Nick Rybak (00:00)
In a world where every custom software company claims to be different, the truth is most look and sound the same. So here's the real question. If every project is unique, do you even need a marketing? Or is there a smarter, leaner way to build a go-to-market strategy that works when your team is small and your budget is limited?
My guest today is someone who has been in that exact position for years. Steven Hannigan is a partner and chief growth officer at Seven Hills Technology. So in this episode of B2B Marketing Flywheel podcast, we will unpack how to build real relationships without being salesy and build go-to-market strategy that fits a small team. How to blend sales and marketing when every client's need is different and unique and how to find leverage without massive ad budgets.
I'm your host, Nick Rybak, so let's dive in.
Nick Rybak (00:53)
Steve, it's great to have you on the show and you and I have talked a lot on how challenging it is to grow a service business where everything you deliver is custom. And I think your perspective on what actually works is going to be incredibly valuable. So for those who don't know you yet, could you give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about what Seven Hills Technology does?
Steve Hennegaan (01:20)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on Nick. It's great to be here.
Seven Hills Technology is a custom software development agency located here in Cincinnati, Ohio. We operate pretty much throughout the Midwest of the United States. I joined the organization and I think it was March, the beginning of March as a partner and chief growth officer after being in this custom software development space for the past 10 years. Seven Hills Technology focuses on building web products that are world-class and helping walk clients through that journey.
Nick Rybak (01:53)
Fantastic. so actually I wanted to start both with the first question. And I think that's that is actually something that I'm personally really curious about is that when you sell is something custom every time like custom software and you actually haven't built that yet. So you are basically selling a promise that you can build
some software. So what's the role of the marketing in that case?
Steve Hennegaan (02:24)
Yeah, for me, marketing in a traditional sense is introspective. It's all about selling yourself. And for us, I think we really try to approach marketing from a service standpoint, right? How can we add value to the client? How can we put tools and features in front of them that allow us to build that trust with them? Right? We feel like trust is a huge thing. Every agency out there is going to say that they're the best and they build the best products.
Our responsibility from a marketing standpoint is to show people what it's like to work with us and what an engagement would look like and hope that that fits what they're looking for.
Nick Rybak (03:04)
Yeah. And how do you think, what would be the marketing go-to for service companies selling high ticket services? Cause for example, with B2B SaaS, it basically works much easier because most of them use paid ads as a main source of growth and
I doubt that it's possible when you sell software for 100K and especially with the cost of click in that sphere. I didn't try that myself actually, but I'm really curious on your perspective on that.
Steve Hennegaan (03:39)
Yeah.
I've worked with some organizations in the past that have dabbled in some of the paid ad things. The difference between building custom products and say SaaS off the shelf products is every one of our clients is unique and different. Every one of their challenges is unique and different. So if you're looking for an ideal customer profile, it's going to be really hard to send targeted money at one specific thing without feeling like you're leaving a lot of clients out there. Now with the SaaS model, that's a lot simpler because traditionally you're solving one
for an organization or a client that looks similar and you're doing that over and over and over again. So it becomes sort of a numbers game. For us, it's a little bit more targeted than that. And we're trying to identify individuals that may have challenges that we've had a successful run at solving those challenges and be able to provide proof and through case studies and through testimonials and through conversations.
Nick Rybak (04:32)
So you think it's more of a game of brand marketing rather than just throwing some money on paid ads and so on?
Steve Hennegaan (04:41)
Yeah, I mean, for us, it is all about brand identity and brand awareness, right? We take the approach that's
Organizations are going to make decisions a certain way. And that typically looks like them sitting around a conference room table or on a zoom call like this. And they're saying, Hey, we have this challenge. How should we solve it? It's rarely us versus another one of our competitors. It's traditionally, should we offshore it? Should we bring this in house and start building a team in house to build out this technical product? Or should we use a local partner or an agency? All I want in my marketing is for somebody in that room to raise their hand and say, I know
the right person, Seven Hills would be perfect for this. And understanding how people buy technology in our space is the first way that we need to start understanding how we can market to those people. So it's all about brand awareness and brand identity and timing. When that opportunity happens, I want to be the first person that they think of.
Nick Rybak (05:40)
Yeah, I kind of agree with that, that you just must be the top of mind for them if they are looking for a solution. as I understand Seven Hills technology focuses mostly on local market rather than like being nationwide or going global. So do you think there is a difference between being like a local
custom software development agency or trying to get as many clients as possible in different states or even different countries.
Steve Hennegaan (06:19)
Yeah, definitely our model works for us because we are local and we do believe in those personal relationships. We still believe in coffee meetings and lunch meetings and meeting in person, mostly because we feel like that's the best way for us to show a client what it would be like to interact and work with us. Right. There has to be that symmetry there. Now for some of these larger agencies that are going international or going across the country, that model doesn't scale very well. Right. So that's a challenge.
that we're going to have as we grow. But I do still believe it is about people. I believe it's about personal relationships. I believe that getting in front of a client and showing them what your team is capable of by how they think and how they interact and the types of questions they ask and how they engage is a ⁓ true way to allow an organization to have trust in who they're getting ready to work it with because it's a scary thing a lot of times, right?
worked with you, I have this big budget, this is a huge decision and this is a huge factor in my career success and a lot of times to build a you know six figure, seven figure software product and I think trust has to remain at the core of what you're doing and if that's not the case then it's going to make it a little bit more difficult.
Nick Rybak (07:38)
Yeah, I agree with that. speaking of some marketing channels, you mentioned that you use kind of traditional B2B marketing with the mix of events, some local activities and so on. Have you ever tried any digital activities, any digital marketing channels like, I don't know, Paydas that we've mentioned before, SEO,
online events or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (08:05)
Yeah, we, we haven't, we've considered everything, right? We've thrown it all out there and said where, what feels natural to us. And what we've come back with is we've done some paid things as far as LinkedIn blog posts, or if we do a blog article or a case study that's targeted to a very specific market or a very specific niche. Um, so we've, we've had some success doing that. Um, other than that, we've really focused on hosting our own events. Um,
We would go to a lot of events and felt like that, that salesperson in the room, trying to get a lead from an event. And sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not, but at the end of the day, you leave feeling exhausting and deflated somewhat. So we just said, if none of these events fit the type of, of relationships or conversations that we want to have, let's create these events, right? Let's start our own events. And so we started doing 10 to 20 person events that are personal, that there's no hard sell, there's no.
pitch, we're bringing smart people in the room and we're really trying to organize thoughtful conversation with thought leaders that are handpicked throughout the industry. And we feel like just being in the room and facilitating those conversations positions us as a thought leader in the industry and allows us to build those relationships organically versus in a forced way.
Nick Rybak (09:24)
Got it. Got it. Thank you for sharing. Do you think is there anything that growth directors or CROs or CMOs at company like yours overestimate or underestimate marketing and service companies?
