How Marketing Teams Can Drive Growth With Fewer Resources

The B2B landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, with markets in a constant state of fluctuation, creating much uncertainty and unpredictability. These evolving market dynamics are forcing organizations to restructure their operations and leaving B2B marketers with reduced budgets, bandwidth, resources, and shorter timelines. So how can B2B marketing teams work within those constraints and still drive results?

That’s why we’re talking to Michael Clark (Chief Marketing Officer, Infrascale), who shared proven strategies on how marketing teams can drive growth with fewer resources. During our conversation, Michael highlighted the importance of marketing agility, leveraging real-time data, and integrating customer feedback into marketing decisions. He also stressed why aligning marketing teams with sales and other internal stakeholders using metrics like pipeline and revenue is critical to success. Michael advised starting with audits, having a deeper understanding of customer needs, and experimenting with small, iterative changes. He also emphasized the power of customer-centric storytelling, where the customer is the hero and your brand is positioned as the strategic guide.

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https://youtu.be/JpydzwWexY4

[2:31] The importance of agility in B2B marketing, and why it matters for sustainable growth

[3:52] Key challenges B2B marketers face when collecting and acting on customer feedback

[9:08] Common pitfalls that B2B marketers need to avoid

[16:14] The role of research and strategic planning in driving better B2B marketing outcomes

[21:16] Tips on how to start small and accelerate B2B marketing efforts over time 

[30:06] Actionable tips for B2B marketers to improve their execution and generate better results

Michael Clark on LinkedIn 

Infrascale

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Christian Klepp  00:00

The B2B landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, and markets are constantly fluctuating, leading to much uncertainty and unpredictability. This results in B2B marketers having to work with limited budgets, bandwidth resources, and collapsing time frames. So what can they do to deliver more with less? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Michael Clark, who will be answering this question. He is the CMO at Infrascale, who has more than 15 years of experience in developing marketing strategies, creating product roadmaps and increasing revenues and success for B2B companies. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:46

Mr. Michael Clark, welcome to the show, sir. 

Michael Clark  00:49

Thank you. Christian, happy to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:52

Great to have you on the show, Michael. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because I think, let’s be honest, it’s something that a lot of B2B marketers are thinking about. I’m not entirely sure if they’re losing sleep over it, but some of them might be. And I think this conversation is something that needs to be had. It’s really important. So, um I shall not keep the guests in suspense any longer. And uh we’ll just jump right in. Okay? 

Michael Clark  01:18

Sounds good. 

Christian Klepp  01:19

Great. So, Michael, you’re on a mission to help design innovative marketing strategies, develop product roadmaps, and conceptualize growth plans to increase revenues and ensure enterprisewide success. So, for today’s conversation, and for the benefit of the audience, of course, let’s focus on the topic of how can B2B marketing teams do more with less. So, before I start asking you all the um all the questions, I’m going to set this up a little bit, right? So I think we all know it’s quite clear that the B2B landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. Markets are constantly fluctuating and that ultimately leads to a lot of uncertainty which also results in marketers having to deliver something with limited budget, bandwidth, resources and collapsing time frames. A very tough combination if I do say so myself. But let’s kick off the conversation with two questions and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So the first one is why do you think it’s important for B2B marketing teams to be agile and given that where do you see a lot of these teams struggle? 

Michael Clark  02:31

Yeah, thanks, Christian, yeah. I think it’s there’s a lot of importance and agility that comes in a variety of ways. We’ll start with the fact that I think, as you said the markets themselves are evolving constantly, and that means we need to evolve constantly with them. And I think, you know, we’ve all had the experience where you come up with a great hook, a great campaign, a great email, whatever it might be, that works for a month or for a quarter and then tails off again. And you can expect what worked yesterday to keep working forever in the future, you need to be constantly testing and expanding to evolve that to a new, successful topic. And I think the agility we’re talking about allows marketing to make those quick changes, to adapt quickly based on two of my favorite things, real time, data and customer feedback. So when done properly, I think agility isn’t chaotic. It’s a structured iteration that’s grounded in data. It’s grounded in listening, and it’s that database that data driven decision of are we delivering results and are the changes that we’re making working, or how do we optimize them further?

