The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mike Maynard, Managing Director of Napier, The Awareness to Opportunity Agency Delivering Results for B2B Technology Clients

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Mike Maynard, Managing Director of Napier, The Awareness to Opportunity Agency Delivering Results for B2B Technology Clients Napierb2b.com The Napier 4-Step Process Napier’s unique four-step process is designed to optimise B2B tech PR and marketing campaigns. It takes the best research on effective ways to deliver great PR and marketing campaigns and distils it into four simple steps: DETERMINE, FOCUS, DELIVER and ENHANCE. Their 4-step process and marketing expertise helps our clients move prospects from awareness to opportunity more quickly, delivering measurable results that help them achieve their business goals.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

What would we ever do without you? The Chris Foss Show, the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother, and now go clean your room. Anyway, whatever that means. So anyway, guys, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. We're going to be talking about B2B sales, content marketing, content making, all that sort of great stuff, and some of the different things that you can do to improve the quality of your business, get more sales,

and all that good stuff. And before we get into it, though, as always, the guilt and shaming of go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas. We'll be talking a little bit about that today. And our big LinkedIn newsletter over there, Growls Like a Weed, 130,000 group over there, subscribe to that as well. Also go to TikTok. We're starting to kill it on TikTok for some reason. We just found a really cool AI to cut up our content. So ChrisFoss1 over there and the ChrisFoss Show podcast on TikTok. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He is the managing director

of a company called Napier, b2b.com. Michael Maynard is on the show with us today. Mike is a self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology. Who saw that coming? He believes that combining the measurement, accountability, and innovation that he learned as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier, his company, delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment. He began his career as an electronics design engineer working for companies ranging from GEC Marconi to GDA, developing products from complex radar systems to Kim Wild's mixing desk. He later joined IDT Incorporated, an American semiconductor company. Miggy is moving into the marketing when he switched from European Applications Manager

to European Marketing Manager. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you? Hi, Chris. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm great. There you go. And I skipped a key part here. You acquired this company, I guess, in 2001?

Yeah, that's right. I decided to buy a technology agency about a month before the dot-com crash, which was not my best business idea. And 9-11 and everything else that happened. Oh, wait. Yeah. No, that was 2011 2011 i don't know what area i'm living in clearly uh i need more coffee so give us your dot com again i think i gave it a plug but let's get it from your lips yeah sure it's uh napier b2b.com which is n-a-p-i-e-r the letter b the number two the letter b.com and if you're into b2b marketing you'll get the url and if you're not you're probably wondering why on earth we've got something so complicated there you go uh so give us a 30 000 overview of what napier b2b does yes so what we do is we help companies that are building technical products so technical things sell them to other companies so that's the

technology and the b2b so um we're helping them sell to generally speaking engineers there you go so engineers is right up your wheelhouse um and uh you've been doing this since 2001 so geez what is that like 22 years 23 years yeah a little bit longer than that i mean i i realized actually when you read the bio that kim wilde's mixing desk is gonna date me and a lot of listeners are gonna to go, who on earth was Kim Wilde? I'm sure. Tell us. Oh, Kim Wilde was a fantastic British pop star.

So famous, I think, mostly for Kids in America being her song. There you go. Got to love the pop. You heard of the Beatles, too? There's the Beatles there. I'm not quite there. You've heard of the Beatles? There you go. There's a on the Beatles? There you go.

There's a couple of them. There you go. There you go. So give us a 30,000 hour review of some of the in-depth stuff you guys do, some of the ways you help these companies do B2B sales. Yes, I think it's really interesting. We spend most of our time working with very large companies so companies with tens maybe hundreds of thousands of people in them you know perhaps

turning over a billion dollars a year um and what we do is we help them sell the interesting thing to me is a lot of what they can do is now accessible to people who are running you know very small or even you know one person businesses so to me you know what we're doing is we're helping bring the technology that's available for marketing to our big customers but also increasing some small startups as well there you go there you go and so what size of companies is kind of your bottom limit uh of size that you'll work with do you have one and uh what are the companies that are a good fit for you? That's a great question. So our smallest company was actually three people. And we did a couple of projects there.