Steve Hennegaan (09:46)
I think a lot of times they expect to showcase their abilities and for people to be wowed by them.
Instead of trying to really put the boots on the ground and really get in there and try and solve complex technical challenges or problems for clients. think they go too far in the self promotion of here's what we do and here's how amazing we are. And here's how great we are. And not as far into here are the problems we solve, and then just going about solving them and then retroactively creating these case studies that show proof and evidence of doing that. So I think a lot of self promotion marketing is out there that does
move the needle, it doesn't add value to the client. And frankly, it just, it puts you in a space with all of your other competitors. And that's that whole situation of everybody saying that they're the best out there. think trying to find ways to carve out your niche that differentiate you from your competition, is a much better tactic than trying to do what the others are doing and trying to keep up with the Joneses. Joneses from a financial standpoint, a lot of these small agencies try and duplicate what some of the bigger agencies are doing, but they
have the budget to successfully do it well.
Nick Rybak (10:59)
Do you think that it is possible to build a positioning or something that will help you to stand out in such a crowded market where basically almost every company sells the same is custom software? So how do you make your company different in that case?
Steve Hennegaan (11:18)
Yeah, I think one thing we're trying to do is we're in the process of productizing our solutions and working with your organization to help rebrand our go-to-market and our website to show how we operate and how we work with people. So it's all about our process being proprietary. It's proven over 10 years and we've always felt like this was the right way to build software and interact with our clients. So we just got to the drawing board and productize our solutions to make that bear
barrier
of entry a lot lower for people, but just to say, Hey, we're not just building anything that you're asking for. Let's take you on a journey here and make sure that we're building the right things with you. Um, that's something that was really important to us. So we went to the drawing board to productize our solutions and be able to showcase how working with us is a little bit different and a little bit unique through proprietary systems.
Nick Rybak (12:12)
Got it. differentiation mostly on the service side, right? Not only marketing side.
Steve Hennegaan (12:21)
Yeah. And I think being able to showcase that right from a marketing side, I'm really excited to kick off a campaign in the next couple of months, just showcasing the productization of our services instead of being just a general agency that, that is really hard to market and really hard to, kind of showcase your abilities. I think by productizing your solutions into assessments and strategy or UI UX design, it allows you to better showcase that from a marketing standpoint, instead of getting in that situation of like, no, we're better.
than them we promise trust us right
Nick Rybak (12:54)
Yeah, I saw that a lot actually. And why do you think custom software development companies rarely stand out by choosing some specific industry that they work with? For example, like custom software for FinTech or for insurance companies or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (13:15)
Yeah, that's interesting. We went down that path as well. Right. A lot of, a lot of people suggested that we niche down and we get super narrow and there's, there's a couple of ways to go about that. can niche down into a technology stack, right? If you want to be a.net shop or you want to be an Elixir shop, can get really narrow focused in that, or you can get really focused, like you said, to into FinTech or HealthTech. And for us, what we realized that we don't have the experts in that space, right? If we were going to go into HealthTech,
Nick Rybak (13:30)
Yeah.
Steve Hennegaan (13:44)
tech,
we don't have doctors, we don't have people that have a lot of experience in that space. So what we do have experience in is working with a lot of different industries, solving a lot of different challenges and problems. And at the end of the day, what we realized, Nick was a lot of them have some of the same issues, right? Like a health tech company in a construction company may look completely different on paper. But if you look at the challenge that they're trying to solve at the end of the day through technology, a lot of them are the same. And a lot of their challenges that they're having have to do with.
poor communication within the organization or mistakes that they've made in technology in the past where they've lost a ton of money or they have a lot of disparate systems. their data isn't giving them the ability to make the decisions that they need to make. That can be the same for a FinTech or a HealthTech company as a construction or an accounting business. And we just realized that it's not about the industry being different. It's about being able to solve those challenges that on the inside pretty much are the same.
Nick Rybak (14:44)
Yeah, I got it. so previously you mentioned that you organize events and all of that stuff. and can you give an example of a event or campaign or relationships that grew from that event that led to some project or something like that in your company?
Steve Hennegaan (15:07)
Yeah, an event that we've really enjoyed that, that we've been running for the past six or seven months now has been a product management meetup. so we do it monthly. and it just, kind of stumbled upon it. We had a lot of conversations with product managers and a lot of them said, Hey, we don't really have a place where we can share ideas. Even within our organization, we're really bad at sharing what other product managers are doing with their team to, help build out products. Right. And so we said, great.
Let's just host one now our ideal client portfolio or client Ideal client isn't product managers We don't necessarily sell to product managers because a lot of those decisions are either being made through engineering on who to bring in as an agency or they're being made through the business team so but we also felt that product managers sit in the middle as a CEO of each product so they could identify Where are we having challenges? Where are the struggles is engineering struggling to keep up or?
Or is the business team not connected to the technical decision makers? And that's where the issue is. And that's why our products not getting off the ground or becoming successful. So they have a lot of intimate knowledge into how the inner workings of an organization works. So we thought bringing these people in the room would accomplish a few things. One, it would allow us to just serve the industry, right? Talk about that give back and expect nothing in return. But another thing it would do would allow us to better understand how these organizations are making decisions.
and working from the inside out.
So if we can speak to somebody who's in the weeds and, and, and give them that, that floor, allows us to better understand our clients and some of the challenges that they're working with and dealing with. think how that's turned for us is it's allowed us to have conversations with clients at a much deeper level, a much deeper level of understanding that's customer focused and it's product focused. And a lot of these companies are revenue focused when they're thinking about building products and they're not thinking about what is the experience I'm going to provide.
to my clients or to my prospects or to my end users and putting that first really ties us into the revenue decision as well.
Nick Rybak (17:15)
Yeah. It sounds like a long cell cycle, I would say, because you establish your name, you build relationships and so on. And with that long and complex cell cycle, how do you actually, measure if your strategy works, bring some results.
as it takes so long. So how do you know that you are going in the right direction?
Steve Hennegaan (17:40)
Yeah, that's not an easy part, right? With marketing often...
Not very often you can draw a straight line from marketing activity to revenue. Right? So it's really hard to say this led to this unless you did an event and you got some names and say, yeah, this individual came to us because they came to this event. That's a little bit easier, but we're finding that a lot of our success is happening much later down the road. And it's like, Hey, I talked to somebody who was at your event and they said you'd be a great partner for us. So we'd love to chat. So it's a lot of it is word of mouth. A lot of it is somebody worked with us.
It's referral based. Hey, I work with this company and they were great. So you should work with them too. We have some KPIs in place, but what we're really measuring from a marketing to sales to revenue standpoint is impactful conversations, right? How many opportunities do we get in front of a decision maker to tell our story, right? To have that, that conversation about what their challenges are. So we track that metric and we also just track our pipeline success, right? Like what can we attribute
to pipeline success. Was it a marketing event? Was it word of mouth? Was it a LinkedIn post or a blog article? Were they ⁓ organic traffic through Google onto our website and filled out a form? I think tracking a lot of that data and that information helps us understand where we should be allocating resources and resources as far as time, but also as far as money as well.
