Any other recovering people pleasers out there? Still triggered by the fear of saying NO and disappointing a friend? A family member? A colleague? A client?
We’re right there with you.
There’s a reason so many self-help books about boundaries and saying “no” exist. No matter how many times we’ve heard lines like “NO is a complete sentence;” “No means ‘no;’ or ‘Just say ‘NO,’ it’s just not easy to do in real life. Period.
And we’re talking both in our personal lives and in B2B SaaS marketing.
The truth is, the same principle applies to saying NO in life to uphold your personal convictions as it does to saying NO in marketing to uphold your brand’s standards. Read that again.
If you really want to succeed in B2B SaaS marketing and leadership, you have to learn to say NO more often. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Let’s dive into why saying NO in marketing is so important for your brand’s identity and integrity.
The Importance of High Standards
Yes, it’s hard to be the person who speaks up and says something isn’t good enough for the brand, but high standards set your brand apart from others.
Any of these lines sound familiar?
But the content team spent months on this asset!
The designers spent hours concepting this!
It just needs to go live!
But does it? Why? So you can get 13 more MQLs?
In order to be successful as B2B SaaS marketing leaders, we have to stop saying yes just because it’s easy. Instead, we need to learn the art of only saying yes to the ideas, projects, even people, that align with our brand goals and our mission.
Ever said yes to a business idea or project you weren’t sure about because you felt like you had to? Ever ignored your gut instinct only to later discover (the hard way) that your intuition was spot on, but you didn’t speak up to uphold the status quo, and you were right all along?
Nothing is worse than shaking your head and giving YOURSELF an “I told you so.” Avoid this icky feeling and practice speaking up and challenging your teams to do the same.
Just like we make certain decisions in life about how and where we’ll spend our valuable time, energy, and money, we need to do the same as we establish ourselves in the world of B2B SaaS marketing.
The Role of Bold Leadership in Marketing
We don’t need to tell you how successful Apple is or to name how many iPhones they’ve sold because it’s a well-known fact that Apple is one of the most revered, successful, highly respected and reputable brands out there. Apple has a clear vision, visual identity, and identity—and everything from their history of innovation to their design aesthetic to their font choice to their crisp white packaging define them as a brand.
These seemingly minute details all matter because they create an overall sense of how we feel about the brand. We trust Apple because they pay so much attention to detail.
Your SaaS brand deserves the same level of respect, dignity, and attention. If there is ANYTHING that doesn’t live up to those standards, doesn’t evoke the feeling, the essence, the truth of who you want your brand to be, then say NO to it.
Think about it.
Balancing MQL Targets with Brand Building
We know what you may be thinking, This all sounds nice in theory, but what about the goals I have to hit? What about my MQL targets? I can’t just throw those out the window…
Nor are we suggesting you should. But what we are saying is be more intentional about how you generate leads, take the time to build quality over quantity in your marketing, and in your creative. Don’t just have your team crank out assets that compromise the quality of your brand.
Do you respect brands with tacky advertising or janky graphics? How do you feel when a brand has an outdated website with pop-up ads coming up every two seconds? What about an ugly font? God forbid a tacky headline or typo.
All of these perhaps seemingly small details affect the overall perception of your brand. Simply saying yes to posting an image you were iffy about on your social accounts because it was quick and easy, or using a content asset simply because it was created do not a good marketer or brand make.
Great marketing takes a bold leader who is willing to hold everyone around them accountable to their creative potential. Speaking of Apple…we’ll talk more about an innovative leader later on…
The higher your standards, the more effective your marketing.
We should aspire to build a brand, a staple in the category, not hit a MQL target.
If your standards don’t match your ambition, it’s all a waste.
In other words, the higher your standards, the more effective your marketing.
Practical Tips for Implementing High Standards
So, how do you implement said high standards in the day-to-day life of B2B SaaS marketing? Here are some actionable steps you can take to set and uphold high standards within your teams.
- Create and foster a culture that asks questions.
Create a culture where your team feels comfortable asking questions. I can’t tell you how many times as a copywriter, I’ve been assigned to create a marketing asset, but no one on the account team or marketing leadership can clearly explain to me what it’s for.
