Beyond B2B 3: Investing in B2B Engagement with Amber Naslund at LinkedIn

Lee: Hello and welcome to the Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing. Today, we’re connecting with a shining light in the B2B marketing and sales world, and owner of the coolest social handle there ever was. Yes, I am talking about my longtime pal and Director of Enterprise Sales and Customer Success at LinkedIn, Amber Naslund, also known as “Ambercadabra”. Welcome, Amber.

Amber: That is the-I am going to steal this intro and plaster it all over my everything. That was the best intro ever. Hi, it’s so good to see you.

Lee: It’s so good to see you. Well, awesome. So, when we last caught up in February of this year, you had just landed this amazing role that you’re in today, right? And it was a big change. I am kind of curious if you could share a little bit about that role and how it’s been going.

Amber: Yeah, so thank you. I was promoted to this director role in February after some people might know that I made a pivot from marketing to the sales side of the world about three and a half years ago here at LinkedIn. It was kind of a natural transition because I was in marketing, I was working with marketers as our clients, so I could still kind of leverage my marketing background, but it seemed an opportune moment to kind of make the leap to the commercial side. Now, my expanded scope of responsibility is overseeing a vertical in enterprise tech across North America. All of my clients are in the enterprise tech sector. I oversee several teams of sales account executives, sales managers, and client success managers. We all work with our clients who are media consumers on our LinkedIn platform. So, they buy advertising from LinkedIn, and we try to help them be successful with their marketing programs. It’s kind of fun, exciting, and overwhelming all at the same time. I am grateful to still be working alongside a lot of people that I’ve been working with for the last few years. So, it’s not super far afield from what I’ve been doing, but it’s definitely an expanded scope and responsibility. I am a little bit like a deer in the headlights right now, but all in very good ways.

Lee: Yes, it’s all good. It’s all good. It seems a lot of marketers have gone from “do more with less” to a “wait and see” perspective given some of the uncertainty or because of the uncertainty in the marketplace right now. I am kind of curious, with your focus on enterprise tech, how are the businesses you’re working with adapting to these market conditions?

Amber: Yeah, it’s a lot of what you said. It’s a lot of “wait and see”. Companies that are typically moving at very high velocity and a very high rate of change, and almost an assertive go-to-market motion, are really pumping the brakes and looking for a lot of efficiency and effectiveness metrics for the investments they’re already making in marketing. We don’t see a lot of net new dollars coming into marketing budgets. If anything, we’re seeing some budget retraction or at least holding on to budgets. We’re seeing some shell gaming of money around channels, so they’re mixing up the channel mix. I am seeing a lot of marketers move to more account-based marketing motions and really narrowing their field of view. A lot of it is just all under the umbrella of a little bit of conservative approaches and not a lot of appetite for risk or change. A lot of things that they’ve been doing, they’re kind of trying to put money on the things they know work or have been working for them and playing a little bit of a “wait and see” game to see if any of the volatility in the macro calms down a little bit.

Lee: Yeah, it’s not like we didn’t just go through this a couple of years ago.

Amber: No, weird, right? It’s 2020 all over again in some ways.

Lee: Yeah. Well, one thing that’s different, of course, is now we’ve got AI. AI here, AI there, AI everywhere, right? And there’s an expression I heard recently: “If everyone is using AI to create content, how will anyone ever stand out ?” I am kind of curious what your advice would be for marketers about how to avoid being consumed by AI rather than being empowered by it.

Amber: I am going to sound a little bit like a broken record for anybody who knows me, but you cannot neglect the mid and upper funnel investment for brand. I think in B2B, again, we shot ourselves in the foot by taking DemandGen and performance marketing and pulling it into its own segment on the org chart and treating it as if it’s this separate and distinct thing. I’ll talk to people and they’ll be like, “Well, we’re just focusing on DemandGen right now”. And that means to them that they’re focusing on motions that are very bottom-of-funnel, contact and email capture kind of stuff, or anything that leads to what they would consider a marketing qualified lead. The problem is, it’s just an engine; if you don’t put fuel in the thing, it’s going to stop running at a certain point. If you saturate the demand in the market that already exists, you’re going to find yourself in a world full of hurt six months from now, where you’ve reaped all of the demand that exists, but you haven’t done the job of creating any demand from the audiences who don’t know who you are yet. And unless you’re Coca-Cola or Adobe or a brand who doesn’t have an awareness problem – and what I’ll tell you, the big secret, they all do brand marketing, all of them – because they never take for granted that brand domination is something that they will get to ride forever and ever. So, they keep feeding the beast to make sure that demand is perpetual. I cannot underscore enough how important the more crowded the space has become, the more noisy our market is, the more important that cut-through is for brand salience. If you’re not on the short list, it’s going to be because nobody knew who you were to begin with. So, I know it feels counterintuitive. I know it’s scary when you’re trying to prove the value and the return on your marketing investments on a spreadsheet somewhere, but it’s a long-term play. Marketing has always been a long-term play, and we have to get back to investing in that.