Christian Klepp  03:40

Absolutely, absolutely. So where do you see? Where do you see a lot of these teams struggling like, do they struggle with dealing with the data and customer feedback? I imagine some of them don’t even do that.

Michael Clark  03:52

I think that’s one of the things that I agree with you. That is missing is marketing is often divorced from customers, might be partners, they might be end users. They you know, customer and B2B marketing is writ large, and even then, I’m looking at external customers. We’ll come back to that in a minute. But to me, the best insights don’t come off your dashboard. They don’t come out of your metrics. They come from the conversations you’re having, and I think that they come from conversations you have with customers who are using your product, and when you listen to them, even if you’re a fly on the wall, not driving the conversation, you hear what sales is saying that they’re responding to. You hear what questions they’re asking, where things aren’t clear, or they’re trying to drill into a specific point of interest, and that has been the gold mine that I’ve mined all my career for all of my best campaigns, is what is the customer telling me that they need, that they want, that they’re looking for, and how is it that then we get that message back into what we’re sending out on the marketing side?

Christian Klepp  04:58

Fantastic insight. I had a follow up question, just based on what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, why do all of these marketing teams skip that bit? Like, I mean, at least some of the marketers I’ve worked with, like, they don’t collect this feedback from customers. Is there some? Is it because of the disconnect between them and sales? Is it because they’ve never spoken to customers or over to you.

Michael Clark  05:24

I think it starts with the disconnect from sales that might be in some organizations. I’ve actually seen marketing and sales set up as competitive organizations, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. These are two people that need be completely aligned in what they’re doing, but I think marketing, I think in a lot of ways, the onus is on marketing to make this connection. And the reason is I mentioned a moment ago, we were talking about external customers before you have internal customers in your organization as well. And when it comes to marketing, sales is your biggest internal customer in almost every case. So ask sales what it is that they’re looking for, what data is important to them, what handoff point makes the most sense to them. And then that lets you start a aligning on what you’re giving sales. They agree that their needs are being met, and they’re more likely to say, Sure, I’d be happy to let you sit in on a customer conversation, because I think it is the organic conversations that have this information more so than a survey you send out or other way of capturing the data. So either you’re using meeting notes that transcribe it, and, you know, fishing for more information, but I’ll tell you being there live, and especially when you are the trust of sales to ask some questions live really lets you hone in on why is that important to you? What is the impact on your organization, and the type of things that really drive the needle? 

Christian Klepp  06:53

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, just, just to that point I remember, in one of my previous roles as a product marketer, one of the biggest learnings I had was when I actually went out into the field with sales people, right? So went out and had meetings with the customers, and I could hear what questions and concerns the customer had and what objections also very important, and how the sales dealt with those questions and how they I wouldn’t say counter the objections, because that sounds like you’re getting ready for a fight. But how do they address them?

Michael Clark  07:28

I think that marketing can have a role there to play, to help make sure that messaging is as on point as possible within the realm of sales, to still display their personality and expertise. But I think when it comes to providing the general message of objection handling, we’re dealing with some form of Product Marketing, or marketing and sales alignment, and marketing and product alignment, depending on the size of the team in the organization.

Christian Klepp  07:56

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Michael Clark  09:08

So when it comes to pitfalls, the first one I see is potentially valuing and measuring the wrong things, and I still talk to marketing organizations that may be focused on their metrics rather than maybe their set, their their sales team, their internal customer metrics. So for example, if you’re looking at how many MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead) you have, or you know, your traffic style metrics, I would encourage you to drive much deeper in the funnel and start looking at opportunities, pipeline and revenue, this is where you can prove what you’re doing is actually having positive impact on the on the organization, is setting up meaningful conversations for your colleague in sales, and just driving success across the board. 

