PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 
 

00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This podcast helps you find out how senior executives, just like you, are building value through marketing. Each episode gives you an insider's perspective of critical marketing issues, why our guests make the decision they make, how they structure their marketing departments, how they build and measure value, and also what they see coming down the road. This is a podcast about marketing's role in modern business, or more precisely, the role of titled marketers, by which I mean those people with marketing in their job title. Today we're talking to a unicorny favorite, one of the stars of season one, Fujitsu's head of Europe marketing transformation, Andrea Clatworthy. Now, last time we met Andrea, she was global head of account based marketing. And we had a good chat about ABM with digital radish's, Renee Edwards, and was delighted to bump into Andrea at the Ignite conference in June when she told me all about her new role.  

 
01:03 
Dom Hawes 
Now, I wanted to find out more. And when you hear what she's doing, I'm sure you will do too. Now, I suspect that her transformation role is how a CEO promotes excellence in marketing to those who have it in their role, if not their job title. And that's part of what I wanted to speak to Andrea about. You see, when we met Andrea, she told me that at Fujitsu, ABM is just business as usual.  

 
01:28 
Andrea Clatworthy 
That's right. One to one, ABM lends itself really well for us. Our customers typically have a really long buying cycle and multiple decision makers. And as you would expect, when an organization is making a big It investment as part of their digital transformation, those things are common. So ABM is a good fit and it's a lovely demonstration of when sales and marketing work together, great results can be achieved. You know what? I'm really proud that I've driven it and Evangelized and made it all happen. It's taken nine years, but now it's so ingrained in how we work. No one needs to actually spearhead it or lead it globally. It's just not necessary. Clearly, there's still champions and leaders in regions and things in the field, and that's where it needs to be in the field. So no requirement in my head for a global role.  

 
02:16 
Andrea Clatworthy 
So job done, as it were.  

 
02:18 
Dom Hawes 
In saying this, Andrea caught my attention immediately. Marketing is evolving, and anyone in B to B knows that Fujitsu andrea have blazed a trail in account based marketing. So is what Andrea is telling me now where the rest of us are going to follow in future? But first, I wanted to find out how Andrea had made the move from a global ABM role into a transformation role. This is what she said.  

 
02:42 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I kind of pondered slightly, what do I do next? And actually quite validly, I could have stayed doing what I was doing, helping countries and regions with their ABM sharing best practice all those things that you do when you're centrally coordinating things. And great to have a grand job title, but I'm not very good at not having a challenge and something to really get my teeth into. And working in a global role in a large organization, you're kind of layers away from the customer, from the sharp end of the business, if you like, and I was missing that. So I want to get back to that proximity with the customer, with our salespeople and doing that within the business part of the work. So I had a chat with the head of Europe region and that's where I'm physically based. So going back to Europe from global would have made sense.  

 
03:25 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Well, we're going four regions and Europe is the biggest one outside of Japan. And I said, Can I come back? Yes, please, was the response. Great. So then we had to work out what I was going to do. So we devised this role. Rather than kind of just plop me back in and augment the team, let's take this opportunity with additional headcount to do something different. So we devised this role head of transformation, and that's what I'm doing and it's brilliant and I love it.  

 
03:51 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me a little bit about the day to day role you have in transformation, because I'm fascinated by any company that is decentralizing, any of their decision making, what does it look like and feel like?  

 
04:02 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Interestingly, we're not decentralizing OOH, so we're doing a hybrid, if you like, which makes it a really interesting challenge. So we're centralizing quite a lot of things. Some key decisions are centralized, some key teams are centralized, but the front end of the business needs that agility and the ability to make on the spot decisions around whatever it may be. Maybe it's an activity, maybe it's something a bit more strategic. So finding the balance is the transformational piece. So what does that mean? Well, first off, you got to build a high performing team in order to be able to operate that way.  

 
04:41 
Dom Hawes 
Andrea, thank you very much. That's amazing context to start with. I guess part of the problem here is that B, two B organizations and marketing in them are changing. What are you seeing?  

