You can't eliminate bias within your marketing team

(but here’s what you can do instead)

“SEO is dead.” “Lead generation is dead.” “Ebooks are dead.” Stop me if you haven’t heard some variation of these statements repeated over and over on social media. But often, the so-called experts promoting dogmas on LinkedIn have very little marketing experience themselves, have never worked in an in-house marketing team at a startup, or have a product to sell that benefits from that exact narrative.

Marketing is neither art nor science. It’s a culmination of both, with different strategies and playbooks that work across different markets. What works for B2B enterprise may not work in B2C retail, for example. That’s why it’s especially dangerous to have strong preconceptions.

Today’s article is all about questioning your biases. Think back to when you first broke into B2B marketing. What are some things that you believed to be true back then? And how has your belief system evolved over time as you gained experience?

Our team at 42 Slash recently spoke with Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper, about how they have had to rethink their entire marketing strategy as they decided to move upmarket to cater to enterprise customers. After a heartfelt discussion, we realized that not only should marketers take a moment to question their bias every now and then, but that they also need an organized framework for doing so.

Biases, preconceptions, and you

“I’m tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.”

“Don’t be a child.”

I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. “What?”

“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”

N. K. Jemisin is one of my favorite fantasy fiction authors of all time. Her book, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” was the first adult fantasy novel that I read after slowly graduating from my time with young adult fantasy. The book was original, featured a unique plot, and challenged many preconceptions that western communities have about people of color.

So, naturally, when I found Jemisin writing about the whitewashing of medieval history on her blog post about Game of Thrones, I knew I had to take heed. 

The need for diversity

In case you’ve been following the world of fantasy fiction as closely as I have, you may have noticed a certain controversy about there being no people of color in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books by George R. R. Martin surfacing time and again on Twitter. It began with a simple enough question — for a novel that features large-scale battles between dragons and the undead, is it really that implausible to include women in empowering leading roles and people of color existing alongside white men in a medieval-inspired timeline?

A shockingly large number of people apparently didn’t think so. They replied with comments like, “Things were just like that back then.” However, that statement is wildly untrue. Historical records, including texts, illustrations, and archaeological findings suggest that medieval Europe, the geographical location that the books are loosely based on, was a lot more diverse than most modern narratives suggest. Europe had extensive connections with the Islamic world, Africa, and Asia through both war and trade.

Dealing with bias

Why am I talking about all this? Because knowingly or unknowingly, we all have our biases. But when those biases are challenged, we have two choices. We can react with apprehension and fear, riling against anything and anyone who dares question our belief systems. Or, in the interest of survivability, we can adapt. We can learn from our biases and question what we have been taught. 

I found myself thinking back to all of this after replaying in my head the conversation with Tara, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper. What biases and assumptions have I made myself susceptible to during my career as a content marketer? And is it time that I started questioning them? 

Adapting for survivability

Founded in 2016, Chili Piper is an automation platform that helps you streamline the entire B2B appointment scheduling process. Its range of products starting from sales coaching to lead generation have one simple goal, to help sales teams book more meetings with prospective clients. In the years that Chili Piper has been in business, they have catered mostly to B2B businesses in the small-to-mid-size range and focused particularly on IT companies. 

However, with the decision to move upmarket, things have changed a lot. Chili Piper is now expanding to target enterprise customers who are being pitched by almost every other platform in the market, making it difficult to stand out on the basis of inbound lead generation alone. That means often leading with an outbound-first approach. It also means rethinking their long-standing stance on some controversial topics in the marketing industry — such as gated content, or MQLs.

Does it still work?

Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are accounts that have been deemed by your marketing team to be more likely to convert to sales in the near future. They’re usually qualified based on behavioral indicators like web pages visited, resources downloaded, or other interactions across company touchpoints.

Tara explained that Chili Piper has always stayed away from using MQLs internally as a defining metric, because they found them unnecessary in the shorter sales cycles that typically come with targeting small to mid-sized businesses. As a result, Chili Piper has also been against gated content, which is the primary method for scoring leads based on this method. But with the decision to bring more enterprise customers into the fold, “things have changed.”

“Even gated content is not completely off the table,” she said, explaining that as the marketing team works to wrap their heads around this shift, they’ve been exploring several tactics that they’ve previously stayed away from, such as having a strong outbound marketing motion and scoring accounts based on their level of engagement across different stages. With the sales cycle becoming more drawn out, it makes sense to have some kind of scoring factor to determine whether the marketing team is moving in the right direction with a particular prospect.

But, it’s also important to be holistic about how you qualify and score leads. Traditionally, marketing teams would work in silos and pass off a lead to their sales counterparts the second it crossed a certain scoring threshold. This would open them up to a slippery slope of questionable practices, like tweaking the score as they see fit to hit their quarterly goal of MQLs. 