Michael Clark  09:57

The second thing that I think is really important is the ability to get stakeholder alignment in what you’re doing. And this, again, can get back to the trust issue, but when you show people that you’re working in the same direction, you can start experimenting. And I think that’s one of the great things about digital marketing, particular, is you can experiment and iterate very rapidly. And whether that’s your basic AB testing or just full on, hey, we had this idea. We think it’s got legs. We’re going to test it small. We’re going to see if it works. You can get alignment better for saying, our plan is to do this small in multiple ways, across multiple markets, with these variables, and then see how it is resonating in the market, see what it’s responding, see what is happening, and then start accelerating from there. And it also then gets you into that sort of, again, agile from a technologist standpoint, mindset of, let’s do small things and iterate them as they’re successful, rather than saying, here is my plan for next year, and I’m going to ride this ship down one way or another, I am constantly testing new vendors. I’m testing new messaging, I’m testing new channels, and I’m mixing those things together in interesting ways, based on what I hear from the customers and where I see this is important. At infrascale, for example, we have found one of the things really critical to our customers that’s a differentiator for us is our award winning support team, and we’ve learned that this is the door opener to the conversation for us. In fact, our sales team was at a competitive event where we had to promise to play nicely with the competitor and not see anything disparaging. So I credit my sales team for smiling as people walked by the booth and said, Hey, how much do you love competitor X’s support. And, you know, people get a sort of sour look on their face and then come over and start talking to them about what we can offer. So that’s an example of arming sales and sales arming marketing with what we are hearing our customers are saying is important, and it’s maybe not a feature, a benefit, a price, but it’s what’s driving the conversation.

Christian Klepp  12:16

Absolutely, absolutely, make that a bit more customer focused. But why do you feel so many and I think I can say this with a certain degree of confidence. Why? Why do you think that a lot of companies in the B2B space default to talking about features?

Michael Clark  12:33

I think because they’re used to telling their story when they need to adapt to telling the customer story. And I’ve used this argument, and forgive me, I forget the author, but there’s a book out there called Story brand that, as an ex English major, appealed to me greatly because it matched basically marketing against the stereotypical hero’s journey and the point of the book, and hopefully you can place the author in here. For me in a bit, the point of the book is that marketing goes wrong when you make your brand the hero, and you want to make your customer the hero, and you are the guide that made this happen. And I see this time and time again where companies stand up and say, these are the six great things we’ve done this year to an external audience of potential customers. And I’m like, if you replace this with here’s six great things our customers have done this year, you’re going to get much more excitement about what it is that you’re saying and much more engagement from them.

Christian Klepp  13:32

Absolutely, absolutely. And the author of the book, building a story brand is Donald Miller, and I know that because I’ve read it twice. So…

Michael Clark  13:40

That’s excellent. My apologies to Donald Miller, it’s a great book. Highly recommend it. There is one other point where I think there’s a key pitfall that I run into and, you know, Coach my teams and people that are mentoring or other people I’m working with try to get out of and that’s my phrase that my team is it grows tired of is, let’s not confuse activity with results. And I think a lot of times, we can get very focused in reporting our own activity, reporting our campaigns, showing our calendars and everything which are important project management tools, don’t get me wrong, but they are not the results of what we’re doing. And I would not generally report that information to external stakeholders, to external stakeholders you want to show business value. And again, to me, that’s pipeline. And further, maybe increasing conversion rates. And if you’re seeing a big change in how your messaging is penetrating earlier. You can bring that up, but you want to tie it back to bottom line metrics. Now I will say it was good news. I was interviewing someone a week ago, and we were talking about campaigns, and I asked her, What is the ultimate metric? If you have to pick one metric as to whether or not your campaign was successful, what is it? And she paused, and she looked at me and said, annual recurring revenue. And I was like, hallelujah, they get it. So I would encourage other marketers, and again, if you talk to your internal customers, you’re really going to hear sales people being like, hey, it’s great. We got a whole bunch of clicks and sign ups. We’re not getting meetings. What do we do to get meetings? What do we do to drive the meeting forward? Or say, No, this channel is producing great conversations, and they may not all close, because the sales cycle is hard, and there’s a whole you know, set of work that has to be done there. But if you are arming your team with quality conversations, they’re going to be very excited and again, willing to help you in any way they can improve success in that area.

