B2B Websites that Convert | A Conversation with Sam Dunning of Breaking B2B

If you’re running a B2B tech company, you want your website to generate leads, and convert interest. Yet so many websites are built for vanity, not revenue.  And that’s Sam Dunning’s goal with Breaking B2B - to change the way that tech companies and SaaS providers think about their web design.

 The website should be the hub to which you drive all of your marketing programs. And yet many of them are designed around good looks and fun messaging – rather than on educating prospects, and capturing their interest. So we discuss some common pitfalls of sites that fail to connect, and Sam shared three approaches he uses to craft clear headlines and positioning statements.

 We also covered the importance of having more than just pricing on your pricing pages; and how to construct a low-friction “book a demo” process. Plus Sam talked a little about his personal branding strategy which borrows from popular social media trends.

 Key Takeaways:

1.      Design for the Audience: A website should focus on the pain points of the target audience. Not the preferences of internal stakeholders

2.      Clarity Over Complexity: Use straightforward headlines that avoid cliches and jargon; and clearly state the value proposition and benefits.

3.     Transparency Builds Trust: Open pricing and accessible demos streamline the sales process, and reduce time wasted on unqualified prospects

4.     Expand your Pricing Page: Incorporate social proof, such as client testimonials, case studies, and FAQs, to address common objections

5.     Engaging Demos: Wngaging product demos, either through videos or interactive tools, allows visitors to understand the product's value quickly and effectively.

Resources:

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

Listen to – or watch - his Breaking B2B Podcast

 For more on Sam’s tips to build a killer B2B tech website, check out Episode #390 “Craft a SaaS Website That Converts Like Crazy”

And for my England-based listeners, here’s Sam’s SEO-based spoof of “It’s Coming Home” 

Transcript

Transcript: B2B Websites that Convert | A Conversation with Sam Dunning of Breaking B2B

[Intro]

A company’s Website should serve as the hub of any B2B marketing strategy. That’s where you drive all of the tactical work – to your own property where you can curate the experience, and capture interest. Which is why time spent on improving and optimizeing your website design and your SEO is time well spent.

On this episode of The Marketing Mix, I’m taking with Sam Dunning, Founder and CEO of Breaking B2B  - a company specializing in tech company websites. We talk about the importance of designing the website for your audience, not your internal stakeholders. The different approaches to headline messaging, And hit on a couple of my faviorite web tiopics – namely the value of book a demo and pricing pages.

So if you’re wondering whether your B2B website is hitting the mark, this episode is for you.

[Intro Music]

Steve: Today I'm talking with Sam Dunning, who is the founder of Breaking B2B which is a web design company that focuses primarily on B2B tech sites.   Sam hosts a podcast, also called Breaking B2B, which Quite impressively, I think he's getting up to almost 400 episodes.

 One of the first things you'll see if you go to the Breaking B2B website is this tagline that says “SEO and web design for revenue, not vanity”. and that is absolutely something we'll be talking about today. So Sam, welcome to the Marketing Mix. 

Sam Dunning:Hey Steve. Thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to the chat and getting stuck in.

Steve Cummins:Fantastic. There's a lot of web design companies out there. You have chosen to focus on B2B tech companies particularly with a focus on SaaS companies, so i'm curious, why have you chosen that as your as your main event? 

Sam Dunning:   It wasn't always. I mean I've been messing around with websites and SEO for probably the best part of 12, 13 years now.

And I've quite literally gone from serving almost anyone and anyone that might need a website or to get found online to slowly niching down to, like you say, B2B technology. So quite often SaaS companies, and then the odd service company in between here and there, if they're a good match, usually because we found those folks tend to have a marketing setup within their business.

So they've got marketers. Not always, if they're super early or super bootstrap, but often they'll have a marketing team. So they'll appreciate the value of organic search.   Rather than us having to sell to them the value and how it helps, how it works, the problems it fix, the way it can capture inbound leads and all that good stuff, they already appreciate the value.

So it just made a bit more sense for us. And likewise, because I am - this sounds super meta - but because I am a B2B tech company, essentially selling to other B2B tech companies, and I'm a founder that sells myself, I know the value of inbound leads. They're literally the lifeblood of technology companies.

