Applying MiniMBA at a small budget B2B

An award-winning example of how MiniMBA learnings apply – no matter your end customer or the size of your budget

MiniMBA triple threat Chris Cotterill recently scooped the Prolific North Marketer of the Year award, as well as picking up a Best Campaign award with his team at Tribepad for their brilliant Stop the Bias campaign.

… And he’s doing it all – gasp – at a small-budget B2B.

Mark Ritson can scream it from the rooftops but a question that still comes up often is: Does MiniMBA apply in a B2B and/or small budget environment?

His answer is always yes and yes. But there’s nothing like a case study to bring something home. So, we wanted to shine a light on MiniMBA alumnus Chris, who demonstrates this beautifully in his award-winning work at Tribepad.

A recruitment software business based in Sheffield, UK, Tribepad currently employs around 60 people and serves close to 170 customers across multiple sectors and business needs. Their feature-rich applicant tracking system (ATS) powers the recruitment for well-known names like Tesco, Greggs, Liverpool FC and Sodexo, as well as numerous local government authorities across the country.

Chris joined the company in September 2021 as Head of Marketing, just as he was approaching the end of his first MiniMBA in Marketing, he says, “Flicking between my course notes and the real world of Tribepad.”

Since then, Chris has completed the Brand Management and Management courses (pocketing a perfect A-A-A score), been promoted to Marketing Director, and instigated real business change across all four Ps – with fantastic commercial results to the tune of increased lead volumes, customer numbers and recurring revenue.

We asked Chris to take us through his journey of applying MiniMBA principles as a fresh hire in a new ‘head of’ role.

As ever, that begins with a rock-solid diagnosis: market orientation, market research and segmentation.

Bang for your buck: diagnosis on a budget

“The Head of Marketing role was brand new for the business, so I was lucky enough to be able to act like a consultant in the early days,” says Chris. “I didn’t inherit a big, immediate to-do list.”

This meant that Chris had the time and space to step back and get a lay of the land. You can do diagnosis with a limited budget; you can do diagnosis with unconventional market research methods; the one non-negotiable in diagnosis is time. And the discipline to step away from the shiny stuff and use that time to truly interrogate your brand and your market.

As Mark Ritson says, when you join a new company, “An amateur or untrained brand manager immediately jumps in and starts making tactical decisions without really having any clue what they’re talking about.

“It’s much harder, but much more important to answer all those initial questions with a hunch of the shoulder, with a shake of the head and with the only answer which is appropriate when you begin managing a new brand, which is, ‘I don’t know. I’m going to find out as quickly as I can and then we’ll put together a winning strategy.’” (Module 3: Brand Diagnosis, MiniMBA in Brand Management)

“Prior to working at Tribepad I had predominantly worked in B2C, big budget, big brand telecoms across Plusnet, EE and BT – so, a very different world,” says Chris.

“We didn’t have the budget for a lot of bespoke first party research at Tribepad and there was an absence of readily available market insight. So, I had to try and apply the MiniMBA learnings as much as I could,” he says, “progress better than perfection.

“I contacted the ONS and got a bunch of data around volume of businesses by sector and size in the UK. I used that as a starter for estimating market size, with some assumptions about contract lengths, renewal rates and therefore ‘in-market’ volumes each year.

“I could then do some basic segmentation based on size and needs. Again, this had to be crude and I took learning from speaking to our sales team, industry experts, our account managers, our customers, et cetera to get a view of the biggest challenges that businesses were trying to solve.

“Based on our internal data I could then give an estimated value per segment using our own customer average contract values.”

A perfect example of the Ritson® Meaningful x Actionable grid in play, this market segmentation supported huge change across the business. While “crude” as Chris describes it,  the work revealed a picture of the market that crushed previous assumptions about where they should (and shouldn’t) be focusing their energy.

 

(click  images to enlarge)

“Previously Tribepad was exclusively targeting enterprise level organisations with 1000+ employees,” Chris explains.

Taking into account John Dawes’ 95:5 rule, Tribepad was effectively targeting only a small number of organisations each year. But Chris was able to use his sizing work to demonstrate the massive unrealised potential of another valuable segment.

“I think there was a lack of understanding about exactly how small this market was in terms of volume, particularly when you consider the majority aren’t actively in-market in any given year. They were previously knocking away leads that were ‘too small,’ but the market sizing helped to show how big that opportunity could be. This diagnosis work led to the formal development and launch of a new product.”

They were previously knocking away leads that were too small

Today, Tribepad offers two distinct products. Tribepad Gro is a simpler version of Tribepad’s core ATS solution, targeted at businesses with teams from around 200 to 750 people. And they rebranded their large-engine, fully customised enterprise-level solution as Tribepad Pro.

“I also ran some brand tracking with a bespoke B2B research agency to get a view of core metrics like awareness, consideration and preference. This wasn’t hugely expensive and it’s something I now repeat on an annual basis.”

With his big-budget B2C days now behind him, Chris says, “Gone are the days of monthly brand trackers and econometrics and MMM and all that stuff. I think most of it is overkill, anyway.