Nick Rybak (19:05)
So as I understand that you still have even with that complex marketing channel that takes long time until you close any client, you will still have like intermediate metrics that you can take a look at, right?
Steve Hennegaan (19:22)
Yeah, we are.
We say it a lot at our organization that we're playing a long game, right? From a marketing standpoint, we're playing the long game here and everything that we get along the way is fantastic, but we're trying to build something a lot more sustainable and a lot more consistent. The biggest struggle in our business is the inconsistencies in your sales pipeline, right? So if you have a project and it goes on for three months with three to five people on the project, well, that project ends. And when that project ends, those people hit the bench and they're
not billing on a project until you have another project spun up for them. Ideally, those people would go straight onto another project, but it doesn't always work that way. It's not always that simple in this space because resources may have different skill sets that are great for this project, but not so great for this project. Right. So you're not always just taking a complete team and putting them onto a completely separate project. So there's a lot of staffing challenges that you have to deal with. And every time somebody's on the bench, right, you're killing a lot of the margins that you worked really hard.
to build up on previous projects. So the goal is to eliminate the ebbs and flows in the sales cycles and the inconsistencies. And we feel like the best way to do that is by consistently marketing and consistently prospecting. Right? So outreach, consistently looking to have opportunities and work with clients that, that fit our ideal client portfolio or profile and, constantly be driving activity. Because a lot of times what happens in organizations of our size is you
Fill up your pipeline with a lot of leads and opportunities. And you're so busy working to close those opportunities with proposals, with meetings and slide deck presentations and follow-up meetings, right. And adjustments to proposals and SOWs that you're not prospecting and you're not, and you kind of drop the ball from a business development standpoint. what we're trying to build is a state sustainable process that doesn't, have those ebbs and flows. And that has to come with playing the long.
game from a marketing standpoint, but also being really intentional about playing the short game from a business development outreach standpoint as well.
Nick Rybak (21:29)
I think it's not really possible to have the steady flow of leads throughout the entire year because from my experience with these kind of services, there are some good seasons and bad ones. So you have to take that into account always. So stepping back on, you mentioned that you work with some outbound, like cold outreach. Can you elaborate on that?
and tell us more what exactly do you do? it cold calling, LinkedIn, email? So maybe traditional mails, I don't know.
Steve Hennegaan (22:05)
Yeah. I mean, our business development rep, Charlie is great at this. And the reason I say he's great is because he understands that there's a balance between outreach and personal messaging. So he is really intentional about his messages, adding value and being non pushy salesperson, right? Each opportunity we enter should benefit both parties. And we truly believe that. So Charlie.
he does a great job mostly through LinkedIn outreach and email of really trying to build a genuine relationship or connection with our prospects that we're reaching out to. So I think with that, he's had a lot of success just being human, right? And not using AI generated emails and hand typing out email messages and doing some backend research and making sure that when he reaches out, it's informative. ⁓
Nick Rybak (22:50)
Yeah.
Steve Hennegaan (23:01)
And
he's adding some value there. Using a little personality, using a little humor never hurts either. So we encourage that. And while Charlie may only reach out to seven people in a day, we know that those, those outreaches are going to be really, really impactful. I'd rather him spend a lot of time being intentional about reaching out to seven people than blasting out messages to 500 people in a day. That's just how, how our business operates and how it works.
We're not looking to add 50 new prospects in a year. We could never do that work. We would have to pass it off to other people. We could never grow that fast. Right. We're looking to add five or six really good clients every year, and then look at expanding and extending those relationships into ongoing, ongoing work. So if that's the state of our business, we need to be just really intentional about our outreach. And, we feel like kind of do it the right way, right? Do it, do it the way that may be a little slower, but.
It definitely shows to have a lot of good returns.
Nick Rybak (24:03)
Got it. Yeah, I actually hate those kinds of emails. mean, AI generated when you get tons of them every day in your mailbox and you clearly understand that this person never ever heard of your company because AI just simply isn't that good at writing these emails. Even if you give them some context, it is still shit.
Steve Hennegaan (24:30)
Yeah, we've we've to combat that, right? Because we see the same thing and I get bombarded with those same emails and I don't even have to open them at this point. It's just, I can delete them and think, well, if this is legitimate, they'll reach out again sometime anyway. So I'll, I'll just kick it down the road, but we've, we've dabbled and done a lot with video. I think video outreach has been something that has worked for us. you have to kind of tow the line between.
coming off as disingenuine, like you know somebody before you do, versus trying to differentiate yourself as an individual and as a human versus an AI bot. So we're trying to tow that line and we're constantly tweaking and he's constantly saying, Hey, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about this? We're always looking for new ways because with AI, like all of this stuff is evolving and changing so quickly and trust in salespeople and marketing people is deteriorating really, really quickly. So we're trying
to zig when everybody else is zagging and go the other way and go more human, but use some AI tools to help us be efficient in that. And it's a constant battle and a constant evolution.
Nick Rybak (25:39)
Yeah, I agree with that. We use outreach ourselves at Forsets and you know, we never tried even to write a message with AI, especially adding some context from their website, from a Prospects website, because it always looks really weird and stupid because...
I usually get a lot of messages where people just mentioned some results that we've published on our website in a case study. And it doesn't look like it was written by a human because, uh, okay. So you think it's impressive to get some ROI and so on. know that we use the exact same headline in our case study. So that's why I think the human being would, would never.
really pride, something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (26:37)
Yeah, I think AI has its place, right? We use a lot of tools to get us started with content. We usually start with the idea with, Hey, this is what I want to talk about. This is a challenge that I see. This is a problem I want to solve. Here's the format that we want to put it in. Here is the tool that we want to use to send it out, whether it's a LinkedIn post or whether it's a blog article. And then allow AI to kind of do it. And then what we do is we go in and say, okay, this doesn't have our voice to it. So let's
go
in and really make this ours and make this us. And I think it gives us a good template, but it's turned us into editors instead of content creators. And for a small organization like us, that helps us be a lot more efficient and helps us accomplish the things that we want to accomplish, which is producing a lot of content at a small dollar amount, but also keeping that brand awareness and that brand identity intact that allows you to differentiate through your messaging.