So it felt like almost over the years after doing, doing it almost as an uphill battle, trying to sell to anyone and everyone eventually found my niche and the customers that seemed to be a good match for our offer.   but I wish I found it many years ago. 

Steve Cummins:Yeah. It's interesting, right? Because as marketers, we sometimes forget to apply the principles of marketing to ourselves, right?

So we would tell our clients, Hey, you've got to narrow down. You've got to find a persona. You've got to focus in on this. We can very easily be guilty of “I can help anybody”. 

So I was very intrigued by your tagline there. I've been involved in a bunch of website projects over the years. Either internal or working with agencies. 

If you're really lucky, I think it's run by a marketing team who sort of really gets it and understands targeting. 

The reality is if you're in a big organization, it's probably something run by a committee. If you're in a small company, a startup, it's personality driven, right? It typically is the founder or the CEO or what have you. So I am curious, what drove you down to this and just tell me a little bit more about that philosophy. 

Sam Dunning: Oh, the tagline. Yeah. like you say, you land on the breaking B2B. com homepage and you'll see B2B SEO and websites for revenue, not vanity.

And it was mainly because I've worked a couple web and marketing agencies over the years and also I've of course taken on client projects where they might have had bad experience with companies and frustrations and having guest marketing leaders on the podcast It is essentially I got annoyed because so many clients would bring to me monthly reports or results and they look awesome.

It's like when someone does a post on LinkedIn, for example, Steve, and they, they post this crazy upward graph trend. And it's like, we took this website from a hundred visitors to a hundred thousand in three months. And then I'll comment on it saying great work. So how many qualified leads did that drive?

And then there's just like a tumbleweed, zero response. And it turns out it's this like super high traffic volume blog that they churned out with AI just to go after a really high volume traffic keyword, but on the back end of it, it's just a super top of funnel informational based query that doesn't actually result in high intent buyers It's just someone looking for information   so I kind of got sick of agencies basically taking clients for a ride and saying well, we're getting you all this traffic We've got you all these rankings and it's like well that looks good on paper, but Where's the where's the leads like where's the demo requests?

Where's the sales calls on the back of it? Because ultimately most folks yes, we use organic search to build our brand. We use it to ramp up website traffic We use it to build mindshare, of course especially important B2B because it's rare that especially in high ticket products and services that someone sees your website for the first time and then Will inquire about 100 grand acv offer.

They need to see it many times and speak to their team Yes, all those things play a part, but ultimately we want Inbound leads. So a lot of those kind of fluffy metrics that you'll see flying about on LinkedIn posts and these crazy graphs is that that kind of annoyed me to the point that I thought I'd like to do the opposite of that and try and put together a headline that resonates with folks that are maybe feeling frustrated as well.

Steve Cummins:Yeah, I think it works. And you know, I've had a few of these discussions back and forth on LinkedIn comments about vanity metrics, right? Because  I rail against vanity metrics and then people say, ‘Oh, but you know, this metric is useful’. That metric is useful. And, and my point behind that is any metric can be useful as long as you know, Why you're measuring it and what activity it's driving, right?

So it may be for whatever reason Maybe you do want all of that top level stuff Maybe it's to get you know, more vc funding or whatever it be but you've got to understand why you're doing it, right? It's not just so that you can have that pretty slide to show in the board meeting that you know shows everything 

So when you do get into it, somebody's read the tagline, gone to your website, said, yeah, I want to work with Sam.   What are maybe the top two or three things you would tell a CEO or a company owner they should really be worried about in terms of website design and SEO?

Sam Dunning:   So there's, there's a number of things. I mean, we can drill into common mistakes and then maybe how to, how to set those right. And I think you alluded to it at the start of the episode, Steve, one of the biggest issues we see, especially in B2B web design across tech companies.

And I think SaaS companies are especially guilty of it is. So their sites are ego driven. So what I mean by that is that basically they're designing the site in terms of the messaging, in terms of the content, in terms of the copy, the headlines, taglines, and more based upon what the company thinks looks good.

Sounds cool works well, and it might even not even be the company. It might not even be the exec team or the marketing leaders, the revenue leaders. It might even be like you said, the VC fund or whoever's backing them on what they think looks cool, but it's not resonating with. Target prospects, ideal clients, the AKA, the folks that are going to buy your stuff or inquire to buy your stuff.

