A Technical Founder's Guide to B2B Marketing

If you’re a technical founder like me, chances are you spend most of your time writing code and building product, which is exactly what you should be doing! If you’re like me, you might also believe your excellent product will simply “sell itself”, so you don’t need to think much about marketing.

But unfortunately this is not the case. It doesn’t matter if you’ve created the greatest product in the world if no one knows about it. Furthermore, tech history is rife with examples of great products losing out to inferior ones that had better marketing behind them. If you want to avoid this fate for your startup, you cannot afford to ignore marketing.

As I’ve learned, marketing is a bit of an art, a bit of a science, but most of all it is a system. Once we understand the system, we technical founders know how to optimize it. So allow me to introduce you to some of the core concepts you need to understand how to succeed in B2B marketing.

The Funnel

Every customer goes through a funnel which starts with them learning about your product for the first time, then eventually trying it out, then finally buying it, and perhaps even buying more of it.

The funnel gets narrower the farther down you go, because lots of people drop off at each stage. For example, many people will see your ads but never click through to your website. Of those who make it to your website, many will not sign up for the product. Many will sign up but never purchase.

There are fundamentally three ways to grow your revenue:

1. Increase your pipeline - get more people into the funnel.

2. Increase your conversion rate - get more people from the beginning of the funnel to the end of the funnel.

3. Increase your customer LTV (lifetime value) - i.e. the average amount of money you will make from the customer.

This is of course an oversimplification - you also have to consider things like your customer acquisition cost (how much money do you spend moving the customer through the funnel) and your retention rate (of the customers you win, how many do you keep).

But overall it’s a good way to think about your marketing strategy. Marketing’s job is chiefly to support #1 - getting more people into the funnel. But good marketing can also help with #2 and #3.

Content Marketing

Top of the funnel (TOFU), which is where Quotient focuses, involves the first stages where your marketing has the widest reach. In this part of the funnel, one of the most important tools at your disposal is content marketing. Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable content - such as blogs, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, and case studies -  designed to attract potential customers.

Content marketing is particularly important in the B2B space compared to the consumer space. As I can personally attest, consumers often make snap purchasing decisions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen some cool looking shoes on an Instagram ad and immediately purchased them, much to my wife’s chagrin.

But in the business world, purchasing decisions are made with greater care. People like to do their research, and they want to know a lot about a product before they buy it and integrate it into their company’s workflow.

This makes content marketing paramount. Content marketing is the best way to build awareness of your brand, establish trust and authority in your space, and ultimately generate leads (more on that in a moment). 

In the modern digital marketing landscape, there are many different channels for content marketing:

• Email Marketing - Email remains one of the best ways to reach customers. This can include broadcast newsletters as well as automated flows tailored to each customer.

• Blogs, Case Studies, and Customer Stories - These are all different types of long-form content that you can publish on your website. This can attract users searching on Google, or you can share them on social media to drive traffic to your site.

• Social Media - Posting on platforms like Twitter X and LinkedIn is a great way to attract attention and establish your brand as a thought leader. 

• Webinars and Virtual Events

Marketing and Sales

A great way to think about the distinction between marketing and sales is to think about them as the air force and the marines. Marketing is like the air force. They soften up the ground below with a barrage of messaging across many different channels, reaching a large number of people.

Sales is like the marines. Once marketing has softened up the ground below with their aerial strike, the marines can storm the beachhead and strike in a more targeted manner, one lead at a time.

Marketing and sales are complementary, each playing a critical role in the customer acquisition process, and they work best when they coordinate. 

While both are important, depending on the mission, one may play a bigger role than the other. A good rule of thumb is that the larger the average deal size, the more important sales is and the less important marketing is. 

The reason for this is simple economics. Imagine your company sells security software to Fortune 50 companies. Companies are willing to pay millions of dollars a year for it, and to sign a deal, you need direct approval from the CISO.

If that’s your company, then it makes financial sense to spend a lot of money on top notch sales people who know how to close big deals. Spending money on marketing is less important, because there might only be a few dozen people on the planet who can buy your product, so it makes more sense to go after them directly instead of casting a wide net.

Alternatively, if you are a company that sells relatively inexpensive “pro-sumer” software - like Canva or Figma - where each company might only spend a few hundred dollars a month on your software, then hiring an expensive sales team is less economical.

It’s more efficient to cast a wide net and reach as many people as you can with your marketing dollars, and to make it easy for them to purchase your product without the involvement of a salesperson. (This is also known as product led growth.) 

