This article originates from a panel at the Revenue Marketing Summit in London, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
In today's highly competitive landscape, successful marketing requires more than just a strong brand and a compelling message. Companies must be customer-obsessed, and have a cross-functional approach that involves all aspects of the organization.
If you missed this panel at our London event, don’t worry! You can catch up right here by reading all the incredible insights from our speakers:
đź”· Chris Hooper, Global Director of Content Marketing and Creative at Veriff
đź”· Keith Povey, Director of Revenue Marketing at Panaseer
Read their thoughts on cross-functional and customer-obsessed marketing, including:
- Organizational structures and relationships
- The importance of customer empathy and obsession
- Why marketing needs to shed its subservient role
- Shifting mindsets towards revenue alignment and unified customer understanding
- Strategic marketing and putting the customer at the center
Organizational structures and relationships
Keith Povey: Hello everyone, I’m Keith Povey, I run a team of 10 in a series B cybersecurity startup with ridiculously unrealistic growth goals on a quarterly basis that keeps me awake at night.
Chris Hooper: I'm Chris Hooper, I work for a company called Veriff, which is a global IDV, identity, and verification specialist. We primarily sell to financial services companies.
My role is primarily around content, I look after our global content team. I've worked most recently for a company called GoCardless, in the FinTech space. And then prior to that, I was working at consultancy capacity for very big tech companies, the big cloud providers.
So I've seen both sides of things from that big multi-faceted, organizational way, through to something that's a bit more manageable and growing. So, let’s start with the cross-functional bit first.
Keith Povey: I think it's come up so many times, the words alignment and sales. The nemesis/best friend of all of us. The closet marketers, because it's so easy to be a marketer, right? Because everybody in sales can tell you how to do it. We’ve all felt those pains.
But cross-functional probably needs to go a lot wider than that, particularly if you're not connected to product. Are your messages on point and up to date? If you're not talking to customer success, are your ICP and your persona as accurate as they should be?
If I'm not talking to some of the SEs, for instance, am I really understanding the message around our solution that's actually being communicated in meaningful sales meetings? Does that match what I'm asking my team of development reps to do? And does that match the proof points at the very high end that I'm putting in campaign messaging or an ABM?
I strongly believe marketing is the hub to all those spokes. Because we speak to customers, to prospects, we should be speaking to everybody inside our business. And we're the amalgamation of all those different points of view.
And that's why we're normally very empathetic people because we have to listen to all those points of view and then convert them into something that we then deliver to a prospect. So I think it has to be cross-functional.
Chris Hooper: I totally agree. How you manage that relationship between marketing and sales shows that there's a dysfunction to a certain extent, because they are essentially two sides of the same coin, and they should be the same thing.
From an organizational design perspective, we've certainly had that in my previous role at GoCardless, we essentially scrapped the marketing team and created something called the growth team, which was an amalgamation of marketing and sales. Lots of mini-alignments around customer groupings were what we were basing things on.
It was an exciting approach I've never done it before and it's something I've taken across to my role here because I feel like having the SDRs for example, is the first front line of sales who were doing those initial outreach calls.
Having them reporting into what was marketing is just in itself a huge leap because you've all of a sudden got access to a new sales channel at the very beginning of the sales process, which is something that was lacking before.
So I think the way that you structure the organization is really, really important, and I fully appreciate that, but not everybody is going to be in the same situation. If you’re a huge behemoth of an organization, changing that is a conversation that's gonna take years.
But the luxury that we have as organizations of our size is that we can put a stamp on it and say: “This is the way it should be structured.” And then you can picture it as you grow as an organization.
Keith Povey: Yeah, definitely. And I think that's why some of us that ended up working in startups keep going back to startups because we see the value in shaping it.
And you've probably gone through some pretty horrific pain. But then you've learned a lesson, even though every organization is unique, you've learned a lesson to come back through and do it a little bit better each time.
People think startups grow steadily over time, but it’s actually more sporadic. They reach points where they go: “Okay, now we need to change”, and then there are huge amounts of radical change, and then there's a settling period, and then there's another.
I've made mistakes about being cross-functional, or what my relationship with sales might be, and stuff like that. And I don't want to go through that again.
Chris Hooper: Yeah. So as I said not everyone is going to be in that fortunate situation where you can mold the organization and make it look like what you want it to look like and have that best practice.
But I think even then there are some small steps that you can take to move in this direction. It’s also the luck factor. If you suddenly just hit upon something that works, which is completely out of the blue.