Nick Rybak (27:37)
Yeah, I like that. Let's let's come back with two these kind of events and some and something like that. How do you actually nurture those relationships? Let's say you met some people on the event that you organized and you had a great time speaking with them, but you don't. I wouldn't.
want to be really pushy and salesy and so how to avoid that but keep nurturing these relationships so this can get something to the company like a new client partnership or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (28:09)
Yeah, there has,
there, at end of the day, the events do have to have some sort of ROI, right? We're not a, we're not a charity or nonprofit, just like putting on events for, for nothing. and, and we are very anti-sell at these events. I think how people purchase and buy products and services in today's world, we don't have to put on a.
a big presentation, letting people know who we are. If we can build a website and a social media presence that does a really good job of displaying who we are as an organization and what we do and the services that we provide and who we provide them for. People are going to do their own research, right? I don't have to shove it down people's throats. So if we invite somebody to an event and maybe we've only met them at another event once or twice, we like to know the people first, or at least have met the people before we invite them to an event to make sure that they're
good fit for what we're trying to accomplish and going to add value to the group and not just take away from it. When we do that, it allows us to not have the pressure of explaining who we are. A lot of times what they're going to do is they're going to go on our website or they're going to go on social media and they're going to
read who we are anyway, right? So I don't need to spend my time telling people who we are and what we do. I want to spend my time trying to understand your challenges and your problems and the things that you're dealing with it as an organization and just getting to know you a little bit more on a personal level and allow you to connect those dots, right? And hopefully our content is done so well on our site that it allows people to connect those dots really easily because they're going to look us up anyway. and me putting that in
in their face just becomes overkill. That's just not how people buy products at this point. They can spend five minutes before they walk into an event and pull up our site and have a really good understanding of what we do and what we have to offer. And we feel like that's the best way to go about it.
So touching base, keeping in touch with them, right? We do meet somebody and they're like, Hey, this seems like a really, really cool opportunity. We may have a challenge that you guys could help us with. The next step is always like, great, let's grab coffee. Let's grab a lunch. Let's, let's find some time to chat, talk a little bit more about it. If we can help fantastic. ⁓ and if not, maybe we can at least, leave you with some, some more information on, the industry and what we would do going forward.
Nick Rybak (30:31)
Yeah, I love it. do you think that, let's say that your like ideal customer profile list is not that big, right? Because you work on a local market and all of these people, are probably, there are like hundreds or maybe a thousand of them, even less, I think. So not that much list of people, right? And do you think this would be valuable to
kind of ran some ads for that list over and over again just to make your brand memorable for them. Have you ever tried something like that?
Steve Hennegaan (31:08)
Yeah, as we are getting ready to roll out our productized solutions, that is going to be something we're going to be a lot more intentional about. As we're rolling out, let's call it an AI data assessment, right? So we're going to come in and understand your data and make sure that you are in this situation to be able to take advantage or build out AI tooling. Now we're into the future, right? If that's an assessment that we're selling and we've had success selling it to a certain industry, let's call it manufacturing or the food service industry.
Now we can put really targeted messaging together, package this productized service up and attach some case studies to it and start doing some really targeted outreach on social. That is kind of a combination for us that we are really looking forward to being a lot more intentional about going after that ideal customer profile with a service that we know that industry is in search of and we've been successful delivering on.
Nick Rybak (32:04)
what advice would you give to a small service team that's trying to figure out its first go-to-market motion? Maybe any suggestions on channels, tactics, or strategy in general, positioning, anything like that.
Steve Hennegaan (32:20)
I think brand identity is really important knowing who you are. And once you know who you are and who you're trying to appeal to, you find the avenue where your customers are going to be spending their time and want to consume that information.
For us, it always starts with social. It always starts with LinkedIn. We know that, yes, we can write overly technical things that appeal to technical decision makers and organizations. But at the end of the day, if we don't have a business or an ROI case at the end of all of our case studies or at the heart of all of our case studies, we're never going to be successful in selling into some of these larger clients. So LinkedIn has been a space for us that we have to be intentional about the messaging and it can't
it be overly technical, right? And so we have to, to, yes, we're building web products. We're doing really cool technology things with AI and machine learning and automation. But the case studies that we're presenting in front of the people that are on LinkedIn are going to be more business focused people. So as we're writing this content or putting these blog posts together, or our individual team members are putting together posts to build their presence on social media, understanding our brand identity and our sound and our voice was really important to them.
then understand how do we echo that into certain avenues like social media. So for us, LinkedIn is king and then personal outreach and email follows that. So.
understanding that and having that brand identity document and having it be a real live document that your entire team is aware of. This is who we are as a company and this is what our sound and our voice is. I think that's really, really important for organizations starting to get their feet wet in this social media or marketing space.
Nick Rybak (34:04)
Love it. And from your perspective as a partner and a person who is responsible for a company's growth, what's one thing that founders should stop wasting money on when it comes to marketing and how to approach that in the first place?
Steve Hennegaan (34:25)
I love this Nick. Boosts at trade shows. Stop spending money to put a booth at a trade show that is in line.
with all of your other competitors, right? We have a philosophy that we don't attend trade shows or conferences that we're not speaking at. So it encourages our people to be thought leaders. If you want to go to a conference or go to a trade show, then that's fine. Like feel free to go to that for learning and development purposes. But as far as marketing and branding dollars, if we're not speaking at that event or at that conference through and showing
that thought leadership, we don't want to have a booth or a sponsorship play at that event. So, that is something that we've really been intentional about because spending the five to eight to $10,000, having a booth at a conference and seeing all of our competitors down in a row, it doesn't put us in an ideal situation that we would have been at BN. I'd rather have my CEO standing on stage speaking, than have a booth at a conference.
Nick Rybak (35:25)
All right, Steve, and the final question. So what is your whole take? What's one thing about B2B go to market strategy? You think small companies are completely overthinking or getting wrong?
Steve Hennegaan (35:43)
⁓ it's still all about people in relationships.
It's not about numbers and metrics. It's about how well do you connect with somebody? How well can you help them accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish and help them solve issues or challenges that they're having in their career? And it's still going to be about the people, right? We see a lot about AI and everybody's trying to enter the AI space mostly to be more effective and efficient. Well, they can maybe be more efficient, but without effectiveness, none of that stuff matters. And we feel like
you know, taking the slow route and really being intentional about building relationships, that still matters in today's world. So make sure that everything that you're doing from a marketing or a branding or a sales standpoint keeps those humans first and those relationships first.
Nick Rybak (36:31)
Yeah, I love that advice and I completely agree with that because people's relationships are the key and the goal of the any marketing is to spark a conversation. So love that. Thank you for sharing.
Steve, this has been a super practical conversation for anyone trying to grow a custom service business without the safety net of a big marketing budget. So thank you for being here and thank you everyone listening to B2B Marketing Flywheel Podcast.
Steve Hennegaan (37:00)
Yeah, thanks everybody. Nick, this has been great. Make sure you check out seven hills technology.com. Check out the great site that Nick and his team built for us.
Nick Rybak (37:08)
Yeah, I love that. If you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend or your team member. And as always, let's pray for conversion. I'm Nick Rebak, your host. So, and see you in the next one.