 
04:51 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I'm definitely seeing ABM taking a more leading role in the go to market, which I think is a great thing. I would say that, wouldn't I, from where I've come from. But I'm also seeing some changes, perhaps, where there's a new role at Chief Revenue Officer. So that's changing slightly the way that marketing needs to position itself and what it needs to do and how it reports. So some joined up KPIs is a good thing. So we're moving away from just MQLs and thinking about what are we doing to actually bring in the revenue. Of course, that's winning deals as well as creating opportunities at the start of the pipe. And I think the technology piece is definitely playing a role. There's been loads of examples recently where people have made a big investment in Martech and they're not really used it correctly. So now they're rethinking what's their Martech strategy and what skills and processes they actually need to have in place in their teams to make the best use of that technology.  

 
05:41 
Dom Hawes 
Is that part of the transformation role, kind of bringing all of that stuff together? So are you the CRO's best friend?  

 
05:47 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Not yet.  

 
05:50 
Dom Hawes 
Do you think the pandemic and the volatility and uncertainty that followed it is going to have a lasting impression on how marketing gets done?  

 
05:58 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, I think so. We all learned a lot about how to do digital during that time and I don't think we're going to forget those lessons. I think there was also a realization from our sales colleagues that actually they needed marketing to enable the engagement and the ongoing conversations with customers that couldn't happen because they couldn't do the face to face stuff. So what's the impact now? Well, for most companies, and I know the same for ours, that sales and marketing alignment is even closer than it was before. So I really hope that stays.  

 
06:26 
Dom Hawes 
Let's just focus on Fujitsu very quickly. You mentioned briefly in the intro, I thought that there was this process of decentralization going on, but actually it's hybrid. Can you describe the marketing organization to me at Fujitsu, please?  

 
06:40 
Andrea Clatworthy 
It's actually quite complex. There's a lot of people in marketing. So we've got a large headquarter function that look after things like the brand core strategy and we're building some additional headquarter located teams to service the regions. So then we've got a whole regional level, which very small teams, but they are the hub for the countries. All of our field people are in the country and increasingly we're asking them to work differently and to use the teams that we're creating at headquarter level that partially replace the more traditional agency model.  

 
07:15 
Dom Hawes 
So kind of inhousing some of the agency work.  

 
07:17 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah.  

 
07:17 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me about the pace of change you're seeing in customers and what you think is driving that.  

 
07:22 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I think there's more than one reason what's quite interesting when somebody moves, so our target market primarily CIO. When one of them moves, there's a domino effect.  

 
07:31 
Dom Hawes 
Okay?  

 
07:32 
Andrea Clatworthy 
And that drives a pace of change to some degree because everyone needs to prove themselves in their new role. And sometimes that's really handy for us because they'll want to bring us with them. But sometimes, perhaps in an established customer or it's a new CIO that doesn't know us, then there's a whole different thing going on. And that slows down the pace of change from the buying decisions that we're seeing. But I think companies are dealing with their own digital transformation, their own sustainability transformation, and these things are boardroom level agendas. So they really need to be thinking carefully about the investments that they make whilst doing it at the pace that their stakeholders, their investors expect.  

 
08:10 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah. Change seems to be everywhere at the moment. Yeah. And it's hard. I know we're only a tiny organization, but if you try and change too much, people think you're fickle. But actually, consistency is much admired quality in people, but it's hard to be consistent when there's so much change going on. All agree change increases complexity, particularly of how you handle response to the market. How are you at Fujitsu? Kind of building agility and building that ability to respond to change into your organizational design?  

 
08:44 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Great question. So for us it's really clear, so very strong and clear strategy from Global Headquarters and that sets the direction for everybody. So big central decisions are made there. But then as we go down in this hybrid model that I was describing before, the faster decisions are made at the coalface with customers. That gives us the agility to do what our customers need us to do when they're asking at the same time aligning to our strategy. So it's kind of layers, if you like, layers of decision making and speed and depending upon the strategic need gives us that flexibility. It's almost agile.  

 
09:20 
Dom Hawes 
What you're doing is a very different approach, I think. I guess that's the role of transformation because this is a big change from the traditional kind of hub and spoke model. You've kind of got the best of both worlds. Is the driver for this. Is it efficiency or speed? What's the main driver behind the new model you're creating?  

 
09:39 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I think it's consistency so our recent brand results told us that weren't quite consistent in every market so to do that you've got to do something top down really, haven't you? So I think that's driving quite a lot of it. And we're evolving as a company. Most people know that Fujitsu for It infrastructure, but actually we're all about digital transformation and sustainable transformation and they're different things. So in order to reposition ourselves, we've got to be consistent.  