The Handoff

You may have heard that marketing and sales people are always butting heads. (Example.) This might be because the handoff between the two teams is often shaky.

Broadly speaking, it’s marketing’s job to create warm leads for the sales team. A warm lead is a lead who has shown some interest in your company/product and might be receptive to outreach from a salesperson. This is as opposed to a cold lead, which is a lead who has not yet shown any interest but who seems like a good fit based on their job title, the company they work at, or other characteristics. 

The handoff works like this - the marketing team collects leads by incentivizing potential customers to give them their contact information. For example, you might request someone’s email in exchange for a free trial account, access to a whitepaper, or an invitation to a webinar or in-person event.

Now they’re in the funnel! Since we have their contact information, we can send them emails they might find relevant or interesting, allowing us to gain mindshare and nudge them slowly toward a conversion.

If the lead continually signals interest - by coming back to the website, opening the marketing emails, reading blogs, or attending webinars - then this means it might be time to reach out to them directly.

At this point, they become a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). This means that the marketing team believes they are interested and a good fit for the product, and so it’s time for the sales team to get involved.

If the sales team has limited resources and more leads they can handle, you might implement lead scoring to identify the most promising leads, based on both their behavior (how much are they interacting with marketing content) as well as their firmographics (their job title and the company they work at).

At this point the lead is “handed off” from the marketing team to the sales team. It is now the sales team’s responsibility to close the lead, and if they don’t, that’s on them! Or at least that’s how it works at some companies, so it’s no wonder there’s sometimes friction between the two teams.

In reality, the marketing team’s job should not end after the handoff, although their responsibilities do change. Even as the lead approaches the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), the marketing team can still play a critical role in closing the deal by continuing to provide the lead with relevant content that increases their confidence in the product and nudges them toward a decision.

Even once the lead converts and becomes a paying customer, the marketing team still has a critical role to play in keeping the customer happy and engaged by providing content around onboarding and education, customer success stories, and upsell campaigns. 

The goal of this type of content - often known as customer marketing - is to help customers get the most out of the product, increase their likelihood of staying, and potentially encourage them to buy even more or different products. 

What to Do Next

By now hopefully you have a basic sense of how marketing works in B2B software. You attract customers through excellent content marketing across channels like email, blogs, social, and video. This establishes your brand as an authority in your space and generates leads. 

These leads move through the funnel and once they’ve shown enough interest and fit they become an MQL, at which point the sales team gets involved. But marketing doesn’t (or shouldn’t) stop there - it continues through the final stages of the funnel and beyond. 

That’s how the system typically works, but how can you start to build it? Where do you begin? Here are some actionable steps you can take to start to build your marketing funnel:

1. Identify Your Target Customer: The first and most important step is to identify exactly whom you’re trying to reach with your marketing. As a technical founder, you should already know who this is. What is their job title? What type of company do they work at? What problem do they have? What are their interests? What type of content do they consume? This is often called your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

2. Start Creating Content: Once you know who you’re targeting, start creating content that would interest them. One of the easiest, lowest budget ways to do this is to write a blog. Unlike ads, blogs are free to publish, and you don’t have to buy any podcasting equipment to write one. As a technical founder, you likely have a gold mine of information sitting locked up in your brain - you’ve been laser-focused on a specific problem for years, and all you need to do is extract some of that gold from your brain.

Modern AI tools like ChatGPT or Quotient can be a big help here. You no longer need to be an English major to produce excellent blogs. What I personally like to do is to give Quotient’s Blog Agent a rough outline of the article I want to write and have it fill in the gaps. As a busy technical founder, this will save you tons of time. 

1. Use a Marketing Platform to Collect Leads: But a blog alone is not enough. You need a way to shepherd people down the funnel and to measure how interested they are. This is where your marketing platform comes in. A marketing platform is a place where you can not only publish content - like blogs, newsletters, and social posts - but also collect leads, analyze their activities, and eventually send them to your sales team. 

Traditional marketing platforms like Hubspot and Marketo often require a lot of time and  expertise to use, and as a busy founder you probably have neither. This is why we built Quotient - we wanted to make marketing easy and cut out all of the tedium. With the power of AI agents, Quotient makes it easy not only to create content but also to analyze its performance and turn intrigued readers into leads.

Ultimately, marketing is just another optimization problem—and as a technical founder, you're uniquely positioned to master this system, unlock your product’s full potential, and ensure it reaches the customers who need it most.