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S 02 | Ep 50 Why the Best B2B Marketing Strategy is Built Around Live Events

See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 50 Why the Best B2B Marketing Strategy is Built Around Live Events.   

 

0:08

Alex Shevelenko: Welcome to Experience Focused Leaders.

0:10

Today we're joined by Joel Harrison, a true pioneer in B2B marketing.

0:15

In fact, he co-founded the B2B Marketing franchise, and now he is the host of Trust and Influence in B2B, a podcast.

0:25

Joel, welcome to the pod.

0:28

Joel Harrison: Hey Alex, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

0:32

Alex Shevelenko: So Joel, the B2B Marketing framework of various events—you organized it once in the UK, once in the US, and I was fortunate to be a speaker at one of yours in London—is really a franchise where you get people to deeply learn about content and all the latest trends and changes in B2B marketing. This is different than the typical conference where people kind of show off and do their thing; I really felt like people were committed.

What do you think is unique in both how you approached it, and what's the market need you've seen for people to dive in and understand the depth of what's going on in B2B?

1:31

Joel Harrison: Well, first of all, it's worth just clarifying: I founded a company called B2BMarketing.net, as you said, 22 years ago. I'm still a co-owner, but I'm not operationally involved at all these days.

Hence, my podcast is a wholly owned thing that I do where I can follow my own creative journalistic instincts around what's interesting. So, there's still an owner of B2B Marketing there, along with the Ignite conference, the Global ABM conference, and all those things. I was heavily involved in their creation and development, and I was a program manager for years, so I know those events inside out, but these days, day-to-day, I'm not so involved.

But in terms of the event format, which hasn't really changed that much—yeah, we always felt it was very important to try and give people real practical guidance, but also inspiration about what's going on and what people are doing. B2B marketing is evolving really fast—it's evolving faster now than it ever has in the past—and so you want to hear what's going on. You want to hear the "warts and all" perspective about what people are finding and how they're approaching particular challenges: the good, the bad, and the ugly, I suppose.

You know that can come from vendors if it's done properly, but it's better if it comes from marketers because it's a bit more honest and candid. Often, a synergy of the two works really, really well. Getting that perspective is vital, but I think above all of that, one of the things that's so heartwarming and fantastic coming off the back of one of these events—and we did one in the beginning of July, just over a month ago now—is the sense of community that you get.

Marketers love coming together, and some of the anecdotal conversations and connections that people build at those events are fantastic. It's not a free event; we curate the agenda very carefully. There are other, less curated conferences on the spectrum or ones with an explicit agenda where you're basically paying to play without much curation involved. You can get a certain level of insight there, but once you're in the door at Ignite or the Global ABM conference, there's just a level of sharing, mutual respect, engagement, and energization you get that puts me on a buzz for about a week afterwards.

3:42

Alex Shevelenko: So that's brilliant, Joel. If you're thinking from a community perspective—and, you know, obviously your podcast is about trust—it seems that the prevailing challenge right now in the B2B world is that it's easier to create content. With AI, the cost of creating something is reduced—maybe not the highest quality content like your podcast or us talking here, but generally, the cost is down.

However, the complexity actually increases for many offerings. It's easier to create products, so there are more products, and large B2B companies aren't streamlining their portfolios from what I've last seen. So there's just a lot of noise and complexity. How does community play into trust, and what are ways in which you can build trust through conversations, content, and beyond?

4:45

Joel Harrison: Yeah, I mean, complexity is what B2B is all about. That's one of the key differentiators from B2C, right? Because at every level—at a product level, at a buying level—it's super hard.

I think tech companies will often try to simplify it by focusing on the products rather than focusing on the brand and what you stand for. So it's about building your brand, or building your reputation, I should probably say. When you start talking about brand, people default to talking about advertising, and that's just one tool in the marketer's armory—it's not the only thing we should be doing.

5:21

Alex Shevelenko: So you're separating brand from demand? A lot of people confuse those two.

5:28

Joel Harrison: No, I think they are separate. I think people confuse them because demand generation activities are all about something you can measure directly toward a sale, whereas brand is more about visibility and awareness.

What I'm seeking to try and do—and I've not thought this through fully or understood this completely yet—is look at how a number of smart people I'm talking to try to distinguish between brand and reputation. I think if you start talking about brand, it tends to be a conversation about advertising to a greater or lesser extent. Whereas actually, the broader topic of reputation is really important. That's where some of the other metrics that build reputation and trust will be better bedfellows.

