Best of LinkedIn: Field Marketing CW 04/ 05

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about field marketing from calendar weeks four and five.

00:00:08: Frennis is a B to B market research company helping enterprise field marketing teams with precise target list research and database driven segmentation as well as event attendee acquisition.

00:00:19: It's good to be back and we are looking at a really specific A very telling slice of time today.

00:00:26: We're talking calendar weeks four and five of twenty

00:00:29: twenty six.

00:00:29: And looking at the stack of insights we've pulled from LinkedIn for just that period, I have to say the the mood has definitely shifted.

00:00:37: It feels like the industry is sort of waking up with a bit of a hangover.

00:00:40: A hangover from the growth at all costs era.

00:00:44: That's a really good way to put it.

00:00:45: Yeah.

00:00:45: And now they're realizing they need to be a lot sharper.

00:00:48: That is a very fair assessment.

00:00:49: I mean, if you look at the aggregate data.

00:00:51: All these posts from field marketing leaders the headline isn't how to throw a better party.

00:00:56: It's about accountability.

00:00:57: Right, we're seeing a hard pivot from what we could call execution excellence.

00:01:02: Yeah, you know are the napkins the right color to strategic accountability?

00:01:06: Which is really just a polite way of saying show me the money or stop spending

00:01:10: it.

00:01:10: blunt, but yeah pretty accurate.

00:01:13: It's no longer enough to just be a great planner.

00:01:16: the sources we're seeing are screaming that you need to be a revenue driver.

00:01:20: So if you can't connect that badge scan all the way to the bottom line, you are in a vulnerable spot.

00:01:25: A very vulnerable spot.

00:01:27: And that transition is the first big theme we have to tackle.

00:01:30: I mean, going from being seen as the logistics person to the strategy person.

00:01:36: It sounds great, but in practice.

00:01:39: It's messy.

00:01:39: Oh,

00:01:40: it's so messy.

00:01:40: It is.

00:01:41: And Miriam W. hit on something really profound about the psychology of this whole shift.

00:01:45: She put up a post arguing that most event planners are, well, they're drastically overqualified for the work they actually end up doing.

00:01:53: You mean they're doing runt work when they should be doing brain work?

00:01:56: Essentially, yes.

00:01:57: She argues that planners understand the physics of a room.

00:02:01: They know how energy moves, how decisions ripple through an audience.

00:02:04: How to engineer an outcome.

00:02:05: Exactly.

00:02:06: But, and this is the trap, they wait to be asked for that insight.

00:02:11: They execute the logistics beautifully, but they keep their strategic mouth shut.

00:02:15: I see this all the time.

00:02:16: You don't want to step on toes, so you just, you know, order the catering the client asks for, even if you know it's the wrong vibe for the meeting.

00:02:23: And that's fatal.

00:02:24: Miriam's point is that if you don't lead with your thinking, the client or your boss, just assumes that thinking isn't part of the package.

00:02:32: You train them to treat you like a pair of hands.

00:02:34: So you have to stop waiting for permission.

00:02:37: Offer the strategy before they ask the menu.

00:02:39: You have to.

00:02:40: It's an identity crisis really.

00:02:42: You have to stop identifying as the helper and start identifying as the architect.

00:02:46: But let's be real, that's so hard to do when you were buried in operational chaos.

00:02:51: Which

00:02:51: brings us to Amanda Hereti's post.

00:02:54: She really highlighted why this is so difficult, especially when you bring account-based marketing into it.

00:02:59: What

00:02:59: a team of one problem.

00:03:00: Exactly.

00:03:01: She described the reality for a lot of ABM practitioners.

00:03:05: It's not one job, it's three jobs in a trench coat.

00:03:08: ABM, field marketing, and demand gen, all for one person.

00:03:13: It is a recipe for burnout.

00:03:15: But Amanda's solution isn't just hire more people because, you know, budgets are tight.

00:03:19: Of course.

00:03:20: Her point is about being ruthless with your lanes.

00:03:23: She argues that field marketing just cannot be everything to everyone.

00:03:27: In an ABM world, field needs to be the high-cutch layer.

00:03:31: So stop trying to fill the funnel at the top.

00:03:34: Leave the volume to demand, Jen.

00:03:35: That's their job.

00:03:37: Field marketing should be the scalpel.

00:03:39: you know, precision, experience, high value touches for priority accounts.

00:03:44: If you're trying to be the net and the scalpel, you'll fail at both.

00:03:48: That distinction really helps, but it also implies you have the budget to be precise and budget meetings.

00:03:53: Well, they're usually where strategy goes to die.

00:03:55: They are.

00:03:56: Jay Manash had some thoughts on this that I found so refreshing because they were so defensive.

00:04:01: Defensive in a good way.

00:04:02: In the best way.