And it's probably the opposite approach. And what you've got to remember is the chances are, if you're a software or for your service company, you've got a warehouse full of your stuff, or you've got an unlimited supply of software. You don't need to sell to yourself. You need to sell to the folks that are potentially going to book a demo or book a sales call.

So that's the common mistake. And I think it's just because they copy competitors so much. So they'll look at their competitors in the market space and they'll see these crazy homepage taglines, like ‘an all in one 360 degree revenue platform to two sup supercharge your revenue with our tech AI wizardry’, and then it quite literally confuses prospects.

The prospects will land on your homepage for the first time ever. Maybe they've come from an ad, maybe they've come from a Google search or elsewhere, and they'll see your homepage here, or they'll read that headline. They'll be like, what the heck do these guys do? And they'll scroll down a bit further on the page.

And I think I see some features and I see some offers, but I'm still not quite sure. And they'll scroll right to the bottom to the bottom. They'll still be none the wiser just because this company is kind to try to sell cool, or maybe they're talking about their awards or they're talking about funding gained, or they're talking about recent G2 or accreditations won, rather than actually trying to resonate with their target buyers and talk about.

Well, clearly, clearly share the offer itself, the problem that it fixes or the results that it brings to the table. So how it helps target clients, get a job done, fix a expensive issue or improve their life business or whatever they're trying to ramp up. So that's like one of the biggest mistakes. And there's a lot of ways to fix that, but that's probably the most glaring one in SaaS and B2B tech.

Steve Cummins:Yeah, it's funny, as you were going through the list of, you know, 360 degree, all encompassing, I was waiting for ‘award winning’ or ‘world class’ to be in there, because world class is the one that winds me up, because that is You know, one of the most meaningless phrases, um I guess award winning is as well because you, you can buy your way into those.

  all right, so, so it sounds like you sort of have maybe three classes of you know, of tagline or headline in there.   you know, problem you solve, et cetera, et cetera.   how do you go through the discovery phase to work out, you know, what that tagline should be and, and which of those three areas you, you really want to, you know, take it into?

Sam Dunning: Yeah. I like that question. So there is, there's a number of ways that you can do it with the headline. I've got a bit of a framework that I advise clients on, and it really depends how far along the line you are with your business, like whether you've got a solid product market fit, whether you've been able to do decent customer research, i.e. you've got, I don't know, up to 10 or so clients that we can interview.

That they don't have to have been with you through that long, but it's really, so we can understand like what their motivation was for using you, the problems they came to you to fix, why they chose you post your competitor.   The results that you've brought to the table now and a few other interesting and useful kind of points like that of qualitative customer research But you might not have that depending on how early stage your company is. If you’re late stage you probably have your earliest stage you probably don't so there's a few frameworks.

I like to use for the home page headline And a lot of this is built upon Something called the grunt test Which you may or may not have heard of from a chap called Donald Miller in a book called building a story brand and it basically is on the basis that could a caveman sitting in his cave could you he's never seen a website before he's never been on the internet.

Could you stick a laptop in front of him for the first time ever, fire it up onto your homepage and without ever having any knowledge of your company or your business before he sees your homepage, sees your headlining, could he quickly grunt exactly what you do, how it helps them and how to learn more or get in touch.

And the thing is, if he couldn't do that within a few seconds and your website's probably missing the mark, AKA, if you're spending money on ads, SEO, or whatever type of Marketing or ads you're doing to drive traffic to your site is basically going down the drain. Because they're going to bounce off to a competitor that gives them a clearer and more enjoyable experience.

So one framework I use is if you're early stage. I usually just recommend something called pure clarity headline – i.e. we do x that improves y   so in our world that might be we craft websites that generate demos or sales leads super simple, but it's clear You And I'd rather have something that's crystal clear.

I don't know, B2B websites that generate qualified sales leads, or if you're in tech, maybe let's say you're in the calendar scheduling world. I often use, we help prospects schedule time with your, with your sales team on the calendars without the endless email back and forth, something like that.

