Mastering B2B Storytelling with Alex Outwater

At the B2B Expo, career B2B marketer Alex Outwater (formerly at IBM and ADP) shares how he’s bringing enterprise storytelling and product-launch experience to smaller companies trying to break through the noise. He emphasizes that many marketing fundamentals don’t change with scale: clarify your story, differentiation, competitors, and especially the real competitor—status quo—since much B2B buying is emotionally driven by trust, confidence, and empathy. Outwater discusses tailoring one core story for different roles on buying committees and how “jobs to be done” varies across stakeholders like users and finance. He urges attendees not to get distracted by “AI-washing,” to ask tough questions, review contracts and risks, and start with simple AI use cases like content and basic automation—only after ensuring strong, clean data foundations.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. I'm so excited to chat with you. Just let us know, Alex, because who are you and and what are you doing here at the B2B Expo? What are you talking about today that people can benefit from? And uh we'll go from there.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Sure. Alex Outwater. I'm a career B2B marketer. I spent 20 years really working in the enterprise IT space for the most part. Uh first with part of my career is with IBM, which I worked at uh till about 2014, and then I've been at ADP for the last 10 years. And then I just recently left ADP actually, and I'm now kind of striking out and working with much smaller companies, which is a lot of fun, taking some of the experience I have in terms of storytelling and product launches and bringing it to smaller companies who are trying to break through the noise, which was essentially what my my presentation here at the B2B Expo was about. Awesome. I live in Las Vegas, so I moved here as well this year. So uh I'm a local and uh thought I'd swing by and have a chance to connect with some new new colleagues and uh some familiar faces as well as be able to share my experience over the last last 20 years of storytelling.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Yeah, that's awesome, especially bringing the I mean IBM and ADP, you know, they're kind of big businesses. They're very big, right? And being able to bring all of what works for them to these smaller audiences in a way that's like, here's all the lessons we learn and everything we know, and how can we make that work for you on a on another level?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Exactly. And and I think bringing something new to market and building uh an audience and really breaking through to engage buyers and then eventually have it lead to sales, like it doesn't change, it changes uh obviously based on the scale of what you're doing, but many of the fundamentals don't change. And it's still a lot of times I think in my conversations with a lot of both vendors and then a cat small business uh owners here, you know, everyone's in a rush to try to do media and do events and do all of the things to try to get to the buyers, but they don't stop to think, what's my story? What do I have to sell? Am I differentiated? Who are my competitors that I'm likely going to be, you know, going head to head with? And the biggest competitor, which I spoke about today, is status quo, right? For most B2B sales, you're not necessarily compete against someone else, but the opportunity for the buyer to do nothing. Exactly. And um, and there's a huge emotional component to that as well. Empathy, trust, confidence, 70% of B2B buy-in is emotionally driven. Yes, uh, is is the data out there. So um, so hopefully it was helpful for a lot of the the organizations here to in terms of helping them think through how do we build that message, you know, and spend some time and even invest some money in it before we then go out and get people to go to our website and get people to engage with us on YouTube or LinkedIn. Because if you don't have a clear, compelling value proposition, you're just really kind of wasting your money.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, I love what you said about storytelling because I feel like that does get overlooked a lot, especially in B2B. It does. Maybe not so much in in B2C, but in B2B, that storytelling piece, right? I feel like gets missed a lot.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Agreed. And B2B buyers are still people at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