“On the back of this diagnosis work, I created a full marketing strategy – which segments we should target and how we should position ourselves to win.”

Cracking brand positioning

“During my interview process, I’d sold the dream of cracking the Tribepad brand positioning,” Chris tells us. “This was obviously easier now we knew who we wanted to talk to, what we wanted to talk about and why.”

Mark Ritson says brands must seek both distinctiveness and differentiation. Stand out, and stand apart – by being more, or less, of something than your competitors. For smaller brands, this is triply important.

Going forward, Tribepad would rise above B2B clichés like ‘innovative,’ ‘powerful’ and ‘award-winning’ and position themselves on their point of relative differentiation: Tribepad cares about making recruitment better for businesses and jobseekers.

A critical first step was to articulate that internally

A critical first step was to articulate that internally, ensuring that everyone from sales to customer service is aligned and on board. For the creative teams who would be bringing the brand to life, they created a more detailed “Tribepad framework.” It asks and answers questions like: why we exist, the problem we solve, what we do and what you hear us talking about.

Importantly, they condensed all of that down for the rest of the business (“who couldn’t care less about marketing frameworks or splashy statements”) into one simple positioning statement, or the Tribepad mission statement: To make recruitment fairer, faster and better for everyone.

“Once we’d got all the strategic building blocks in place, we were able to move onto the more tactical delivery plan to support.”

The promotional P: What does that look like for the customer?

“Creatively we try to be distinctive and stand out against the sea of boring B2B ads,” says Chris.

However, the system is rigged towards bigger (richer) brands. More money spent on media reach will almost always trump a great ad with limited budget behind it. But smart marketers can work the system with the power of integrated marketing communications (IMC).

Spreading spend across multiple channels will significantly boost the effectiveness of a campaign. An Analytic Partners study found that an integrated campaign across five different media platforms results in a whopping +35% ROI.

Mark Ritson summarises this phenomenon with a simple equation: a x b > 2a or 2b. (Module 10: Marketing Communications, MiniMBA in Marketing)

“We don’t have huge budgets so it’s not TV or radio or OOH, but paid social, BTL, SEM and events,” says Chris.

“It was important that we increased our channels to market to improve performance. We’d previously relied a lot on industry events and some small scale below the line campaigns, but we quickly introduced paid social, more PPC and retargeting activity, outbound, and upscaled our content production too.”

While their top of funnel campaigns do the job of building brand awareness and helping Tribepad stand out from the rest of the boring pack, mid-funnel campaigns hammer home their position as a brand that is challenging the norm and trying to better the recruitment industry for everyone.

A fantastic example is their Stop the Bias campaign, which launched in 2022 with a damning report that revealed less than a quarter of job applicants believed diversity data was benefiting them.

The research was supercharged a year later, with results published in the Stop the Bias Report 2024 – this time analysing representative data from over 2 million applications and nearly 70,000 hires.

The report credibly roots Tribepad in important (often mandatory) conversations around ED&I for businesses, while promoting brand preference and relevant product capabilities such as their Anonymous Applications feature.

“Stop the Bias was just one of our brand campaigns designed to show how we wanted to make recruitment fairer for everybody. It’s a little bit controversial in that we are directly challenging the people we wanted to sell our product to. But it felt natural and authentic and valuable.

“The work picked up Best B2B Campaign at the Prolific North Awards 2024, which was great recognition of the impact it had, particularly when you consider we were up against some big hitters like LinkedIn, Dulux, Bupa and more.

“It’s something we’ll continue to build on,” says Chris. “We’ve seen great results with increasing usage of some of our anti-bias features and customers talking to us about how to improve their processes to enable fairer recruitment. So, it’s not just positive commercial results but also a positive impact on the community.”

You can download the latest report here: tribepad.com/stop-the-bias

What does growth look like, three years on?

“Commercially, results have been strong. We can’t share exact numbers in this article, but lead volumes, customer numbers, recurring revenue and all that stuff has increased consistently over the past three years – even in the tough economic climate we now find ourselves in.

“On a personal level, I started to put myself into conversations in other areas of the business – gaps I’d noticed in terms of propositions and go-to-market strategy. This was on the back of some of the things learnt on the MiniMBA in Management and I think one of the things that helped my promotion to Marketing Director in August last year.

I started to put myself into conversations in other areas of the business

“Then in October, I picked up the Marketer of the Year Award at the Prolific North Awards. The judges said: ‘Chris has clearly made an impact, with his hard-hitting results. A valued member of the team, he has been a driving force for Tribepad’s achievements and growth, while having a commitment to his own professional development.’

“So, it’s fair to say that my MiniMBA journey has had a direct influence on me picking up that award!

“In terms of what comes next, I’m excited to keep building on the solid foundations we’ve established at Tribepad. We’re pushing for B-Corp status to further support our positioning and I’m challenging the team to be bolder in our creative execution.

“We’ve got some exciting product developments on the way and I’m sure we’ll continue to deliver against our ambitious growth plans whilst building a business we are proud of.”

Chris Cotterill is Marketing Director at Tribepad. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn or visit tribepad.com to see more of his impressive work.