 
10:08 
Dom Hawes 
I'm no fan of job titles. They make sense in an.org chart, but not so much sense in real life. In my opinion, the roles people play are much more important than the titles that describe them. And if you look at a modern, progressive and thriving B to B organization, you'll find elements of what used to be marketing in the roles of many people. Even if they haven't got marketing in their job titles.org, charts make businesses rigid. They're antithetical to both agility and transformation. And as we've just heard from Andrea, customer change is increasing complexity. The way to manage complexity in your environment is to increase flexibility in your organization. But that comes with risks. The role of marketing in these circumstances is to keep the proposition, the reason people buy from you, the measurable value you create consistent in the customer's mind. That takes a lot of skill.  

 
11:03 
Dom Hawes 
And it means the role of marketing might best left in the hands of what I'm calling titled marketers. I was recently told about one b to b CEO leading a giant, and I mean a giant business who let it be known that he doesn't believe in marketing. So when he acquires new businesses, anyone with marketing in their job title is purged. Those that want to survive post acquisition, they delete marketing from their job titles. Now, do you think that means this business doesn't do marketing? Of course not. Marketing is like air to a company. You can't be in business if you don't market anymore than you can live without breathing. The CEO's choice, therefore, is to live without marketers, not to live without marketing. And that, in my opinion, is a bad choice because marketing will still happen. It's just not going to get done by marketing people.  

 
11:53 
Dom Hawes 
Now, if you're happy having your dentistry done by non dentists, this probably won't seem problematic to you, but personally, I want qualified dentists to look after my teeth. So I also expect proven marketers to lead marketing. But the issue is this however you set up your marketing organization, marketing still happens. And as I said, if you look at a modern, progressive and thriving B, two B organization, you'll find elements of what used to be marketing in the roles of many people, even if they haven't got marketing in their job titles. So you better get pretty used to the fact you're going to have to train non marketers in marketing. Let's focus in on some of the risks of decentralization and having non titled marketers executing marketing angio. What are the risks of decentralizing, your marketing and decision making?  

 
12:41 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I think there's a lot. There's probably three key ones that we could mention today. There's that potential dilution in terms of strategy and brand and all those sorts of things. There's the inefficiencies of resourcing, as inevitably there'll be some duplication or overlap. And the other potential hazard of centralization rather than decentralization is shadow marketing popping up.  

 
13:01 
Dom Hawes 
That's very interesting. We're going to come back to that, but first let's unpack the other two a little bit before we look at how we can mitigate that kind of risk. So decentralization potentially dilutes your ability to execute a strategy. Where do you see strategy might be diluted? And what would the effect of that be to the business? What does it mean to a customer?  

 
13:19 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I think there's some really subtle nuance on this and it's over time. If you could think about it, if a local market is pandering to the needs of their customer, which is the right thing to do, then that might deviate ever so slightly from the core messaging of the brand in terms of the propositions they're trying to land. Over time, that could morph. Then it's quite conceivable, perhaps, that a customer or prospect or the market in generally are getting different messages from different parts of the business and then that leads to confusion. And if confusion exists, then it's quite possible again that a customer or prospect might not naturally have that supplier front of mind when they're making a selection.  

 
13:54 
Dom Hawes 
There's also an element on the strategic side that if strategy is not being driven from the center, the execution of it is really hard locally. And that might lead on to the second point, which is kind of inefficiencies and I guess inefficiency the obvious thing is duplication of resource. I suppose if you are decentralizing a lot in different markets, but is that titled duplication or is that like a functional duplication?  

 
14:18 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I think it's more functional and capability bandwidth driven. If you move into centralizing a model, then quite typically what would happen, and we've all seen this. You have the best people from the countries and regions move into central HQ for all the right reasons, because they're great at what they do. But then the country or region lose that resource, the best will in the world, that person or group of people don't have the bandwidth to do for that country or region that they came from, what they did before. So there's a real problem there. If you flip that back around, okay, we've got this centralized bunch of awesome people, but it makes sense to have them decentralized. But you can't split one person ten ways, can you? So you're going to have to duplicate them back in the field.  

 
14:59 
Dom Hawes 
Does that change the role? Maybe I mentioned in our mid role just then about not being a fan of job titles, and I guess that's where I'm coming from because if you're building a cell structure, for example, rather than a hierarchical one, there'll be certain roles that you can do locally, but you might have other roles as well. And I mean an obvious one that we've talked about today is that kind of harmonizing sales and marketing. So are you in the kind of the hybridity, if you like, that you're looking at Fujitsu? Are you having to change and morph roles locally?  