And still making choices.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

They're still making choices, and they're making choices based on do I trust you? Do I have confidence you're gonna be around and you're gonna be able to, if something breaks, yeah, fix it. Exactly. Empathy. Do you understand my situation and do you understand the problems I'm trying to solve? Because if you don't, then you're it's just like it's a hammer looking for a nail in terms of trying to sell me something. Do you care do you care? Right? Is there that fit in terms of like just mindset and how do we how are we gonna work together? Yeah, assuming it's not a transactional, very short-lived kind of product-service relationship.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Sure, right, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, I feel like in B2B, you've got like your buying committees, right? So you have so many stories you have to tell to the decisions.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Hopefully, one story that's nuanced for the buyer in different ways, right? So I talked about that too. It's it's really kind of looking at both the role that they play in the organization, yeah, and then what their drivers are more from a persona basis, right? So are they are they the one purchasing the solution for other people to use? Are they the users as well of the solution? In which case they're probably gonna have to be other elements of the story that need to resonate with them. Yeah. Are you in finance and simply need to pay for the solution and making sure that you can afford it? In which case you're gonna have a whole other element of a story and need to appeal to your basic needs. So it's nuancing that story for the different sort of jobs to be done in the buy-in organization are really what I kind of addressed.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yeah. I love what you just said about jobs to be done because I thought about that when you made your comment about the status quo being the competition. Yeah. Uh for those feel like that's maybe a little inside baseball. For those that don't know, talk about what the jobs to be done framework is, because we know what it is. You know what it is. But why don't nobody else does?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I don't want to get too gorpy or or geeky on it, but essentially, you know, within a buying process, there's different roles that people play, and there's different, there's different considerations they have, and there's there's different, you know, essentially roles that they'll play in what's called the buyer journey, right? And the the time when you first learn about a solution to evaluating it, to seeing it, and making that decision to purchase it and potentially then even buy more or something that's sold on top of it. Marketers spend all their time like really understanding their buyers, and those in B2B are are sometimes fragmented even within the buying committee. Some people are buyers, some people are influencers, some people are both.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Yeah. So yeah. What would you say for this group, right? We're in we're a room full of probably hundreds of B2B moves and groups. Like, what's the one thing that you would want them to be the take-home message from being here for two or three days in community with all of these B2B people? What would you want to take home with them?

SPEAKER_00 5:57

I think the biggest thing, don't get distracted by AI. Yes. Everything is being in the in the world of technology right now, everything is being AI washed. It's an AI tool. It's AI. Some people were talking talking about AI as if it's a noun, like, oh, you need AI. And AI isn't really a noun, it's a set of technologies that are tools for people to do things sometimes much faster, sometimes at much greater scale, sometimes at lower cost. But you really can be sort of skeptical and patient around what exactly is the AI? Is it a thing like an agent, or is it simply an element of something larger that is essentially just automating workflow, which is not anything new? So a lot of what's being termed AI is just simply smarter workflow, smarter process automation. There are true brand new use cases for AI, but it's still really early, especially on the AI agent side. So anyone who tells you about AI agents and they've been using AI agents for a year or two, be really skeptical because that's still evolving. And you have to just make sure that if you're investing in something that is AI driven or AI enabled, just really understand not only what the opportunities are of that, because you'll get a great sales pitch around it, but also what are the risks? What are the pitfalls? What are the potential compliance implications if you're in a regulated industry? How often does your AI hallucinate? Right. Because you can believe the open AI studies that they put out that ChatGPT 5 hallucinates a lot less than GPT 4. But I tell you, I use AI every day for daily things, and it doesn't always work. Right. And it's I use multiple tools and none of them work all the time. Right. So just if you're new to the AI world, be skeptical. You know, ask tough questions. You can try to get more familiar with AI. Go and ask AI what questions you should ask about AI. Right? Exactly. Very well, meta. And it's kind of like sometimes I think the world's becoming dystopian with the potential for the robots and the intelligence agents to be running things. Yeah. But they are here. It's early. It's still really early. So as much as you're hearing about them, these are the early days. Keep that in mind and be skeptical and ask tough questions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

