75. Aligning strategy with business goals

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 
You're listening to Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back. This is part two of the Unicorny conversation with James Gatoff, CMO at Lombard International. Now, I know I started part one with a bit of a rant, and I have calmed down now, you'll be pleased to hear. But I am going to come back to some of the issues I raised at the end of today's show because actually, I think they're really important. Meanwhile, today we're going to talk tech stacks, measurement and aligning, marketing and business goals. We're going to talk crisis planning, wargaming and crisis management. We may even mention the d word dashboards. Jamie moves through his stack and his method at pace.  

 
00:45 
Dom Hawes 
As he says, many of you will already be doing much of what Lombard is, but as you hear what they're doing, remember the filming capability we talked about last time? Just keep that front of mind.  

 
00:57 
Dom Hawes 
Buckle up and let's go, Jamie. We're going to talk about measurement, measurable marketing and data driven strategies. Easy thing to say, harder things sometimes to put into practice. And I'm really keen also to explore the balance between the things that you can measure and the things that you can't measure over the next ten or 15 minutes. Maybe we could start with, like, a big picture. How do you generally try to ensure that the activities that you're doing, the effort that you're expending, and the assets you're applying to your campaigns are measurable, both measurable, but also very firmly aligned with what the business is trying to achieve.  

 
01:38 
James Gatoff 
So I'm laughing at this because I think that is the holy grail. So if anyone can crack that and let me know, I think we could be a very wealthy team to do that, because I think that is the question which the finance teams, which our shareholders will constantly ask to say, right, if I give you a million dollars, what is that going to get me back? And I think that's always the most difficult question to answer because we'll talk about, well, it's about building the brand and it's about building brand perception. It's about building brand loyalty. They say, yeah, okay, but how are you going to be able to demonstrate that and measure that? What is really keen for me is, as I said before, is I'm very focused on running a commercial marketing and communications team. We are a sales led organization.  

 
02:26 
James Gatoff 
We have to be able to work shoulder to shoulder with our business development and sales colleagues and to show that we're actually doing things which add value. And we are quite ruthless with that. We're ruthless pragmatists. We're looking at actually, we need to see what we're going to do and if it adds value, we're going to do it. If we don't think it's going to add value. It's nice to have, well, we just don't have the luxury of having a nice to have. So what we did at Lombard International with my team was we built a dashboard to try and start to track through on a regular basis. Well, certainly on a monthly basis, but I used to report back to the executive committee. If I look at the various different almost, I try to segment the marketing function to different disciplines.  

 
03:10 
James Gatoff 
So some is easier to measure than others. So if we look at communications and PR, well, we can actually start to track through the pieces of editorial coverage, we can talk around and track through the numbers of earned media coverage as well, and earn media opportunities, media mentions and sentiment. So that's certainly a bucket which we measure very heavily. And we have technology to do that. So you can use a media monitoring tool. So we currently use scission, which helps us do that and certainly that's one element. Then we look at our marketing communication campaigns. Our sales team use Salesforce, which they are actively encouraged to use so they can track through all their opportunities and they can rank their opportunities. My digital team and my deputy came in and said, well, actually we can start to link into that.  

 
03:57 
James Gatoff 
So we use a piece of software called pod dot, which then can link through number of campaigns rerun. And they came up with a fantastic sort of measuring system to be able to start to look at the levels of engagement from our partners who actively start to interact with us through the various different channels of communication which we talk to them with and communicate with them in. So we can look at the number of campaigns which we run, the digital campaigns, we can then look at how many people actually then receive. So it may sound simple, but actually data is critical here. So have we got the right contacts in the right database system? How many people are bouncing back? How many people have moved on? There's a way to help clean up that data.  

 
04:43 
James Gatoff 
Then we'll start to look at how many people actually open the campaign and we can track that through. And then actually the panacea is what do they do with it? How many people then actually click through and actually engage with us? You can track that all through and I'm sure many of our listeners do that today as well. I think it's really important that you capture people's imagination. So we do that. And then the really important element, going back to our conversation from earlier, is broadcast. So we now can see how many videos we produce, we can see how many people watch the videos and what they do with those videos. So almost going back to the marketing campaigns, we can actually see people forwarding the emails and videos and we can track all that through.  

