Why A Plan Is Not A Strategy with PJ Morris

This episode of B2B Inspired explores how marketers can elevate their impact by shifting focus from tactics to true business strategy. PJ Morris, Head of Customer Experience and Marketing at Fletcher Building Concrete Division, shares how marketers can become more effective by understanding the commercial model of their business. Drawing on her extensive experience in B2B, she unpacks the idea that strategy isn't a list of activities—it's about solving real business challenges with clarity and cohesion.

Throughout the conversation, PJ outlines the mindset and skills marketers need to earn a seat at the strategic table. From aligning with finance and operations to simplifying strategic thinking, the episode offers a practical look at how marketing can deliver more value across the business. It's a must-listen for leaders who want their marketing function to move beyond communication and start driving real organisational growth.

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

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Transcript

Dale Koerner 0:19

Thank you, people from within our ecosystem. We're here to help the New Zealand B2B community to become one of the best, boldest and brightest anywhere in the world. Now if, like me, you live and breathe all things business to business and you're looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Kia ora, and welcome to B2B Inspired.

Dale Koerner 0:44

We're joined today by someone who's actually one of my favorite people in marketing and I haven't told her that before, and I'm hoping that triggers a smile. We're joined by PJ Morris, who is the Head of Customer Experience and Marketing at Fletcher Building Concrete Division. Bit of a mouthful, I think I got that right. Pj and I we sit on the special interest group the B2B special interest group together for the Marketing Association, and we've talked a number of times about strategy, what it is, what it isn't and what marketers need to get themselves on page with in order to be able to actually fulfill their potential within business and to deliver the most value that they can to the businesses that they work for. So, pj, thank you for joining us.

PJ Morris 1:23

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Good, A little nervous are you all? Right, a little nervous, that's okay, we'll get there.

Dale Koerner 1:29

Nervous and fine, nervous and fine. So one of the things we like to do on the show here is, first and foremost, we want our guests to get to know the messenger before we talk about the message. So tell us a bit about yourself.

PJ Morris 1:39

Okay, so I have been in marketing for oh, I'm going to sound old now, 25-odd years, nice. I actually fell into marketing. It was never, ever my plan. I went to university and went to art school, trained to be an artist Don't know if you know this very hard to make money being an artist. And just went out and found a job, started helping out the marketing manager in the business I was working in and went oh, this is fun, it's creative, it's exciting. So I went back to university and went this is what I want to do.

PJ Morris 2:11

So predominantly I have worked in the B2B side of marketing for most of my career. I've done a little bit of B2C, but predominantly construction, b2b marketing, and I love it because it is strategic and it's exciting and you get to be involved in so many more facets of a business than you often do when you're in B2C and that's not to say in B2C you don't. But there are a lot of companies where the marketing department is purely comms and in B2B you tend to be a lot wider and that's why I love what I do. So you know I work for Fletcher Building at the moment. I've been there for three years in the role that I am leading up the marketing for the concrete division, which covers five of our concrete businesses. But prior to that I have done other big brands across Fletcher, building insurance and Sky TV is probably the biggest one people know.

Dale Koerner 3:00

They were the biggest names in New. Zealand.

PJ Morris 3:02

In the media space inside of things, and so I have learned a lot along the way and, yeah, real passionate about ensuring that marketers have a seat at the table and understand the value that they bring to an organization and how to share that with wider organizations as to how they can really deliver value.

Dale Koerner 3:19

I've always loved that about our conversations and I know you do a lot of work with the universities and all the up-and-comers and it's a thing that the industry needs and I love that. I'm intrigued. Sorry, so you went back to university. Yes, what did you study second time around?

PJ Morris 3:33

Business and marketing. So I went back and I did my business degree, majoring in marketing, and then I went back a second time and actually did my masters in marketing as well.

Dale Koerner 3:42

Nice.

PJ Morris 3:43

And particularly in consumer behaviour and how culture impacts the way that you purchase and the way that you buy, particularly in a country like New Zealand. I thought it was a really fascinating and interesting topic because we are so bicultural and we have so few people who grow up now just with one culture impacting the way they learn how to shop.

Dale Koerner 4:04

Well, I mean there's a whole other episode on that. That sounds fascinating. Which was the more fun of the degrees art or business?

PJ Morris 4:12

They're different. I don't know if you could say one was more fun than the other. Art is a lot more subjective and everyone has an opinion on it. And saying that, everyone's got an opinion on marketing too. Marketing has a lot more straight theories and fundamentals that, if you follow, it is what it is. The rules of marketing haven't changed since marketing was invented. Art is way more subjective and a lot harder, I think, to you know to judge and to assess what's good and what's not.

Dale Koerner 4:43

It's quite funny whenever I talk to people about the degree that I did, which was international management and German of all things, a lot of it was social sciences, right, so you could never really get 100%.

