As a B2B marketing leader focused on revenue performance management, Brian Hansford is also a B2B revenue producer, multimillion-dollar pipeline builder, marketing technologist, marketing data analyst, and content strategist and producer. He has made a huge contribution towards the digital marketing industry, and we had a quick interview with him to get the inside details of the industry.
About Brian Hansford
Brian Hansford: Passionate about people, process, data, content, and marketing technology, I focus heavily on measuring and directing pipeline performance and communicating results to CXO’s and investors, that too in the language they understand. A former B2B marketing consultant and long-suffering but proud Colorado Buff alum, I now build multi-million-dollar revenue pipelines and lead the demand generation effort at MediaPRO.
About Brian’s company and its background
Brian Hansford: MediaPRO provides security and privacy awareness training solutions. We develop and deliver the most innovative and entertaining content that helps employees within any organization to learn how to recognize cyber threats and avoid them. MediaPRO is recognized as an industry leader and a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader.
One thing people should innovate for the marketing industry
Brian Hansford: Marketing technology integrations need to improve dramatically as integrations are the biggest pain point for many marketers. Without effective integrations, it’s incredibly difficult to measure full-funnel marketing performance without tons of spreadsheet work and working on multiple platforms. Most importantly, inconsistent integrations create problems with delivering consistent and effective customer experience. Better integrations will improve overall sales performance and make it easier to measure what’s working in real-time.
One thing people should forget about the marketing industry
Brian Hansford: People should forget that simply integrating marketing automation tools automates marketing.
Marketing is incredibly complex, with a myriad of processes that run through multiple technology platforms. Signing up for a marketing automation platform and sending emails won’t magically solve marketing problems. Marketing technology creates infinite opportunities to engage an audience and drive revenue. But there isn’t anything that ensures marketing will be automated.
The area marketers should utilize data to make the biggest impact on customer experience
Brian Hansford: Marketers need to identify who their customers are, how they do research, how they engage, how they make decisions and the critical problems that they want to get solved. Structured and unstructured data collected from a variety of sources impact customer experience to a great extent. It is important to spend the time and energy to build the models, analyze and review them, and turn them into repeatable processes. This can be a difficult task, but the result is an improved customer experience which leads to a high-performance pipeline.
Transformation and innovation are key to any role; Brian’s thoughts
Brian Hansford: I enjoy coming up with new ideas and finding ways to improve our demand generation efforts. Innovation and transformation do not have to be a complex process powered by some whizbang technology. There are always ways to create a better experience or streamline a process. Creativity is a huge ingredient of innovation that should be continually fostered and rewarded.
Favorite B2B companies doing great inbound marketing
Brian Hansford: Drift does really well with their inbound marketing, and I like Triblio’s inbound marketing as well. B2B marketers are in a challenging transition right now, moving from the gated content era to one that makes it easier for visitors and buyers to get all the information they want. But we still need to generate leads. Also, many companies need to improve their inbound marketing.
Golden rule to succeed in marketing
Brian Hansford: When I asked my dad for advice, early in my career, he taught me that it’s easy for people to be the hero when plans are rolled out. Plans look and sound great, but only the results matter at the end of the quarter or the year. So, be the hero at the end of the quarter or year, not at the beginning.
Favorite B2B companies doing great marketing
Brian Hansford: BrightTALK, Vidyard, SEMrush, Chorus.ai, Gong, and Loom are some of my favorite B2B companies doing great marketing.
Impactful projects managed with marketing automation, associated challenges, and its solution
Brian Hansford: For me, the most challenging projects are when I inherit a legacy marketing automation implementation. Legacies are usually a hot mess with tons of old and undocumented nested programs, terrible data integrity, inconsistent folder structures, and data mapping problems with the CRM and other tools. I have encountered this several times, including in my current role.
We have successfully overcome the vast majority of these issues with the help of an expert agency that assessed our current implementation. They also provided a prioritized comprehensive plan to improve the implementation, and have been instrumental in helping us clean things up and optimize them. The project has been a huge success. We have increased the opportunity pipeline by over 50 percent and have more detailed data on marketing performance than ever before. This effort has strengthened our partnership with the sales team, and we are making forward-looking decisions, instead of dwelling in the past.
Skills that a successful marketer should have
Brian Hansford: Successful marketers must absolutely be able to collect and analyze data that shows full marketing performance. Marketers must then be able to communicate the story to the executive suite, board members, and investors. This is a career differentiator.
Too many B2B marketers are still stuck in activity-based metrics because they need technical skills. A specialist who only works on trade shows will have a limited career runway. Written skills are incredibly important, as well. Even if marketers aren’t directly involved in content creation, they should have the skills and capabilities to develop and edit the necessary assets that an audience wants to consume.
Thoughts on the evolution of the marketing arena a few years from now with regard to some of its potential disruptions and transformations
Brian Hansford: We are approaching the end of the cookie era, which allowed marketers to track and measure audience engagement on digital properties. Privacy concerns and regulations are rapidly changing how organizations can use cookies. That means new innovative tools that use machine learning must fill that void with predictive technologies. Google’s new analytics platform is making a big step in this direction which will force a massive change.
I think we will see interesting new uses of video in marketing and customer communications. People have talked about video for so long, and many companies have pursued video formats. But there are interesting new ways videos can be rapidly produced and personalized for specific audiences.
The biggest challenge for companies while adopting a new marketing technology
Brian Hansford: Utilizing the new technology in the right way is the biggest challenge for companies while adopting a new marketing technology. Marketing teams only utilize a portion of their overall tech stack. That means lots of tools go unused and do not deliver the intended value. If a marketing team cannot fully utilize their marketing tech investment, heads will roll, and they will lose budget. That does not mean that marketers should not experiment with new tools and tech. It is important to identify the strategic tools and the nice-to-haves and the experiments.
The most “SCARIEST” task
Brian Hansford: Ensuring that all the data and analysis is correct before presenting to my executive team and board is the scariest task in my role.
Inspiration
Brian Hansford: People who have stayed positive and open to others, regardless of personal viewpoints is the most inspiring thing.
Books or podcasts recommendation
Brian Hansford: I am reading “Enabler? I Hardly Know Her! How to make the sales experience not suck” by T. Melissa Madian and would highly recommend it.
Fun activities
Brian Hansford: Going outdoors in search of undocumented waterfalls, exploring the mountains, playing golf, and doing photography are some of the things that I do for fun.
Five words that describe Brian
Brian Hansford: The five words that best describe me are intentional, committed, sarcastic, passionate, and curious.
Thank you, Brian, for taking your time out to educate us more on the evolution of the marketing industry, the future of it, and how digital marketers need to prepare themselves for a successful career.