You can engineer that a little bit by experimenting, and just trying something and taking a very small team, focusing it on something, and maybe making that your little cross-functional pilot, where you have:
- Sales,
- Products,
- Your classic marketing functions,
- Maybe business intelligence,
- And whoever else needs to be involved in that.
It’s a very small pilot program you can run, just to show that it works.
Where I found it to be most successful is aligning it around the customer part of this conversation. Sometimes you can take that small team and say: “This is a particular customer or grouping of customers that we're going to go after.” And then that's your pilot because then all of a sudden you can attribute metrics to it.
You can test whether it was a success or failure. Did we win this deal? Did we not? Did we get more business out of them? So I think having that customer-centricity is probably the same angle to this conversation. But it's just the underlying piece about how you build that foundation in the first place.
The importance of customer empathy and obsession
Keith Povey: If you've got cross-functional hubs, you're able to take feedback. So if you're customer-obsessed, for instance, is it your ideal customer profile? Or is it actually people that you've sold to that you want to retain?
So, for instance, what we sell is six figures a year, and a minimum of a three-year contract. It’s really complicated, and it's sticky. It’s a 12 to 18-month sales cycle. So I have to wait a year and a half before I see any value.
So we've got customers that we've onboarded, even in the last nine months, they're not really ready to tell me what they feel about the platform because they haven't used it for a year yet. So getting advocacy and getting feedback is tough.
We've only got 20 or so customers. On any given day three or four of them might be annoyed for some reason, because customers like to get annoyed with us, right? And then you've got five or six that we've only added in the last nine months, they can't really help me.
So now my pool of customers that can give me valuable feedback is only about eight. And then those eight get badgered by customer success, by upsell, by product, by beta releases, by all of these things. And then there's me in the back going: “Can you just tell me how I sell to other people like you in the future?” They haven't got that time.
So being customer-obsessed is about delving into the world that you want to be in contact with. Relentlessly trying to align your tactics to your persona at every single step. Be obsessed with whether what you do meets the person you want to meet at the other end.
I think we're all guilty sometimes of firing the odd thing out that you think might hit a little bit, but also might miss but you're comfortable with that because the thing needs to get done. Whereas actually, whether you're HSBC or Veriff, you can't afford that waste of your time and effort.
Chris Hooper: Yeah, it's very true. And I think there's no finish line with that stuff. Even with your persona developer, for example, it's constantly evolving, almost like a living organism. The more information that's coming in every six months or every quarter, that persona is altering ever so slightly, and the needs of it and how it's responding to external stimuli and so on.
Keith Povey: Definitely. I got the persona equivalent of a kick on the shin about two or three months ago when I actually got to speak to two or three chief information security officers. I was chatting with them, and I just came out and went: “What do you read?” And all three of them from different sizes and types of organizations said: “We don't have time.”
One of them said: “I get easily 300 to 400 emails a day from someone like you, or organizations like you. And I don't even have time to delete them. So I have rules in my outbox.
“People I know and people I don’t know, and if I don't know who you are, you go out, you're wasting your time. I don't have time to watch a full webinar, I don't have time to read a full white paper. I don't even really normally have time to scroll through LinkedIn. Because can you imagine what my inbox looks like on a daily basis?”
And I said: “So how do I get to speak to you guys and girls?” And he said: “Like this, you need to catch us in a place where we're probably surrounded by our own peers. And don't sell us anything. Because we've been assaulted 400 times a day, every day, every week, every month, all year.
“Don't sell us anything. Ask us questions, learn about us, and then walk away. Because we're all intelligent enough to know that when we want you, we’ll come and get you, and we’ll remember you for not selling to us more than we’ll remember you for being in my inbox 12 times.”
Chris Hooper: There are two really good points in there. The first one is about how customer obsession really is what it means, that you have to have an understanding and empathy with that customer, right?
So you understand the problem they've got, in this instance, that they've got 400 emails coming in every day. So how do we cut through that? And how do we build a relationship with them that enables us to grow together?
The second point, how you get to that, is something you've just said which is a real rarity. How many marketers have actually spoken to their customers? It's a hard thing to do because most of the conversations are usually sales, right?
They're the ones who have that ownership of the back and forth. So if you can insert yourself into that conversation, I think that's where you get those learnings that don't necessarily come from your research team who are talking about the big industry trends and pain points for this year and things like that.
So if you can actually have a conversation, as you did, and say, what is it that you're struggling with? What's the problem that you're trying to solve? That's when you can start to bring in an understanding of that. And then four or five stages down the line, you can say, well actually we've got a solution for this. That's a different kind of selling. It's more subtle and empathetic.