00:04:03: He's trying to arm marketers against the CFO.

00:04:06: Jay's critique is that too many budgets are just pulled out of thin air.

00:04:09: You know the drill.

00:04:10: We spent fifty K last year.

00:04:12: So let's ask for fifty five

00:04:13: or the classic.

00:04:14: Here's what we have.

00:04:15: So that's what you get,

00:04:17: right?

00:04:17: So Jay outlines this framework that forces you to work backward.

00:04:22: Start with the KPIs that ladder up to the actual business objectives then identify revenue sources of sponsorship in the mix.

00:04:30: Then and this is crucial break down fixed versus variable costs.

00:04:35: that fixed versus variable split is where people get burned

00:04:39: every single time.

00:04:40: Yeah.

00:04:40: If you don't know which levers you can pull when things go sideways, you're not managing a budget, you're just spending cash.

00:04:46: It's just basic business hygiene, but I bet fewer than half of field teams actually do that kind of rigor.

00:04:52: I'd take that bet.

00:04:53: Now, I want to pivot to the how of all this, because the common advice when you are overworked is just outsource it.

00:04:59: Hire a contractor.

00:05:00: And

00:05:01: Alex Atkins is here to tell you there's a dangerous fantasy.

00:05:04: I loved his post.

00:05:04: It was so honest.

00:05:05: This myth that contractors are just instant leverage.

00:05:09: Alex points out that quick tasks are rarely quick.

00:05:12: You hold all the brand context in your head.

00:05:14: The contractor doesn't.

00:05:15: So you end up spending two hours explaining the backstory for a task that might take them an hour to do.

00:05:20: You're not saving time.

00:05:21: You're just shifting the effort from doing to teaching.

00:05:24: And you're creating risk.

00:05:26: Alex warns that without incredibly tight management, contractors become single points of failure.

00:05:33: It changes your role from marketer to project manager and not everyone's ready for that.

00:05:37: So be careful who you hire and maybe be careful what you change.

00:05:41: We saw some interesting data from Julie Solaris and Bold Push Plus about that urge to shake things up.

00:05:47: Oh, this is a classic new leader move.

00:05:50: I'm in charge now.

00:05:51: Let's redesign the whole event.

00:05:52: Right.

00:05:53: And Julie is looking at the data and he says, stop it.

00:05:56: Boring advice.

00:05:57: but probably profitable.

00:05:58: His research suggests that radical redesigns usually disrupt the audience more than they delight them.

00:06:04: The smarter play is micro-optimizations.

00:06:07: Look at where your MPS dipped last year.

00:06:09: Fix that.

00:06:10: Don't tear down the house to paint the bathroom.

00:06:12: And Yannick Simon threw in a financial incentive for that kind of planning.

00:06:16: He mentioned you can save up to, what, ten thousand euros just by avoiding planning bloat?

00:06:20: Yeah, things like booking venues that are too big because you're overly optimistic.

00:06:25: or, and this is a big one, unrefined briefings that lead to endless revision loops with agencies.

00:06:31: Revision loops are just setting money on fire, so the takeaway here is be precise, define your role, and stop reinventing the wheel.

00:06:39: Which brings us to the elephant in the room.

00:06:41: You can do all that perfectly, but if you can't primitive work, you're still getting your budget cut.

00:06:47: This is our second theme.

00:06:48: Event ROI, measurement, and data discipline.

00:06:51: This is the part that hurts.

00:06:52: We call it the black hole of event data.

00:06:55: Nick Bennett shared a story that is frankly terrifying.

00:06:59: He talked about a company dropping nearly three hundred thousand dollars on events.

00:07:03: And their success metric, gut feeling.

00:07:05: The vibe was good, boss.

00:07:06: Can you imagine telling that to a CFO?

00:07:08: You'd

00:07:08: be fired on the spot.

00:07:10: But Nick diagnoses the problem so accurately.

00:07:13: It isn't usually that the event was bad.

00:07:14: It's the data handoff.

00:07:16: We've all seen this movie.

00:07:17: You scan badges, the data is messy, wrong emails, personal g-mails, no context.

00:07:22: And it sits in a spreadsheet for two weeks because everyone is exhausted?

00:07:25: Spreadsheet purgatory.

00:07:27: By the time it gets to sales, the lead is ice cold.

00:07:31: Nick is pushing for instant enrichment and tagging.

00:07:34: He mentioned tools like Popple.

00:07:36: You have to bridge that gap between the handshake and the CRM immediately.

00:07:40: Ryan

00:07:40: Elver is Cohen and Connor Jeffers back this up, looking at the human error factor.

00:07:45: Ryan calls it revenue leakage.

00:07:47: And let's be honest about what that means.

00:07:49: Sales reps hate manual data entry.

00:07:51: They

00:07:52: hate it.