Maybe it'd be short and snappier, but it gives you the general idea. And that is better than saying ‘we're a 360 all in one revenue driving AI supercharged award winning platform’. It's just talking about how great you are. I have no idea what you do.   

the second one that I often use is fixing a problem or talking about a pain point.

If I take it to our world, most SEO is focused on traffic and rankings.   we ditch that to focus on kind of organic search that drive leads. So there's probably, there's probably a fluffy or a vanity metric that a lot of prospects in your world are frustrated with. That bring to the table a lot of your customers bring up so you basically say most most Sector companies focus on this we do the opposite then share your point of differentiation. Or the other one is a kind of similar thing which basically I used in my headline where you pick an enemy So in mine kind of websites and SEO for revenue, not vanity.

And you basically stand against the enemy in your sector. And again, most of that is taken from listening to sales schools, listening to prospects, maybe you're in communities and you kind of hear that what your prospects bitch and moan about, and you basically talk about how you stand for the opposite.

So that's a few frameworks that you can use depending on how much research you've got behind you or whether you just want to do something crystal clear And obviously straight underneath typically in that homepage hero You have a call to action to grab a demo or learn more. Maybe a snapshot of your product and then maybe kind of brands work with like 150 B2B tech companies helped this year or whatever.

Steve Cummins:Hey, I, so I really like those frameworks. I mean, really you're bringing it back to some kind of a messaging strategy.   How do you handle that with prospective clients? And I'll admit, I did this a few years ago when I was on the other side of the counter and I was bringing agencies in to redo a website.

And one of them came in and sort of pitched, your first thing we got to do is a discovery session. And we're going to work on your messaging and all that. And We've, we've, we've already done that. We already know our messaging,   who knows if they were right at the time. Probably were,   so how do you push back against that resistance where somebody says, no, no, no, we don't need you to do the messaging for us.

We just need you to fix the website. Do you, do you come across that? 

Sam Dunning: All the time all the time 

Sometimes you'll break through, other times you won't

Probably like as as you've experienced in the past I'm sure so it really depends like I suppose it it depends on the stage of the business On how relevant this is because if it is an early stage Company and perhaps they're bootstrapped and they they haven't got that many customers then it might not be as relevant Because the website is probably not getting a ton of traffic.

It's probably more founder led sales. So the founders may be utilizing it is existing network referrals, maybe doing a bit of cold outbound, maybe doing a little bit of ads. So the website is probably not getting all that much traffic. And as long as people can click onto that site and get a clear idea of what he does or she does, how it helps them probably check, check pricing, check proof of results, case studies, maybe see the offer in action if it's SaaS and then easily book a call. As long as it checks those five or six boxes, it doesn't matter. 

Whereas when you're getting into, when you're ramping up business and then you're going more aggressive on other channels, be it SEO be it paid media be investing in paid review sites Be it maybe some of your team's active on social channels like linkedin Maybe you're launching a podcast and you're going on other people's podcast doing webinars and you're getting more and more traffic Your company is getting more visitors to the site and you've probably got kind of various other competitors that are getting brought up in sales conversations That's the point where the messaging is going to be more important because then you've got to actually show that this is how we're different in the marketplace And that's where, like you said steve, customer research is important because then you can pick up things like Why have your recently onboarded customers decided to choose you as opposed to your top three competitors?

If you are doing regular customer research, which is super useful for your website You can get you can garner insights like what made them choose you What was the expensive problem that they fixed or that they wanted to solve rather than by choosing you? 

So when you start getting into differentiation. How you're, how you're basically got a one up on your competitors or what actually are the reasons your customers choose you is, is going to be super useful in that messaging standpoint, not just for your website, but across your ads, across your message on social, across your sales conversations and all that good stuff.

So not as important when you're fresh. But certainly more than the more you grow. 

Steve Cummins:Yeah. And I think it's interesting that you shared some of the questions you ask, cause I think some people would get into it-  not if they're a web agency but if it's an internal marketing person or, you know, somebody trying to do it themselves  - well, I don't even know what questions I would ask to get there.

Right. So that framework you were talking about, it's a little bit like this sort of Jobs To Be Done thing, right? What problem are you trying to solve here? What, why did you bring us in? You know, what was that issue?  I like that approach of, it's not just, Hey, what did you like about our website?