Christian Klepp  15:47

Absolutely, absolutely. You’ve touched on this a little bit at the beginning of this conversation, Michael, but I’m going to go back to it again, like talk to us about the importance of conducting the right research and having the relevant strategy in place, right? And especially when it comes to things like, well, marketing team do more with less. Now I think it becomes some if I do say so myself, like a little bit more imperative,

Michael Clark  16:14

Yes, I will say that research can really depend on the specifics of where we are in the B2B marketing world. So one of the reasons I start with the customers is we all have them in some way, shape or form. And as I said, in my experience, all of my most successful campaign hooks came because a customer told me. So I would also, however, not sleep on what your competitors are doing, especially if you were in a market where your competitors are larger or better funded, you can win by doing things better. But keep an eye on what messaging they’re trying and you will sometimes see gaps in capabilities that you can slip into because there is an opportunity to beat more money with better execution, with better messaging with things that are more tightly aligned to what it is that your end users and customers are responding to, but keeping an eye on where they are and what ideas that might spark as to how to tie back into your core messaging will do better. 

Michael Clark  17:17

I think that there’s a role for AI (Artificial intelligence) here as well to keep track of trends and data, and you can do something specific to execution, like researching time of data post on various social media channels. There’s a lot of capabilities in there that, again, get into the detail of execution. And I think detail might be the most one of the most important things, period, and where I think some people go off the rails with AI, which I think is a great force multiplier, is you still have to make sure the detail is correct. And if you’ve got a very technical audience, you need to make sure you are presenting them with a technical message that resonates and generic. AI may not do that out of the box. If you’re looking at really honing in on specific key phrases and keywords, you need to make sure they’re the right ones with your audience. And if you’re making sure that the channels and spend makes sense, you need to make sure that that aligns with where your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and audience is actually going to be and what they value. And we’ll maybe come back to that in a few more questions.

Christian Klepp  18:30

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we are in 2025 and what kind of a podcast would this be about B2B marketing if we didn’t talk about AI, right? And absolutely in terms of, like, you know, there is a place in time for AI, and certainly it can help alleviate some of the burden and make the work a bit more efficient. But, yeah, I do agree, because I do quite a bit of this copywriting work myself, there is a certain nuance, especially if it’s technical in nature, or if it’s very like niche where you have to be careful about how AI is being used, because, for example, I did a white paper last year on third party risk management, and anybody who’s an expert in that field will see if that was AI generated content or not, just because of the way that the the way the Paper is structured, or the terminology, right? The key, certainly, there’s keywords in there. I mean, everybody uses keywords. But again, I think it was back to your point, which I which, I think is what you were trying to say, it’s the way that it’s also conveyed, the way that it’s communicated. It’s, are you speaking in the language of that target audience, right?

Michael Clark  19:38

Yeah, that’s really important. And I think there’s an opportunity for those of us that compete in different industries. You know, we’ll talk a bit about maybe iterating content. And I think there’s a real opportunity to create a piece of content that you then create, you redesign, for specific industries, using their terminology, using their tool. Using their pain points, using their acronyms, so that your ICP reading that from, let’s say, insurance, sees the terms that they are comfortable with, and don’t have to translate it into their worldview. I think that’s a really important way to get it so I’d say, you know, the real strategy comes from a combination of that customer insight comes from some of the market intelligence that we’re talking about now. What are we is that we know about the market, the trends in the market, and the various data sources available. And then the last piece, though, I think, is still internal alignment. How do you drive that connection with sales, with executives, with product and with the stakeholders overall? I think that’s how marketing moves itself from a sort of service organization to a strategic leader in the organization,

Christian Klepp  20:50

Absolutely, absolutely Okay, moving us on. And you know, you’ve given us a lot of great tips so far, but you know, like based on your experience, Michael, how can B2B marketers start small and accelerate. So what steps do they need to take? What are those key components that need to be in that process?

