End boring B2B marketing by doing deep work
Drew Bear is a B2B SaaS marketer. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Most marketing in B2B SaaS is undifferentiated. And as a result, it’s boring.
“Grow faster and work smarter.” That’s the main website headline for one of the largest enterprise SaaS companies in the world.
Come on. All software you buy for your business should help you grow and work more efficiently.
After spending 12 years working in startups, I've discovered that the reason for this mediocrity is not a lack of marketing talent.
It’s because marketers are too busy with shallow tasks to create great marketing.
Slack alerts, endless email chains, and meetings that could have been messages. These shallow tasks are overflowing on the laptops of marketers around the world.
And they are distracting us from creating our best work as marketers.
A solution that has helped me create some of my best work is the practice of prioritizing deep work. And I think it can help you out too.
Deep work drives your company pipeline
In his book, Deep Work, author Cal Newport, an MIT graduate and professor at Georgetown, defines deep work as “activities you do in your job in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”
The efforts in doing deep work create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate.
To create great marketing, it requires deep, thoughtful, and uncomfortable work that stretches you.
Work that requires sifting through market research, joining sales and customer calls to test and refine product positioning.
It also requires creating partnership programs that enhance your strategic narrative. And developing a strategy that gives value to the 95% of your ideal target market who aren't in market yet to buy from your company.
When you do this, it can lead to directly attributable revenue for your company.
For example, when I was building the agency partner program at Loop Returns, a returns app for fashion brands on Shopify, I spent five hours of deep work with a new agency partner that had yet to refer us any of their clients to use our software.
During those five hours, I analyzed return data from 3,000 brands and created a custom trend report for the agency.
Six months later, they referred their first client to me, resulting in $21,000 in annual recurring revenue for Loop.
I then repurposed that trend report as enablement to share with all my agency partners.
This resulted in an additional $500,000+ in annual recurring revenue for Loop from our agency partners.
The more you do shallow work, the harder it is to do deep work
Here's the catch that most marketers don't realize: the more we default to shallow work — constantly checking email, responding to Slack, and context switching between tasks—the harder it becomes to do deep work.
Research by the University California of Irvine found that on average we spend almost 13 minutes on a task before we are interrupted while working.
And it takes another 15 minutes on average to regain focus and resume the difficult task we had been working on.
The path back to deep work gets steeper with every interruption.
Workfronts 2019 study further affirms this as we see B2B marketers and other knowledge workers only spend 44.5% of their week performing their primary duties of their job. While the remaining 55.5% of their time spent is on meetings and administration work.
We've conditioned ourselves to avoid the mental strain of deep work, choosing instead the comfortable dopamine hits of quick tasks and instant responses.
Here are two proven strategies that have helped me create space for deep work, even in the chaos of startup life.
Strategy 1: Learn like an athlete to control your pace of performing deep work
Watch any great NBA player. Kobe, Lebron James, Michael Jordan.
They all have something in common: they don't play at full speed all the time.
They control the tempo, which will sometimes be explosive and sometimes methodically slow. Pace is a deliberate skill they’ve learned.
The mastery of pace is what separates good players from great ones.
Marketers need to also develop the skill of pace so that they can be more effective in their deep work sessions.
Yet I’ve worked with marketers who operate like rookies.
Pressured by the demands of their C-Suite to deliver results immediately, marketers sprint from deadline to deadline, learning new skills only when projects demand them.
I call this “in-game learning.” Where you scramble to produce results with your current skillset.
There’s nothing wrong with using your existing skillset as a marketer.
But if you’re not intentionally creating space to improve the pace of how you work, you’re limiting yourself from creating better work.
Dan Shipper, Every’s CEO, calls this “Making time to play:”
“.. it doesn't matter if you're an employee, executive, or founder. You have this decision you have to make every day, which is ‘Do I do things the way that I know how and get them done?’ And then I have so much work to do that. Like if I worked the way I know how for 20 hours a day, it still wouldn't be enough. But like I can just get it [my work] done and I can go home. Or do I spend two hours playing around with this new tool that may not work?…But the skills are changing really rapidly. And if you have invested the time and you are a little bit more familiar [with a new tool], your rate of progress and your rate of productivity is so much higher. You just need to like be given the space to realize that.”
To master your marketing pace, you need what athletes call an "off-season"—dedicated periods where you deliberately slow down to grow and learn a skill in order to level up.
I know what you're thinking: “Who has time for an off-season when you’re working at a startup?”
An offseason is where you create a personalized learning program to acquire new skills that will help you produce higher quality work in your deep work sessions.
Take copywriting, for example.
Instead of learning it piecemeal across multiple urgent projects, block out two hours every morning for two weeks. During that time, take an online course. Read 1-2 copywriting books. And spend time deliberately practicing copywriting.
Think about the math: 24 hours of focused learning at 80% efficiency beats 50 hours of scattered, reactive learning at 25% efficiency.
For me, I like to look for 2 weeks that are around lighter seasons within the 4 quarters of your business. I like to look for times close to company wide holidays and lighter quarters with less work travel or conferences.
But the real power of these off-seasons isn't just in the efficiency. It's in how this approach lets you control your pace.
With these skills mastered in your off-season, you can shift tempos when needed: sprint through familiar tasks, slow down for strategic thinking, and create the margin needed for deep work.
Just like a veteran player who knows exactly when to accelerate and when to slow the game down.
Strategy 2: ABCC - Always Be Communicating Clarity
I’ve learned that saying "yes" to every request doesn't make you a better marketer. It has the potential to makes you a bottleneck for your team.
Your mission is to protect your deep work time by communicating your active workload with clarity.
Here's how it works:
Never say just "no" to new requests
Instead, respond with "not yet, and here's why"
Show your current project pipeline
Propose clear timelines for the new request
Let me share a personal lesson.
At my last SaaS company, I agreed with our CEO to prioritize building our first outbound email campaign.
Two weeks later, he asked for results. But I hadn't even launched it yet.
What I failed to do was clarify when it would be ready while juggling other priorities.
When we finally reviewed my full project pipeline together, he understood the delay.
This became our new way of working—clear priorities, clear timelines, and protected space for deep work.
I’ve found that the executives and colleagues at the startups you work for are more interested in understanding when something can be done vs when you can start working on it.
Remember, your calendar is the battleground where boring marketing dies and great effective marketing is born.
Protect it fiercely. You’ll be more fulfilled in the work you create if you do.
The next time you feel that familiar discomfort when tackling a challenging marketing project, block the time and clearly communicate your priorities.
Because the best marketing isn't born from busy calendars.
It emerges from those focused hours when you're willing to do the hard things with deep work that other marketers won't.