Lee:  LinkedIn’s own research from the B2B Institute shows that only 5% of the market is in-market, and 95% is out-of-market. So, you’ve got to pay attention to that 95% if you want to even be in the playing field for that 5% consideration. Absolutely.

Amber: Absolutely. Everybody learns about a brand for the first time at some point. And it’s our job as marketers to be the catalyst for that. Nobody walks into a world of B2B buying consideration doing fresh research. They’ve already got a list of those front-runners in their head, and that’s brand marketing. So, I’ll preach that until the day they retire me or make me go into the woods somewhere, because it is a very under-invested thing in B2B marketing, and it’s also very misunderstood. So, that’s my, “If you’re going to do one thing for the rest of 2025, put that in your budget,” because you’re going to need it. Yep.

Lee: Yeah, be relevant. So, what keeps you inspired? You’re doing a lot, and you’re moving into, you’re in this new role, and you’ve got a lot of responsibilities, but I am just curious, what keeps you motivated in your career? Are there books or processes, habits, personal philosophies that guide you?

Amber: There are a couple of things, I guess. I’ve actually been doing a lot of personal work. The book that I am working on is all about-it’s called The Courageous Career. And for me, that’s all about divorcing your identity from what you do for work. So, it’s about how you separate who you are from what you do. So that has been keeping me very energized outside of my day-to-day.

Because it’s something I believe very much in, and it’s a very personal thing for me because it’s a journey that I’ve walked and had to make my own peace with. So that keeps me energized. On the work front, being in a new role is really energizing, even while it’s overwhelming. But as cliché as it sounds, the thing that keeps me coming back to work every single day is my team and my customers. The most fun I have is when I get to get out in the field and on the road and in meetings with clients, brainstorming and problem-solving and having a laugh over a drink and dinner. It’s, man, we talked about the human element in marketing; the human element in business is the thing that keeps me coming back. I have an awesome team. I have awesome people that I work with. And at the end of the day, I am just selling ads for a living. No, I am not curing cancer. So for me, the most important thing that I can do is cultivate the human connections that carry far beyond the scope of my job description because those are the ones that endure anyway. So, my team and my customers are the things I go back to on the days when I am feeling low energy. That’s what brings me back.

Lee: Fantastic. Well, that’s why I feel such a great connection with you because we have that same perspective on what creates power and motivation and inspiration. Courageous Career, right? The book? Well, what’s our timeframe for this? What…

Amber: Yeah, I don’t know if there are any agents listening to this. Let me know because I’d love to get a proposal in front of somebody. I am refining the proposal right now, so I am hoping to shop it in the next couple of months, so we’ll see if it gets picked up.

Lee: Okay, I will DM you contact afterward on talking. Absolutely.

Amber: Amazing. See? That’s why I keep you around. I’ve been sitting on the shelf for years, so I have to get my act together.

Lee: Okay, so where would you, I guess it’s kind of a leading question, but where can people, what’s the best place for people to find out more about you, the work you’re doing? Hey, maybe they want to buy ads on LinkedIn.

Amber: Yeah, it’s not weird. Weirdly enough, you can find me on LinkedIn. That’s where I am talking. But that really is actually where I do a lot of my online stuff these days. So if you just go to LinkedIn and type in Amber Naslund, you can find me pretty easily. And I have a Courageous Career newsletter on there that you can subscribe to. But yeah, that’s where most of my content is. And you can always DM me there if I can help on the business front.

Lee: Super, well I’ll make sure we include links in the notes for this. Thank you so much Amber, I really appreciate it. It’s always lovely to talk with you. You’re a fountain of knowledge and that shining light for great B2B marketing and sales. Thanks for your time.

Amber: It’s my pleasure as always, my friend. Thank you for having me.

Lee: Well, I want to thank everyone for tuning into the Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast. Make sure that you do subscribe so you can stay tuned for our next guest. And remember, there’s no better time than now to break free of boring B2B.