In a world where every custom software company claims to be different, the truth is most look and sound the same. So here's the real question. If every project is unique, do you even need a marketing? Or is there a smarter, leaner way to build a go-to-market strategy that works when your team is small and your budget is limited?
My guest today is someone who has been in that exact position for years. Steven Hannigan is a partner and chief growth officer at Seven Hills Technology. So in this episode of B2B Marketing Flywheel podcast, we will unpack how to build real relationships without being salesy and build go-to-market strategy that fits a small team. How to blend sales and marketing when every client's need is different and unique and how to find leverage without massive ad budgets.
I'm your host, Nick Rybak, so let's dive in.
Nick Rybak (00:53)
Steve, it's great to have you on the show and you and I have talked a lot on how challenging it is to grow a service business where everything you deliver is custom. And I think your perspective on what actually works is going to be incredibly valuable. So for those who don't know you yet, could you give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about what Seven Hills Technology does?
Steve Hennegaan (01:20)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on Nick. It's great to be here.
Seven Hills Technology is a custom software development agency located here in Cincinnati, Ohio. We operate pretty much throughout the Midwest of the United States. I joined the organization and I think it was March, the beginning of March as a partner and chief growth officer after being in this custom software development space for the past 10 years. Seven Hills Technology focuses on building web products that are world-class and helping walk clients through that journey.
Nick Rybak (01:53)
Fantastic. so actually I wanted to start both with the first question. And I think that's that is actually something that I'm personally really curious about is that when you sell is something custom every time like custom software and you actually haven't built that yet. So you are basically selling a promise that you can build
some software. So what's the role of the marketing in that case?
Steve Hennegaan (02:24)
Yeah, for me, marketing in a traditional sense is introspective. It's all about selling yourself. And for us, I think we really try to approach marketing from a service standpoint, right? How can we add value to the client? How can we put tools and features in front of them that allow us to build that trust with them? Right? We feel like trust is a huge thing. Every agency out there is going to say that they're the best and they build the best products.
Our responsibility from a marketing standpoint is to show people what it's like to work with us and what an engagement would look like and hope that that fits what they're looking for.
Nick Rybak (03:04)
Yeah. And how do you think, what would be the marketing go-to for service companies selling high ticket services? Cause for example, with B2B SaaS, it basically works much easier because most of them use paid ads as a main source of growth and
I doubt that it's possible when you sell software for 100K and especially with the cost of click in that sphere. I didn't try that myself actually, but I'm really curious on your perspective on that.
Steve Hennegaan (03:39)
Yeah.
I've worked with some organizations in the past that have dabbled in some of the paid ad things. The difference between building custom products and say SaaS off the shelf products is every one of our clients is unique and different. Every one of their challenges is unique and different. So if you're looking for an ideal customer profile, it's going to be really hard to send targeted money at one specific thing without feeling like you're leaving a lot of clients out there. Now with the SaaS model, that's a lot simpler because traditionally you're solving one
for an organization or a client that looks similar and you're doing that over and over and over again. So it becomes sort of a numbers game. For us, it's a little bit more targeted than that. And we're trying to identify individuals that may have challenges that we've had a successful run at solving those challenges and be able to provide proof and through case studies and through testimonials and through conversations.
Nick Rybak (04:32)
So you think it's more of a game of brand marketing rather than just throwing some money on paid ads and so on?
Steve Hennegaan (04:41)
Yeah, I mean, for us, it is all about brand identity and brand awareness, right? We take the approach that's
Organizations are going to make decisions a certain way. And that typically looks like them sitting around a conference room table or on a zoom call like this. And they're saying, Hey, we have this challenge. How should we solve it? It's rarely us versus another one of our competitors. It's traditionally, should we offshore it? Should we bring this in house and start building a team in house to build out this technical product? Or should we use a local partner or an agency? All I want in my marketing is for somebody in that room to raise their hand and say, I know
the right person, Seven Hills would be perfect for this. And understanding how people buy technology in our space is the first way that we need to start understanding how we can market to those people. So it's all about brand awareness and brand identity and timing. When that opportunity happens, I want to be the first person that they think of.
Nick Rybak (05:40)
Yeah, I kind of agree with that, that you just must be the top of mind for them if they are looking for a solution. as I understand Seven Hills technology focuses mostly on local market rather than like being nationwide or going global. So do you think there is a difference between being like a local
custom software development agency or trying to get as many clients as possible in different states or even different countries.
Steve Hennegaan (06:19)
Yeah, definitely our model works for us because we are local and we do believe in those personal relationships. We still believe in coffee meetings and lunch meetings and meeting in person, mostly because we feel like that's the best way for us to show a client what it would be like to interact and work with us. Right. There has to be that symmetry there. Now for some of these larger agencies that are going international or going across the country, that model doesn't scale very well. Right. So that's a challenge.
that we're going to have as we grow. But I do still believe it is about people. I believe it's about personal relationships. I believe that getting in front of a client and showing them what your team is capable of by how they think and how they interact and the types of questions they ask and how they engage is a ⁓ true way to allow an organization to have trust in who they're getting ready to work it with because it's a scary thing a lot of times, right?
worked with you, I have this big budget, this is a huge decision and this is a huge factor in my career success and a lot of times to build a you know six figure, seven figure software product and I think trust has to remain at the core of what you're doing and if that's not the case then it's going to make it a little bit more difficult.
Nick Rybak (07:38)
Yeah, I agree with that. speaking of some marketing channels, you mentioned that you use kind of traditional B2B marketing with the mix of events, some local activities and so on. Have you ever tried any digital activities, any digital marketing channels like, I don't know, Paydas that we've mentioned before, SEO,
online events or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (08:05)
Yeah, we, we haven't, we've considered everything, right? We've thrown it all out there and said where, what feels natural to us. And what we've come back with is we've done some paid things as far as LinkedIn blog posts, or if we do a blog article or a case study that's targeted to a very specific market or a very specific niche. Um, so we've, we've had some success doing that. Um, other than that, we've really focused on hosting our own events. Um,
We would go to a lot of events and felt like that, that salesperson in the room, trying to get a lead from an event. And sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not, but at the end of the day, you leave feeling exhausting and deflated somewhat. So we just said, if none of these events fit the type of, of relationships or conversations that we want to have, let's create these events, right? Let's start our own events. And so we started doing 10 to 20 person events that are personal, that there's no hard sell, there's no.
pitch, we're bringing smart people in the room and we're really trying to organize thoughtful conversation with thought leaders that are handpicked throughout the industry. And we feel like just being in the room and facilitating those conversations positions us as a thought leader in the industry and allows us to build those relationships organically versus in a forced way.
Nick Rybak (09:24)
Got it. Got it. Thank you for sharing. Do you think is there anything that growth directors or CROs or CMOs at company like yours overestimate or underestimate marketing and service companies?