Defining Strategy vs Planning

Dale Koerner 4:53

You could never really get that top grade, so you had to do these strategic accounting and finance papers where the answer was right or wrong, just to keep your grades up. That was a strategy, and that's probably not a bad segue to the conversation, which is really about helping now the people who we want to be listening to this episode Marketers who want to be having more of a seat at the table in that strategic process, but also business owners who are at that stage, beginning a new financial year, looking ahead what should they be looking for in strategy and who should be involved and how should they be doing it? Well, so, having come from a conversation here about academia, let's do a good old academic thing and talk about definitions. So how do you see strategy? How do you define?

PJ Morris 5:38

it. I guess strategy is a word to me that's bandied around a lot and half the time people are talking about planning they're not talking about strategy. Strategy is, in my mind, a cohesive response to a business challenge, and the key word there is cohesive, so it's about what direction you are going as a business and how you are all working together to get to that challenge. So, if you want to simplify it, it's the point of view on the problem and having a point of view on a problem and sticking to it.

Dale Koerner 6:12

And also knowing what the problem is, presumably.

PJ Morris 6:14

Well, yes, I mean, you have to be able to identify what the problem and the challenge is. And I think, if you break strategy down into kind of three key areas, it's about diagnosing the problem and kind of, really, what is the nature of the challenge you're trying to solve, the overall approach to how you're going to overcome that challenge, and then it's the plan, which is that cohesive, coherent actions that you are going to take as a business to really deliver a result that moves you from A to B.

Dale Koerner 6:45

And you use the phrase there that the word strategy gets bandied around a lot and my sense of it is that different departments within a business will have a different read on what strategy is. You know, when you hear people talking about like a social media strategy, it's like okay, cool, let's unpick what that actually means to you, because it's it's interpreted differently by by all these different layers. So, at its core, who does strategy belong to? Oh, who should? Who should own it? Who's the driver?

PJ Morris 7:14

that's a big question. I think, overall, business strategy is owned by that top table, be it your executive team, your your GM, your CEO, whoever that is. The execution of strategy is owned by everybody in the business. I am a big proponent of you have one strategy and one strategy only, and everything else is a plan, because it's about how you're executing that. The minute you start to have multiple strategies, you start to lose the cohesion and to me, that cohesion is that key word to strategy and if you have more than one strategy, how do you ensure it's cohesive? So, in my mind, when you get to, particularly in marketing, digital, social, social comms, they're not strategies, they're plans about how you are delivering to that bigger business challenge of what you're trying to do.

Dale Koerner 8:11

Yeah, I really, I really like that piece that you talk about there about things getting diluted the more you kind of slice and dice it, and it's that kind of classic chinese whispers piece, isn't it that if you've got this one starting point and everyone kind of has their spin on it and their interpretation of it, everything gets lost in translation. This question, I didn't prep you on this one and I'm going to put you on the spot how big should a strategy be? How many pages?

PJ Morris 8:37

If you can't write it on one page, you're in trouble because you can't communicate it Good. Like a strategy should be able to be articulated in really simple two or three sentences, and if you can't get past that, you can't get everybody rolling in the same direction because it's too complicated.

Dale Koerner 8:53

I love that and I completely agree. I remember talking to someone at an event a while ago and they were really excited about the concept of like AI delivered strategy and how they're working with this tool, that in about two hours it spits out a full 65 page strategy and I'm like that's great. But all I care about is what you didn't include on pages 64 to page two. It's page one, like that's the only thing that should matter. Keep it nice and simple, because otherwise it's like you said, it's super hard to align to something that you you can't actually put a stake through.

PJ Morris 9:25

What is the problem? What are you doing to try and solve it? And then everything else is the actions.

Dale Koerner 9:33

Yeah, you're completely right. So where do people go wrong?

The Starting Point for Effective Strategy

PJ Morris 9:38

That's one area. Where do people go wrong? That's a really big question. I think we get caught up sometimes in trying to do too much, and a huge part of being strategic is actually working out what you're not doing and what you are doing, and then how you communicate that with everybody in the business to ensure that you all understand the ultimate goal. And for marketers, and certainly for young, up-and-coming marketers that I talk to a lot, what they often miss is understanding the commercials of how a business makes money, and you really need to understand the commercials to understand the plans that you are putting in place and how they impact those commercials.

PJ Morris 10:27

Because, let's be honest, we're in business to make money, and that's why we're doing what we're doing. So you need to understand how to make money, and that's not necessarily just how to drive volume or revenue, but actually how do you drive profit, EBIT margin and what are those levers that you're pulling. And, as a young marketer coming into this, if you want to be strategic, make friends with finance, make friends with operations. Understand how your business makes money.

Dale Koerner 10:56

Yeah.

