Business leaders face numerous challenges with staffing. Hiring, training, and retaining new employees is expensive, time-consuming, risky, and exhausting. It consumes more of leaders’ time now than at any point in at least 18 years. It drains critical leadership resources that are better allocated to high-level activities in manufacturing, distribution, and service businesses.
Marketing leaders John Buie and Jason Hagerman argue for proper training and guidance in B2B content marketing services. In their B2B marketing blueprint “Imposters on the Zoom!”, they suggest these measures can help staff overcome issues like imposter syndrome. This method reduces employee turnover, allowing businesses to focus more on growth and less on HR matters.
Turnover in B2B marketing roles is now 16% higher than the B2B average
Data from IQ Partners shows that B2B marketing roles have a higher average turnover rate than all other roles. According to a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, more than 20% of workers aged 20 and older spent a year or less at their jobs in 2022. This number has reached its highest point in almost two decades.
And in 2023, according to data from LinkedIn, more than half of U.S. workers actively considered leaving their jobs. The same data showed that more workers aged 18 to 43 plan to quit their jobs than any other demographic.
“Almost everything you read about the job-hopping attributed to millennials and Gen Z is about shifting personal priorities, salary, and career growth. Which are all real things, of course,” Buie mentions.
“But you don’t read much about how they’re struggling to work with the skills they have in fields they never even knew were out there until they got the job,” he adds. “This is one of the reasons imposter syndrome is so prevalent in B2B. It is a more significant driver of all the challenges businesses face than most leaders realize.”
Imposter syndrome is the sense of being a fraud, fear of being discovered, and difficulty internalizing success. This creates other spin-off effects, like disengagement, inability to focus, anxiety, procrastination, and more.
Problem: Most leaders can’t identify these signs of imposter syndrome in their B2B marketing and sales staff.
Hagerman explains that imposter syndrome could look like this for a team member: On Monday morning, a marketing manager sits down to write a social media post. She struggles with the content, repeatedly writing and deleting. After finalizing a draft, she searches for an appropriate image, leading to more revisions.
Once posted, she notices a spelling error. She deletes the post, fixes it, and reposts it. Doubting the quality of her work, she takes a break before lunch to refocus.
In the afternoon, her productivity declines. She feels discouraged about her morning work and time management. So, her energy is split and drained. She’s distracted and worried. She’s falling behind, making errors, and rushing and slowing down simultaneously.
Hagerman explains, “This scenario is imposter syndrome – the cycle that leads to losing a marketing employee who could thrive in the business and help it grow. They start feeling like the only way to escape the bad feeling is to leave the job, so that’s what they do.”
Hiring new B2B marketing and sales staff can cost 2X their annual salary
Hiring is difficult for many reasons. It takes time and resources. Reports from Gallup, Upwork, and Jobvite all place the cost of job turnover anywhere between one-half and two times the employee’s annual salary.
Employees don’t know what they will get because, according to a University of Massachusetts study, 81% of people lie about themselves during job interviews. Unsurprisingly, retaining staff is better for the business than hiring repeatedly.
“Once you’ve hired the person, that’s who you have,” Buie explains. “Even if they’ve misrepresented themselves, it doesn’t mean they can’t do the job. However, they’re likely starting from a place of imposter syndrome.’”
He adds, “The key is to train them well and show a clear path to success. This helps them overcome imposter syndrome while doing their job. Over time, you can retain and nurture them into highly valuable team members.”
In “Imposters on the Zoom!”, Buie and Hagerman lay out a B2B marketing blueprint for generating sales leads in any manufacturing or distribution business. For the authors, the blueprint is the easiest way for a lead-generating employee to learn about their industry actively, get measurably better and more confident in the job, and create value for their employer while developing some critical lead-generation skills.
Buie and Hagerman recommend that leaders hand “Imposters on the Zoom!” to their marketing and sales employees as part of onboarding or annual professional development so that those employees can take the lead in their own skills development.
“They need to know what to do. Where to look for answers. Where they can observe your customers talking unfiltered, and they need examples of the output they should create to achieve the goals associated with their roles,” Hagerman says.
“We put this all in the book because a big part of imposter syndrome is an inability to ask,” he cautions. “The shame around asking something a person feels they should know. They don’t have to ask when they have a place to look. And they can move themselves past their blockers.”
A simple system can change the trajectory of the entire business
The key to turning new hires or long-term low-to-mid-performers into marketing and sales pros and returning increased profits to the business is the implementation of repeatable systems.
Every manufacturing business has clear, defined steps for production. Most have clear, defined steps for sales professionals in the industry. Few have clear, defined steps for lead-generating marketing staff in the industry.
“It’s almost impossible to retain satisfied marketing staff when everything they do is ad hoc, flying by the seat of their pants. No wonder they feel like imposters,” Hagerman argues.
The authors believe few B2Bs have the time or aptitude to define clear steps for marketing staff. So, “Imposters on the Zoom!” was written to provide those universal steps and help businesses apply universally valuable activities to their unique niches. Buie and Hagerman believe leaders who use this simple B2B marketing blueprint can solve the problem in a week.
Buie mentions, “One of the best ways to make a business profitable is to retain staff. And the best way to retain staff is to help them feel confident in their skills.”
“In my experience, pictures, lists, clear directions, easy references, and many examples give the clearest path to this kind of confidence,” Buie points out. “If leaders want their staff to perform well and stay with the business for the long run, that’s exactly what they need to provide.”
Buie and Hagerman have used the system outlined in the “Imposters on Zoom!” for the past decade at their consulting and B2B marketing agency, Journey Better Business Group, helping manufacturers and distributors grow in contracting market conditions.
Through “Imposters on Zoom!”, they hope more businesses can benefit from their experience by implementing a system that solves imposter syndrome, trains staff to be confident in their role, retains staff longer, and organically drives more profits into the business.