Right? It's really driving into, you know, what is the hole you're trying to fill by, by buying our, our service or our product.   

So you've listed through some of the big things you want to see on the homepage, right? Obviously an attention grabbing headline, easy way to book an appointment, testimonials, et cetera, et cetera.

So let's say you've fixed the homepage or created a new homepage, right? That's job one is done.   And then you sort of move deeper into the website. One thing that I think often generates a lot of discussion is a pricing page.   I always rail against companies that do not have a pricing page or do not have serious pricing on their page.

I'm curious what your approach is towards pricing pages 

Sam Dunning: Yeah, i'm exactly the same.   I usually it's not so much with Kind of what I call lower ticket SAAS companies, because they'll usually share their pricing because their pricing might be anywhere from 10 bucks a month to 50 bucks a month with some custom enterprise plans.

If you've got tons and tons of users or seats, it's usually the large enterprise companies. Because we have a hundred k ACV. We can't share pricing on our website or the more custom B2B service suppliers. Oh, everything we do is bespoke and tailored to order. So how dare we share pricing? It will scare off the quote unquote leads.

That's usually where I see pushback, but I'm in the same camp as you. I think I've been there actually, because. One of my previous companies I was at for, for some time, I would just get frustrated myself on the sales side. Cause I was dealing with a lot of the sales calls. We just get all these leads and I'd end up having discovery calls with them for 30, 45 minutes, sometimes even an hour, understanding like what issues they're facing, why they want to fix it, where they want to get to, their goals.

And then we get to towards three quarters of the convo and they just have no way near the budget to work with us and I'd say, this is frustrating. Right. We need to stop this we're wasting their time. They'll probably get annoyed. I'm certainly getting annoyed. It's wasting our team's time It's wasting our ad spend.

Whatever. Let's just share the pricing on on the website So it's it's super easy if you're a SaaS solution because you'll probably have three tiers maybe like basic, medium, advanced and then an enterprise option But when you get to more customized solutions, I think that's when folks get a bit worried and a bit scared.

So that's why I normally encourage people to use a bracketing pricing approach. Like, I don't know, tier A is from three to 5k, tier B is 10 to 20 K, C is 30 K plus,   and it typically covers these, these bullet points within the offer, but get in touch with us for a, for a tailored. Kind of discovery call or demo whatever your next step is 

But the good thing about a pricing page is not only does it qualify in decent fit prospects and qualify out poor fit ones But it gives you a chance to address a lot of the common questions and problems that you get on sales calls So i'd always encourage you to have kind of pricing options at the top or brackets and then maybe weave in some social proof, maybe have like a video review of one of one or two of your clients where they talk about that problem while That initial problem they faced the impact of that problem Why they chose you compared to two or three competitors and what what life's like now And the results you've brought to the table and then you can have a nice faq like a carousel section but not a generic faq like most companies, but where you actually address the questions you get on sales calls head on like Why is so expensive isn't competitor be better than you?

How long does account Matt,   do I get a dedicated account manager? How long set up time? What's your refund policy? I literally did this on a lot of our service pages on the breaking B2B site. Like why are you more expensive? The competitors isn't a quicker to invest in ads compared to SEO. And just all those questions I get all the time, just adress them head on.

And it just speeds up sales cycles and it drives more qualified prospects. So when folks book a call with sales, that they already know kind of, they're already more than halfway there. 

Steve Cummins:I think it's interesting because it's another one of those that differentiates between lead generation and revenue generation, right?

Cause I think, you know, one of the objections is, well, I want people to contact me to find out the price cause then I'll get the lead. So I'm getting more leads that way. But the reality is, to your point at the beginning, is that. If, if they're completely out of your price range, that is not a qualified lead anyway.

So you've just wasted their time and you've wasted your time, particularly if you have that 45 minute discovery call before you even get to that. And then I think even worse, you'll have some clients or prospects that are too nice to say or embarrassed to say,’ Oh, that's too expensive for me’. So it actually drags it out, you know, further into the pipeline.

 So the other thing I'm curious about on the pricing, so you were mentioning about testimonials and FAQs, are you saying you would include that on the pricing page or is that a separate part of the website? 

Sam Dunning: Always within the pricing page itself. So the pricing page is probably, if you've got one.