I love the ask tough questions because that's where you really start to unpack like what's exactly what's really cap what's the capability that you're really talking about. Exactly. What's potentially going to be a speed bump that you're not telling me about or whatever the case is.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Look at your contracts too. Yeah. Because some companies now they're using AI and the fact that AI doesn't work all of the time. Right. And by the way, people don't work all of the time. It's the right execute the right process or answer the right question or do whatever the AI is doing. So compare, compare the success probabilities with using people, but then also look at your contracts and what happens if the AI doesn't work. Yeah. And that's a mission critical sort of process for your business. Yeah. What protections do you have? Is the company liable in any way for that? Like the legal implications of AI are evolving very quickly. Every day. And that's something you really need to pay attention to as well, depending on what your vendor is doing with AI.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Yeah. And that's a really good, I think that's a really good segue into one of the questions I want to ask you about coming from big businesses now working with small businesses, smaller businesses. But how do the conversations sound a little different around AI? Because I find when I talk to some of my smaller clients or my small business clients, they're overwhelmed. They're just completely overwhelmed. They're like, there's this AI thing and I'm not doing it, and I feel like I'm behind and I don't know where to start and I don't know what to do.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah. I think to make it consumable, you really have to break it down into sort of a almost like a not to sound again consultant-like, but like a maturity curve. Start simple. Start with using the AI to potentially create content. Right. And the AI won't, it's a tool to create content. It won't do it for you. And you have to check it. But that's, especially in the world of marketing, is you know, like that's the low-hanging fruit. Like how do you use AI to create content more effectively, more fast, faster, and more personalized. And make sure you check it and the humans can't be taken out of the loop, but start there. Use AI to maybe experiment with some of the very basic workflow in your automation, in your in your organization. Maybe it's a chatbot on your website, and some of those are more plug and play these days. Yeah. And you have to figure out how it connects to your CMS and how it's going to capture data so that someone from say if your AI agent has a conversation with a potential buyer, what data is being stored that the sales team can then action to inform the conversation they'll have if they're following up from the agent. So to start simple, get more sophisticated as you get more comfortable with it, you'll know the questions to begin asking. Don't jump into the world of like AI needs to be running this whole part of my business, or like AI is really being used, even in mid-sized companies now, to do a lot of work of like BDRs or SDRs. Yeah. And those use cases are being proven out. But but create it, use it as a tool to create workflow and easier ways to automate essentially what BDRs do before you say, well, it could do the work of a BDR. AD A AI is not really in the place yet where replaces humans. That's a big misconception that's out there. It's really just a tool and an accelerator, really, to be able to go a little faster.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, I think that's such an important insight, is to remember it is another tool in our tool belt. Exactly and marketers love tools. We like our toys. We like our toys. Shinier the better. And I'm constantly trying to pull people back from shiny objects. Well, sometimes. Let's do something practical and pragmatic for a minute. But it's interesting. I've had a number of conversations today about the importance of the basics. The foundation has to be solid and strong before you can lay these new automations and new tools on top of it. Because if that foundation is junk or if your data is all over the place, it's not gonna matter. This isn't gonna come in and magically fix it.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Well, and that's a great point, Meredith. I mean, the data is key to AI being effective. Yeah. If you do not have good data, don't try to lay an AI-driven process on top of it. It's just garbage in, garbage out. Yeah. I think that's the most important thing to remember. So if you want to invest anywhere, invest in making sure your data is really good, especially if you're marketing sales, your CRM data, like get that as as strong as you can, even though that the augmented with third-party data. Do that before you're using AI to do anything with that data.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah, absolutely. Good infrastructure, good foundation. The rest can then grow from there.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

What are you most excited to try and take away from these next couple of days? Like, what do you what would you walk away from this expo with like that was cool? What are you hoping to see?

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Yeah, I'm just nothing in particular. I it's just so interesting how B2B is just evolving so so rapidly in this world that we live in that seems to just be like so many different sort of mega forces at work. Yeah. AI being one of them, but just competing more globally is another one that a lot of companies that, you know, especially as they get to grow and be mid-sized companies, they look at, well, how do we have some Canadian clients now? And that's now a market for us. So, how do we build more of a cross-border kind of presence in a business? And what do I need to think about if I'm now marketing or selling my product or service into parts of Canada where French is the native language? Right. And how does that affect my processes? I was just having a conversation with one of the vendors here about that particular. I'm just looking forward to meeting more people, really hearing about the stories of what they're wrestling with and what how they're looking to grow their business and really just kind of learn from them. Yeah. And just sharing my experiences and what I've been working on.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Yeah, that sense of community. Like we've all just been it's we have different levels of expectations for these in-person events now. Totally. And I feel that sense of community and a common thread. Yes. Like having good conversations and asking questions, just building some relationships that I think before we didn't have as much of a focus on.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

We lost the muscle during the pandemic whenever they wasn't face to face. Exactly. And it's taken three or four years, but I feel like it's now to relearn and I feel like it's now come back.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

So I think that's the that's one of the in addition to AI being the thing we're all talking about. I feel like that sense of community is so a common theme that I'm seeing and observing hearing about future. And hopefully it continues.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yes. Hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yes. Thank you so much, Alex. This was a super fun conversation. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Best of luck in your new endeavor as you get out there on your own and strike out in this new business venture. Yeah. And just a super great conversation. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Thank you.