the challenges that exist on both sides of the fence in a sales and marketing motion. The challenge is that we have a tendency to overcomplicate our world in marketing, we often do this because we are under such scrutiny but much of what we need to ask is common sense. Questions like ‘would I read this?’, ‘is this simple enough to understand’, ‘is the message clear enough’ etc? Our work is mostly with large blue chip organizations, that introduces a level of complexity as those businesses are large and so the simple questions are bifurcated across groups within the organizations. Personally, this is what drives me, how to simplify the complex and that is never more true than in B2B where the buying group (for our clients solutions) is complex, layered and the purchase cycle is long.
Transmission is known for addressing core marketing challenges. How do you uncover needs that go beyond the brief and steer clients toward deeper solutions?
One of our core values is ‘challenging’ that is both inside our organization but also exists externally. To be clear, it’s not meant to challenge for the sake of challenging but the focus is on being that annoying child constantly asking ‘why?’. Often we find clients will give you 50% of the information, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t always have context on how you can solve those problems. Our role in uncovering their needs is in the deep level of questioning but always with clear context so they understand why we are asking the question in the first place. If you tell me x, i’ll provide you with answer y. Right now, clients are not asking for more agencies, they want less, they want fewer partners where they can get more connected solutions and I use that word ‘connected’ very deliberately. For us, we help our clients across any real problem they are facing and so that gives us the ability to ask quite broad and quite specific questions so we can deliver a solution that will answer the challenge they have and sometimes the challenge they are not aware of. This depth is not what a lot of agencies will do but is something we pride ourselves on hence constantly asking ‘why’. This also means, our clients follow a very similar behavior, typically challenger mentality (not challenger brands but the clients themselves).
What common disconnects do you see between marketing strategies and real buyer needs—and how can marketers close that gap?
The big gap is the lack of understanding around buyer needs, consumption habits and their rightful skepticism of marketing tactics. In B2B, younger buyers are entering the market and their habits are not the same as their predecessors. Most marketing organizations are still stuck in the traditional campaign led approach, and frankly that is too one dimensional, is very product or brand led, means you need a lot of media dollars and usually the message isn’t compelling or builds trust with the buyer. In addition, these younger audiences are leaning much more into LLM’s to help them navigate their buying decisions. However, one thing LLM’s can’t do well is foster TRUST. This is where brand awareness and the sales team really come to the fore for brands. Unfortunately, most marketing strategies are still heavily reliant on campaign and product led approaches, talking to customers vs. having a dialogue. For us, the first thing is having a deeper understanding of audience needs and then translating that into ways to build brand equity through clever storytelling and arm the sales teams with true insights whilst automating as much of that mid-funnel journey as possible.
How do Transmission’s Dynamic Content Engine and Brand Storytelling capabilities meet the demands of today’s B2B buyer?
The modern B2B buyer values their time, efficiency, and connection. Transmission is adapting to the evolving market and providing these buyers both speed and authentic engagement with these features. The Dynamic Content Engine allows for faster content delivery by leveraging the power of generative AI – but since this process is guided by authentic human strategy, results still retain the personalised touch that these decisionmakers desire. This fosters the trust that is key to standing out with younger B2B buyers Coupled with the emotional hooks and genuine connection that Brand Storytelling provides, these capabilities in tandem employ the best of both the qualitative and quantitative cravings of key decisionmakers in B2B buying.
Why is brand storytelling and entertainment becoming essential in B2B, and how are clients responding?
For B2B buyers, personal decision drivers have the potential to be just as impactful as professional ones – if not more. In these increasingly competitive markets, a unique and full-funnel approach is what brands need in order to stand out to buyers. Incorporating storytelling generates authentic connections with audiences, fostering an organic sense of investment and loyalty that can help bypass competitors and achieve brand goals. Stories resonate with people in many aspects of the human experience – so it only makes sense to bring stories to the B2B stage as well. We’ve found younger audiences flocking to platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Roku, and YouTube TV to consume both personal and business content – because we’re human and crave stories. B2B has become almost too reliant on primarily product-first campaigns. It’s important to understand that our customers need stories – even if that means we aren’t in them – in order to lean in harder and deeper.
How do conversations about marketing transformation differ between managers, CMOs, and boards?
For the most part, I feel like managers and CMO’s recognize the need for transformation and are mostly aligned on what that transformation is. How they would execute said transformation might be where they differ. Boards tend to have a different view of transformation because mostly it is linked to the business goals and what they ‘think’ will drive business goals whereas marketers ‘know’ what will drive business goals but the idea isn’t always liked by boards. For example, if a business has a deficit in pipeline the board may feel like we need a greater focus on demand generation vs. the marketing team may recognize that leads aren’t converting because no one wants to talk to them and that brand is the issue. The problem is the moment the marketing department say the word ‘brand’ there is an immediate reaction because that is seen as pretty pictures and not as business driving. This is not uniform because we are fortunate and lucky that many of our clients the boards are very pro-marketing and brand and in some cases are pushing that narrative heavily.
Transmission has a global footprint. How does the agency maintain consistency in delivering customer-first programs while adapting to regional market nuances?
It’s really difficult to be honest but since most of our clients are global blue chip companies one of our key initiatives with most clients is building a consistent campaign architecture and then helping our clients develop a global to local set of operating principles. Often when we start working with clients that are highly complex and have multiple business units and such like, we see lots of messages hitting the customers where our clients are competing with themselves for airspace. This is then further exasperated by the fact that the field marketers are also then creating their own set of marketing programs in region creating further noise. There is a further disconnect where often the field don’t believe global truly understand their regional customer. As someone that is British and born in the field, I understand this completely and so most brands need to arm their regions, be more efficient and again customer first. So, how we maintain consistency is not solving it at the Transmission level but solving it for our clients which allows us to drive the right behavior within Transmission where everyone knows their role in servicing our clients and their respective customers. Campaign architecture allows us to unify their messages into outcome based programs, less is more in other words. We then apply that over a brand to demand architecture where global to local responsibilities are clear from brand to 1:1 ABM models.
What area of B2B marketing remains undervalued, and how is Transmission positioning itself to lead there?
B2B marketing can be very results-driven – understandably so.However, if brands lean into understanding what drives B2B buying decisions, they can experience just as much success than if they solely focus on output. Transmission incorporates measures to not only understand today’s B2B buyer through dedicated behavioral research, but to truly connect with them and give them what they want – through new capabilities like Brand Storytelling or the Dynamic Content Engine.
What advice would you give to emerging B2B marketers looking to drive meaningful change in a rapidly evolving landscape?
Never forget the audience, it seems simple enough but so much of marketing in general but especially B2B is inside out vs. outside in. If you understand your audience better than anyone else, you will put together amazing program(s).
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A quote or advice from the author
In this AI age where the mid-funnel is compressed, brand is where you need to double or triple down to drive true growth
Ricky Abbott, President for Transmission
Ricky Abbott serves as President for Transmission. With over 20 years of consulting experience with companies of all sizes and industry verticals, Ricky is an authority on B2B marketing. Whether it’s brand, demand, sales enablement, or ABM, Ricky has helped clients transform their Sales and Marketing operations through pioneering, customer-first programs designed to drive growth. He works with key stakeholders from the managerial level to CMOs and the Board to get to the heart of his clients’ ‘why’ – questioning every brief to ensure that what clients say they want is aligned with what they really need. He also is a board member with Engera, an organization dedicated to creating sustainable change in under-resourced communities around the world. Previously, he has worked at DWA (acquired by Dentsu) and Reed Business Information (part of Reed Elsevier). LinkedIn.