00:07:52: If you give a rep a stack of four hundred business cards or a CSV file, they're not going to type them all in.

00:07:58: They'll cherry pick the three they remember and trash the rest.

00:08:01: That is leakage.

00:08:03: And Conner Jeffers from a then happily mentioned the gold standard.

00:08:06: Real time sink.

00:08:08: He said they had meetings booked for the following week before they even got on the plane home.

00:08:11: That is speed to lead.

00:08:13: And Peter Dalton gave us a stat that proves why speed is everything.

00:08:16: He noted that eighty percent eight zero of trade show leads are never followed up on.

00:08:20: It's

00:08:21: staggering.

00:08:21: Companies spend millions to get these leads and then just ignore them.

00:08:26: They don't mean to ignore them.

00:08:27: The window just closes.

00:08:29: Peter's point is the problem isn't attendance.

00:08:31: It's that by the time the data is usable, the prospect has moved on.

00:08:35: However, yes, the nuance.

00:08:37: Manpreet Waddam stepped in with a warning about speed versus quality.

00:08:42: Good point, because if you just auto-blast everyone who's stopped by the booth for free socks, you're gonna annoy a lot of people.

00:08:48: Exactly.

00:08:48: Manpreet warns against chasing volume.

00:08:51: Not every badge scan is a lead.

00:08:53: If you hand sales five hundred leads and four hundred fifty other junk, sales will stop trusting field marketing.

00:09:00: So what's the fix?

00:09:01: You need speed but you also need filters.

00:09:03: Manpreet suggests using AI to rank buyer readiness.

00:09:07: Identify who is actually in market and send those to sales immediately.

00:09:11: Put the rest in a nurture track.

00:09:12: Don't waste a human's time on a swag hunter.

00:09:14: Speaking of things that seem like a waste of time but aren't, we have to talk about Daniel Brooks in the mobile bar.

00:09:20: This was my favorite insight of the week.

00:09:22: It really challenges our definitions of ROI, for sure.

00:09:26: So the setup.

00:09:27: A client spends eight hundred pounds on a mobile bar.

00:09:30: Sponsors chip in another five hundred.

00:09:33: It's a rounding error in a marketing budget.

00:09:35: Yeah, that usually just gets coded as catering or something.

00:09:37: Correct.

00:09:38: They tried.

00:09:38: the business closed at the bar.

00:09:40: It was three thousand two hundred pounds in new deals signed right there.

00:09:43: That

00:09:43: is a forex return on a few drinks.

00:09:46: And Daniel's data showed that seventy three percent of attendees said their best conversations happened at that bar.

00:09:52: Why?

00:09:53: Is it just the alcohol?

00:09:55: It's the psychology.

00:09:56: It's an infrastructure for trust.

00:09:59: You don't close deals while sitting in rows listening to a keynote.

00:10:02: You close them when your guard is down, you're relaxed, and you're having a human interaction.

00:10:07: So networking costs aren't fluff.

00:10:09: They're actually high-yield investment vehicles.

00:10:11: That's what Daniel's proving.

00:10:13: It's about creating the environment for the transaction, which brings us to the infrastructure of the industry itself.

00:10:20: Our third theme, event technology and platform consolidation.

00:10:24: And the landscape is changing fast.

00:10:26: It is contracting.

00:10:28: The big news was Sevent acquiring ON-Twenty-Four and Elan Rosanski had a very sharp analysis of this.

00:10:36: A lot of people looked at that and thought, why buy a webinar platform now?

00:10:40: Aren't we back to in person?

00:10:42: Elan says that is the wrong take.

00:10:44: He thinks this is a masterclass in data strategy.

00:10:47: First, look at the price.

00:10:48: Sevent paid about one point five X revenue.

00:10:51: Compare that to the tech valuations a few years ago.

00:10:54: So they bought it at a fire sale price.

00:10:56: A

00:10:56: post-correction price.

00:10:58: But the strategic layer is scary smart.

00:11:01: Sevent owns the physical world registration.

00:11:04: Badges.

00:11:05: Hotels.

00:11:06: Owen-twenty-four owns the digital journey webinars.

00:11:09: Content hubs.

00:11:10: They own the handshake and the webinar.

00:11:11: Exactly.

00:11:12: By combining them, Sieven locks in data ownership across the entire life cycle.

00:11:16: It creates a walled garden.

00:11:18: But

00:11:18: that also raises concerns about monopoly.

00:11:20: It does.

00:11:21: And that's what Stuart Price from Guidebook and Chad Blaise were flagging.

00:11:24: Stuart's take was interesting.

00:11:25: He's betting that video isn't the future.

00:11:27: He's doubling down on the physical handshake being the only thing that really matters.

00:11:30: Pretty

00:11:31: much.