Keith Povey: I played it back to my VP of Sales, and suggested we reach out like this. And he's actually very on board with not selling, or what he calls going left. This is, instead of asking the question: “Why would you buy it?” instead it’s: “This is obviously not of interest to you, I’ll leave you alone”.
And throughout the sales process, he forces people to come back to him with the affirmative, as opposed to chasing the affirmative, which takes some getting used to. And there are a lot of salespeople that aren't fully on board with it but are trying their hardest. It works, especially in what we sell, but he came back and was uncomfortable.
So I've had direct feedback from CISOs saying: “I don't read anything. It's not that I don't want to, I just don't have the time to consume this information. I expect my direct reports to raise it with me.”
And then I explained what we said, whether there was an angle there, and it made him uncomfortable because we all want to be customer obsessed, but the kind of the pull factor is we're answerable to these Lords and Masters that want to see results.
They want to see growth, they want to see revenue pipeline, they want to see tracked stats. And sometimes I think that's because they aren't necessarily experts in marketing.
Sometimes being customer obsessed as marketers is easier, but trying to make other portions of an organization be just as customer-service-obsessed, has to be a cultural thing.
Chris Hooper: I totally agree with that. And I think it's this good fortune of the level of industry that we're at, in these growing organizations where you're creating that connection, and embodying that customer obsession in your outward facing material is where you can really lean on the leaders within your organization.
So we’re quite lucky; I've got a very willing and personable founder and CEO who's more than willing to go out and have these conversations with peers, and network in that way. It's a good way of just getting that out there and making a human connection that can then translate into eventual revenue.
And I think that you can do that to a certain extent in the content world. If the C-suite person is the target, that's the one we're all trying to get to from a B2B point, they may not even be the final decision maker, they might just be the final approver.
But the decision has been made a couple of rungs down. So these folks down here are the ones you need to also be building your rapport with, casting your net wider, but in a more targeted sense, because relationship building at this level is equally as important as this one up here. It's a tricky balance to do.
But I think that leveraging leadership, leveraging experts within your business, because we find it in the IDV (Identity Verification) space, most of our customers don't really know what IDV is, they know they’ve got a problem, but they don't necessarily know what the solution is. So it’s about painting that picture for them.
Why marketing needs to shed its subservient role
Keith Povey: Is there anyone that doesn't consider themselves customer obsessed? I think the keyword there is obsessed, right? Because I think the customer comes into everything that we do every day. But is there anyone willing to admit that they might not be customer obsessed?
I would say I'm on my way to trying to make next year customer obsessed. I took this job 14 months ago, and I had some really basic hygiene things to build.
And I kind of had to ignore some of the stuff that I knew might be more sophisticated or elegant. I've been more sledgehammer than scalpel recently. And next year I need a little more finesse. And I think customer obsession comes into that.
Is there anyone here that doesn't agree at all with that statement? Is there a bigger thing that should be the future of marketing?
Audience member: It’s like a marriage. And marriage is hard. It’s like, why does it always feel like marketing has to try and make it work? Do we fall into a danger within marketing that we're so cross-aligned, that we're having touchpoints with so many bits of the business, that you lose that gut sense of what works within marketing?
Very rarely in my experience has that ever been reciprocated. You go into the meeting ready to change the world and it’s just met with mute. It just doesn't come the other way.
Keith Povey: I totally agree. I think there are two points to it. One is good old-fashioned Myers Briggs. Generally, we have empathy, we have a personality, and we have a degree of being outgoing. And even if we're introverts, we're happy to be faux extroverts in order to get our job done. All of these things tend to be a characterization of marketers.
Now, we're a lot more data-based, and the fluffiness has gone away because we've worked really hard to make it go away.
But I think there's a character, whether the marketing attracts the character, or the character builds what marketing is, I think we are just naturally people that are happy to open the door to someone that we haven't spoken to before. I think we all have those characteristics.
You can see things that are broken, and I go: “I'm just gonna ring the Customer Success Director, I've never spoken to him before, I've got a problem.” And generally, people react quite well to that. I don't think it's fair to have marriages where only one person makes the effort.
The second part is, the fluffiness, the make this look pretty stuff has irked me for years. But we've worked really hard to get rid of that myth that that's what we do. And I think in the modern world it's now the exception, not the rule when people don't see value in what you do in some way, shape, or form.