 
15:27 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yes, but it's not straightforward. You can't draw it on an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, there's lots of nuance. Some roles are better done by specialists. Would you have your webmaster also be an ABM, for example? Right, extreme view. But it's those sorts of things that you have to think about. And in some of our countries, actually, where we've only got one marketeer, they've got to wear several hats. Okay, that's very difficult then, to enable them to be experts or masters at all those different marketing disciplines they've got to think about.  

 
16:01 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, by definition, I think if you got only one, you have to be a generalist, I guess. And I mean, I think many companies are like that and that's why they use agencies. Now you're building that specialist capability in the center, presumably to support the regions.  

 
16:12 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, absolutely.  

 
16:13 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, let's move on. To the fascinating subject of shadow marketing. Talk to me about that.  

 
16:18 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I've seen this loads of times. I'm sure everybody else recognizes the concept. So what are we talking about? We're talking about marketing capability. Normally people, a person perhaps that pops up somewhere in a part of the business that have declared to themselves that they're not getting the marketing support they need from the existing function. And maybe they've asked and it's not happened, or maybe it's not lined to structure, whatever. For whatever reason, they've decided that they're going to make an investment in a person and some budget. And that's shadow marketing. And normally back to your title question. They don't have a marketing job title because it needs to be hidden. They don't want to lose it. They want their great new person with budget to get sucked into that central function.  

 
17:01 
Dom Hawes 
So they call them something else, but they're actually doing marketing roles. What are the risks?  

 
17:06 
Andrea Clatworthy 
There massive risks. So if they're working independently, then they're probably not aligned to the brand or strategy. So all those things were talking about before, major risks, they just won't be aware of this massive engine that's going on. They're also likely to bring on agencies that perhaps aren't on the preferred supplier list because they're not tapped into all those processes and policies that exist.  

 
17:26 
Dom Hawes 
Big risk from corporate, but obviously existential risk to the local person who's creating the shadow marketing function.  

 
17:33 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, it's going to get their knuckles wrapped somewhere, aren't they?  

 
17:36 
Dom Hawes 
At very best.  

 
17:37 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Or it works and that part of the business flourishes and then they say, okay then, okay. Yeah. And that's why decentralization and centralization is a cycle, I think.  

 
17:47 
Dom Hawes 
Let's talk about the role of transformation and how your role is helping to mitigate the kind of risks we've identified while affecting change. And I guess it's all about improved performance.  

 
17:59 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Absolutely. So if we think it's essentially about creating a high performing team, we do that by transforming elements of what we do and how we do it. So I've been doing this role since January. I started off by running a marketing maturity audit, obvious thing to do, where are we now type stuff. Because it's quite a big piece of work actually. There's a couple of really good models out there to use for this. There's one from ITSMA and one from Propolis, but actually neither of those really suited what I needed. So I created one myself that worked for us. Had twelve categories and 38 subcategories. So this is quite forensic stuff. Right? So by country did the audit, where are we now in all of those? Where do we want to be? You can do some gap analysis there and then of course prioritize those gaps because you can't do all of them all at the same time.  

 
18:47 
Andrea Clatworthy 
So in parallel with that bottom up stuff, thinking top down, where is it? We're trying to get to what we're trying to do, what's that hybrid model going to look like and what skills do we need or what do we need to change in order to really make that work for us. And that's given me and us our work streams for the rest of the year.  

 
19:05 
Dom Hawes 
That's fantastic. Were you auditing the marketing people or was there a kind of 360 degree to this? Were you asking other people in country about their marketing function?  

 
19:13 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Great question.  

 
19:13 
Dom Hawes 
Just marketing and talk to me about progress.  

 
19:17 
Andrea Clatworthy 
That navel gazing actually was a really cathartic thing to do. Listeners will recognize this. Sometimes your head down doing stuff, you forget to sit back, do a bit of analysis, whether we're doing the right things in the right way. So actually everyone really enjoyed that process. If you think about building a high performing team is also about communicating, coaching and everything that comes with that. There's a lot of trust in that. And to build trust, you need to learn the people. So going through that maturity audit, I learned the people and they learned me. So we got to know each other really well. They trusted that I would do what I said I was going to do. They trusted that I would keep things anonymous, perhaps when I said I would. And they've been part of the work stream activity to take things forward. So we're doing it together, I'm not doing it to them.  