PJ Morris 10:56

And then you bring to the table what the customer wants and that real market-oriented look of. Here is the gap in the market, here is the customer need. How do we now connect those two things together? And that's your strategic skill set that you as a marketer can really bring is customer insight and customer knowledge to connect to those two things.

Dale Koerner 11:18

You're dead right, the piece around understanding the commercials. Now I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. You know people in a lot of businesses. You know a lot of. You know university students and the up and comers and everything else like that. How open are leadership teams to actually taking their teams through what makes money? Because it's a critical part, right, you've got to be able to understand that, like you said, the difference between revenue and margin, and understanding that. Okay, if you're driving a promo sale and you're taking 40 off your price and you've only got 40 in it, then guess what? You ain't making money. But I think it's easy to. It's easy to look at that whole scenario and say, well, marketers need to understand the commercials, but do they always have access to them?

PJ Morris 12:10

I've always found, if you ask you do, I can't say. I've ever been in a business when a market has been inducted and their first step is you know, let's sit down with the finance team.

Dale Koerner 12:19

We see the P&L and see the P&L.

PJ Morris 12:22

But if you ask the right questions, people are really always happy to talk about what they do and why they do it. I'm a really big fan of what I call day in the shoes, and so that is sending my teams out to spend their days with salespeople, with operations people, with finance people, so that they can really understand what their day-to-day looks like and what those conversations are, and to understand it. And you know, I got into marketing because I like being creative and I like being strategic and I like developing things that customers like to do. I hate spreadsheets I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a finance person but you have to know how to read them.

Dale Koerner 12:59

You have to be able to understand and actually understand and quantify the impact of what you've done.

PJ Morris 13:04

I mean you've got that whole cause and effect piece that often is lost when you don't understand the effects that you need to actually drive and if you don't want to be thought of as the colouring in department or the comms department, then you need to be talking a language that says if we do this, the impact on the business is this and it helps move that business goal forward in this way and this is why we're doing it and be able to show that return on what you're doing and just switch your language to slightly talk to the way that they talk, you know. So you drop the marketing jargon which we all love, and you just talk language that they talk. So you don't talk about brand equity, you talk about future demand. So building the pipeline to sales of you know, these things are short-term focus that will deliver sales now. These are the longer-term focus things that will ensure that we have sales in the future.

PJ Morris 13:58

We don't talk about brand salience. We talk about being top of mind in the buying decision place. It's just about adjusting that language and showing that you get that what you do contributes to that overall strategy.

Bringing Customer Insights to Business Challenges

Dale Koerner 14:13

I love that that makes so much sense. But it's one of those things it's almost easier to talk about than it is to do, particularly if you don't feel like you've got much. It can be quite intimidating going and going and have a conversation about finance with a CFO right, Particularly if you're worried about getting the wrong language. But I like what you've shared there. It's kind of a mid-ground that it's relatable both ways. Yeah, that's really good. So one of the things that you talked about earlier on is about understanding the problem and ultimately understanding what needs to then happen as a solution. So understanding how you can put things in place and how you can align customers and all those other things to make that solution happen. But where do you start? On day one, you've got a blank piece of paper at the beginning of the financial year that says strategy 2025 on it and a biro next to it. What happens next?

PJ Morris 15:10

From a marketer's point of view, you start with the customer and you start with the market. A lot of organizations talk about being customer led, but they're often what I would call sales or product oriented. Here's my product, go sell it. Here's my sales pipeline Go fill it, go fill it, go fill it. Um, but if you are truly customer centric or market oriented, you start with the customer. Go out and talk to your customers and I'm not talking about investing thousands of dollars in customer research, like great if you've got the budget and you can go out and get people to do it. But pick up the phone and talk to your customers.

PJ Morris 15:42

Go out on the road with your sales teams and b2b, go stand in the places where you sell and just listen to what is happening around. You go online and google different terms and have a look at what comes up and then you start to see what the customer problems are and that allows you to see the challenge. And then you've got from your CEO normally what the business is trying to achieve. We want to grow x amount, okay, so we know the ultimate goal is to grow this. We know now what the customer insight and the customer challenge is and then we can kind of go okay, to get from here to here. We can now see that we need to develop this, be it a new product, or we need to price differently this way, that we need to develop this, be it a new product, or we need to price differently this way, or we need to communicate this way and we understand who we're talking to, what we're talking to them about, and then we can start to pull those levers of your four Ps.

Dale Koerner 16:38

I was going to say and I love how you were building up to that and, like the only one, we did talk about, that was distribution. Yeah, we'll talk about distribution. I love how you subtly baked them into the build up there. That's awesome. One thing that kind of comes up time and time again, I think, in this whole piece around developing strategy and understanding customers. I think and I've said it probably on a previous podcast as well if you work in B2B, you have this amazing superpower particularly if you work in a market as small as New Zealand to actually be able to get a really good representative conversation by tomorrow. You just literally pick up the phone, talk to some customers hey, sales, who are the accounts we should talk to? Hey, customer service, who should we talk to? And it's amazing how quickly you can actually reach some really really good conclusions just by pulling on a few threads in a conversation, right.