 
05:24 
James Gatoff 
To see that level of engagement, we look at our website, we look at the traffic there, we look at obviously where the traffic's coming from. Because we have an international business, we will have different websites in different languages. It's not just a translation, though, because we don't believe in that. We believe in making sure that it is bespoke to that specific market. So we can track that through, we can see what's being looked at, what's being watched, and then the other important element is internal engagement. So again, the catalyst round the pandemic was to build a rudimentary intranet system, which my guys worked very hard with on with the IT team.  

 
06:02 
Dom Hawes 
Obviously, you mentioned in the first half of the show you like an integrated approach. And that is it is your approach, would you say? Is it video first now?  

 
06:09 
James Gatoff 
I think, where possible, probably, yes, absolutely. I think it is. Whether it's a webinar, whether it's a sound bite, whether it's a more in depth overview of a solution. Yes. And we're using it more and more now internally, but not only video, we're experimenting with podcasts now as well, so people can put their headphones in whilst they're working and listening because actually we know, I'm sure you would agree with me, video, you've got a certain amount of time to really capture someone's imagination. I think from a podcast perspective I think you've got a bit longer.  

 
06:41 
Dom Hawes 
So the other thing I think that's really interesting is you are scoring within Salesforce, you're scoring your targets based on engagement and how they're behaving. Just clarify for me the targets that you're marketing to. They're your intermediaries.  

 
06:56 
James Gatoff 
They are, yes, to end users, not to end clients. At the moment, we do communicate with our end clients in certain ways and some of our businesses directly intermediated. So I think that's really important that we find that mechanism to do that. And this is probably a topic for another day is around technology and the use of technology in somewhere, a place like Luxembourg, because there are professional secrecy rules, there are constraints over what type of technology you can use to hold information in the cloud and things like that. So you have to be very careful in the way in which you do utilize information or contact details with regards to contacting end clients as well.  

 
07:37 
Dom Hawes 
We're going to have to do it. We're going to have to mention the a word. What role does AI play with you currently?  

 
07:43 
James Gatoff 
So we're still playing with it at the moment. I don't know about your experience, but what I generally find now is though you am I allowed to swear on?  

 
07:51 
Dom Hawes 
You can swear as much as you like.  

 
07:52 
James Gatoff 
So shit in is shit out. Okay. So effectively, if you create a shit problem prompt, you're gonna get a whole other goggley group back. So I think what's what I'm, and I'm sort of playing with on a regular basis as well. I've got a couple of the different apps on my iPhone. It's all about investing the time in writing the right prompt, and if you get the prompt right, it will help us. So I think for us at the moment, AI is almost like a catalyst. We've used the word catalyst quite a lot in our podcast, but I think it helps to speed up some of the copywriting if we need something quick and efficient. However, I have some great copywriters in the team and I now know their style, so I can easily see when they send me stuff.  

 
08:36 
James Gatoff 
Hey Jamie, what do you think about this? I can see that when they've invested their own time in writing something, it's far more eloquent than AI is. But if we need a quick fix for something, or we need a quick prompt for something, that it's fine. Certainly, our graphic designers are beginning to look at AI from a design perspective, utilizing some of the newer AI tools out there so you can almost create your own bespoke design, especially when you don't necessarily want to go and buy stock imagery. Now, again, it's still in its infancy, it's still not as sophisticated as I'd like, but it's certainly helping us to think about it.  

 
09:11 
Dom Hawes 
So I think this is my view, too, where in any case, where good is good enough, AI can probably help. Yes, but where you want something that is better than that, then at the moment we need human input. So I guess over the next twelve to 24 months, it's just going to get more and more important to the point that maybe some of the work we do today we just won't need to do.  