 
20:07 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I'm facilitating that transformation on behalf of all of us.  

 
20:10 
Dom Hawes 
You often hear people talk about psychological safety and kind of accountability going through that process of that audit, the self awareness you get from that. And if you have that psychological safety and you take like an improvement approach to it, you can learn so much. And I expect that you found your teams are probably in the regions, are probably pushing themselves harder than you would have thought of pushing them.  

 
20:32 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, and they're awesome anyway, so they're trying to be even more awesome. We keep telling ourselves do marketing. It's really easy to get bogged down with internal stuff, but essentially we're here to do marketing. So some of what I'm looking at is how do we make that internal stuff easier then that gives people the headspace bandwidth to do the stuff they really enjoy. Happy people do great work. So if there's things that we can improve, then we can. So a good example would be our marketing Ops people have been great central function. They've improved all of our dashboards and things like that. Things that would take a lot of admin time, if you like, and that are now not a problem.  

 
21:13 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, that's a really critical part because thinking about shadow marketing, it's very shiny and it's the kind of thing people in the regions might want to play with a lot. So actually to be able to provide them with amazing tools that come from the center that they can just use, probably saves a lot of time and money.  

 
21:29 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Absolutely. The other piece of saving them time and money is having that internal agency model. We're learning that it's not there yet, but it will be. The advantages of doing that is that of course we save money in external spend, we drive consistency, maximum asset reuse and all those types of things. And they're colleagues and we want to give them meaningful work to do in the same way that we want meaningful work to do. So it's not a circular economy, but it's that way of thinking.  

 
21:58 
Dom Hawes 
No, I get that. As an agency person, obviously I'm slightly wincing.  

 
22:02 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Of course. But then you use your agencies for the strategic thinking.  

 
22:06 
Dom Hawes 
Yes, exactly. And look, I think that's where agency is going. Tier one creative, strategic thinking, the kind of external eyes expertise. That's the future of agency, not the doing. I agree with you because I think you're probably also seeing faster cycle times, I guess.  

 
22:21 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Very much so. So our agency internal agency model is follow the sun so super quick you can breathe something in the morning, next morning it's done really quick.  

 
22:31 
Dom Hawes 
There's something to think about.  

 
22:32 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I know.  

 
22:32 
Dom Hawes 
So you mentioned in our production meeting for this show that transformation doesn't come with a huge budget and I guess buying things, especially things like platforms, well, that doesn't change anything anyway, which I guess is the purpose of transformation unless the people and processes are already transformed themselves. What are your main tools for enabling change?  

 
22:52 
Andrea Clatworthy 
In fact, it's not about the tools, it's about the approach and the comms building that trust I talked about already. That's really important. So it's comms, it's coaching, it's working with and for colleagues it's aligning commonalities there are some really easy wins like common goals and KPIs and objectives and then methods to be able to measure and track those.  

 
23:18 
Dom Hawes 
And are those measures and the kind of KPIs they're consistent across the whole region?  

 
23:22 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yes.  

 
23:23 
Dom Hawes 
So people might be at a different level of transformation based on the assessment you did at the beginning, but everyone's using the same tools.  

 
23:30 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yes, absolutely.  

 
23:31 
Dom Hawes 
That's kind of cool. Any shadow measures appearing?  

 
23:35 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I don't know because I can't see them.  

 
23:37 
Dom Hawes 
We talked about one of the drivers of transformation being performance improvement for both obviously outcomes and consistency. But I bet you're also being faced with the number one trend I'm seeing everywhere at the moment. I'm literally hearing it on just about every podcast I'm reading it in every book, newspaper. Doing more for less.  

 
23:54 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, absolutely. And part of our response to that is setting up this internal agency model and the hybrid layer approach that we're taking. We're early days, as I mentioned before. But it will work, I'm sure it has to work because as a profession we need to do more with less all the time. But the other thing to do is to focus. And this is not about measuring attribution of which event is better than anything else, but it's being really clear on, this is where we're going to go and this is what we're going to do and this is the plan. And quite often there'll be a shiny new thing that pops up, or an ask from a particularly assertive salesperson, and then it's about our people having the skills and courage and the capability to say no because or yes, but. So I think some of that plays true as well.  