PJ Morris 17:29

Yeah, and asking who the right customer is to talk to, because sales will often give you their favorite customer or their most profitable or their biggest customer.

PJ Morris 17:38

Not necessarily the same thing biggest and profitable. Actually, what you want to talk to is who doesn't want to work with us and why don't they want to work with us? Who have we lost that we're trying to win back? What is a segment of the market that you've never managed to crack into? And go talk to those customers, Because the ones you work really closely with you know really well. You know what's working and don't get me wrong, you can learn a lot from what's working with those customers about what you need to replicate.

PJ Morris 18:04

But you don't understand why those ones who don't want to work with you don't want to work with you and New Zealanders will happily have a conversation. They'll talk to you about anything. And if you're not confident enough yet to go have a customer conversation by yourself, go sit with your customer services people or your sales people and just listen to the phone calls. I have spent many an hour sitting in a call centre listening on the phone. You don't say anything, you just listen. It's amazing what you learn about those nuggets that actually drive an insight, because you're watching a customer do something. Or you're watching a customer try and do something on your website and get frustrated.

Dale Koerner 18:44

Yes, without trying to breathe too heavily down the phone so they get creeped out. No, I'm with you. I find often in those conversations there will almost just be this one thing that stands out glaringly above absolutely everything else. It can even be just the body language and the way that they talk about something, they get animated about this or they get frustrated about that. If you're not having those conversations and you're not listening in, you're just leaving so much money on the table, both for the business and ultimately for yourself as a marketer as well, I think.

PJ Morris 19:19

Yeah, and if you can find those customers who, particularly, are willing to do it over Teams and Zoom these days, recording them is a really helpful way to play it back to the organisation as well. So, particularly if you're trying to take sales or your CEO on a journey of why you want to do something and how it will help deliver the strategy something heard from the voice of the customer Then it's not about me and my opinion. It's actually about this is what the customers are saying to us and this is what they're prioritising, and this is what they're saying will move the dial for them. Therefore, it will move the dial for us.

Dale Koerner 19:50

I love that we have this approach. Whenever we're doing a playback on those interviews, we'll talk about the warm and fuzzy stuff, the stuff that feels nice, and then there's like and the prickly stuff. But it's great to be able to, like you said, use the voice of the customer for that, because all of a sudden it removes. It removes bias.

PJ Morris 20:10

It's like I don't know straight from the horse's mouth. The horse has said this um, and it's really hard, because the minute you join an organization, the minute you put that blank piece of paper on the page and you start working on your 2026 strategy, you're not the customer. You don't know. You've got to remember. You live and breathe this business every day. You know things that the customer doesn't know or doesn't think about or doesn't understand, because the customer probably thinks about you once a month, if you're lucky, you know. I mean, I heard a stat the other day, even about Coca-Cola, that the majority of their sales come from people who buy Coke twice a year.

Dale Koerner 20:44

Yeah, and it's actually the casual buyers. Yeah, those are the ones Coke twice a year. Yeah, and it's actually the casual buyers, those are the ones who make a difference. So it's getting them from like twice a year to three times a year. That actually are the big, big drivers for them Because, like you said, the people who've got a case of Coke at the back seat of their car.

PJ Morris 20:59

They're buying it.

Dale Koerner 20:59

You don't need to worry about that. Yeah, exactly.

Simplicity: The Key to Strategic Success

PJ Morris 21:01

And with B2B you've really got to think about what is that? I guess that length of call cycle, but also how often are they engaging in buying that product or that category or what it is, and where do you need to influence that purchase? I mean, particularly in construction marketing. You know you've got habitual buyers. They buy the same construction products all the time, yeah, so you're not really trying to influence at that level. You're trying to influence at specification, so, or at an architect level or at a merchant level to stop your product. And so really thinking about how often and when and where makes a difference to those plans that fall off that strategy of going here is the business challenge yeah here is how we're going to face that challenge in this segment.

PJ Morris 21:52

We're going to look at to deliver on it.

Dale Koerner 21:55

Here is the targets within those segments and those targets might not be transactional buyers, but they're really important to understand how they fit into those plans I really hope that when this episode goes live, we have the ability to reach people who've been sceptical about the value that marketing can bring, because this is the conversation. This is the type of conversation that I wish that more of the business community I mean globally, but I mean here in New Zealand, in particular in B2B actually got a handle of what marketing should be bringing to this conversation, because what we're talking about here is it's deeply ingrained in what makes a business successful and what can make a business successful. So there's a question there, though. I mean, when you look at strategy and you look at all of the inputs you talked about this whole idea of forming a cohesive direction that can be followed With all of those inputs how do you prioritise what makes it to the output? How do you know what to say no to when you've got opportunity here and opportunity there?