What are the goals? Where and how will this piece be distributed? No one knows? OK, cool. Great.
And yet, I’ve still spent hours working on content for deliverables that fall into the marketing asset black hole. Avoid this pitfall! If your creative team isn’t sure or asks questions, take heed. Don’t blindly assign tasks without thinking about the purpose. You hired creative people on your team who are the experts at their craft. Challenge them to think outside the box. Educate them about your business challenges and let them help come up with a lead-generating strategy.
- Establish and adhere to brand guidelines.
One of the first questions I have when I’m working on a new project or with a new client is whether they have brand guidelines. You may be surprised at how often brands actually do not have established brand standards for their visual identity, tone, writing style, or anything.
Don’t make this mistake of creating before you have clearly established brand standards. Many new brands make the mistake of starting to do the work before they have truly established themselves as a brand. Messaging doesn’t align to a larger strategy because there isn’t one. Blinded by achieving their sales and MQL targets, they fare forward sloppily and without direction, rushing super important customer-facing assets—even big ones like their website. We know what you may be thinking…It’s time-consuming to create brand guidelines, and we need a website by the time of the product launch!
Yes, it can take time, but it’s one of the best investments you can make.
Once you create and establish a set of visual and written guidelines, you have a single source of TRUTH that is your brand identity that everyone abides by. Consistency is the King and Queen of high standards in marketing. All of these elements and details combine to form your brand. When your users or potential customers trust you as a reputable, reliable source, they will feel more comfortable trusting you with their business. They will want to refer their friends to you.
- Be patient
As Guns N’ Roses famously wrote, “All we need is just a little patience.” Hum that tune when you’re feeling the urge to rush through something. Perhaps most importantly—and the most difficult to actually implement in marketing: Be patient. Generating quality leads may take time. But a long-term customer is much more valuable than 1 or 2 or even 100 MQLs that don’t actually lead to anything.
Being a leader in marketing means valuing relationships over short-term wins and hitting MQL targets. Yes, as we said before, we do need to prioritize MQLs and have goals that keep us moving forward and devoted to excellence, but we should be more focused on establishing ourselves as a reputable brand that draws in and keeps our customers over time than hitting numbers on a spreadsheet that don’t actually mean anything.
Example From a Real-world NO Sayer: Steve Jobs
Back to being a bold leader in marketing…enter Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is known for saying NO in marketing.
Most of us are familiar with his choice to say “no” to fashion decisions—simply wearing his iconic black turtleneck day after day to clear his brain from any wardrobe-related distractions. Although this may be an extreme example of eliminating options to create more space and time for the “yes” things, Jobs also practiced the art of saying NO quite often when it came to customers.
Perhaps this laser focus is the truth behind Apple’s innovation—instead of cluttering their brand identity and image with many shiny new products or gimmicks, they keep it simple and do the few things they do extremely well. And they take their time (there’s that patience again…) to introduce their products to the world.
As Jobs said, “People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Instead of saying “yes” right off the bat to customers, Jobs and Apple instead thought ahead and sought to solve the biggest problems they faced and relieve their pain points. He didn’t listen to their proposed solutions because his belief was that the best, most innovative solutions have to come from the company, i.e., the brand of experts at Apple.
Your SaaS brand deserves the same level of respect and dignity.
If there is ANYTHING that doesn’t live up to those standards—that doesn’t align or evoke the feeling, the essence, the core values—-of who your brand is, then say NO and trust that a better YES is coming soon. And when it does, you’ll be so glad you waited.
Join the Dialogue
Want more expertise on the value of saying NO in marketing and other pro tips for B2B marketing strategy? Follow our founder and B2B SaaS marketing expert Garrett Mehrguth on LinkedIn, read the full post we’re referencing in this blog, share your experiences in the comments, and keep the dialogue going.
Together, we can rally as the NO sayers in marketing.
To close with the wise words of Mahatma Gandhi, “A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”
Listen to Gandhi.
And remember: Just say NO!
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