Why B2B Startups Stall: ICP, MVP & Messaging (Jonathan W. Buckley)

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Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today we are joined by Jonathan Buckley from the Artisian Network. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. >> To kick this off, what do you guys do and what do you do for companies in the day-to-day? >> Sure. Um, so the Artisian network was formed some years ago after my career as a CMO and VP of marketing for many companies in Silicon Valley, some public, some private, and I saw a gap in the market for early stage tech companies, especially B2B tech companies to assemble a fastmoving quality season team to take them from their minimal viable product to series A, series B and beyond. And in this gap, the companies had two choices to outsource it to firms that are usually divided up in their competency. One's a good maybe a PR firm, one is an email marketing firm, one is a website building firm. Takes a long time to assemble and takes the CEO offline when he or she is is needed the most. And um the other option of course is to hire someone and that typical process is they pull from a larger company's marketing team usually a director senior director uptitle them to VP of marketing or or whatever and sort of rely on a single person maybe they assemble a team but it's expensive.

you don't get the season you need and usually folks coming out of these bigger companies are subject matter experts in a part of marketing. So I knew I I pulled together a generalist team and we focused on doing just that finding the primarily series A series B companies that needed a boost into the market prove out and grow the mathematics of their funnel. I step in as the CMO and I have a full team behind me from the creative product marketers. We even handle pricing when needed, the content and all the infrastructure that's required, you know, marketing automation systems. So, we've had about 60 clients so far. More than half of them, if you can believe it, have made it public or have been purchased. So, we actually have a very good track record. We've got a very good process. We're always bringing in new inventive tools. You know, we were one of the first that I knew of that got in heavily into AI, for instance, for various areas. Now, Aentic AI in the past year. So, you know, we try and keep it fresh.

Not all our clients are in Silicon Valley. They're all over the US, some in Europe. We've had some in Israel. So, >> and Jonathan, when it comes to these B2B tech companies that want to make it and maybe they are working very hard >> but they are not scaling, >> what do you usually find underneath it? >> Is it a problem around positioning or maybe their ICP isn't specific enough or they have weak messaging? >> Yeah. So okay, if I were to look at the numbers in our history, there have been quite a number that failed to objectively validate an MVP, a minimal viable product. That is to say, they relied in friends and family network to test and give feedback on the product. It wasn't a fair representation of an open market purchase on a repeatable pattern basis. So usually shortch changing the MVP process and not making it as scientific as they should. Then the next point of failure by the time we're brought in is the ICP. It's a combination of the ICP or ideal customer profile and the personas under them not being refined enough and proven enough.

So they're sort of two degrees off where they need to be or five degrees off. The third area is indeed you mentioned messaging and positioning. So most of our clients actually have engineering backgrounds, the CEOs, right? They invented something remarkable, something that's potentially gamechanging, but they tend to be leftrained in thinking. In other words, you know, more of the engineering, more of the and I see it all the time. There's actually a distrust of marketing people, right? So we spend a lot of time our methods are actually more quantbased than a lot of marketing firms. So we describe to the CEO for instance driving a product MVP and a marketing sales MVP because there is such a thing at the same level and put it in their language about what we're doing, how we're doing it, and how the numbers in the end will put them on a more risk-free, less capital inensive chance for success. So the messaging and positioning is very important.

You can't just make one message because if you're selling to the enterprise for instance, you have six to seven constituents, you know, a main buyer, but maybe the CFO, the CIO, the chief security officer, whatever. So, multiple personas. So that core message needs to be put into the language of each of those personas and that's almost always skipped by the early stage startups unless they get some seasoned help in there. And again, assembling your own team, it could take you three months to reco to recruit somebody that will give you doesn't have the experience, right? Wants the title. Proof of this is that the average tenure of a marketing lead in tech startups is 12 to 18 months. So they shortest tenure in the seauite. Um, and then they take another two or three months to hire their team and then get everybody working. you're out six months before you're actually starting to do marketing. Whereas, if you take a seasoned team, think of us as like a SWAT team that comes in, we're delivering stuff on week one because we've been there before. We're highly technical. It doesn't matter what the product is.

We've been deep, but we work on the translation of the engineering brilliance into what the marketing actually buys in the end, the values that the product has. Yeah. >> So, it's a combination of multiple things. >> It's multiple things, but kind of in that order. So, we check the box. Is the MVP good? Are they hitting the right people under the thesis of the company? And are they speaking to the right people in that way? Now, there's a lot of other things, of course, to get to scale like how you configure your systems. And these days you don't have to have huge budgets for marketing to have impact because we have automation tools now. But it requires your operators to be seasoned know the patterns. You can't just leave it to AI to do as much as people would believe. You need an orchestrator like a conductor in an orchestra to pull this together with some human and some robot help. When it comes to the messaging, if a rep has no deep domain background and they need to sell this, >> what must the messaging include so it still lands and converts? >> Well, I've written some articles on this.

They're on my LinkedIn, my personal and business website. There's one called the math and science of storytelling to the enterprise. So, I I know people think enterprise tech, how could there be anything emotional? How could there be anything but like speeds and feeds and facts and tech? Well, that's part of the challenge in doing good messaging and positioning is finding that angle that connects to the CFO, the CIO, the CEO, whoever your targets are. Maybe it's lower in the organization and poke your story because everything in life that sells of greater and greater value has a story attached. Think art, right? The best great art in itself does not build in value over time. But if it has a story about the artist, what it represents. Same thing with the business. the story of the business, the product, the problem is attaching and the business value of that product. >> And a lot of buyers don't trust marketing. >> No. >> Do you see any practical ways that companies earn trust faster in the enterprise space? I guess back in the 90s and the early 2000s, it was enough to say, "Trust us.