 
24:42 
Andrea Clatworthy 
So, focus sticking with what you said you're going to do for all the right reasons, but then having the ability to be agile. If something's not working, then to spin on it.  

 
24:52 
Dom Hawes 
Doing more for small businesses or startups is a lot easier. And I think sometimes when they say do more, they're trying to communicate more. But where you're a global multinational, when you have multilayered products and services, doing more could just make more noise. So how do you keep the consistency and the simplicity you're talking about in your external communication?  

 
25:14 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, a really great point. So we rebranded recently with a business brand called Yuvant. I'd say recently, it's two years ago or where's the time go.  

 
25:22 
Dom Hawes 
I know.  

 
25:22 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah. So everyone is focusing on that. We're really clear on that. Back to this, having a really clear strategy and brand promise and values and look and feel. Then the next layer down from that are what we're calling our key focus areas. So there are seven of them. So that's what we talk about, those seven key focus areas, those seven key areas of proposition sets, if you like. We try not to deviate from those. Sometimes you have to, because a customer, we want something that doesn't naturally fall into one of those seven. But then that's the front of the coalface decision. That's something that the decision would be made locally.  

 
25:58 
Dom Hawes 
So I'm hearing that this is part of kind of the central HQ, where here are the seven priorities. You're going to communicate locally, they're going to take those localize adapt for local market, but stay true to message unless there's a specific need, and then they're enabled to change at the point of customer impact. What you said, that's really cool. Yeah, that's really cool.  

 
26:20 
Andrea Clatworthy 
You said it much better than me, Dom.  

 
26:22 
Dom Hawes 
Well, I had the advantage that you already said it. I just had to repeat what you said. So, look, I can't let the interview go without bringing up the subject everyone's talking about. I'm afraid I'm going to mention AI. I think it's only industrious people in this business that are worried about AI. If you're lazy like me, I cannot wait for most of my job to be done by a machine. What's your view? Is AI kind of part of the transformation effort?  

 
26:46 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's awesome, right? We've been waiting for this for years, so I think it's brilliant. Proceed with caution, obviously, because it can't replace everything. So then it's about picking when and how you use it and what you put in place around it so that you're not, for instance, just generating tons of blurb. That human piece is always going to be required. We're not replacing humans with AI, I don't think. I think it's brilliant. We've been talking AI for years. We've got massive propositions in this space and do AI with our customers. But for us as marketeers, this generative AI stuff fabulous.  

 
27:20 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, great tool.  

 
27:21 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Bring it on.  

 
27:21 
Dom Hawes 
I know. So look, I want to bring our discussion back to where we started today, but actually I'm going to look to the future. So this is a transformation role and I think so I don't think I know that I haven't come across someone who's approaching transforming their marketing function in the way that you are doing at Fujitsu with what you're learning and where you are now. What do you think our listeners need to think about for the next twelve to 24 months if they want to go on a transformation journey too?  

 
27:45 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Really good question. So I think they need to start with taking a look at what is marketing's purpose for their organization. Because I think it's different in different organizations. It will be really interesting to see how tools like AI can take us forward and what that looks like in two years is going to be completely different to how it is now. And then if you link those two things together, what does your organization want for marketing or what the tool is going to bring us then? What skills do you need in your team and what ecosystem do you put in place around you for those? So what's your agency ecosystem, for example? So I think those things are going to be really interesting. I think that role of Chief Revenue Officer is going to play a role and whatever it ends up being in the next iteration because that's how it happens.  

 
28:32 
Andrea Clatworthy 
I'm really looking forward to there being less focus on MQLs and those vanity metrics. That's got to be done, right. The other thing I think is going to be really interesting is that thinking around the whole customer journey. So, customer satisfaction, customer success, who owns that? Wouldn't it be great if marketing could own customer?  

 
28:51 
Dom Hawes 
That's really great. You've done it again. You dangled another whole subject for another podcast. Customer success is the overlooked part, right? Especially of rev ops. Because ideally, if you're going to adopt a CRO or a rev ops approach, it's got to be all the way from first point of contact all the way through to customer lifetime. I e success totally limey. There's a thought for the future. Thank you very much.  

 
29:15 
Andrea Clatworthy 
Thank you.  