To the second part of what I think your question was—around what mechanics, techniques, or metrics you can use to help build that—I'm looking at that canon of trust in terms of five protagonists that can really help you build it:

Thought leaders: Individuals who are notable in their points of view.

Employee advocates: People who are perhaps less about a specific point of view, but carry kudos and a resonant voice that you can empower, deploy, enable, and engage to communicate with customers and prospects.

Unpaid influencers: People like journalists or analysts.

6:56

Alex Shevelenko: So just to pause on that for a second—with employee advocates, this is basically your team members who aren't in a sales position sharing their thought leadership and best practices. They're more trusted than a LinkedIn post coming from your company page because this is an individual with their own reputation who wouldn't just say stuff to sell stuff.

7:27

Joel Harrison: Well, I... 

7:28

Joel Harrison: Yes, but just to be clear on the nuance: the thought leaders are the people with a point of view who have unique perspectives, high levels of expertise, and knowledge. They are respectable, respected, and visible.

7:39

Then there are more of the rank-and-file employees who perhaps are not in those positions of authority and would perhaps never want to be. They may be more junior or more functional in their roles, but they are influential at a granular level. They need enabling—they need the facilities, license, and ability to go and communicate.

7:59

Smart companies do this. I did a great podcast episode with Rita Odaba Oyabadi from Workday, and she was talking about her work there—that's fascinating. So those are the first two personas.

8:08

Then you've got unpaid influencers. These are people like journalists and analysts who are in the market and within the firmament of your industry. They have influence and visibility, but you don't have a transaction with them to get them to say something.

8:26

Then there are paid influencers, right? You can pay to amplify your message.

And lastly, there are customer advocates.

8:34

So those five protagonists, I think, are really critical in enabling you to build trust. What I find increasingly is that when it comes to integrated campaigns—the thing marketers spend a lot of time and money focusing on—agencies often aren't very oriented toward those personas. They don't understand them, recognize them, or deploy them as effectively as they could. Yet, those five protagonists can be the most powerful voices in a brand's armory, partly because of the proliferation of brand messages coming as a consequence of AI and changing social media.

Leveraging those humans and this ongoing trend toward humanization—for me, that is where the future of B2B marketing lies.

9:20

Alex Shevelenko: Yeah, it's so interesting. I think everybody recognizes that the easiest sales opportunities are the ones where a customer refers another potential customer in, right? Because there's already that background conversation where they said, "Hey, we had this major project that we couldn't complete, my job depended on it, and these guys came in and helped."

But the underlying issue is we don't have enough of those leads, right? Everybody wishes we had more of these types of referrals. Partner and other influencers are maybe slightly next level, but they might have more distribution horsepower, right?

10:07

So it balances out between trustworthiness—like "Hey, I've used this myself"—versus "This is cool, check it out." They have a big audience, so it spreads. Is that one way of thinking about these five?

10:21

Joel Harrison: Yeah, it is. They play different roles at different stages of the buying journey, right?

10:31

To your point about customer advocacy: yeah, it's very powerful, but it's a hard thing to do. Few companies have processized, systemized, or automated it. You're starting to see consultancies and technology vendors setting up to enable them to do that and create it as a flywheel.

Otherwise, what tends to happen is one salesperson has one good contact and starts overusing them, which just pisses them off—apologies for my language. It becomes almost a cottage industry. What we're starting to see now is this becoming much more scalable and robust as a discipline that can actually make an impact.

11:16

Otherwise, you get random acts of customer advocacy where someone happens to know a former colleague who uses that company, or you look on LinkedIn to see if they've worked together. That's all good, but you can't build your business around anecdotal support. What's exciting now is the real momentum building because people are enabling you to do this at an industrialized level.

11:42

Alex Shevelenko: One of the things I love that I've noticed in our experience is—I don't even have a precise term for it—basically customer-generated content growth.

For example, a customer of ours generates a report, publication, or guide using our platform. If it's designed for marketing or broader communication rather than individual sales processes, it gets exposure to peers. A good example is an Investor Relations Officer at a competitor who scans what their peers are doing on their IR website. They go, "Wow, you have this great interactive asset—that seems to be working."

It's so much easier to have a sales conversation when they've seen a peer or competitor use the product. This process is scalable because we don't even have to ask the advocate to do anything, right? Just by publishing, they're doing the legwork.