 
09:33 
James Gatoff 
Yes. And I hesitate to say yes, I think that's right. But at the end of the day, though, marketing and communication is about emotions. It's about getting that emotional connection with your audience. It's around targeting that audience in the right way. It's about feeling the nuance and the difference, certainly from an international perspective, that the way in which we want to communicate with our partners, our clients, our colleagues up in the Nordic regions of Europe compared to the south mediterranean regions are going to be vastly different. And I'm intrigued to see whether AI is going to be able to cope with that and see what's happening there.  

 
10:11 
James Gatoff 
I certainly see at the moment, I've got a lot of agencies presenting opportunities to me where they've got the ability to record somebody, they get their tone of voice, they get their sound, and then they are able to get them to speak in every single language across the world. But for me, that's not authentic because those who will know me is I can't speak fluent Japanese, I can hardly speak English, but I can't speak fluent Japanese or Mandarin or Italian or Spanish. So does that really show that you're credible if you stand up there on a video and all of a sudden you're speaking all these different languages? I'm not so sure. For me, I think it's all around that, those personal connections.  

 
10:47 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah. Eleven labs have an amazing engine that will do that simultaneously into 32 different languages. As a treat, I'm going to put some mandarin, I'm going to take your last sentence and put it in.  

 
10:57 
James Gatoff 
Fantastic. I'm looking forward to this podcast. Excellent.  

 
11:00 
Dom Hawes 
Just so we can see that. But I agree with you. I think, you know, AI, there's a risk that we focus too much on the sausage and not enough on the sizzle.  

 
11:10 
James Gatoff 
Yes.  

 
11:10 
Dom Hawes 
And our jobs isn't just about function, it's also about form.  

 
11:16 
James Gatoff 
Indeed. And that connection and that engagement as well. How you stand out from the crowd, how you create that experience, how you get that real connection to say, yeah, I like that brand and I want to work with them.  

 
11:32 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, let's take a moment. We just talked about the importance of measurable marketing and data driven decision making. Of course, this isn't necessarily new, but doing it ensures our marketing efforts are not only effective, but they're also closely aligned with what the business is trying to achieve. Now, as you probably know, I hate dashboards. I prefer machines to work for me, not me for the machine. But even I know how effective dashboards can be if they're done well. So on this occasion, I think it's dashboards. One, Dom, zero. I also think Jamie hit on something that I picked up originally in Duncan Dane's conversation with Rachel Fairleigh while I was away. We all need to understand where the mojo, where the spiritual heart of our business sits. Now. Some businesses are clearly marketing businesses at heart.  

 
12:22 
Dom Hawes 
General Electric, three M and Vanguard come to mind. Others have their heart in engineering, others in research. And so the list goes on. Jamie is very clear that Lombard International is sales led. Thus he gears his activity to support the sales team, which is why localization matters so much for him. And I'm going to come back very briefly at the end of today's show to talk about that orientation. Now, I promised I'd give you Jamie speaking Mandarin. I'm going to give you a few seconds of that now. And then we're going to go back to the studio to talk about something we feature often on this podcast, playbooks. This time around, we're going to look at crisis planning and having the playbooks in place to handle whatever life throws at you. And we're going to finish by looking to the future.  

 
13:07 
Dom Hawes 
Then I'm going to close the show with a few thoughts and a little homework. Ready?  

 
13:11 
Dom Hawes 
Right.  

 
13:11 
Dom Hawes 
Let's go straight after Jamie impresses us with his mandarin skills.  

 
13:28 
Dom Hawes 
Just to set the scene for the last part of our conversation. You're in an environment where you’re communicating globally across cultures. You've got a very fine tuned approach to the cultural nuance in how you communicate. And at the centre of your campaigns is your own broadcast capability. And everything that you do is being tracked and measured digitally. So all of the foundations for your normal communications are in place. But we know the world is barking mad at the moment. It's mad completely unpredictable, and therefore we can't just rely on what happens normally. So I want to, in the last part of this conversation, kind of look around some of the other areas and the other ways that you're kind of helping and preparing your business to mitigate risk.  

 
14:18 
Dom Hawes 
And I want to start with crisis communications, especially in a global business that's spread across multiple markets. Talk to me about your approach to readiness.  