So we're not pretentious about, you know, they've got to be a certain size. But generally speaking, you know, the best fit companies are companies that are making a technical product. And that can be, you know, something physical. So we have clients that make like huge industrial motors we have clients that make ai silicon chips um to speed up ai um or they can be doing some uh software so that could be software around you know helping businesses run more efficiently um or helping engineers do their job and that's that's another big area we do things called software development tools so software engineers actually bizarrely use software to create better software it's kind of a

you know a recursive sort of thing but um we do a lot of helping those companies talk to software engineers and sell their products there you go do you find that a lot of companies especially engineering companies have a hard time bridging that gap into the people marketing business? Definitely. I think this is one of the big challenges. And, you know, I used to be an engineer, so I did all the wrong things. I know how it goes wrong.

And what happens is you have these engineers and they've spent three years of their life and they've dedicated it to designing, you know, a new product. And let's say it's a it's a new drive that powers a motor and three years of their life has been pumped into this all their expertise all their effort and they want to tell you every single detail about what it does they want the precise specifications because you know they've worked hard making it 0.1 percent more

efficient um but the problem is when it comes to marketing, people don't actually want all that detail. They can go look at that if they need to, but initially what they want to know is, you know, how is it different? Why does it stand out? You know, the classic sort of marketing messages. And so, you know, being able to tell the story around, you know, why the product was developed

and why it's different and why it's special, that's what we're really good at. And we help people do that. But also we help people phrase it in a way that engineers like, because, you know, speaking as an engineer, we're pretty special people. We're pretty unusual. You know, we're not necessarily a classic people people, you know, we're quite nerdy. And so we like things communicated in a certain way. So we're able to take those stories and make them exciting to engineers who do care about, you know, some of the details and some of the technology. There you go.

And having someone help translate that because I, you know, I know how engineers in my Silicon Valley people are, you know, a bit nerdy and technical. And, you know, their conversation is like, so you take the ISO 540 to the CDL and you're like, I don't know, what are you talking about? And so being able to convert that to a marketing aspect where people are like, why do I want to buy this and what does it do for me, can really help with that translation.

Yeah, definitely. I love the quoting of the ISO regulations there, Chris. I didn't mean that up, actually. i'm just making shit up at this point yeah it sounds real that's how uh that's how it is no i mean we have we have a great example for example we do a lot of work with um you know companies developing software um and in in you know the automotive sector you're producing software for cars you kind of want it to work if it's the system controlling

your brakes for example that helps um it's important and so you know you could talk to a person say this software helps make sure that when you hit the brake pedal the car actually stops um engineers probably want it slightly different you know and they'll talk about this software helps you comply to iso 26262 which is is the hot one in the automotive sector. I'm sure you love that. Yeah, that's my favorite. Late night reading. IS2, yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, you have to communicate it in a way that really says to the engineer what it's going to do, how it's going to help them. And, you know, it's hugely important. And let's be honest, it's really important that when you do hit those brakes, the car does stop. I've found that. The judge says the last time I cut someone's brakes, I can't do that anymore. Now you guys have what you guys call the four step process. Tell us about how that works and how you help clients with it. That's a great question. So again, this is, you know, kind of a bit of a nerdy marketing thing.

But what we find happens a lot is that when people start marketing, they see all these tools and they've got all these different things. And they go, oh, we can run Google ads or we can go on LinkedIn and we can do some advertising or, you know, we can write some blog posts or we can create a TikTok. And, you know, they're rushing off in four different directions, doing four different things that actually don't really help each other. And so what we do is we put in a process and the whole point of the process is to get people to think. And so if you're marketing you know there's a couple of stages you've got to go through um and the first is you know thinking about where you are and where you want to get to so you know it's that change that you've got to make um and that might be that you know you're a company that doesn't have a