I think the next thing we need to do is work to get rid of this subservience that marketing has attached to it. Because I do think we drive how we talk to a customer, how we engage with our customer, we set the narrative for:
- How we're going to sell,
- What the expectations of the product are going to be,
- What people will expect of us as a brand and as a culture and as what those values are. We set all of that.
So why are we subservient? Why do we serve sales, or serve the business? We drive it. And I think there's now a mindset shift that we should all take the mantle up in the next five to 10 years to shed that. And then I think that contribution would be more even.
Chris Hooper: I'd agree with that. From a tactical point of view, when you're having those sessions, where you do a workshop for sales as the example you had, and it's just stony silence, I think a one size fits all approach never works.
So there's a lot of trial and error involved. And I think that there's an empathy level to this as well with your own internal people. So going to sales and saying: “This session didn't work.” Why? What is it? What would work next time? That's the conversation we need to have in order for us to show you what our worth is.
We're quite fortunate at Veriff in that marketing does have a seat on the board. And I think the business strategy as a whole is probably driven by us. Certainly, we put the presentation together that went to the investors. We're quite fortunate that we get to mold that and set that in the early stages of things.
Shifting mindsets towards revenue alignment and unified customer understanding
Keith Povey: So does anyone else think the future of marketing is something else? Is there anything else that the future of marketing should be?
Audience member: Probably one existential comment or question when you talk about how big or small your target group is. My thought was, do you need marketing at all? Whether sales will be enough to drive those conversations and have those roundtable discussions with clients.
It's the type of question we need to ask ourselves, how we sell ourselves internally to be still needed. If we talk about growth and revenue enablement, do we need marketing at all? Or what do we mean by marketing?
Chris Hooper: I love that question. Partly because I think it's, to a certain extent, it’s a naming thing, right? We've got lots of other different names that we can call ourselves. But I think what that is reflective of is a mindset shift as well.
And I've certainly seen it in the last two organizations that I've worked at where the alignment around revenue is something that crosses both marketing and sales to the extent that they don't really exist as separate functions anymore, which is the ideal state that we've all been talking about. So to actually get there is quite a nice feeling.
But the way my previous place GoCardless had it was essentially looking at revenue targets that were equally applicable to everyone within that cross-functional team.
And the measure of success is whether they hit them or not. So taking that sales bonus structure where we need to win this deal, or we need to upsell whatever it may be, and applying that to marketing people as well, aligns their thinking around the same thing.
So all of a sudden marketing doesn’t need to exist anymore, it's part of this bigger unit. It's just one small function of it. Do you agree with that?
Keith Povey: Well, I'm now in revenue marketing, and that's the first time I've taken a job title where that has been the explicit thing. And even that felt like a shift. Because I'm targeted and bonused and all these other things, not on MQLs, my CMO doesn't care.
I am in the first stage of qualified sales opportunities carried forward. So yes, it's only 10%. For those of you that are Salesforce bunnies, it's only 10% and onwards. But there’s no recognition for me until it hits that point.
I also don't agree the MQLs are dead, which was the popular white paper in the last three or four years, where everyone wanted to just tear it down. I still use those metrics, it's just not my ultimate target.
And because of that, my attitude to how I work with sales, those lines are blurred. There's a crossover, there's not a point where we hand over the fence, we're both in the same place. So I have this great big leap into sales. I think it is evolving.
Chris Hooper: So are you saying then that the previous classic marketing metrics around engagements or click-throughs and lead-generating things are now completely meaningless? Or are they just milestones on the way to revenue?
Keith Povey: I think they're milestones. I think as technology attribution, visibility, and transparency, improve, probably due to technology and understanding, because we can see further in, therefore the more critical metric moves along. But there's still an argument to know if I need to talk to 100 CISOs to engage 10 in meaningful conversations to convert one.
It's not necessarily that you should put metrics on something near the top. But knowing where to spend, where to put resources, where to focus down, all of those things, I need those perspectives and those proportions to understand that I'm not completely out of whack.
I don't want to reach June and go: “I've burned 50% of my budget, I've only got now half a year to make a full year's target. Because I didn't have visibility of X up front.”
So I still think they have a value, the MQL is not dead. It's just not the most important metric anymore, it's one of many. There are countless ways to measure what we do; share of voice, brand reach, influence, impressions, etc.
I’m old enough to not have had those metrics 20 years ago. So we're lucky. But I think also the important metrics vary depending on your organization.
Chris Hooper: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that what matters in one place doesn't necessarily matter in another. Maybe my view is slightly jaded by the fact that I've recently been to places where there’s no distinction between marketing and sales.
So maybe I've just been fortunate, but it does feel to me as though that's the way things are trending. Having worked in both I can see a lot of benefit from this approach.