Michael Clark  21:13

So I think it start needs to start with looking what you have currently. I think you know you need to make sure you are auditing what currently exists and looking at what you’ve been doing the same way, because you just keep doing it over and over again and put some fresh eyes on it and say, is there an opportunity to be more efficient? Here is this web page that I haven’t looked at aligned with the new terminology and the new value statements that we’re doing. This can lead to faster wins, like maybe optimizing some of your lead flow. This can lead to better integration and data flow, and it can lead to measurable pipeline changes. I’ll give you one example we’ve talked about several times now I’ve mentioned aligning and integrating with the sales organization. One of the things I think is common from a marketing standpoint, is to say, All right, I’ve launched, say, an ad campaign, and I’ve got my ad copy, and I know how to optimize. Is the headline working? Is the body working? Is it getting clicks? If it gets clicks, you look at the landing page and see how that’s working, and we’ve learned the lesson that the landing page needs to be tightly aligned to the message that they clicked on. You can’t say, I want to save 20% and take them to a free trial landing page that talks about an equally different set of features. You need to keep that message going. Where I’ve seen some organizations fail is they don’t tell sales what that message was. So when sales does the follow up on that conversation. They say, Hey, have you heard about our free trial? And the person’s going, Oh, no, I was just looking to save money. Thanks for anyway, I guess I don’t need this meeting. So remember that you know, if you’ve got a core hook that is working to get people into a discussion, make sure sales knows that and make sure they know how to open that conversation.

Christian Klepp  23:02

Yeah, yeah, definitely. But again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, about the disconnect, right? So how do we, how do we bridge that, bridge that communication gap, right?

Michael Clark  23:14

Right. So we, you know, in my weekly conversations with, you know, the sales organization as a whole, of various teams. One of the things we’re doing like, these are the campaigns that are currently running. These are the core messaging. This is what it’s going to look like in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) when it hits. So you know what it is they’re saying. And in fact, you know, here’s our document recommendation of the key bullet points you want to be hitting early in this conversation that we think have got them to start this conversation the first place where you go from there depends on your expertise, because sales is bringing expertise to this conversation as well. But let’s get through the door that they expect us to walk through in a way that sets everyone up for success.

Christian Klepp  23:58

Yep, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Okay, and I think we’ve talked about this already earlier, but just to maybe recap, like, how can B2B marketers ensure that they’re aligned with internal key, you know, stakeholders to get the right support. And I think a lot of this has to do with this continuous communication. Because, you know, there’s been many cases, even in the past, where if you don’t communicate internally, like what the marketing team has been up to, it’s going to be out of sight, out of mind, right? But it’s not just it goes beyond that, right? It’s also preparing them for that conversation. So it’s not like dropping some surprise on them, but like, you know, warming them up for that discussion.