 
14:27 
James Gatoff 
Well, one of the great advantages of being owned by private equity is having access to some fantastic resource, talent and support from the actual shareholder. And they run crisis communications approaches very seriously, as we all do. They helped me write to begin with when I first got there, a crisis communications playbook, which took quite a long time to develop. And we looked at a whole host of different ways in which there could be a crisis. One from being from in our world, a media and comms crisis right through from a, what I call BCP, so business continuity process from an ITDRP, so it disaster recovery process, and a pandemic, which we've updated recently, as you can imagine.  

 
15:13 
James Gatoff 
So we spent quite a bit of time developing a very clear crisis communications playbook within that, looking at how you would effectively rate and rank a crisis depending on what we thought it was and what that escalation process would be. Now, I've been lucky through my career that I've gone on a number of different training programs on this. I actually inherited a most enormous crisis when I first became the group communications director at Friends Providence, which suddenly erupted onto Twitter, where Stephen Fry retweeted this issue, which I won't go into today, but it's a long and involved story which actually culminated in meeting some very distressed family members in our head office to take over their, or to receive their petition against an issue I've had. So that was probably one of the most scariest parts of my career ever.  

 
16:09 
James Gatoff 
But going back to the comms playbook, we have one. We then make sure that we have a clear process and procedure in place to manage that. We then also created a whole playbook on lines to take. So working with our PR agency, and that's where I think agencies are very good to help and support you to do that, and also to be able to respond to questions in the right way and give the answers you wish to give as well. My team have gone on media training for that purpose. I have as well. And the other element around why we use agencies is to make sure you have those local contacts in each of the different markets in which we work in. And so we talked about that slightly earlier on.  

 
16:49 
James Gatoff 
I like to work with people who are well connected, who can give sound advice. And the other thing is, I also have the advantage and the benefit of talking to our shareholder, who have a comms team who have been super supportive to me. So you can bounce off ideas, being the CMO or the chief marketing officer. Chief communications officer can be quite lonely at times when it's. When there is a crisis, because you just want to bounce some ideas off somebody, say, well, how. Hang on a minute, do we want to do that? And also, you have to stay calm, and you have to stay very calm and collected, because many other people get very excited, they get very wound up around you, and you need clarity of thought and clarity of what the strategy is to overcome the issue.  

 
17:34 
Dom Hawes 
So I love the idea of the playbook. I mean, a comprehensive playbook. We have a similar thing, I guess, mainly around the it disaster recovery and or like a cyber breach, because we deal in quite a lot of, you know, customer data. Yeah. So we have to be careful and we have to understand, I mean, those people, therefore, who are involved in that process all need to be trained in the playbook. Do you wargame, this stuff? Are you running exercise?  

 
17:56 
James Gatoff 
Yes. And actually our chief information security officer has helped to create these wargames. So I've done that many times. We've done one, actually. I think we did one, if I remember, beginning of this year. So it's nice to have everybody around the table, but I don't commute to Luxembourg as often as I do. And we utilize video conferencing. So it was actually good that I was actually the end of a video conference as well, whilst we're doing this to sort of wall game and think about it, because the other key element is the cascade process. Super, super important, making sure that you actually have all the right contact details of everybody. Because then who needs to know when as well? Who do you need to pre brief?  

 
18:32 
James Gatoff 
Because there'll be certain issues and crises which actually, you may have a hint that something's going to happen. You may have a hint it's going to hit the media maybe the next day. So who do you need to make sure are briefed appropriately then? Do you want to cascade to from a business development perspective? Because again, we need to make sure that we brief our sales colleagues that they can help to control the story, because as we know, with the crisis, you have to control the narrative and making sure that really, you cut through the crap if you put in my language. And also, as we know these days, depending on the type of publication, the headlines become much more sensational because it's the clickbait.  

 
19:09 
James Gatoff 
So the high end publications of the high end media, they are challenging, but they are respectful, and they are prepared to listen to your arguments and prepared to listen to what you have to say to help to construct the story. Other publications who are chasing the clickbait just get so ridiculous at times. And they have these ludicrous headlines, as.  