Have you found more examples of this? Maybe we're unique because we have a publishing externality that benefits us, but is that something you've been seeing as a scalable approach in other companies you work with?

13:17

Joel Harrison: Yeah, I've been approached to do similar things. I haven't done it directly myself, partly because B2B Marketing as a company has relationships like that where they will work as an advocate or curate reviews—maybe not from a report as much as that.

I've been invited to work commercially with a software provider if I liked the tools, saw a use for them, and could authentically advocate for them. I think that's tremendous when done by someone I hugely respect, by the way. I won't mention him here because I don't think it's appropriate, but he's someone with tremendous kudos. The fact that he's doing this on his second startup—having sold the first one very successfully—demonstrates that this kind of stuff can really work.

14:13

So I think that's definitely a hugely powerful thing that really works in the technology arena. Would it work in other categories, like financial or professional services? Maybe it'd be harder to get people to do it there, but you're tapping into the passion tech users have for the technologies they rely on every day.

I guess it's that old cliché with Salesforce: build movements, not monuments. You're galvanizing the reliance people have on your platform technology to make good marketing capital, and that's just a wonderful virtuous circle.

14:54

Alex Shevelenko: It's interesting you bring up Salesforce. Obviously, they've created "Disneyland for B2B," but they are very much in the technology world and are a founder-driven company. The founder is the consummate marketeer at heart, making it a marketing-led company versus, say, Oracle, which is sales-led in its DNA. 

15:22

Alex Shevelenko: But outside of technology—which you brought up several times—technology companies tend to do things where you see innovation in the B2B marketing space, and why are they innovating there?

Technology companies, we kind of get it: they know how to buy software, and they come to sell to a little bit more technical and universally large audiences. But what about other spaces where innovation is happening?

15:54

Joel Harrison: I certainly see the professional services sector transforming itself in terms of its marketing competency, efficiency, and consequently, elements of innovation as well. Now, there's probably an argument: can you separate them from the technology sector when they're using technology and often consulting on technology projects?

16:14

Alex Shevelenko: Let's remove the Accentures of the world, TCSs, and people that are into IT services, and talk about other parts of professional services.

16:25

Joel Harrison: Well, in other parts, less so—because I tend to see this stuff in the bigger organizations: the Capgeminis, the PWCs, the EYs, you know.

At a more granular level, a lot of my window on the world comes from looking at entries to the B2B Marketing Awards, which is one of the largest programs for B2B marketing excellence anywhere in the world as far as we know. We don't get as many granular-level entries from lower-tier professional services as we might like. I just think the Big 4 or 5 are up here, and the rest of the market is down here.

17:11

Alex Shevelenko: They're kind of... yeah.

17:11

Joel Harrison: I can't quantify that completely. I think they invest in things like thought leadership pretty well because they know they need a point of difference when selling their insight. But in terms of some of the innovative stuff in the middle, I'm not seeing that—it might be happening, but I tend to doubt it.

The other area I'd identify—though again, it blurs with your point around tech—is cybersecurity. It's a massive, multifaceted category that's grown enormously. But it is essentially technology as well, so whether you can separate that depends on your definition.

Beyond that, I don't really see a great deal. Those are the main pockets of innovation. Otherwise, it's very brand-by-brand. There always tends to be an alignment between your technological savvy and your ability to do interesting things in marketing, because the two things tend to go hand-in-hand.

Although, having said that, we've entered a world where the primary marketing channel at the moment tends to be events. We've never been so focused on events as an industry as we are right now, partly because of the overindexing on digital, I suspect.

18:21

Alex Shevelenko: In this context—and I want to come back a little bit to the laggards in a second—part of the reason for events is because digital is oversaturated. Everybody's running ads, even LinkedIn is no longer as personal, and there's a feeling that it's being automated. So you don't know who to trust; you want to look somebody in the eye and then follow up digitally. Is that kind of the gut level motivation?

18:53

Joel Harrison: Yeah. And LinkedIn themselves—not a week goes past where I don't see them leverage the agency community to sell LinkedIn advertising and enable agencies to run events at their offices. There's not a week that goes by without another B2B marketing agency event at their London office. I don't know if that's the same in Paris or San Francisco, but it's certainly true over here.

So they rely on events even though they're selling digital advertising. The whole thing is wrapped up together, and LinkedIn is the definition of overwhelm if there ever was one, as far as I'm concerned. The amount of content being created on there is extraordinary—and I know I'm contributing to that, but...