It feels like that system is more customer aligned as well. It feels like there's more understanding of the customer in that way. A more unified understanding of the customer. In the old world, there was a marketing understanding of what the customer was and a sales understanding of what the customer was, and quite often they weren't the same.
And quite often they were in complete conflict with each other. So there’s now a more unified view of things. It feels to me as though that's the way to go, it feels as though it's a better way.
Strategic marketing and putting the customer at the center
Audience member: I think the future of marketing is just better strategic marketing. As marketers, what we can do that brings a lot of value to the board is understand the customer and represent the customer, we can then use that to plan market orientation, strategy, messaging, striking the right balance between brand versus demand, all of that stuff.
And while I think revenue is that bridge to bring together sales and marketing, I think it just comes back to some of the basic marketing fundamentals, which often get forgotten with new tactics.
Things like good communication, and good alignment. And I think not getting lost in tactics, setting the strategy at the top, doing some of the fundamentals really well, I think that solves a lot of the recurring issues.
Chris Hooper: I totally agree with that. We've just formulated our strategy for next year, which is to take a more sub-verticalized approach, to take our verticals and break them down to become even more customer-obsessed, and get more in there in the weeds with it, working on three new ones every quarter.
And that was something that we presented and was agreed to at board level. And so from there, once you've got that buy-in, it filters down and it's communicated as a business-wide objective.
So our whole business now is focusing on these three sub-verticals in Q1 next year. And then all of a sudden, there's just a way things are working now, and we can be a bit more hands-off with things because we know that everyone is aligned around this stuff as well.
So we've kind of won that battle as it were, and then we can start to concentrate on the tactical stuff that gets things done. And we could only have done that with access to the board for sure.
Keith Povey: If you boil marketing back over the last 50 or 60 years, at its core, the customer should always have been at the center of marketing. I forget which famous advertising magnate said it, but: “50% of my advertising spend works, I just don't know which 50%.”
From that mentality onwards, people have realized that they’re wasting money and time if they’re not trying to talk to a customer. So, yes, I think it's the future.
In a pre-digital world, you were trying to put out a copy or a message, or a product, that customers wanted, it was always central to it. The sub verticalization we're literally doing the same thing.
We've been focused for nearly six years, because of how complex we are, just in financial services. And this year, with a body of data, we realized that we'd sold to some very non-financial services companies in the last 18 months. So, why were we just limiting ourselves to one vertical?
In spite of that, we were selling it to large distribution companies of soup, tires, and all these other things. And if we just listened… but I do sometimes think the corporate machine rolls away, and sometimes you need those little stopping points. Let's check in, are we doing the right thing? My next year is going to be very different.
Chris Hooper: I think that there’s a data angle to this too, and understanding of the data as well. So what does your customer base look like? How much are they spending? Why are they spending this and not this? And so on. So having that is absolutely critical.
We've got quite fortunate where we are to have a really well-developed and mature product marketing team that owns that and does a great job with it. But I think having that data is something that no other team has. So that's maybe our leveraging chip.
We've got this information that no other person in the company has, and influences future product development, influences our go-to-market approach. It influences everything, really. So not having that representative at a leadership level, feels like a big mess.
Keith Povey: It was literally a data-based example of checking back in with your customer.
But I think in fairness, it wasn't wrong. I'm sure at some point two years ago, we went: “Oh, we sell a lot to financial services, they’re rich, they’re complicated, we should go after them”, and then two years on, we've checked back in with our customer on a database and we went: “Oh, that's not true anymore, it's now this shape.” And I think that happens to all of us.
I'll be doing the voice of the customer forums in the first half of next year because I want people to tell us what they need because I don't think we have a clear view of that. And I think that will shape what we do then for the next 18 months. And I'll probably have to do it again and again and again. Because I can't afford the wastage, I can't afford to be wrong.
Chris Hooper: I think that voice of the customer stuff is really important. At Veriff, we only really build new products when a customer asks us to. We've got a base product obviously, but if people using it come and say: “Oh it’d be better if it did this or did that,” or whatever it may be, we then try to build it for them.
So I think even at the company's core, there is a putting the customer first type approach to things, which is not just, here's a product, we'll get it on the market and see what happens. We know that somebody wants this, and if they want it, there's a mirror company over here that will probably want it as well and then we can go from there.
So having that customer-centricity running through everything is crucial. But I feel like the ownership of it is a marketing domain. And it's something that should influence everything that we do, from organization to design, all the way through to tactics.
