Growth Strategies for Decision-Makers: Building Strong B2B Partnerships
Authors
UnboundB2B
UnboundB2B is a leading B2B demand generation and marketing agency, specializing in strategic solutions that help businesses scale, and achieve sustainable growth through innovative campaigns.
In this article
Introduction
The landscape in today’s business realm is constantly changing, driven by technological advances, evolving consumer preferences, and global connectivity. In this dynamic landscape, two key pillars stand tall: B2B partnerships and growth hacking.
B2B partnerships, once considered as traditional collaborate companies ions between, have now evolved into strategic alliances crucial for driving innovations, accessing new markets, and driving sustainable growth.
Concurrently, growth hacking has emerged as a powerful methodology, enabling businesses to expand rapidly and breakthrough success through unconventional yet highly effective means.
However, amidst these strategies lies a crucial yet often overlooked factor: cultural differences. As businesses transcend geographical boundaries, understanding and navigating diverse cultural landscapes have become essential to establishing meaningful relationships and enabling collaborative ventures.
To explore the intricacies of B2B partnerships, growth hacking, and the critical role of cultural intelligence in today’s interconnected business world, we present to you an expert interview with Chris Salazar, EVP, Digital Growth. He possesses 18+ years of experience in driving market expansion, increasing ROI, and elevating market awareness for Fortune 500 companies.
Before joining UnboundB2B, Chris led Marketing and Digital for several large enterprises including Hitachi, VMware, NETGEAR, Fortive, and GoTo – all with the common need to introduce new growth strategies that impact the bottom line and customer share of wallet.
The goal of this interview blog is to highlight the impact digital marketing plays across B2B organizations and how to navigate the evolving landscape of buyer behavior, growth metrics, business partnerships, and cross-border cultural challenges. We’ll also address the nuances of attributing success to growth hacking and fostering a culture of continual learning within matrixed organizations.
Here’s What We Uncovered in our Conversation with Chris:
UnboundB2B: Why do you think it is crucial to build B2B partnerships globally and how can you network well when there are digital and in-person events options?
Chris: This is a great question and is likely one of the biggest challenges covid brought and continues to be a focus in the post-covid world. First off, don’t forget that B2B partnerships last a lifetime and it truly is a small world. My rule of thumb is to focus on helping, mentoring, and offering value to any relationship first before any other agenda.
Chances are you’ll learn from those experiences and you’ll build a strong network of experts that you can one day rely on. Especially as you drive growth initiatives, you’ll really need support or a sound board for those wacky ideas. Oftentimes, those wacky ideas lead to innovation and you’ll need someone to convince you not to give up or stay on track.
In-person events take planning, but are crucial to your overall success cross-borders whether that be within your country or overseas. The diversity you experience with in-person events is worth the entry fee plus.
You’ll also get to practice your own elevator pitch whether that is about you, your company, or mission, that takes practice. Strangers will be become friends, and friends will foster into strong partnerships that will foster your growth.
Digital events have picked up speed and likely will not go away, but they’ll change in form. You’ll continue to see more on-demand events to supplement missed opportunities, and that’s a great thing. Download these before a flight, learn while you’re 30,000 feet in the sky (which I heard the brain excels at comprehension) and challenge yourself to share the event learnings with others. Be that resource for others who cannot attend live.
UnboundbB2B: What strategies can enterprises use in B2B partnerships to drive innovation and disrupt existing markets? Also, what is your secret sauce for winning clients globally?
Chris: The strategy you build needs to be a full funnel, but remember, it’s not linear. Buyer behavior has changed and will continue to evolve as digital and AI become more alive than ever. Buyers enter into your funnel from different angles and drop out of your funnel quickly, but you cannot let that sway your strategies and instead optimize. For top-of-funnel, narrow in on your content syndication and programmatic campaigns to build brand awareness and trust your internal nurture process.
Include middle-of-funnel activities like Webinars to attract the right business decision-maker and practitioner to get a hands-on feel for the leads of your company and your solution. Then optimize your bottom-of-funnel sales qualified leads strategy with a strong SDR team to support your sales team and bring in buyers ready for the demo and pull the trigger.