Michael Clark  24:44

I think it’s really similar to the work we’re used to doing externally, but forget to do internally, which is, again, what is the language of our customer, what is important to our internal customer, executives, sales, stakeholders, whatever it may be, and it’s usually. You know, looking at where we’re winning and how it’s impacting again, things like, you know, sales accepted leads, you know, pipeline, whatever your metrics are that shows sales has taken this and run with it. I think it’s an opportunity to also make sure our data is integrated. So if we have a shared dashboard and we’re sharing the same systems. We can say to sales, here’s what we see that we’re passing to you, and it should align with what sales sees as them picking up. So we’re now, we’re building trust because we have a single version of the truth, and we’re showing that we are aligned on the same set of numbers. And again, to me, that number is really getting into the revenue impact that you’re having downstream. So you want to show marketing impact, not in things that are very much top of funnel or pre funnel. We can talk about those now and then, but we really want to make sure the metrics that we hone in on is important are those that are down funnel, that are showing how it is the organization is benefiting from this. I think one of the things that I saw so I had the opportunity earlier this year to be a judge for the Stevie American Business Awards for marketing, which was really neat because it was marketing across all sorts of areas. I saw B2B, I saw B2C. I saw associations and organizations all submitting. I think I personally reviewed 60 different entries across different categories. 

Michael Clark  26:32

I would recommend those who are familiar with the organization to check it out. They’re, they’re a great award. They’re really value based and output based. So there is no pay for play here. There’s just the opportunity to let your credentials resonate with the judging panel of peers in the organization. But for me, the ones that stood out in this were the people that didn’t say we launched a successful event that had all these members, you know, it was the ones that said that was 30% more than the year before. Here’s the feedback from our members. Here is the feedback from our executives. Here’s the feedback from our partners. You know, you can’t always say we had this event and it produced $2 million in revenue, and the goal was to have the event anyway. But there are ways to talk about how everyone else is viewing that event and viewing that mini campaign, if you want. You not always many that one set of activities that can show the value that other people see in it, not just the value that you’re showing. So show the metrics year over year compared to other events, show it based on maybe reduced spend or costs per and then tie that back to what feedback do you have, internally and externally, wherever you can describe it, that would be an example of a way that I think you’re taking something that is often seen as this event was expensive, and showing it back to the organization a way that says, No, this event was valuable, and it was valuable because we have more people coming through the doors. We had higher survey number results, higher survey metrics in terms of satisfaction. We have these great quotes. We have these people saying we didn’t know this. We’re excited to do business with you now. And that’s how you turn a we had a good event into we had an event that’s going to be celebrated, potentially, not just in our organization, but by you know, people that are waiting how your events compare to others.

Christian Klepp  28:41

First of all, congratulations on being selected to be a judge. I think that must have been a very, very exciting experience.Number two, congratulations on reviewing 60 entries. I’m pretty sure that was no small feat, and then it you certainly had a I’d imagine you had a certain list of criteria to go through that you know, to make sure that you know what, what, what you would consider, or what would qualify to be like a winning entry. And thank you for sharing those insights, which, which I think were profound. There were a lot of questions that were racing in my head as you were talking, and I think you’ve answered most of them like, in terms of, like, what would really stand out as something that’s like, like, a winner, right?

Michael Clark  29:28

Yeah. And I think it’s, you know, how can you prove it’s a winner, other than your opinion. 

Christian Klepp  29:32

Right. 

Michael Clark  29:33

And I think it’s funny, because, again, I think we do this so often in marketing, but we forget to do it internally about what marketing is doing

Christian Klepp  29:43

Exactly. Okay, so we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty, but just imagine there’s a B2B marketer or B2B marketing team out there who is listening to this conversation, and there are three to five things you want them to take action on right now? What would those things be?

Michael Clark  30:06

I would start again with that sort of audit step of what you’re doing now, and make everything defend its own existence. I can share a story from a company I was with a couple of years back that was spending an ever increasing amount on Google ads. And I’m not against Google ads, and I agree that there are a lot of good reasons to do it, but I was surprised it was working with such a technical audience in this industry. And I had the opportunity to sit in on some customer conversations, and I said, Hey, you know, how did you get to us? We’ve been running a lot of ads in this and we’re talking to basically an IT admin who was like, I would never, never click on a Google ad. I’m not. I have no interest, no offense in what you and marketing want to tell me. I want a proven solution to my problem. Show me the fix. Show me the white paper. Show me the technical expertise that I need. And that was a great way for us to say great. I’m not saying we get rid of Google ads, but maybe we take the number down to a rational number, and we reallocate that spend into some of these other things that we’re going to attempt next. 