great reputation you want a great reputation or it might be you've got a product nobody's heard of and you want people to hear about it and that that's what we call the determined stage. That's the first stage. Then you've got to work out who you're talking to and what's going to change their mind. So you've got to understand them. And there's lots of people looking in depth at marketing and they build these personas, these models of what people are like. But that's our focus stage. We look at who we're going to talk to, what they care about, what their problems are, and how we're going to solve their problems. And so we kind of have these two stages before we rush in that make sure that our campaigns are then built upon something

that's going to be effective. Because you can run great campaigns, you can even get campaigns that go viral and generate a lot of views, but actually don't generate any sales. And what we really care about, and I think this is, you know, marketers talk a lot of views, but actually don't generate any sales. And what we really care about, and I think this is, you know, marketers talk a lot about ROI, right? It's like, you need to make sales.

At the end of the day, most of marketing is around driving sales or making people more enthusiastic about being a customer. There you go. Plus you got to refill that advertising budget. If you don't make sales and refill that advertising, you can't advertise anymore.

And then you just file bankruptcy. So the four-step process, determine, focus, deliver, and enhance. I like these identifiers here and how you have them. And also for delivering great service as well. Tell us a little bit about that. So, I mean, what this does, this process, is it lets our clients, you know, understand how we're building campaigns. It's all the engineers in the interpretation too, huh? Yeah. But also, we talk about, so a lot of agencies talk about, you know, measuring results at the end. I mean, that's too late.

You know, if your client spent a load of money with you, you've run a campaign, you go, yeah, it didn't work. That's not really very helpful. So, we're always measuring we're looking to actually you know put things in that say are we heading in the right direction are we not um and that for us is super important because you know when it comes to marketing it's about creating ideas and some of those ideas really work and really resonate some of them perhaps you know not quite there but if you can see that you've just missed a little bit and you can redirect um you know at the start of the campaign you can actually end up with a really effective really good campaign so we talk about enhanced because delivering great

service is all about making sure we get to where the customer wants to go um and so it is that continual course correction to make sure that you know okay our first our first attempt our first idea you know maybe it was perfect first attempt, our first idea, you know, maybe it was perfect, maybe it wasn't. But if it wasn't perfect, we're going to get to that perfect idea by the end of the campaign. There you go. And so you guys do a lot of different things with campaign strategy. You do marketing research, measurement results, international campaigns, PR and media relations. That's probably one important aspect. Do you basically work with anyone around the globe or do you have a specific market you like to do business with?

That's a great question. So we do work around the globe with clients, but our biggest areas really are Europe and the US. So recently, about 18 months ago, we actually launched an office in the US, which is quite exciting for us as a European company. We've been working with American clients basically for the entire history of the company. But opening in the US has allowed us to do a lot more there.

And that's been a real exciting success for us. But, you know, that's our focus. And, you know, I'm going to be honest, don't come to us if you want to campaign in China. We're not experts in China. and that's a very specialized area um and equally japan again very specialized so we won't be there but we do run campaigns you know particularly across the english-speaking world so you know if you're looking for campaigns in australia a lot of our campaigns run that that sort of area what sort of social media platforms do you usually run on well being business to business linkedin is

like the biggest platform there you go um and and the reason for that um and i don't know how many of your listeners will know a lot about linkedin um but linkedin lets you target by um what they say firmographics and demographics so a bit about the company and a bit about the person. So you can say, I want to target chief engineers at companies that do this product. They're in food manufacturing. And LinkedIn uniquely lets you do that. And that's LinkedIn's superpower because a lot of people, when they're marketing, they know who they want to talk to. They know the kind of companies these people work in.

They just don't know the individuals. And LinkedIn lets you get there so that's by far our primary um uh sort of social media platform other social media platforms not exclusively but generally tend to be used for things like retargeting so when someone gets hit with one of our linkedin campaigns or something else you know maybe an outbound email or just Google search, they come to the website, we'll then show them ads on other social media platforms. And that's very cost effective. But it's much, much harder to find the people we want on those other platforms. LinkedIn is unique in its ability to find people. It definitely is. Back in the day when there was pretty much the kind of the big three, there was Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We used to say, think of LinkedIn as the bar,

which hasn't changed much. Think of Facebook as your house or hanging out at the family reunion. And then LinkedIn is think of being at work. So, you know, post appropriately and act appropriately in those three segments. Last thing you want to do is be on LinkedIn, acting like you're in a bar and posting bar stuff and things.