 
29:17 
Dom Hawes 
Well, there you have it. Another belter of an episode, Andrea's. So easy to listen to and so quote worthy too. Now, as usual, you'll be able to find full show notes at Unicorny Co. UK and you'll find abridged notes, as well as links to Andrea and my LinkedIn profiles too. If you'd like to comment on today's content, please leave us a voicemail at Unicorny Co. UK or send us a message through any of the other channels listed on that site. Right, what am I taking away from today? First up, at the top of today's show, I made the point that marketing is evolving and I asked whether what Fujitsu Andrea are doing now is where the rest of us are going to follow in future. And I think the broad answer to that is yes, because the number one challenge we're all facing is to do more with less.  

 
30:05 
Dom Hawes 
And yeah, I know it's a bit of a cliche, I know you've probably heard me say it loads, but it's true. And it is going to lead to a change in how marketing is seen in house and what the relationship looks like with the rest of the business and how it works with agencies. Now, after we finished recording this interview, andrea was keen to point out to me that she still very much sees a role, and an important one for agencies in the mix at Fujitsu. So much so that she actually now sees part of her role as helping her agencies transform too. Now, I think progressive agencies probably are already on this. Like in her own business, for example, Digital Radish is working with leading technology businesses to help them define strategy and translate that into their top level creative. And the same focus is finding favour at law creative too, as they help industrial, automotive, healthcare and hospitality clients position themselves for the future.  

 
31:00 
Dom Hawes 
How we're all working is a departure from the past. Agencies like ours used to want as much of the pie as they could get, and that is just not the case anymore. The right approach, the approach that Andrea has just talked to us about, is blended, where boundaries between sales, marketing and agencies are blurred. And if you're not already thinking about your future this way, now might be a good time to book a meeting room with a whiteboard and invite your best brains in. The other thing I was really struck with, and a little bit surprised about too, if I'm honest, is how Andrea and Fujitsu are mixing and matching their organisational design by both centralizing and decentralizing at the same time. You'd have picked up that I came into the show thinking this was just a story about decentralization and I was keen to mine that vein.  

 
31:53 
Dom Hawes 
But as is so often the case, reality isn't as simple a study as you might like it to be. Maybe that's why the heart of this story is about the role of transformation. What Fujitsu is doing isn't a simple change management program. It's not about a restructure or a reorganization. They're redefining the whole way they go to market in this territory and they're metaphorically changing their engines in mid flight. That is not an easy thing to do. Andrea, talk to us about a few of the key things they're doing that I want to leave you with. Number one, understand the purpose of marketing in your organization. Everyone does marketing differently. There's no right answer as long as it works for you. Well, hang on a SEC. Yeah, that's not quite true. I'm making the base assumption here that you're not like, the CEO I mentioned at the top of the show who doesn't believe in marketing at all.  

 
32:44 
Dom Hawes 
I guess you wouldn't be listening now if that was the case. So assuming that you do realize marketing is essential, how you do it, well, that's your call. But being very clear of your marketing's function, of its purpose, and communicating that to the rest of your organization, that's a very important and essential first. Step number two, create the vision for what the team needs to look like, what its skill base needs to be, and what role agencies will play in your mix. Basically, I'm saying you need to define the ideal state and then socialize that plan with your fellow execs. Number three, audit your team to identify gaps, spot talent, and create the transformation program, then to achieve your ideal state. Now, Andrea gave us some really good heads up on how she went about that, and I think she even referenced some templates that exist out in the market, and I'll make sure we put those on the show notes.  

 
33:40 
Dom Hawes 
Step number four execute, then communicate, and communicate more. I love chatting to Andrea A. She's really good fun in the studio. And by the way, we laughed a lot when were recording this. We've kind of edited out the giggling to try and keep this sort of professional on message. But I hope you got a sense of the fun that we had, and I hope you enjoyed today's show and got as much value from it as I did. We would love it if you'd rate, review, or refer us. Reviews and referrals are how shows like this one grow, and it takes us ten to 12 hours to record each and every show. So please, we'd be very grateful if you take a little time right now to support The Unicorny Project. Now, if you're interested in joining our community, you can register at Unicorny Co. UK, where you can also ask questions or leave comments.  

 
34:30 
Dom Hawes 
That's it, folks. For now. I'm going to foray back into the forest and see what inspiration I can find for future episodes of The Unicorny Project. See ya.