PJ Morris 23:04

I think that's having that cohesive strategy that you can go back to, to go. What we're saying is to win in this, we're going to do x. Is this connected to that or is it taking us off on a tangent? Is it going to make money to deliver to that goal? And that's about being commercial and understanding those financials and having that conversation. If you rock up as a marketer and you go if we go, do this we're going to get you know, a thousand likes and a reach of X in media. Their eyes glaze over because they don't understand what that means. If you rock up to the table and go if we do this we will drive 500 inquiries into our sales team, of which we believe they can convert 75% of them, and that is going to generate X in revenue at X margin boom, you're being listened to because you have actually gone.

PJ Morris 24:06

I understand the goal we're trying to get to. I understand that the activity I'm doing is laddering up to delivering that and it's laser focused on that and I'm not being distracted over here going.

PJ Morris 24:17

I can sell a thousand of these widgets, but we're not going to make money, so let's not worry about that yeah, let's focus on the thing that's got and let's focus on the thing, and I have shown that what we're going to do is doing this, and so, if you give me this amount of budget, this is what I can deliver. Yeah, because I have sat down and I have worked that all backwards for you. Now, if you want to have a conversation about cutting budgets because we all know marketing budgets get cut that's fine. You cut the budget, then this is what I can deliver on that budget because, again, it's proportionate, because you've understood how the business makes money, you've understood the cohesive business strategy of where you're trying to win and you can then put your limited resources to go.

PJ Morris 24:54

We're not doing that because it doesn't align with the strategy that we've discussed and agreed on, and so it makes it really simple to say yes and no to things. Because the question comes back and it's the same. As you know, often marketing teams, you know, manage the full product life cycle in b2b and that product management piece of we now need to retire that product because it's no longer delivering to that. So, yes, it might still be making money, but we don't want to invest any more marketing and growing it because it doesn't fit with this segment, this target.

PJ Morris 25:23

That what we're doing yeah, yeah, because again it comes back to cohesion, and that then also comes back to communication across the business.

Dale Koerner 25:31

Yeah, yeah.

PJ Morris 25:32

So you need to make sure everybody in the business understands what you're trying to do as a business so you can have those logical conversations. Strategy is simplicity, and that is the key thing that you have to remember is keep it simple. Once you start putting fluffy words of, you know we're going to win by being customer centric and ensuring that our message is sustainable and digital. And what does that mean?

Dale Koerner 25:55

Yeah.

PJ Morris 25:56

And if somebody who, outside your industry, can't understand what that means, then your teams won't understand what that means either, and you know simplicity.

Dale Koerner 26:07

I think the other piece that you have in that I mean particularly in b2b is that there's never just one person involved in the decision. So you might have the super techie speccy description that makes sense to the you know the engineer who understands micron tolerances and whatever else, but for that person to secure the spend with you they've got to then go through procurement, they've got to go through finance. They might have other people involved. So I think across the board, that simplicity piece just means that it can go from desk to desk to desk to desk and still make sense.

PJ Morris 26:37

Yeah, and because you've got to think a bit like Chinese whispers this person says it to this person, who says it to this person? And it still has to make sense. Your who?

PJ Morris 26:44

says it to this person and it still has to make sense. Your plan and your execution for your strategy can have different messaging depending on your target audience, where they are in that buyer journey, whether or not they are a transactional customer or they're an influencer, or they just need to know your name so that they're comfortable signing off that the procurement person is. It's a brand that they know and they feel comfortable with. So that can all change, but the actual strategy needs to be very, very clear.

Dale Koerner 27:12

Yeah.

PJ Morris 27:13

And again, how you translate that to a customer who can then go say that to their boss I'm buying X because they'll deliver Y for us, and that will help us achieve our growth goals of.

Dale Koerner 27:25

Of X, Y and Z.

PJ Morris 27:26

Yeah, I was like trying to use a different letter. Don't come up with one we can do. A, b and.

Dale Koerner 27:30

C. I mean, I hear they're in fashion. So let's play out a scenario here. Let's say, we've got someone who runs a business who feels like they should be getting more out of their marketing team at this level what sort? Of? What sort of questions can they be asking of their team? What sort of asks can they be making that actually bring everyone along for the ride and actually start to unlock, like you said, that superpower of customer insight that is the marketing function?

PJ Morris 28:03

I would be starting by asking your marketing team for their latest customer research and insights. It is really hard work to be market-oriented Like it's a constant thing. Research is not something you do once a year and forget about. It is an always-on thing. So ask your marketing team how often are they out seeing customers? What is the insight that they're learning? How does that insight influence the challenge the business has? And you know in the marketing team you're not setting what that business challenge is, that that comes from the top, but you are influencing the how you solve for that business challenge yeah and that is where that market insight is so important.