I love seeing people do it, but I love LinkedIn. I've loved LinkedIn for all my years. It's so great, and you can interact with people who are professionals, or at least they're acting professional until they get to Twitter. But you can target people, and you can target people on, you know, whether they're engineers or ceos and what they're into you know our big target is leadership and podcasts and so um it's just such a great platform and uh it's it seems it seems to be getting better our newsletter over

there just keeps growing immensely it goes out to everyone's email it's it's uh i've loved it our groups used to be able to send a group email to everybody uh but uh microsoft fucked all that up but that's another story um so uh what what are we touched on that you guys do and help with clients that we should uh tease out to people so i think what we do is you know we really help people reach engineers um And so that's our first thing. And that's why you mentioned our services and you talked about services. And it's true, we do a lot of things.

But the reason we do a lot of things is because they all need an understanding of who you're talking to. And I think it's going back to, you talk about the different social media platforms. You really need to be very different in the way you behave, the way you advertise on Facebook

than you do on LinkedIn. linkedin is much more professional um you know one of our clients actually said they said you know the real difference is linkedin people go there to do work facebook people go there to waste time and advertisers should respect that they're trying to waste time and he was absolutely right you've got to go and have fun on facebook it's got to be enjoyable you know it very different from LinkedIn where actually sometimes some fairly unexciting content can actually do really, really well because it talks about an important topic. Whereas you try that on Facebook, it's going to crash and burn. People want to have fun. They want to enjoy it.

Yeah, it's hard to do business over there. I see people trying to do business on Facebook, and I'm just like, what? And I mean, you can't target people with jobs. I don't think you can target people with ads and jobs, but LinkedIn is so good. So what are you finding most companies now in the B2B market really struggle with the most, and how do you help them overcome that?

That's a great question. I think if you look, companies, whether they're big or small all have the same problems and this i find really interesting you know we'll have the same problem with you know a client that's got 4 000 people in marketing across the globe to a client that's got maybe 20 people total in the company and generally speaking it's around content it's around creating things that they can then use for marketing. Most people know how to push the buttons and push out a LinkedIn campaign.

And yes, you know, could we do it better than they could in-house? Possibly. But is it going to make a massive difference? No, you know, it's maybe a 50% improvement. If we can create great content, and a lot of that comes from great ideas, then we can make a huge difference you know it's orders of magnitude better in terms of performance when you create that content and almost universally what we're seeing is you know everyone's talking about

content marketing the reality is is although they're talking about content marketing they're all struggling to generate that content and having people who can do that is really, I think, the superpower of having an agency like us. And that's why we're so focused on one particular thing, talking to technical people about technical products, because we're really good

at creating content that works in that environment. There you go. Creating the content. Do you guys repurpose a lot of content? Yeah, absolutely. That maybe people are trying to make work? Yeah, I mean, it's all about taking one thing

and reusing it as many times as possible. And particularly when you're talking about something technical, because quite often you might need, you know, someone fairly senior in the company who's an engineer, who, you know, really doesn't put marketing at the top of his priority list to come and, you know, validate what you've created and make sure that you have got those technical details right

or to come and brief you at the start. And so if you do a one and done piece of content from that, that's it. You've got one piece of content. You're not going to get anything else. He's probably not going to come back. And typically it's a he, sadly, but some of the best CTOs I know are female,

but most of the people are male in our industry. But you've got one piece of content and that's it. So you've got to look to repurpose it. And you've got to think about from the start, how am I going to get something that can then be split into different things? And that can be, you know, taking something that's written and creating video or animations from it, or it can be taking an interview and then spinning out, you know,

different pieces from that. So lots of different ways to do it. There's no one magic way to repurpose. The magic way to repurpose is think about it at the start. There you go. I mean, when it really comes down to it, I mean, engineers can be very cerebral, very technical based, you know, kind of like we joked about earlier. But sales is still a human, sometimes, well, most times, emotional sort of decision-making process.