Steve Hennegaan (09:46)
I think a lot of times they expect to showcase their abilities and for people to be wowed by them.
Instead of trying to really put the boots on the ground and really get in there and try and solve complex technical challenges or problems for clients. think they go too far in the self promotion of here's what we do and here's how amazing we are. And here's how great we are. And not as far into here are the problems we solve, and then just going about solving them and then retroactively creating these case studies that show proof and evidence of doing that. So I think a lot of self promotion marketing is out there that does
move the needle, it doesn't add value to the client. And frankly, it just, it puts you in a space with all of your other competitors. And that's that whole situation of everybody saying that they're the best out there. think trying to find ways to carve out your niche that differentiate you from your competition, is a much better tactic than trying to do what the others are doing and trying to keep up with the Joneses. Joneses from a financial standpoint, a lot of these small agencies try and duplicate what some of the bigger agencies are doing, but they
have the budget to successfully do it well.
Nick Rybak (10:59)
Do you think that it is possible to build a positioning or something that will help you to stand out in such a crowded market where basically almost every company sells the same is custom software? So how do you make your company different in that case?
Steve Hennegaan (11:18)
Yeah, I think one thing we're trying to do is we're in the process of productizing our solutions and working with your organization to help rebrand our go-to-market and our website to show how we operate and how we work with people. So it's all about our process being proprietary. It's proven over 10 years and we've always felt like this was the right way to build software and interact with our clients. So we just got to the drawing board and productize our solutions to make that bear
barrier
of entry a lot lower for people, but just to say, Hey, we're not just building anything that you're asking for. Let's take you on a journey here and make sure that we're building the right things with you. Um, that's something that was really important to us. So we went to the drawing board to productize our solutions and be able to showcase how working with us is a little bit different and a little bit unique through proprietary systems.
Nick Rybak (12:12)
Got it. differentiation mostly on the service side, right? Not only marketing side.
Steve Hennegaan (12:21)
Yeah. And I think being able to showcase that right from a marketing side, I'm really excited to kick off a campaign in the next couple of months, just showcasing the productization of our services instead of being just a general agency that, that is really hard to market and really hard to, kind of showcase your abilities. I think by productizing your solutions into assessments and strategy or UI UX design, it allows you to better showcase that from a marketing standpoint, instead of getting in that situation of like, no, we're better.
than them we promise trust us right
Nick Rybak (12:54)
Yeah, I saw that a lot actually. And why do you think custom software development companies rarely stand out by choosing some specific industry that they work with? For example, like custom software for FinTech or for insurance companies or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (13:15)
Yeah, that's interesting. We went down that path as well. Right. A lot of, a lot of people suggested that we niche down and we get super narrow and there's, there's a couple of ways to go about that. can niche down into a technology stack, right? If you want to be a.net shop or you want to be an Elixir shop, can get really narrow focused in that, or you can get really focused, like you said, to into FinTech or HealthTech. And for us, what we realized that we don't have the experts in that space, right? If we were going to go into HealthTech,
Nick Rybak (13:30)
Yeah.
Steve Hennegaan (13:44)
tech,
we don't have doctors, we don't have people that have a lot of experience in that space. So what we do have experience in is working with a lot of different industries, solving a lot of different challenges and problems. And at the end of the day, what we realized, Nick was a lot of them have some of the same issues, right? Like a health tech company in a construction company may look completely different on paper. But if you look at the challenge that they're trying to solve at the end of the day through technology, a lot of them are the same. And a lot of their challenges that they're having have to do with.
poor communication within the organization or mistakes that they've made in technology in the past where they've lost a ton of money or they have a lot of disparate systems. their data isn't giving them the ability to make the decisions that they need to make. That can be the same for a FinTech or a HealthTech company as a construction or an accounting business. And we just realized that it's not about the industry being different. It's about being able to solve those challenges that on the inside pretty much are the same.
Nick Rybak (14:44)
Yeah, I got it. so previously you mentioned that you organize events and all of that stuff. and can you give an example of a event or campaign or relationships that grew from that event that led to some project or something like that in your company?
Steve Hennegaan (15:07)
Yeah, an event that we've really enjoyed that, that we've been running for the past six or seven months now has been a product management meetup. so we do it monthly. and it just, kind of stumbled upon it. We had a lot of conversations with product managers and a lot of them said, Hey, we don't really have a place where we can share ideas. Even within our organization, we're really bad at sharing what other product managers are doing with their team to, help build out products. Right. And so we said, great.
Let's just host one now our ideal client portfolio or client Ideal client isn't product managers We don't necessarily sell to product managers because a lot of those decisions are either being made through engineering on who to bring in as an agency or they're being made through the business team so but we also felt that product managers sit in the middle as a CEO of each product so they could identify Where are we having challenges? Where are the struggles is engineering struggling to keep up or?
Or is the business team not connected to the technical decision makers? And that's where the issue is. And that's why our products not getting off the ground or becoming successful. So they have a lot of intimate knowledge into how the inner workings of an organization works. So we thought bringing these people in the room would accomplish a few things. One, it would allow us to just serve the industry, right? Talk about that give back and expect nothing in return. But another thing it would do would allow us to better understand how these organizations are making decisions.
and working from the inside out.
So if we can speak to somebody who's in the weeds and, and, and give them that, that floor, allows us to better understand our clients and some of the challenges that they're working with and dealing with. think how that's turned for us is it's allowed us to have conversations with clients at a much deeper level, a much deeper level of understanding that's customer focused and it's product focused. And a lot of these companies are revenue focused when they're thinking about building products and they're not thinking about what is the experience I'm going to provide.
to my clients or to my prospects or to my end users and putting that first really ties us into the revenue decision as well.
Nick Rybak (17:15)
Yeah. It sounds like a long cell cycle, I would say, because you establish your name, you build relationships and so on. And with that long and complex cell cycle, how do you actually, measure if your strategy works, bring some results.
as it takes so long. So how do you know that you are going in the right direction?
Steve Hennegaan (17:40)
Yeah, that's not an easy part, right? With marketing often...
Not very often you can draw a straight line from marketing activity to revenue. Right? So it's really hard to say this led to this unless you did an event and you got some names and say, yeah, this individual came to us because they came to this event. That's a little bit easier, but we're finding that a lot of our success is happening much later down the road. And it's like, Hey, I talked to somebody who was at your event and they said you'd be a great partner for us. So we'd love to chat. So it's a lot of it is word of mouth. A lot of it is somebody worked with us.
It's referral based. Hey, I work with this company and they were great. So you should work with them too. We have some KPIs in place, but what we're really measuring from a marketing to sales to revenue standpoint is impactful conversations, right? How many opportunities do we get in front of a decision maker to tell our story, right? To have that, that conversation about what their challenges are. So we track that metric and we also just track our pipeline success, right? Like what can we attribute
to pipeline success. Was it a marketing event? Was it word of mouth? Was it a LinkedIn post or a blog article? Were they ⁓ organic traffic through Google onto our website and filled out a form? I think tracking a lot of that data and that information helps us understand where we should be allocating resources and resources as far as time, but also as far as money as well.