00:11:31: He thinks video is just for the aftermath.

00:11:34: And Chad Blaze took the David versus Goliath angle.

00:11:37: He thinks this consolidation is actually good for the little guys.

00:11:41: Yeah.

00:11:41: He believes that when big players merge, they get slow.

00:11:44: They get focused on shareholder returns.

00:11:47: And that leaves a massive opening for independent innovators to build tools that actually solve specific

00:11:53: problems.

00:11:54: the classic cycle of bundling and unbundling.

00:11:57: But whether you use a giant platform or a startup tool, Vanessa Lovett dropped a stat that hurts everyone equally.

00:12:03: The ninety percent user error stat.

00:12:06: Stings.

00:12:07: She claimed ninety percent of tech failures are actually user error.

00:12:10: We love to blame the platform.

00:12:11: Oh, the app crashed.

00:12:13: But usually we didn't configure it right.

00:12:14: We didn't read the manual.

00:12:15: We never read the manual.

00:12:16: But Brad Langley added a nuance here that I think is fair.

00:12:19: He brought up technical debt.

00:12:21: That's

00:12:22: a software term, right?

00:12:23: It is.

00:12:24: But it applies.

00:12:25: If vendors build features too fast prioritizing speed over quality, they're building fragile systems.

00:12:30: So sometimes it is the platform's fault.

00:12:32: So we have the strategy, the data, and the tech.

00:12:36: But none of it matters if the actual experience is terrible.

00:12:40: Our final theme, experience design and human engagement.

00:12:44: And it feels like the more tech we add, the more we crave something real.

00:12:49: That is the paradox Dylan Hebb pointed out.

00:12:51: He said tech should be invisible.

00:12:53: Invisible tech.

00:12:54: I like that.

00:12:54: It only matters if it removes effort.

00:12:56: Nobody goes to a conference to use an app.

00:12:58: They go to learn or connect.

00:13:00: Dylan's argument is that as tech gets smarter, the experience has to feel more human, not less.

00:13:05: And Kevin Richards took that idea of human scale.

00:13:08: Literally.

00:13:08: He's seeing a shift away from the mega booth.

00:13:10: Yeah, the vanity metrics are dying.

00:13:12: Yeah.

00:13:12: B to B tech loves to brag.

00:13:13: We had a fifty by fifty booth.

00:13:15: Kevin argues that small events, executive dinners, roundtables are often working much better.

00:13:20: Because you can't hide in a small room.

00:13:22: Precisely.

00:13:22: Deep conversations require intimacy.

00:13:25: Trust happens in quiet rooms, not on a crowded expo floor with a DJ blasting.

00:13:29: Speaking of stress, Angelika Bruce Kaufman touched on the host paradox.

00:13:34: This was the emotional core of the week's reading for me.

00:13:37: She highlighted how often the host of the event is the most miserable person there.

00:13:41: Running around with a headset, panicking about the AV.

00:13:44: And her point is, if the host is stressed, the guests feel it.

00:13:48: Energy transfers?

00:13:50: Her goal for experience design is that the planning should be so tight that the host can actually be a guest.

00:13:55: It's so true.

00:13:56: If I walk into an event and the organizer looks like they're about to have a panic attack, I immediately feel tense.

00:14:02: It ruins the psychological safety.

00:14:04: You have to design for your own peace of mind.

00:14:06: We also had Sophia Fry's talking about how to design that experience specifically.

00:14:11: Stop guessing.

00:14:12: Community co-creation.

00:14:14: Just ask them.

00:14:15: Sophia suggests using things like WhatsApp feedback groups to ask the community what they want before you build it.

00:14:21: And finally, Honor Ag DeGull gave us the best summary of the week.

00:14:25: It cuts through all the jargon, all the tech talk.

00:14:27: Humans touching grass together.

00:14:29: It is perfect.

00:14:30: It is.

00:14:31: We overcomplicate this so much.

00:14:33: But fundamentally, we're just trying to get people to leave their screens, come into a shared space and connect.

00:14:38: If you aren't achieving that, the rest is just noise.

00:14:41: So if you look at weeks four and five as a whole, what's the signal?

00:14:45: The signal is maturity.

00:14:47: Field marketing is growing up.

00:14:49: We're moving from the party planner era into a strategic revenue era.

00:14:53: That means leading with strategy, defending your budget with data, and using tech to enhance, not replace, that human connection.

00:15:02: Humans touch in grass, but with better data attribution.

00:15:05: That's the goal.

00:15:06: Well, that brings us to the end of this deep dive.

00:15:09: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:15:12: Also, check out our other editions on account-based marketing, go-to-market, channel marketing, MarTech, social selling, and AI in B to B marketing.

00:15:20: Thanks for listening.

00:15:21: Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

00:15:23: Catch you then.