Michael Clark  31:13

So if you make sure what you’re doing is showing the actual results that are needed to justify the time, the resources and the money that you’re spending on it, you can often use that as a way to get a little more, maybe not a lot more, but a little more, to gain some time to do some additional tests. I think then the next thing is, as I said, understand what is important to your customers, including your internal sales customers, and then align on their language wherever possible. You then to me, start experimenting next you want to start saying, how do we get this information out into the market? Where do we think that it’s going to work? How are we going to prove that it’s working? And for me, I focus even in the early stages, because we’ve been talking about bottom of funnel stuff, maybe on conversion rate optimization as a way of looking at the early stages of is this working before you accelerate it, then you have the ability to say, we tried this, we saw these results. We’re excited about them, and we want to try more. But remember that this won’t work forever, so keep that testing and iteration process going as you go forward. 

Michael Clark  32:29

The next thing, I think, I would say, is especially for smaller teams, you want to reuse content wherever possible. So this is actually an area I think AI can be helpful, but you can turn one good piece of content into a host of social media posts, into a short video, maybe into a webinar or a webinar, back out into these pieces. And then earlier I talked about, if you have industry specific segments, you redo these pieces focused on those industries, and you rewrite maybe I would guess 20 to 25% of it that is focused on the industry’s terminology, the industry’s pain points, the industry’s acronyms. I’ve even seen software companies that redo screenshots with industry applications on the screen that are running. So it’s a great way again, to make that translation for your customer to your value proposition a lot faster, and then, because this is how I, in fact, got started here at infrascale and as a way of proving my value for larger organizations, I would encourage them to consider fractional resources as a way of driving results in ROI (Return On Investment) so we, you know, even in my experience of marketing and everything else, I got my current role because I said, Hey, you’re right. Give me, give me 90 days to prove my value, and then we’ll have a conversation the same way I would do with a lot of these campaigns and everything else. Let’s break apart what’s not working. Let’s prove this is working, and let’s accelerate it.

Christian Klepp  34:05

Some great advice, man, like let me just quickly recap for the benefit of the audience, right? So call what you always want to be conducting an audit of existing assets. I think was the first one, then the second one is understanding you know your what’s important to your customer. The next one was start experimenting and also get that internal buy in. Let that permission to experiment. Keep testing and iterating as you go along, because none of this should be written in stone, especially if you’re a small and agile team. Reuse content wherever possible, and this is where AI can play an instrumental role and then consider fractional resources. Hope I captured all that accurately.

Michael Clark  34:49

Yeah, I think that that’s a great start. Depending on the type of organization you have, I think there’s something there for everyone.

Christian Klepp  34:56

Absolutely, absolutely, all right. I. I’m going to ask you just to kindly get up on your soap box here and tell us about the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why.

Michael Clark  35:12

So I think the thing that I keep reading that doesn’t make sense to me is that AI has the ability to completely replace marketing, and I see AI as a fantastic tool. I see AI as a force multiplier that can even the playing fields between small teams and large teams when you use it properly. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near the point where it replaces judgment strategic over and strategic and creative oversight. I think the specificity of language that we’ve talked about with technical audiences, I think the ability of AI to still, even today, occasionally hallucinate or be entirely sycophantic, just make it as a tool that helps what you’re doing. It makes good organizations better. At the same time, it won’t help bad organizations, because junk that is created with AI just results in more and faster junk. So let’s get quality content and use AI to iterate and expand upon it or reuse it in creative and useful ways.

Christian Klepp  36:23

Absolutely, absolutely the world is that old adage, right? Garbage in, garbage out. All right, fantastic, fantastic. Okay, so here comes the bonus question. So I have it on good authority, and AI didn’t tell me this. All right, I have it on good authority that you enjoy playing DND, excuse me, for the audience’s benefit. DND stands for Dungeons and Dragons with a local group as well as your kids. So the question is, I guess it’s a two prong question, because the first part is like, Okay, how does that serve as a creative outlet for you? One and two, what is it about Dungeons and Dragons and how you play it and the skills you apply. How can that be transplanted or apply in B2B Marketing?