Nick Rybak (19:05)
So as I understand that you still have even with that complex marketing channel that takes long time until you close any client, you will still have like intermediate metrics that you can take a look at, right?
Steve Hennegaan (19:22)
Yeah, we are.
We say it a lot at our organization that we're playing a long game, right? From a marketing standpoint, we're playing the long game here and everything that we get along the way is fantastic, but we're trying to build something a lot more sustainable and a lot more consistent. The biggest struggle in our business is the inconsistencies in your sales pipeline, right? So if you have a project and it goes on for three months with three to five people on the project, well, that project ends. And when that project ends, those people hit the bench and they're
not billing on a project until you have another project spun up for them. Ideally, those people would go straight onto another project, but it doesn't always work that way. It's not always that simple in this space because resources may have different skill sets that are great for this project, but not so great for this project. Right. So you're not always just taking a complete team and putting them onto a completely separate project. So there's a lot of staffing challenges that you have to deal with. And every time somebody's on the bench, right, you're killing a lot of the margins that you worked really hard.
to build up on previous projects. So the goal is to eliminate the ebbs and flows in the sales cycles and the inconsistencies. And we feel like the best way to do that is by consistently marketing and consistently prospecting. Right? So outreach, consistently looking to have opportunities and work with clients that, that fit our ideal client portfolio or profile and, constantly be driving activity. Because a lot of times what happens in organizations of our size is you
Fill up your pipeline with a lot of leads and opportunities. And you're so busy working to close those opportunities with proposals, with meetings and slide deck presentations and follow-up meetings, right. And adjustments to proposals and SOWs that you're not prospecting and you're not, and you kind of drop the ball from a business development standpoint. what we're trying to build is a state sustainable process that doesn't, have those ebbs and flows. And that has to come with playing the long.
game from a marketing standpoint, but also being really intentional about playing the short game from a business development outreach standpoint as well.
Nick Rybak (21:29)
I think it's not really possible to have the steady flow of leads throughout the entire year because from my experience with these kind of services, there are some good seasons and bad ones. So you have to take that into account always. So stepping back on, you mentioned that you work with some outbound, like cold outreach. Can you elaborate on that?
and tell us more what exactly do you do? it cold calling, LinkedIn, email? So maybe traditional mails, I don't know.
Steve Hennegaan (22:05)
Yeah. I mean, our business development rep, Charlie is great at this. And the reason I say he's great is because he understands that there's a balance between outreach and personal messaging. So he is really intentional about his messages, adding value and being non pushy salesperson, right? Each opportunity we enter should benefit both parties. And we truly believe that. So Charlie.
he does a great job mostly through LinkedIn outreach and email of really trying to build a genuine relationship or connection with our prospects that we're reaching out to. So I think with that, he's had a lot of success just being human, right? And not using AI generated emails and hand typing out email messages and doing some backend research and making sure that when he reaches out, it's informative. ⁓
Nick Rybak (22:50)
Yeah.
Steve Hennegaan (23:01)
And
he's adding some value there. Using a little personality, using a little humor never hurts either. So we encourage that. And while Charlie may only reach out to seven people in a day, we know that those, those outreaches are going to be really, really impactful. I'd rather him spend a lot of time being intentional about reaching out to seven people than blasting out messages to 500 people in a day. That's just how, how our business operates and how it works.
We're not looking to add 50 new prospects in a year. We could never do that work. We would have to pass it off to other people. We could never grow that fast. Right. We're looking to add five or six really good clients every year, and then look at expanding and extending those relationships into ongoing, ongoing work. So if that's the state of our business, we need to be just really intentional about our outreach. And, we feel like kind of do it the right way, right? Do it, do it the way that may be a little slower, but.
It definitely shows to have a lot of good returns.
Nick Rybak (24:03)
Got it. Yeah, I actually hate those kinds of emails. mean, AI generated when you get tons of them every day in your mailbox and you clearly understand that this person never ever heard of your company because AI just simply isn't that good at writing these emails. Even if you give them some context, it is still shit.
Steve Hennegaan (24:30)
Yeah, we've we've to combat that, right? Because we see the same thing and I get bombarded with those same emails and I don't even have to open them at this point. It's just, I can delete them and think, well, if this is legitimate, they'll reach out again sometime anyway. So I'll, I'll just kick it down the road, but we've, we've dabbled and done a lot with video. I think video outreach has been something that has worked for us. you have to kind of tow the line between.
coming off as disingenuine, like you know somebody before you do, versus trying to differentiate yourself as an individual and as a human versus an AI bot. So we're trying to tow that line and we're constantly tweaking and he's constantly saying, Hey, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about this? We're always looking for new ways because with AI, like all of this stuff is evolving and changing so quickly and trust in salespeople and marketing people is deteriorating really, really quickly. So we're trying
to zig when everybody else is zagging and go the other way and go more human, but use some AI tools to help us be efficient in that. And it's a constant battle and a constant evolution.
Nick Rybak (25:39)
Yeah, I agree with that. We use outreach ourselves at Forsets and you know, we never tried even to write a message with AI, especially adding some context from their website, from a Prospects website, because it always looks really weird and stupid because...
I usually get a lot of messages where people just mentioned some results that we've published on our website in a case study. And it doesn't look like it was written by a human because, uh, okay. So you think it's impressive to get some ROI and so on. know that we use the exact same headline in our case study. So that's why I think the human being would, would never.
really pride, something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (26:37)
Yeah, I think AI has its place, right? We use a lot of tools to get us started with content. We usually start with the idea with, Hey, this is what I want to talk about. This is a challenge that I see. This is a problem I want to solve. Here's the format that we want to put it in. Here is the tool that we want to use to send it out, whether it's a LinkedIn post or whether it's a blog article. And then allow AI to kind of do it. And then what we do is we go in and say, okay, this doesn't have our voice to it. So let's
go
in and really make this ours and make this us. And I think it gives us a good template, but it's turned us into editors instead of content creators. And for a small organization like us, that helps us be a lot more efficient and helps us accomplish the things that we want to accomplish, which is producing a lot of content at a small dollar amount, but also keeping that brand awareness and that brand identity intact that allows you to differentiate through your messaging.
Nick Rybak (27:37)
Yeah, I like that. Let's let's come back with two these kind of events and some and something like that. How do you actually nurture those relationships? Let's say you met some people on the event that you organized and you had a great time speaking with them, but you don't. I wouldn't.
want to be really pushy and salesy and so how to avoid that but keep nurturing these relationships so this can get something to the company like a new client partnership or something like that.