One of the most visited site pages on your site, probably like home pricing. If you've got a demo page results, then maybe the book a cool page, probably like the top five visited. 

So people literally are going to go home pricing. Maybe look at live demo if you've got one or check out some Case studies and results and then they're probably going to book a call So if you can if you can handle all those objections up front within that pricing page itself Just think of all that time that you can save and basically because Sales are going to get asked that question like right away like all those things like how long does it take to set up?

Do I get an account manager? What's the refund policy and all that stuff you can just address that head on it just saves so much time and pain And it shows trust And transparency. 

Steve Cummins:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense.   So you said pricing is one of the most visited pages. I agree. That's one of the first pages I always click on myself.

Does it help with SEO as well though? Do you find that the pricing is one of the pages that tends to drive SEO traffic too? 

Sam Dunning: It can a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It can a bit. I mean, I encourage depending on what type of business you are, whether you're software or services. It's like, for example, SaaS companies will have typically homepage, then feature pages, maybe industry pages on the industries, the sectors, the markets they serve.

They'll probably have a pricing page. They'll have a bunch of resources, different types of blog articles, media, Podcast and such demo pages. So not just within pricing page but faqs on each specific page that are relevant to that topic And the questions that get brought up on customer success calls or sales calls or even early stage calls are really useful.

Because again, they build trust They handle handle objections head on and they also help with seo value because it's actually searchable content. That's genuinely useful 

Steve Cummins:Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I know google tends to like faqs.   you know, right? It's great content for them to serve up. So you mentioned another one of my favorite topics there.

We didn't rehearse this I swear we didn't

Demos. I love a good demo It it drives me nuts when particularly software companies don't have a demo because it's the easiest thing in the world to have a demo video for But the other frustration I have is they have a demo but they put it behind they gate it right They put it behind some kind of form.

  and you know The number one reason for it typically is well, we don't want our competitors to see it Well, guess what your competitor is going to see it, you know, unless you have it behind fort Know. Any thoughts on the best way to have a demo how to present it? 

Sam Dunning:yeah 

Sam Dunning: Basically the most of the insights I share are from from like you say on on our podcast breaking B2B We've interviewed nearly 400 B2B marketing leaders, execs CMOs vps of marketing, etc Fast growth tech companies and from that data They've basically said to me if I land on a B2B site be it service or tech I want to quickly get an idea of what you do how it helps problems you fix I want to see pricing.

I want to see the offer in action I want to get some of my questions results questions answered, sorry, see some of your case studies or client results. And if you check all those boxes, then I want to be able to easily schedule time with an expert that can address my questions and see if we're a fit to help.

So with that said, yeah, if you can share, at the very least you want to share screenshots of your offer in action. The product one up is, is a gif. Get various gifs throughout the site and one up from that is like a product video So various tours of the certain elements and features within your product people want to see in different use cases that weave into relevant pages then one up from that is the The demo tool, the light interactive demo itself, which I think probably makes sense now, considering there's a lot of tools like Navitek and Walnut, and there's a few others that enable you to do that.

So it's a tricky one. I think whether you should gate it behind an email or not, I think I'd probably be inclined to give people a taster. So I'd probably say, look, let's, let's give them maybe the most demanded two or three features within the demo. So they can…maybe in your header of your website, you've got try it now and then book a demo.

So you can hit try it now that takes them to that interactive demo itself. They can guide through the top two or three features that are most asked for within the product. And then once you get to that stage you say this is all we can show you for now.  Book a call with a sales engineer or specialist, then you can see the whole thing in action for 20 minutes or however long the session is.

That would probably be my take, but curious to know yours. 

Steve Cummins:  yeah, I, I obviously not a fan of gating these things because you want people to see your products.   Typically…  you and I should have worked together long ago because typically that's the approach I've taken is you give like a two minute video demo for free and then, hey, if you want to see more, you know, fill out the form and then you get, get the full video,   and then drive people, you know, to sign up for a One on one demo, right?

And I, and I think it does highlight that fact of, You know, the people that are deciding what goes on the website are not necessarily the people that have ever bought these products. Right. So oftentimes you'll get pushback from sales. Well, if, if, if there's a demo on the website, then nobody's going to want to talk to me and I need to talk to them to show how it is.

