Behind B2B #23: Dean Lindsay

For our latest instalment of Behind B2B – our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry – we meet Dean Lindsay.

WHO?

Dean Lindsay is the Customer Marketing Lead at Soldo, a provider of prepaid company cards. He has previously worked as a Product Marketing Manager at a global payments solution provider, and at a SasS provider of voice, video, and chat API solutions.

HOW DID YOU END UP IN THE WORLD OF B2B?

I started in call centres, answering the phone to people trying to cancel their broadband. I then became a supervisor, a team leader, and then eventually a call centre manager. After that, I was a Club Med call centre manager.

I guess the transition came when I bumped into a former colleague who was working at EE at the time. She asked me if I wanted to do this call centre work crossed with marketing work. I said I’d give it a go. But my first B2B role was at a company called 8×8, where I got into customer marketing and what worked in that realm ever since.

I now really enjoy working in B2B. I really enjoy the opportunities. I find it really interesting.

WHAT ARE THE KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN B2C AND B2B CUSTOMER MARKETING? 

I think you need to be more targeted in B2B and think about the customer that little bit more. B2B is a bit more niche. You need to do the due diligence – you need to really look at a company and what you need to do for them to say yes to you. 

WHAT DID YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO BE WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER? 

I wanted to be a footballer. I got quite far in my former life. I moved to Bristol to play football at 16 and played semi-professionally across a lot of teams in London for a few years. And it was kind of like that time when it was like, I need to make a decision. This isn’t quite happening as I wanted it to. Professionally, what am I going to do? 

WHAT’S THE BEST WORK YOU’VE BEEN INVOLVED IN DURING YOUR CAREER?

It was probably a customer story that I did in one of my previous roles. We did it remotely, interviewing on something like Zoom. It was quite an interesting one because the finished product was really good, a lot was going on behind the scenes, and there was a very quick turnaround.

We used it for a customer marketing campaign for a beta product. The interest was really strong, and the sales team was really happy. We had more inbound leads for that new product than we’d ever had.

WHAT’S THE BEST B2B CAMPAIGN OF ALL TIME?

Slack has an ongoing video testimonial campaign where they almost take the mick out of themselves, but they do it in a really sort of smart way. They go to a customer that’s using Slack, who explains how they’ve used it, and how Slack is brought to life. 

I really enjoyed it because it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it still delivers and explains how good and powerful Slack is. It shows it’s transformative. I like the way that they’ve done it. It’s not done in an obvious way. They’ve really taken away a lot of the formality that you see in B2B. They’ve made it fun, they’ve made it engaging, and they got very serious numbers from it. 

IF YOU WERE GIVEN THE POWER TO AXE ONE B2B MARKETING CLICHÉ FOREVER, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

Some of the buzzwords like  “circle back” and “align”. There’s a long list that I try to avoid. I say some of them sometimes – they slip out and I cringe!