We've got big VCs behind us. Got a big treasure trove. You know, we'll be around." It's not that that's unimportant. They want to know that you have financial backing and staying power. But proving the product, proving its value, having the story that fortifies it and then has good backing because of those things gives confidence to these companies. Now, not all enterprises will take risk of course on a young company, right? But if you find the market leading ones, they always have departments that are looking for strategic edges that can be provided by new tech. That's where you got to focus. Whether it's at American Express, there are some lagards and then there are some early adopter Microsoft, Amazon, these sorts of companies have to stay out on the bleeding edge and to stay ahead of their competitors. You mentioned that you use AI a lot inside of your company. >> Yes. >> Where do you think AI actually helps teams?

>> I know already. And what we're experimenting with now test whether we get the value because a lot's changed in just the last year. Our first AI client was 2017 and it wasn't until 2018 that Google issued the white paper about processors which brought LLMs to life. So we were in on it early. So the the obvious one everyone's using and their thought of what AI is is through the LLMs, right? And there are many of them. We use many of them for different reasons. So you have to ask the question, what business problem are you trying to solve with the AI and then find the one that best fits that. We get a lot of value out of Claude lately. Opus 45 and now it's 46 with co-work and coding. You get pretty good writing augmentation. You get pretty good research, but you get excellent automation.

Let me just say the only thing Claude might fall a bit behind some of the competitors would be the generation of videos or graphics, right? None of us is bad at it, but Gemini, for instance, is is truly multimodal where you can throw audio files, video files, PDFs, and um get great results. And of course, they have many different uh nano banana and other video and um photography based stuff. So, OpenAI is the gorilla in the group. They were the first out. It's still pretty good for strategizing and for straight up research, manice and perplexity are very good. They bring where they're training themselves from and disclose it, right? So you can track everything back. Lately, I just posted this today on LinkedIn. We've been experimenting with creating a digital clone of me. So this is a unique use of AI. We're experimenting because it's jarring to some people, but I used a company called Hey Genen to create a physical clone of myself and then I used 11 labs to create a voice clone of myself and I connected them with an API.

The problem I was trying to solve is that the executives we work with, the young CEOs can't find consistent time on their calendar for professional recordings, right? And video is so important now. The production costs of traditional video is just too high for startups. You know, doing the creative, doing the post-p production work, the lighting setups, everything. So, we do it once and then we have an AI window where we can take our scripts, implement it, and we get the creative, the packaging, the video. And in the past two quarters, we found that uh quality is good enough. We've tested it out with engagement AB testing that uh we're adding that to our portfolio in this coming quarter. These are kind of the things that we're using with the various different AIs in marketing right now and of course we're moving one client to an agentic based demand genen system and claude accomplishes so much with that. >> Yeah, >> that's interesting use case with the cloning of yourself.

>> Yeah, >> I never thought about that. And in terms of the goals that you have or the vision for Artisian Network, what does it look like? >> Well, to be quite honest, until fairly recently, kind of ran it as a lifestyle business, right? This few people, most clients came through personal networking, referrals. It's really in the past year that I decided I I had a stint living in Europe, was not able to entrench myself there. Uh I've come back and restarted with Viger the company and we've turned to demand gen finally you know because we have a great track record I just need to amplify the voices I think we have 71 recommendations on the website and u you know the greater than 50% going public all that's great stats now we're using demand genen we by the way we've turned to Apollo IO which uses AI in the background to provide a lot of our sequencing, our targeting and enrichment.

That's an example of a tool that took six different tools like intent data, contact data, sequencing, and collapse it into a a fairly reasonable offering. I mean, to get all that for $59 a month, monthtomonth is amazing, right? AI is really causing disruption. >> Okay. And for the people that are listening who want to check you out, where should they go? >> Well, I can recommend three places. First is artisian network.com. It's not artisan, but artisian as in an artisian water well. And um number two is my name is Jonathan middle initial w and buckley. If you go to jonathanwbuckley.com, that's my professional background, including my company, but other endeavors. And then finally, LinkedIn. Jonathan Wbbuckley on LinkedIn. You can find me there. Connect with me. I network with a lot of people to give just informal advice because I' I've been around to see a lot of stuff happen, many waves of technology, and I've marketed them all.

So, we're we're in our most remarkable time right now, I think, in history. The transformation that's ahead of us with AI capabilities, robotic capabilities, it's moving so fast, it's going to transform everything. >> Definitely, it almost feels like the new internet, >> like when the internet came out. In my opinion, it dwarfs the impact the internet had for one reason. It's recursive improvement now. AI creating better AI. Our innovation curve is doubling and tripling Moore's law, which was the previous rule for tech improvement. And we're seeing every 3 months like a 100% improvement in the performance of everything. Now, that's got to level off at some point, but it looks like, you know, it's the fastest adoption in history. The internet really took 15 years to get into people's homes in earnest. This is being adopted so fast. I mean, we're going to see in 24 months, this will be a different world, believe me. >> Yep. >> Well, thanks for joining us, Jonathan. >> No problem. I I appreciate you having me