19:35

Alex Shevelenko: Well, yours is high quality, which is why!

19:39

Joel Harrison: Oh, you would say that! Thank you, Alex, you're very kind.

19:39

Alex Shevelenko: So on that note, you brought up agencies, and that leads to my next question. We have this notion that agencies are supposed to be evaluating innovation and then bringing that innovation, when appropriate, to their clients.

Ironically, I've found some of the agencies we've worked with aren't particularly innovative. They're curious enough to take a meeting, but they are still doing things in a fairly old-fashioned way, and they feel a lot more disorganized relative to a more purposeful campaign.

So what's your take on agencies? Do they need to change themselves dramatically to survive? But first: what's their role in dispersing innovation, and who's doing that well versus who's not picking up on it?

20:43

Joel Harrison: I loved your point just now about how they're good at talking about innovation, but not necessarily always good at doing it. That really, really resonates with me.

The B2B agency community—particularly in London, but also in the States—has always been a brilliant partner for us. I've got some very good friends who work agency side, and I think they're just fantastic people whose work I respect.

But the category is going through massive challenges at the moment because of AI specifically, alongside a general economic go-slow. It's just kind of slowed up, and certain political decisions aren't helping ease things.

Moving on from that, to your point: they talk about innovation, but they don't necessarily always do it. That's definitely true. One of the challenges is that if you're a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. They have established ways of making money out of things—they understand what a client wants, and they know if they give them that, they get a predictable return.

Whereas if I try to do something I don't understand or haven't done before, I'm not going to make a guaranteed return, and I'm going to get in trouble—either with my shareholders, my boss, or worse, face financial trouble. I've been in that situation at B2B Marketing in my role: people want to take an innovative approach to a solution, and you end up delivering something that actually costs you money. That's a terrible situation to get into. 

22:25

Joel Harrison: I can respect how that happens. So yeah, they tend to follow an established path.

And again, LinkedIn advertising is a good example of this, right? I know for a fact that LinkedIn pays huge backhanders to agencies for spending advertising money on their platform. It's not reported and not discussed, but they pay a significant kickback to everyone.

So B2B marketing is very exposed to LinkedIn advertising—too much so, I would say. And part of that is because LinkedIn is essentially bribing people.

22:57

Alex Shevelenko: Joel, you have an insider perspective that a lot of folks don't.

Let's say you're a tech CEO who has never really been an expert in B2B marketing, and all of a sudden you realize you're creating a product that isn't getting to market. What are a few tips of uncommon wisdom that aren't obvious?

For instance, regarding agency incentives: if you're hiring an agency, you probably need to ask, "Hey, how much are you getting back from LinkedIn or whatever platform you're selling?" What other tips would you give to a purchaser of B2B marketing services or technology?

23:51

Joel Harrison: Well, I think there's a lot in what you said, Alex, so I'm going to try to navigate through that.

Correct me if I got this wrong, but the proposition you set up was a CEO who isn't very marketing-savvy, wants to do marketing, but doesn't know where to start and is worried about making the wrong decisions.

If we're talking about using agencies, I'm never going to say don't use agencies. I think they are fantastic. There are so many great agencies out there responsible for brilliant work. But at the same time, you probably need someone to hold your hand through that process.

If you don't have a marketing person on your team, the growth in fractional marketers or leaders in recent years has been extraordinary. That's partly due to insecurity in the job market, meaning there are lots of great people out there whom you can bring in to offer strategic advice, ensure you make the right decisions, and remove a portion of that risk.

So I'd advise working with a fractional CMO or consultant to help frame your strategy, objectives, and metrics. Then, choose the partner to deliver that, and have that consultant available at arm's length to help you troubleshoot if issues arise.

25:22

Alex Shevelenko: To build on that—and let's connect the two questions baked in there:

You're relatively new to buying marketing.

What are the hidden traps or secrets where people falter?

To get a guide like Joel to steer you through these decisions is great, but here's an obvious trap: you're just starting out, and people offer you a bunch of brand marketing services. In my view, that's probably a misplacement of effort initially, because you first need to figure out where the demand is and who your ideal customer is—the one saying, "Hell yeah, I love your service." Only once you figure that out are you better off investing in brand messaging and reach.

What other hiccups do you see marketing teams or CEOs make? You've seen so many people come to your events showcasing amazing work, but often that work is suited for later-stage businesses. Where do you see misconnections where people spend a lot of time and money on marketing but get very little out of it? And what quick wins are people missing out on right now—in 2025 or 2026?