PJ Morris 28:41

So once you, you share those insights it's about. So who is the segment we should be going after? Within those insights, we can solve this problem Generally. As a business, you're not a mass market business in B2B. You don't have the budgets or the staff to go mass market.

PJ Morris 28:56

so what segment are we going to go after? Within that segment, who are the targets we need to talk to? And just make sure that they very clearly have articulated all of that for you and that then will allow them to then go into tactical planning of your price, your promotion, your place and where those fit very, very carefully through the thing. But the minute you jump to I need a campaign, you're skipping all those steps that ladder back up to the why and it becomes very hard to say yes and no to things.

Dale Koerner 29:29

Because it's then just based on what's shiniest and most interesting yeah, as opposed to what has meaning to the business.

PJ Morris 29:36

Yeah, and we all have ideas about what's shiny and what's meaning and what will work and what won't work. And you know you can use insight to actually work out what is the right thing and what needs testing and what doesn't. And you know campaigns will work and campaigns will fail. We've all had campaigns that have failed, yep, but you've got to learn from them and then pivot and go, okay, cool, that didn't work, but the insight was right, the execution might have been wrong. Okay, so what's our plan? Strategy shouldn't change Plans should change. Plan strategy shouldn't change plans. Should change, because plans change with what's happening in the market the dynamics, the competitors, the what other people are doing, your budget availability, how many sales people you have and you don't have yeah plans can change, but the ultimate business challenge and where you're going shouldn't, and if that's changing every, then you're never going to get moving forward because there's no cohesion.

Dale Koerner 30:31

And if you're reinventing the direction that you're taking every single year sure there are times when you need to pivot, but what's a realistic time horizon for a strategy to be valid over A business strategy.

PJ Morris 30:45

That's a good question. Marketing I tend to do five-year marketing strategy. So here is our five-year strategy of what we are doing to deliver to that business challenge as a marketing team and department and how we're working. We do 12 month and quarterly planning in that yep and those plans change within that quarter all the time, sometimes based on what's happening or something's working really well so we lean into it or we don't lean in or whatever that is. But that strategy has not changed. You know, we have a very, very clear idea of we are going to win by achieving this must market share and we're going to achieve this must market share by doing these things how we do those things.

Dale Koerner 31:26

Yeah, like you said, the plan can be a very, very dynamic and flexible thing, but I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up, though, is that they conflate the two, right, you know, when you're talking about strategy to measure the effectiveness, I mean, let's just use this podcast as an example. Right, like, there is a huge community aspect to what we're doing here, but ultimately, this is part of our marketing approach. Right, there's a commercial angle to this somewhere along the line. For us to have measured this on episode four. You can't Pointless, right?

PJ Morris 31:55

No.

Dale Koerner 31:57

And, to be honest, when you look at making a big bet, like you said, for a sustained period of time, for five years, I guess part of the challenge in seeing marketing is critical to achieving that is that tenure within marketing changes quite quickly and quite often sometimes. But having that focus and actually I think anyone who's listening to this who runs a business I mean having a five year window to say, right, this is what we're going after, let's give it time to percolate, gain traction, particularly in b2b, when you've got long buying cycles. Yeah, you know we we'll often pick up. If someone comes to us and says the pipe's low, we need to run a lead gen campaign because we need to turn revenue around within the next three months. It's like, okay, um, what's your buying cycle? 18 months?

PJ Morris 32:46

okay, you know these things take time yeah, they do, and you know it's important to know, as a market, how to be pragmatic and pull some short-term levers. But those short-term levers are generally already in your pipeline or they're people you've interacted with or who are already part of that. It's not about resetting a strategy to go after them. It's about going okay, we need to focus short term on investing in this because we know we've got the biggest chance of winning quickly with these customers or these prospects or this segment. And then we always need this always-on kind of long-term thinking happening in the background because, again, that strategy is long-term. If your strategy is changing every year, you cannot build those relationships with customers. And so much of B2B is about relationships because it is long-term driven and it is about trust and you trust people you have a relationship with and you want to come back and do business with them again. And you want to work with them again because they're listening, they understand my problems, they're trying to solve them for me, to make my business better.

Dale Koerner 33:49

It's that classic cycle of I know what I trust, I trust what.

PJ Morris 33:52

I know.

Dale Koerner 33:52

I know what I trust, I trust what I know, which is when you can get your clients to a point, your customers to a point, where they're in that cycle and you're on the inside of it. Happy days, yeah.