Steve Hennegaan (28:09)
Yeah, there has,
there, at end of the day, the events do have to have some sort of ROI, right? We're not a, we're not a charity or nonprofit, just like putting on events for, for nothing. and, and we are very anti-sell at these events. I think how people purchase and buy products and services in today's world, we don't have to put on a.
a big presentation, letting people know who we are. If we can build a website and a social media presence that does a really good job of displaying who we are as an organization and what we do and the services that we provide and who we provide them for. People are going to do their own research, right? I don't have to shove it down people's throats. So if we invite somebody to an event and maybe we've only met them at another event once or twice, we like to know the people first, or at least have met the people before we invite them to an event to make sure that they're
good fit for what we're trying to accomplish and going to add value to the group and not just take away from it. When we do that, it allows us to not have the pressure of explaining who we are. A lot of times what they're going to do is they're going to go on our website or they're going to go on social media and they're going to
read who we are anyway, right? So I don't need to spend my time telling people who we are and what we do. I want to spend my time trying to understand your challenges and your problems and the things that you're dealing with it as an organization and just getting to know you a little bit more on a personal level and allow you to connect those dots, right? And hopefully our content is done so well on our site that it allows people to connect those dots really easily because they're going to look us up anyway. and me putting that in
in their face just becomes overkill. That's just not how people buy products at this point. They can spend five minutes before they walk into an event and pull up our site and have a really good understanding of what we do and what we have to offer. And we feel like that's the best way to go about it.
So touching base, keeping in touch with them, right? We do meet somebody and they're like, Hey, this seems like a really, really cool opportunity. We may have a challenge that you guys could help us with. The next step is always like, great, let's grab coffee. Let's grab a lunch. Let's, let's find some time to chat, talk a little bit more about it. If we can help fantastic. ⁓ and if not, maybe we can at least, leave you with some, some more information on, the industry and what we would do going forward.
Nick Rybak (30:31)
Yeah, I love it. do you think that, let's say that your like ideal customer profile list is not that big, right? Because you work on a local market and all of these people, are probably, there are like hundreds or maybe a thousand of them, even less, I think. So not that much list of people, right? And do you think this would be valuable to
kind of ran some ads for that list over and over again just to make your brand memorable for them. Have you ever tried something like that?
Steve Hennegaan (31:08)
Yeah, as we are getting ready to roll out our productized solutions, that is going to be something we're going to be a lot more intentional about. As we're rolling out, let's call it an AI data assessment, right? So we're going to come in and understand your data and make sure that you are in this situation to be able to take advantage or build out AI tooling. Now we're into the future, right? If that's an assessment that we're selling and we've had success selling it to a certain industry, let's call it manufacturing or the food service industry.
Now we can put really targeted messaging together, package this productized service up and attach some case studies to it and start doing some really targeted outreach on social. That is kind of a combination for us that we are really looking forward to being a lot more intentional about going after that ideal customer profile with a service that we know that industry is in search of and we've been successful delivering on.
Nick Rybak (32:04)
what advice would you give to a small service team that's trying to figure out its first go-to-market motion? Maybe any suggestions on channels, tactics, or strategy in general, positioning, anything like that.
Steve Hennegaan (32:20)
I think brand identity is really important knowing who you are. And once you know who you are and who you're trying to appeal to, you find the avenue where your customers are going to be spending their time and want to consume that information.
For us, it always starts with social. It always starts with LinkedIn. We know that, yes, we can write overly technical things that appeal to technical decision makers and organizations. But at the end of the day, if we don't have a business or an ROI case at the end of all of our case studies or at the heart of all of our case studies, we're never going to be successful in selling into some of these larger clients. So LinkedIn has been a space for us that we have to be intentional about the messaging and it can't
it be overly technical, right? And so we have to, to, yes, we're building web products. We're doing really cool technology things with AI and machine learning and automation. But the case studies that we're presenting in front of the people that are on LinkedIn are going to be more business focused people. So as we're writing this content or putting these blog posts together, or our individual team members are putting together posts to build their presence on social media, understanding our brand identity and our sound and our voice was really important to them.
then understand how do we echo that into certain avenues like social media. So for us, LinkedIn is king and then personal outreach and email follows that. So.
understanding that and having that brand identity document and having it be a real live document that your entire team is aware of. This is who we are as a company and this is what our sound and our voice is. I think that's really, really important for organizations starting to get their feet wet in this social media or marketing space.
Nick Rybak (34:04)
Love it. And from your perspective as a partner and a person who is responsible for a company's growth, what's one thing that founders should stop wasting money on when it comes to marketing and how to approach that in the first place?
Steve Hennegaan (34:25)
I love this Nick. Boosts at trade shows. Stop spending money to put a booth at a trade show that is in line.
with all of your other competitors, right? We have a philosophy that we don't attend trade shows or conferences that we're not speaking at. So it encourages our people to be thought leaders. If you want to go to a conference or go to a trade show, then that's fine. Like feel free to go to that for learning and development purposes. But as far as marketing and branding dollars, if we're not speaking at that event or at that conference through and showing
that thought leadership, we don't want to have a booth or a sponsorship play at that event. So, that is something that we've really been intentional about because spending the five to eight to $10,000, having a booth at a conference and seeing all of our competitors down in a row, it doesn't put us in an ideal situation that we would have been at BN. I'd rather have my CEO standing on stage speaking, than have a booth at a conference.
Nick Rybak (35:25)
All right, Steve, and the final question. So what is your whole take? What's one thing about B2B go to market strategy? You think small companies are completely overthinking or getting wrong?
Steve Hennegaan (35:43)
⁓ it's still all about people in relationships.
It's not about numbers and metrics. It's about how well do you connect with somebody? How well can you help them accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish and help them solve issues or challenges that they're having in their career? And it's still going to be about the people, right? We see a lot about AI and everybody's trying to enter the AI space mostly to be more effective and efficient. Well, they can maybe be more efficient, but without effectiveness, none of that stuff matters. And we feel like
you know, taking the slow route and really being intentional about building relationships, that still matters in today's world. So make sure that everything that you're doing from a marketing or a branding or a sales standpoint keeps those humans first and those relationships first.
Nick Rybak (36:31)
Yeah, I love that advice and I completely agree with that because people's relationships are the key and the goal of the any marketing is to spark a conversation. So love that. Thank you for sharing.
Steve, this has been a super practical conversation for anyone trying to grow a custom service business without the safety net of a big marketing budget. So thank you for being here and thank you everyone listening to B2B Marketing Flywheel Podcast.
Steve Hennegaan (37:00)
Yeah, thanks everybody. Nick, this has been great. Make sure you check out seven hills technology.com. Check out the great site that Nick and his team built for us.
Nick Rybak (37:08)
Yeah, I love that. If you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend or your team member. And as always, let's pray for conversion. I'm Nick Rebak, your host. So, and see you in the next one.