27:09

Joel Harrison: Well, it depends on your trajectory as an organization.

To your point about brand: let's be clear—you have a brand whether you've invested in it or not. So the question is: what is enough? What is your baseline level to give you a platform to run demand generation?

Those are basic elements like your assets, logo design, website, and so on. You can't shortcut that baseline, though there's no hard-and-fast rule on exact requirements—a brand consultant or fractional CMO can advise on that.

Jeff Bezos is often attributed with saying, "Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room." That is exactly true. So how are you understanding what that actually is and aligning with it?

Once you assume you have a baseline you're happy with, then it becomes about your operational model. It depends on your business, the speed of your buying cycle, customer churn, and how you need to demonstrate effectiveness. An e-commerce approach is going to look very different from a long-term B2B sales cycle.

Eventually, you must have someone in marketing on the ground who understands these dynamics and knows which levers to pull. The main thing is to avoid making reckless, short-term decisions—whether in brand or demand generation—that you'll end up regretting.

You need to understand when you expect a return on investment. If you need a return in three months, investing heavily in brand advertising is a very poor decision.

So, establish a clear agreement with someone who holds strategic authority—ideally a strategic marketing mind responsible for managing campaigns alongside an agency or provider—and make sure the goals are robust and deliverable based on realistic benchmarks and experience.

29:42

Alex Shevelenko: What I'm hearing is: first, understand what kind of business you're in and your current stage. The challenge is that if you listen to random marketing podcasts or go to events and misapply advice from the consumer/e-commerce world to the B2B world—where, despite some overlap, dynamics are very different—you get into trouble. You must be very clear about who you are and what advice is appropriate for your specific model. 

30:18

Alex Shevelenko: And then once you're there, even there, it's like, "Well, okay, fine, but what's your timeframe, right?" You need to be very clear that if you have 100% of a pie, what percentage of it can you allocate to long-term returns—which may be disproportionate, but three years from now—versus short-term returns?

Is that capturing the topic? I know it's a broad question, but I've been guilty of reading a great marketing book or interviewing an expert like yourself and saying, "Oh, I've got to use that." But then, if my expectations aren't set and it's not clear where it fits into the broader picture, it creates misalignment, to your point. It seems pretty common for people to struggle with non-contextual advice.

31:17

Joel Harrison: Yeah, but don't stop getting educated, and don't stop getting excited about things! When you read a great marketing book or listen to a great podcast, hopefully you take away a nugget of information that adds to your general knowledge. But what we don't want are random acts of marketing—we want a considered strategy with a robust set of objectives.

31:37

Alex Shevelenko: On that note, you've hosted various events for decades now. What are some of the most memorable experiences or nuggets you still carry with you—other than the Jeff Bezos quote—that really stick? You've created so many moments of learning for others; what stand out as your key moments from running the program for so many years?

32:11

Joel Harrison: Just the general buzz you get is always really powerful. When you stand up on stage and deliver a presentation or a session where you've gone out on a limb—for instance, at the last Ignite event, I did a session on consumer-grade entertainment in B2B and the blurring boundaries between B2B and B2C—and you get feedback saying, "Oh, I really liked that, that was fantastic," it's deeply rewarding because you put something at stake.

33:01

Alex Shevelenko: So to interrupt: if you say something that isn't controversial, even if people agree with it, you know it's safe. But when you feel like a point is risky and you're staking something on it, there's more value.

33:03

Joel Harrison: It doesn't necessarily have to be controversial; it just has to be new, novel, or something they hadn't considered before. It's about changing people's perspectives.

I get a kick out of that because this has been my life's work—I've been doing this for over 20 years. When someone comes up to me and says, "Joel, you've really helped me, and I appreciate your perspective," even if they don't agree with everything—because I get stuff wrong, too—it makes me tremendously grateful. Whenever I'm invited onto a podcast like this, I feel very fortunate to work in such a collaborative environment.

33:56

Alex Shevelenko: As we wrap up, one of the biggest shifts in the space is the prevalence of AI everywhere in marketing. What are your thoughts from a pattern-matching perspective? You've seen SaaS trends, tech trends, and content creation shifts of all kinds. What do you see that others might miss without that historical context?

34:29

Joel Harrison: That's a really big question! I'm glad we got half an hour into the podcast before mentioning the word "AI"—we should give ourselves a pat on the back for that!