PJ Morris 34:01

And if you think about it, behavior drives an attitude change and attitude change doesn't drive behavior changes easily, okay. So if you think about that building trust, then you start to build behavior change. Then you build the attitude that says, hey, I like you. Then you get a bit of an NPS score, then you get people talking about you better and you get better customer satisfaction. But you've driven a behavior change first by building that relationship.

Dale Koerner 34:26

Yeah, I mean trust. We talk to clients about this all the time. Trust is the currency of business to business, right? I mean? It really, really is just what makes the whole thing turn.

PJ Morris 34:37

It's a core, fundamental of any kind of I guess brand framework, brand tone of voice, business framework. You need to trust us because so much of business to business is intergrained and you don't walk away. It's not like if I buy a can of Coke and I don't like it, tomorrow I can go back to Pepsi. If I've put in a CRM system and I don't like it, I'm stuck with that now. So how do you trust?

Dale Koerner 35:05

Exactly. But I mean, when you look at that, I think that's when you talk about the long-term horizon of a strategy. I think that's why it's so important to take that, because trust is something that takes a long time to build, seconds to destroy, as we know. But to get to that point of trust when you've got a group of people making a decision where everyone has to feel comfortable. I read a great article from LinkedIn recently where they talked about the role of B2B marketers, of being basically it's just the function is there to make it possible and to give the buying group permission to agree.

PJ Morris 35:39

Yeah, and I think it is that permission to agree. It is that everyone within that group has enough awareness of the brand to go. Yeah, I'm comfortable with this decision. Everyone within that group has enough awareness of the brand to go. Yeah, I'm comfortable with this decision, even if I don't have the technical knowledge to know what that is and how to do that.

PJ Morris 35:55

Yeah, I'm comfortable with that brand? Yeah, and you know. Are you going to buy a CRM from Salesforce or HubSpot, which are brands that everybody knows who are, or am I going to buy Mike's Bargain Bas basement CRM that I've never heard of?

Dale Koerner 36:10

oh, mbbm, I hear that's really good. It's um. I saw it on a Google ad and I clicked it and I didn't buy it you know.

PJ Morris 36:17

So it's trust, and trust can be as simple as brand salience. I know that brand.

Learning Resources for Strategic Thinking

Dale Koerner 36:23

Therefore it's big enough that I can trust it yes and that's about making sure your brand has awareness in the right places with the right people yeah, and recognizing as well, though, that there are more than just, there's more than just that one key user. Yeah, so when you talk about building trust with the right people, it's okay cool. The person in finance should have heard of us. Yeah, the person in procurement should be. It shouldn't feel risky for them to say sure, let's do this. Yeah, now we've talked a little bit about learning.

Dale Koerner 36:48

We've talked about little bit about learning. We've talked about experience along the way, and I know that you are you. You consume knowledge and research like a, like a teenage boy consumes bread. Um, so what recommendations would you make? Where can people go to learn more about what strategy is, what it isn isn't, and how to do it well?

PJ Morris 37:16

My favorite book on strategy is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Romelt I think his last name is. It breaks it down. It's really simple. It is one of the best books I have ever read on strategy, and so I highly recommend, if you want to understand strategy, read Good Strategy Bad Strategy. There are lots of resources online where you can look at strategy and Google marketing strategy or business strategy and how to look at that. Marketing Week in the UK put out a huge amount of articles that are really helpful and useful and full of tips and tricks.

Dale Koerner 37:44

And B2B focused as well now.

PJ Morris 37:46

And a lot more B2B focused. Linkedin's B2B Institute is a raft of really good documents and research that you can use to help sell to the wider business and showcase what it is. It's written in English. It's easy to understand.

Dale Koerner 38:02

But it's robust as well.

PJ Morris 38:03

It's robust If you're real theoretical. You know the Ehrenberg Basque Institute, like how brands grow, bands go to particularly how brands grow too, because it focuses more on b2b than the first one does. But it's really theoretical and it's really technically written. So you have to be in the right mindset to read that versus good strategy, bad strategy. You can read it on a weekend and it's in english. Um, and podcasts like I'm a big fan of podcasts, I listen incessantly to business and marketing podcasts because I think there is a lot to learn from them. I think you've just got to be really smart about who you're listening to and looking at what their background is and what they know. The rise of social media has brought a rise of business and marketing influences and I think there is a lot of fluff to what they say and not a lot of substance to it. You know, comment on my post email and I'll give you my email strategy.

Dale Koerner 39:02

My 65-page, one guide.

PJ Morris 39:04

You shouldn't have an email strategy. So the minute they're trying to sell you something, it's probably snake oil and and be really careful about that. And I'm not saying there aren't some amazing people on linkedin who have some incredible information, yeah, but just make sure that when you're reading something, there's fact behind it and where those sources come from and how you, I guess, look at it to go. Does this make sense or is this a little bit?

Dale Koerner 39:27

yeah, am I going to build my entire year's worth of budget on this insight, or is it? You know a tactical thing we'll dabble with.