You know, people buy based on emotion. And so being able to bridge that gap for your clients and make sure that, you know, whoever's on the other end, the buying end, is connecting with the product, maybe not always from an engineer basis um you know they they can understand what's going on and make their decisions uh are you guys using or seeing any advancements in ai that's maybe helping you uh and your clients do better it's getting there um i mean i think the challenge is that ai is really good at reproducing content that's similar to other stuff.

And that's what we see. And, you know, if you see even the image creation things where, you know, you ask for, I don't know, a giraffe riding an elephant or something, it's still basically, you know, pasting a giraffe on top of an elephant. You know, and it's something you'd never see in real life, but it's bits of things that are kind of pasted together it's the same with written content you know chat gpt when it produces content it's fundamentally kind of pasting ideas together that

already exist so for us there are two problems one is quite often we're talking about something new um and today ai is not great about writing something new it can kind of do it but it's it's not brilliant um and secondly it's incredibly technical and so those technical differences matter hugely um and again ai is not great at fact checking you know um my favorite thing is you know one of my one of my hobbies is speed skating, and I'm a genuinely terrible speed skater. All my friends who skate will be laughing at this. But I typed into chat GPT a little while ago, tell me about the greatest speed skaters in history. And it gave me this really good answer.

And then I said, what about Mike Maynard? Isn't he one of the greatest short track speed skaters in history? And chat GPT went, oh, yes, funny you should say that. Actually, he is. He skated for Canada. You know, I've had this amazing career that it made up for me um and genuinely that there's no mike maynard that's skating for canada and had this history and competed in the olympics it didn't happen um but but for a while i felt great and i think that's a big problem with chat gpt and technology and technical products is there's so many facts that have to be right.

AI is not great at getting facts right. And so that's another challenge. I mean, will it get there? Well, it's certainly going to get a damn sight better than it is now. I mean, that's for sure. You know, it's absolutely going to get closer and closer. You know, the jury's out as to whether it will replace writers i suspect it probably won't i suspect there'll be fewer writers who are you know much much more

creative driving the ai and using it as a tool rather than you know all the writers disappear um or all the designers disappear i think there'll still be people around but it's going to be an incredibly powerful tool it's only getting better there you go uh you know maybe you'll get a hall of fame hockey hall of fame thing or speed skater hall of fame uh induction you'll be like wait he bought that wow that'd be also i did play hockey a while ago so uh quite a few years ago now but uh chat gpt doesn't seem to to know about my hockey career i'll have to tell you i'm gonna tell it how I'm the sexiest man alive and I've been on the cover of Vogue or whatever 10 times.

See if it buys it. There you go. So there's a lot of interesting things that go into marketing. Do you feel that in the future, marketing is going to get more challenging, more noisy, harder to, you know, social media is pretty noisy these days, even LinkedIn. Do you think it's harder to be seen? Is it harder to get noticed? Or do you just have to be like yourselves where you have your finger on the pulse and you know how to dial

it in? I love that question. That's such a good question, Chris. This is why they pay me a dollar for coming on the show and being the host. I a dollar per show doubled your salary that's amazing yeah sometimes they throw in like a quarter or something it's cool no no it's a brilliant question because what's going to happen is there's going to be a lot more noise there's going to be a lot more noise a lot more content AI is going to generate an awful lot of content but the reality is is only a tiny proportion of content that's generated today has any input only a tiny percentage of um tweets or posts or anything go viral um and so that's not going to change and what we're going to see is we're going to see two groups of marketers we're going to see one group going for volume and they're going to produce low quality high volume

and it's not going to do well it's going to do very much like it does today it's it's it's pretty meh you know i mean you might get something but it's never going to go big and most of your stuff will never get viewed and there's there's been studies that show you know some websites 90 of the pages never get viewed oh wow very large very large very very large websites so um you know they never get looked at people only look. Very large, very, very large websites. So, you know, they never get looked at. People only look at a very small percentage. So these people going for volume and just investing everything in AI to generate volume,

they're going to struggle. And it's going to get harder and harder for them because there's going to be more and more volume. There's going to be other people that focus on quality. And the reality is in marketing, and, you know, sometimes agencies like to say this, but some of your campaigns will work, some of them won't.