It's not that we're "over" AI, but there is a sense of overwhelm—just another post about AI. The parallel I see is with the wave of transformation around 2007 when marketing automation came in: the demand generation wave with Eloqua and Marketo. That was a massive shift.

It's interesting to see how Gen Xers or older millennials who lived through that seem to be coping better with today's transformation. Partly, it's because they're later in their careers and have seen more water go under the bridge, but specifically, they've seen this type of shift before. They know they have to reinvent themselves for a new era, and they're busy doing that.

With younger generations—and I'm not saying one cohort is better than another, as broad generalizations are inaccurate—their digital savvy is incredible, but the resilience and appreciation of the need to change can be different. In some ways, it's a great leveler: we are all starting again from scratch.

I like that the AI discussion is maturing past "Oh my god, we're all going to lose our jobs" into "We recognize this is a big shift, and while it will change a lot of things, there will be just as many opportunities at the end of it." What worked in the past won't work in the future.

The difference between now and the marketing automation revolution is speed. Automation happened over five years for some companies, whereas this is happening so fast we're all getting whiplash.

37:05

Alex Shevelenko: As we wrap up on that point: what's going to happen with marketing automation workflows? Some organizations still just want leads. There may not be as much excitement about platforms like Marketo anymore, but when given the choice between a gated content asset and an ungated one, a lot of people still choose gated content because their incentives are aligned that way. What are your thoughts on that?

37:39

Joel Harrison: Logically, the MQL should be dead. But it's still here with us. To your point about incentives, that's what the team's goals are aligned around, and crucially, that's what the CFO understands. It's a clear number on a spreadsheet. Brand engagement, or however else you measure it, isn't represented by the same straightforward number, so they can't relate to it in the same way. 

38:11

Joel Harrison: The most nuanced perspective I had on this was from a senior marketer, Kate Mackey at EY, when I interviewed her a few months ago. She was saying that it's still a currency with some value, and marketing has to navigate around it.

I think most marketers would get rid of it if they could, but many people still rely on it. I don't quite understand some of the reticence, but it's interesting on a technological level.

Eloqua was a brilliant product and brand that was killed by Oracle—it was much-lamented, everything it stood for was great, but they just bought it, integrated it, and killed it.

Whereas Marketo still exists. Even though Adobe—and I have this from a power user's mouth—has been trying to kill it, they've recognized they just can't, because it has a solid base of users who still love it. Even though Adobe has been trying to kill it by a thousand cuts, they recognize that some people, in his words, "still bleed purple." They've got to keep investing in it and keep it alive for a significant time to come.

That means it's deeply baked into the business processes of a lot of organizations, and it's doing its job. As long as you have that technology around and CFOs who understand what an MQL is, I think we're going to see that mindset persist for the foreseeable future, even if the smart money is moving away.

39:47

Alex Shevelenko: One of the patterns I see is that people are maximizing what they can do with existing technology. For instance, they're delaying gating much more. We've been brought in to help delay gates on Marketo to reduce friction and improve the user experience so it converts directly into booked meetings—or adding chat capabilities inside gated assets to turn them into real sales conversations.

It converts to another metric the CFO understands: a booked meeting. I don't want to position it as black and white; we do see innovators adapting the workflow. But it is limited by the legacy of the technology. The real hurdle is that it's tough to adapt something originally built in 2007.

40:49

Joel Harrison: You can see that. I'm involved in a think tank, and platforms like Adobe and Salesforce are both really pushing down the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) route because they don't want to be stuck in the MQL game.

John Miller, who co-founded Marketo, has essentially said there has to be more to life than MQLs—those are my words, not his, but that's the crux of it. So I think it's only going in one direction, even if it's not moving that fast.

41:16

Alex Shevelenko: Brilliant. Joel, I loved connecting. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. Where can people find you and continue learning from you via your podcast?

41:25

Joel Harrison: Thank you, Alex, for inviting me on! I was delighted to have this conversation and really enjoyed it.

You can find me on LinkedIn—look for Joel Harrison—or search online for "Joel Harrison B2B" to find my website. You can subscribe to the podcast via my website or wherever you get your podcasts, like Spotify or Apple. You can also follow me on YouTube, where all the podcast episodes and plenty of other content are available.

Joel Harrison, B2B.

41:52

Alex Shevelenko: Joel Harrison, B2B. Thank you, Joel.

41:55

Joel Harrison: Thank you.