Marketing is human

In the end, we need to realize that marketing is built around human connections, which is why you can’t afford to get so buried in automation workflows and vanity metrics that you fail to see the bigger picture. It’s also why blanket statements like how a certain marketing tactic is “dead” are usually far from accurate — because they don’t factor in the random and unpredictable nature of human behavior, which doesn’t necessarily follow steady patterns. 

In fact, startups that end up surviving this cutthroat market do so because they’re quick on their feet and open to adapting for the sake of survivability. From NVIDIA to Adobe, there’s no shortage of examples in the tech industry where a company found massive success after pivoting their go-to-market strategy based on the industry’s needs. The task of finding product-market fit isn’t an easy one, which is why startups must shift gears multiple times throughout their life cycles before they find that sweet spot.

Pivot for success

In the case of NVIDIA, their name used to be synonymous with video games and video editing because the chips that they manufactured were essential for both. But today, with the AI boom that’s followed in the wake of ChatGPT, NVIDIA’s valuation has reached $1 trillion. That’s all thanks to their new H100 and A100 series of machine learning GPUs, used by the likes of OpenAI and Stable Diffusion. 

When Adobe’s revenue dropped 20% in the wake of the 2008 recession, the management team decided that there had to be a better way to deal with the situation than just go through another round of layoffs. That’s when they drew inspiration from Salesforce and launched Adobe Creative Cloud, essentially pivoting the entire product line to a software-as-a-service model. By 2013, Creative Cloud had far surpassed the company’s growth expectations with over 700,000 paid subscribers across the world.

Thinking back to our conversation with Tara, it’s not hard to see how some of the long-standing ethos that have ensured Chili Piper’s success with SMBs may not necessarily apply to enterprises. When selling to larger organizations with multiple decision-makers across various departments, you will inevitably face a more drawn out sales cycle as you work to get approval from every stakeholder within the client account. 

This requires incrementally educating your prospects about the benefits of using your product over time, rather than trying to set up a sales call at the very first touchpoint. It also requires a mindset shift towards more outbound relationships than inbound, because personalization is a crucial part of enterprise sales. That’s why they’re choosing to adapt.

A framework for innovation

B2B companies spend thousands of dollars a year on creativity training. But the traditional approach, which usually involves some variation of company-mandated brainstorming sessions, doesn't contribute to a lot of divergent thinking. 

That’s because, depending on the company culture, most executives define creativity as something that conforms to their idea of what creative thinking looks like. They look for indicators like past performance, or selectively entertain ideas that mesh with their existing values. This, in turn, reduces transparency and encourages employees to think within the box, instead of fostering true innovation.

Angus Fletcher is the Professor of Story Science at a leading academic think tank called Project Narrative. He recently collaborated with the University of Chicago Booth School, U.S. Special Operations, and businesses ranging from Fortune 50 companies to Silicon Valley startups, to explore a new model for encouraging creativity, called counterfactual thinking. The team found that the solution was to promote the idea of anomalous thinking and protect the privacy of employees when sharing new ideas. They created a few exercises to do just that, here’s how they work:

• In the first exercise, each team member anonymously writes down an idea they like but are afraid to admit to the group. The answers are then shared while maintaining anonymity. Everyone takes two minutes to imagine that they like each idea and silently plans a way to incorporate it into the workspace. This exercise empowers subjective bias, encourages teams to appreciate nonconformity, and primes the brain to value anomalies. 

• In the second exercise, team members imagine a new competitor in their market, identify a highly unusual feature about that competitor, and then envision themselves as that competitor. The focus is to determine what this anomalous feature allows them to do in the market. This exercise activates non-logical and mostly non-conscious regions of the brain, which often leads to unexpected insights and epiphanies.

• In the third exercise, instead of selecting the 'best' ideas from any brainstorming session, each idea is ranked based on creativity and potential for innovation. The current operational environment is then assessed in terms of stability and certainty. The selection of the idea to pursue depends on the environmental assessment. For example, in highly stable and certain environments, less creative but more innovative ideas are prioritized. In contrast, in unstable and uncertain environments, highly creative ideas, even those seen as long shots, are preferred.

The goal of these exercises is simple. They encourage deviation from the traditional model of creative thinking to encourage more radical ways of finding and approving new ideas. While it’s impossible to eliminate bias from the human mind, the most innovative organizations usually find a way to acknowledge the bias within their workforce and make it as transparent and diverse as possible.

Overall, this is simply a more structured presentation of what Tara’s team is doing over at Chili Piper. Every once in a while, marketing teams should take a moment to question their biases and rethink what they have learned to appreciate as universal truths as marketers. And, where innovation is the goal, it’s important to treat creativity as a team effort and encourage collaboration while tearing down silos. 

B2B marketing is too generic. It’s time to make a change. What will you be doing in the upcoming days to promote new ideas within your marketing department?

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Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes - Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn / follow her on Instagram.

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