But has that salesperson ever tried to buy a SaaS product and seen how frustrating it is not to get it. So I think it's the whole you know, walk a mile in someone else's shoes. 

Sam Dunning: Exactly. It's that famous saying, isn't it? People buy for their reasons. So exactly why they're going to, if, if you, if you hide it from them, same with pricing, same of your product, same with client reviews.

If you hide it, they're going to find a way in SAAS. G2, Capterra, whatever, or they're just going to YouTube it or search it. They'll find it. If they want to find the information they will, or I get so frustrated and think this company is like so against showing me anything, I'm just going to go to a competitor and you're giving your competitors free leads.

Steve Cummins:Yeah, , it's that whole path of least resistance, right? It's like, I'm not going to spend too much time trying to, trying to understand your, your product. 

I could keep talking about this for hours, but you know, the reality is you've, you've covered a lot of this ground.

There's, there's a really good episode of your podcast quite recently where you went into best practices for, for B2B website. I'm going to link to that in the show notes. I would recommend anybody go and listen to that and really dig more into the details. I have a couple of more questions for you though.

Slightly, slightly less focused on websites. So I've seen that for your personal branding, you have started using some sort of TikTok style memes, right? You did this. Hey, I asked the public, what is what gets you number one ranking on Google, right?   I'm curious, how is that working for you?

Sam Dunning: Oh, I do a lot of stupid stuff, man. And I waste a lot of time on linkedin, but I think for me it's because again a bit like my breaking B2B website headline. I was a bit frustrated with other seo 

So i'm probably Opposite to most SEOs and the fact that i'm not that technical I come from a sales background and so most of my approach with seo is Rather than going super technical and web dev wise i'd rather go high level strategic Content i'm a lot more scrappier.

So I like to do stuff that gets impact quite fast Because of that sales background. So I've said that with that in mind, a lot of the stuff you'll see from SEOs on LinkedIn is very technical. Whereas I think, how can I stand out, do something that's a bit different. And so one of those concepts recently was I just go up to folks in the street with my rhode microphone and my friend filming me and just ask them questions.

Like, do you, do you know what SEO is? How do you get to the top of Google?   is Google a force for good or bad? What do you think about AI content? And some of the responses, like super funny. I also did stuff where I talked about outbound sales. So I went up to folks and said, what do you think about cold cooling or does cold cooling still work?

And bumped into a policeman. This police officer just started having a go at me. It's like cold calling's illegal. And I just went on a super rant and it was just, yeah, it's just funny, man. To get, to get people's reactions. Cause you even get people that are super against it. Or people that are actually like really receptive and every now and then you bump into someone that actually is an SEO themselves or has a friend that does digital marketing and so it just produces quite funny responses.

Steve Cummins:Yeah, no, it's good stuff. We always talk about the split between B2B and B2C marketing. I think it's great when B2B sometimes takes a page out of B2C or social media and does something fun. I think the bigger you get the tougher it is to do so   I give you credit for that.

I I would encourage anybody to follow sam on linkedin as well to see some of these videos I'll put a link in the show notes to that as well. 

That's good. All right. So last question.   I call this the Marketing Mix. I always think of this as, you know, it's fine talking through the screen. It'd be much better if we were face to face. Having a drink talking about all things marketing. So if we were doing that, what would we be drinking? 

Sam Dunning: Oh for me for my sins, it's going to be being a typical Brit, especially now at the time recording that the football the euros are going on and england had just got through to the Semi finals, it's going to be a lager probably several pints for me 

 Very good.

I did mean to congratulate you. You did a spoof of it's coming home, which for any England fans would love. So you'll find that on, on LinkedIn as well. So, all right. Pint of lager, maybe like a Shandy and, in the warmer weather, but very nice. 

Hey Sam, thank you for, for sharing your thoughts here.

I will put a link in the show notes to your podcast in general, but to this one episode that I think is a really good rundown of all things B2B.   

You can follow Sam on, on LinkedIn as well.   but again, really appreciate it and look forward to having a pint of lager with you to celebrate England winning maybe.

Sam Dunning: Oh, let's hope so. Appreciate it, Steve. Good to chat.