The campaigns that really work are the ones you should go and invest more dollars in. And you should be doubling down on what works and what really resonates with your audience. And that again, let's bring this all the way back to repurposing. A lot of what we do is we'll produce different pieces of content.

We'll look at what works with the client. And then the content that gets the best engagement will then start repurposing and putting it maybe, you know, from written into video or video into written or whatever it is. And really focusing down on the thing that we know works and focusing on that quality and doubling down on on what actually delivers

results that's what's going to be the best thing for people in marketing and that's what marketing you know i think really will be in the future is finding you know those those sweet spot um things and then really really working on them there you go uh yeah it's i i just i i realized that as soon as you said it, that AI is going to make the world noisy. People are going to be putting, you know, there's already now a thing where I guess Amazon has been flooded with AI-written books on travel that are just flooding the market. Some are hijacking copyright and people's content

that they've made as a human being. But yeah, it's going to flood everything, and I guess everybody will write a book here with AI or something. I don't know. It's going to get insane, and it's going to get harder to get noticed. It's crazy. I mean, Amazon's also having the same problem with reviews. There's lots of sites where you just search for As An AI in the review section,

and you see all these reviews that are AI-generated. So, yeah, top tip on Amazon. If you see As An AI in any of the reviews, probably don't trust any of the reviews for that product. Yeah, we've seen that in podcasting with podcasting reviews. I've had people that I'm like, how do you have, have like three episodes and 500 uh reviews and they all read like a bot in fact sometimes their their grammar will be off and

there'll be like a period in the wrong place on all of them and i'm like oh i see what's going on uh you i get those approaches on linkedin like all the. I don't know why Pakistan and India cornered the market on podcast promotion, but I don't know. Somehow we failed in our countries to corner that market. Don't do that, people. I mean, that's just an example of the more noise that's going to be out there. And, you know, creating content that converts the brain that builds awareness makes a difference. And then, you know,

you guys have a little bit of added feature where, you know, there's the technical aspect of it that you have to make a juicy or what's the word I'm looking for, you know, uh, uh, you know, something that's exciting for people, even though, you know, talking about microchips or, or something that might not be, you know, something that's exciting for people, even though, you know, talking about microchips or something like that might not be, you know, as fun as, I don't know, buying a car, buying a Ferrari or something, you know?

It's a little bit more technical. Yeah, well, as an engineer, clearly talking about microchips is way more interesting than talking about cars, unless you want to go back to those ISO standards where, you know, that'll get you excited. There you go. Well, you got to do those ISO standards where, you know, that'll get me excited. There you go. Well, you gotta

do the ISO standards and the DDT and the that's a poison for rats or something. I'll just start making up shit here. So, any final thoughts before we go out on teasing out what you guys do and how you do it and

how people can onboard with you, reach out to you and get to know you guys better. I mean, it's been fun conversation. I think, you know, if people out there, they're working for a company that's B2B, they're selling something that's technical, whether it's software or a real product, you know, just come and ask me questions. And I love talking to people. So, you know, obviously we mentioned the website, napierb2b.com.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Mike Maynard. I'm the only Mike Maynard at Napier. Or you can email me. And I'm sure most of your viewers, you know, they're pretty smart. They probably realize my email address is mike at napierb2b.com. You know, if you've got questions, just send me an email. You know, love to talk to people.

Be great to get to meet some through the show. There go that'll be awesome uh thank you very much mike for coming the show we really appreciate it thanks so much for having me as a guest chris really appreciate it there you go guys check it out go to their website you can reach out to them and contact them there too napierb2b.com uh thanks to our audience for tuning in go to goodreads.com. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, youtube.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn, of course, our favorite. And we're starting to do stuff on TikTok, Chris Voss 1 on TikTok,

and the Chris Voss Show podcast on TikTok. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.