My secret to success is 2 fold:
A CMO for a $40B organization once told me that her secret to success is to focus on the ONE, SINGLE metric that your organization is truly focused on and become obsessed with that.
In marketing for example, if the organization is focused on revenue, don’t get distracted with rebrands and reorganizations if they’re not directly impacting revenue immediately. Instead, drive every aspect of your organization to build the sales pipeline and talk about that in every meeting. Measure this.
Don’t let any other fancy marketing trends get in the way. Present to your leadership team how you are impacting this metric, focus on nothing else.
Optimize, Test & Learn, Optimize. Organizations try to preach, fail fast, optimize, and learn, but I’ve only experienced very few excel here. Every inch of your organization needs to be working against this mentality and not afraid of failing. It’s ok to see red in the KPI as long as there are learnings because that drives new thinking.
Innovation comes from living and breathing this daily, not just talking about it. But, it starts with the management team building the right culture to support this and when times get tough, they have to stick to this. Trust the process.
Chris Salazar EVP, Growth Marketing UnboundB2B
Apart from partnership and networking, I am keen to know about growth hacking and experimentation, its vitality, and how C-suite can benefit from it in their organization irrespective of demographics, company size, industry, or any other similar factor.
UnboundB2B: What are some ways to utilize personalization and customization in your growth hacking initiatives? Can you share an example of a successful campaign that leveraged personalized messaging or experiences?
Chris: One of the most powerful growth hacking techniques is using event-based personalization across web and email platforms. Many organizations lack the vision and resources it takes to truly create journeys that are personalized based on customer cohort and the actions they take with brand content.
Hubspot is an example of a company who does a fantastic job at personalization based on visits, downloads, and overall interactions with their website. They lead all event engagements with valuable content that keeps their community engaged. They just happen to sell a CRM, but that’s not what they lead with (pretty smart in my opinion).
UnboundB2B: How do you attribute the success of your growth hacks to specific channels and initiatives? Can you share your approach to measuring the impact of your growth hacking efforts?
Chris: Tracking user behavior at every step of the journey is key here. One of the most successful attribution models that I ever put together was for NETGEAR where we introduced a robust paid marketing strategy but had no way of tracking engagement with advertising to a product conversion.
We introduced paid marketing as a tactic to drive the next wave of new product introductions that were poised to lead the industry and have a material impact on revenue targets. But, we needed to account for every dollar out and how much ROI we drove.
The attribution model for an “intent to purchase” helped build the right business case that led to hockey stick growth for our ecommerce business – growing from $0 to $MM. Huge digital hack that still exists today (5+ years later).
UnboundB2B: Can you outline some solutions that enterprises can benefit from to overcome cross-border cultural challenges and resistance to change within your organization to promote a culture of experimentation?
Chris: From my perspective, it all boils down to leadership alignment, an inclusive culture, and employee-wide education on cultural differences.
Leadership must be aligned up/down and side to side. But, this takes time and I’ve found that organizations lean towards prioritizing actions that drive revenue directly, rather than the intangible (and sometimes unmeasurable) actions taken to drive a successful company strategy.
People are every company’s biggest asset and that becomes even more true with teams across borders. The diversity in talent and experience should be embraced across the organization. Time should be allotted every week to spot check inclusion and make the necessary team adjustments.
Building this culture will innately unlock a culture of change and experimentation, which in my opinion, is the foundation of innovation. You cannot innovate if you’re scared to make a mistake. Mistakes are learnings, and learnings drive innovation.
Are You Aligned with the Power of Global Partnerships?
Global B2B partnerships have become and important solution to expand market reach, stimulate innovation, and gain diverse perspectives. Businesses can navigate various international landscapes through global B2B partnerships while absorbing different learnings from the markets and industries.
Network management today demands a combination of physical and virtual events. While strong relationships mostly rely on in-person events, digital events assure flexibility by reaching more opportunities with minimal geographical and time restrictions.
Both methods of networking complement each other and assist you in developing and nurturing relationships that ultimately foster long-term success. Recognizing such strong value systems, mentorship, and honest collaborations within such relationships helps businesses develop meaningful and long-term relationships.
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