PJ Morris 39:33

Yeah if it's saying you will grow your business five times by being on tiktok, you probably need to think about it, because we're going back to is your customer even on tiktok? Yeah, it's not a strategy, it's a channel, and is it the right channel for you? That's going to depend on your business and what you're trying to achieve and who your target market is yeah and where they consume information.

PJ Morris 39:54

You know you wouldn't believe it, but concrete people are on instagram and that is one of the biggest channels that we use. But it's not a strategy. It's a channel to communicate with our customers small insight here.

Dale Koerner 40:07

I bought a bag of eco sure cement last weekend. Way to represent thank you. We appreciate your purchase I made a bonsai pot out of it. Okay, and is it? Does it work on instagram? Because when you finish concrete and cement, well, it looks amazing. Is that the driver? Sorry, I'm so intrigued by the insight they are real passionate about like like.

PJ Morris 40:29

Concrete's a really technical product. Yeah, it can pretty much do anything. It's the second most used material in the world after water. Really, yeah, there are billions of cubes of concrete poured around the year and it's beautiful and they're just concrete places, and people who work in the industry are just really proud of what they do and it's a visual product that they like to share on yeah on instagrams of visual media.

PJ Morris 40:55

Um, to be fair, I'm not on tiktoks. There's a high chance they probably are on tiktok and I should go look at that. Um, but it is just, it's beautiful and they're really, really talented customers who can shoot some stunning video.

Dale Koerner 41:09

Wow. Well, there you go. I mean, that's completely changed my lens on the whole thing.

PJ Morris 41:13

But it is about again understanding your customer and where they are and going back to it. When I came into this industry and, like I said, I've worked in construction on and off for probably 20 of my 25-year marketing career you don't think that you're going to be marketing construction on Instagram, but it's where the audience is and that again coming back to that whole original piece of understand my customer and try and see the world through their eyes, yeah, and engage with them in a way that makes them see the value that they get from from your product and, again, that's how you help achieve your business challenge this is a great conversation.

Parting Wisdom: Get Out of Marketing

Dale Koerner 41:52

I'm looking at the clock and I'm thinking oh, there's more I want to talk about, but I feel we're running out of time. Is there anything else that that you want to share with with the audience? Any kind of parting wisdom or tidbits? We'll call it, either we'll set a spectrum.

PJ Morris 42:08

If you really want to be strategic, bring the voice of the customer. Think broadly and bigger than marketing comms. But actually, how are we going to help this business make money? Go talk to your finance and your operational teams and spend time with them and understand how things work and how you make money. Then you can have conversations, particularly around price and product, which marketing is often left out of in a lot of organizations and shouldn't be, because price is so much about how it is presented and the value, and so really understanding means that you can help lift margin and you can help grow profits because you understand that actually, yes, you might want to make a 20 margin, but if we pitch it this way, we can make 30 margin and there isn't any cfo that's going to turn around and go oh no, I don't want to do that. Yeah, um, so get involved and get out of the marketing department. Don't sit at your desk all day.

Dale Koerner 43:11

Get out and go talk to customers I love that and that piece about it being so much bigger than than yeah, it's not comms.

PJ Morris 43:18

No, it is not comms. Comms and advertising is like literally like 10 to what you do yeah everything else should be thinking about big picture of how do I fill a customer's need that's going to drive value for a business I don't think I can add anything to that.

Dale Koerner 43:33

It's pin drop, mic drop. That was awesome, pj, thank you so much for joining us and thank you, thank you for unpicking all this stuff. Like I said, we've talked about strategy off and on um casually, and I'm it's been such a pleasure to actually sit down and do nothing but this for the last 45 minutes, so thank you so much.

PJ Morris 43:51

Anytime. I love talking about marketing. I haven't talked to anybody about marketing anytime.

Dale Koerner 43:55

So hit PJ up on LinkedIn. That's what I'm hearing here.

PJ Morris 43:57

Yeah, come hit me up on LinkedIn, in particular if you're a junior marketer and you want some guidance and help. I'm always open to coffees and conversations to help marketers grow real passionate about building a skill set for future generations.

Dale Koerner 44:08

I mean it's so awesome to hear that it was part of the driver behind us setting the podcast up was around. You know we talked about the commercial angle but really ultimately we saw so many teams have won who don't have access to seeing what people are doing over here and what they're doing over there and access to people like you who've got 25 years experience and a wonderfully approachable person who's got so much knowledge to share.

PJ Morris 44:31

So hit pj up. Yeah, thank you so much and um, that'll be us.

Dale Koerner 44:37

That's that. Thanks for listening to. We do b2b by blue ocean. Now brace for ctas. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more, more B2B goodness, be sure to follow Blue Ocean, the B2B agency, on LinkedIn. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this thing grows. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.