Michael Clark  37:10

Sure. So I played DND for many years when I was younger, through high school, through college and with friends after college, before, like many people, it ended up taking a bit of a backseat to life, and I credit my wife Christine for encouraging me to get back into it, but it’s been really cool that I did so again, both with adults locally, as well as with my kids and their friends. So I’ve enjoyed that as a creative outlet. I find that, you know, first of all, it’s, you know, it’s got some escape element to it, certainly. And I, you know, I read fantasy and science fiction for similar reasons. But when I look at how it helps, I think it helps primarily in two ways. Number one, especially as someone running the game a dungeon master, that’s called. It’s not you versus the players. You’re telling a story together, but the Dungeon Master has to try to keep it rolling and adjudicate the rules and things like that. And it is amazing to me how important communication is in this role. And I’ve seen things where I thought I was telling something really clearly to a group of players that some of them missed or one of them had no idea what I was saying. And other times you can set the scene properly. You get the tone, and the more you lean into it, the more everybody else leans back into it, and it suddenly is a much just richer experience as they rise to the occasion of maybe taking a little risk and being a little emotional with the role playing. And, you know, this, this pivotal moment that you come up with. So choosing the words, listening to the feedback, and adjusting your strategy is a really big part of this. In both of these, where I see some definite overlap. The other one, I think, is simply challenges in problem solving. You know, whether you’re running the group or in the group, you have a set of resources and a set of challenges, and you’re trying to allocate, how do we prioritize? How do we deal with them? And then, how do we creatively deal with them? Because the most fun elements of this aren’t necessarily, I walk over and attack it with my sword. But, you know, Ah, wait, I will shoot the flaming the lantern above them so it falls down on them. They burst into flames. So the people, it rewards creativity in itself, because those are the moments that the party get. The group gets excited about that everybody else starts trying to up their game and do something fun and interesting, and it might blow out and be a little silly now and then, but if we’re there to have fun. So I don’t necessarily have an ROI or revenue calculation at the end of the day, but we’re trying to make sure that the experience resonates.

Christian Klepp  39:55

Absolutely, absolutely, just out of curiosity, because it’s been years. Since I played DND, Michael, but like, how much time do you spend? How much time could you spend playing, like, one game?

Michael Clark  40:09

So there is one game is hard to answer. So we generally meet every two weeks for about four hours, right? And that probably is three hours of actually doing things, and one hour of getting people to show up and whatever else we’re doing. The story, the sessions tie into campaigns, which, depending on the length of the campaign and the story, can go years. I’m probably two years in with this group, and we’re probably about two thirds of the way through what I think we’re doing, but they have their own ideas and go off on tangents. So that’s been fun. The other group that I know of that meets in that space, I think, is on their second campaign in that same time period. So it’s a matter of how, how well you keep them moving, how interested the party is keeping moving. And I don’t necessarily play that strictly because we’re there to have fun, and if you know they want to have a fun session of a bar brawl that takes up, you know, half the session, great. Let’s do that.

Christian Klepp  41:10

Fantastic, fantastic. Michael, this has been a great conversation. I mean, you know, Dungeons and Dragons included. But thanks again for coming on and for sharing your expertise and experience with the audience, please quick introduction to yourself on how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Michael Clark  41:27

Sure. My name is Michael Clark. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Infra scale, and I’ve done fractional work supporting other organizations. You can reach me at [email protected] or at LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeclark/.

Michael Clark  41:45

Fantastic. Fantastic. Once again, Michael, thanks again for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Michael Clark  41:52

Thank you, Christian. This has been a lot of fun. Take care. 

Christian Klepp  41:54

Bye for now.