 
19:30 
Dom Hawes 
Do the lunatic social media channels, which are to be avoided. But there's nothing quite like a well handled crisis to use as a sales aid. I always think, actually, you know, in a relationship based business, if something goes wrong and you deal with it well, you end up stronger than if you hadn't had the crisis in the start.  

 
19:46 
James Gatoff 
Absolutely. I totally agree with you on that front, Dom. Yeah, totally. And I think what's really important is the way in which you communicate it and be authentic and transparent as well. So if you can go and target those most important partners and clients and say, hang on a bit, yes, something's happened, but let me explain why it's happened. Let me explain what we're doing to resolve it, and let me explain to you why it's not going to happen again. The future. And I think that's absolutely critical and it can help you to be there and go out there and tell that story.  

 
20:15 
Dom Hawes 
What do you think marketers need to.  

 
20:16 
Dom Hawes 
Look out for the next twelve to 18 months? So we know you've got playbooks that handle the crises. We know there's uncertainty, so you're equipped to deal with it, and anyone listening needs to do the same thing. But what do you actually see coming down the line at the moment within.  

 
20:28 
James Gatoff 
Financial services, you're seeing a lot of change from a regulatory perspective, a legislation perspective. Across the globe, regulators are becoming much more circumspect. Governments are becoming more nationally focused as well, because after the pandemic, they want to focus on making sure that their own markets are serving them well. And we've got to get to grips with that and really understand that. And then if you look at consumers, we're all consumers. At the end of the day, we're all time poor. We're all being bombarded every single day, every single moment with information. And I think we have to tell a story which is easily understood, which is engaging, and which captures the imagination. And I think if you can tick all those boxes, you've got to be successful, but there's a lot of competition out there and you've got to find your space.  

 
21:15 
James Gatoff 
But for me, it's all about being authentic. It's about really having that core purpose in life, both from a work perspective and a personal perspective. And what does that brand tell you, and what does that brand message give out to those audiences so that they can say, yeah, I understand that, I get that. Yes, I want to do business with you.  

 
21:35 
Dom Hawes 
What's your view on working models and the impact that the way we now work is going to have in the marketing industry?  

 
21:43 
James Gatoff 
I look at this through a lens of always having worked for the last ten years or so in an international role where I've never necessarily always stayed in the same office or worked from the same office as all my team. So I probably have a slightly different view to many who or some who want to try and insist on getting everybody back to the office day in, day out. Those days are gone. I think certainly if you look at the younger generation as well. When recruiting new people, one of the first questions they ask is, what's the flexibility and what do we do now? Actually, interestingly, in Luxembourg, there are, in cross continental Europe, there are tax implications depending on where you live and where you're employed.  

 
22:23 
James Gatoff 
Certainly in Luxembourg, if you work in Luxembourg and live in Germany, France or Belgium, there are only a certain number of days you are permitted to work from home. Otherwise you've got to have a double taxation issue. So that starts to dictate some framework in Europe as to how you're going to do that. I firmly believe, though, if you want to be creative, if you want to start to come up with new ideas and concepts and brainstorm ideas, there's nothing better than getting in the room together and really debating. I don't want everyone to say yes to me. And actually my team who will be listening to this, will laugh and say, well, we don't. We want to have a rigorous debate with you and really start to sort of tease out ideas.  

 
23:03 
James Gatoff 
And for me, I don't think that's possible to do that remotely day in, day out. So I think you've got to get people together then, from an external perspective, when we're out there talking and we're delivering events and engaging activities, again, we saw a surge of people after Covid saying, yeah, I can't wait to get to an event and be with people. And I think that people, yeah, maybe we're slightly nervous to begin with as to the social distancing when that sort of wound down. But now, today, I think people want that. But it's all about experiences, though. I think it's all around creating an experience which people want to come to, which they say, okay, I can't get that from somebody else or I can't get that myself.  

 
23:44 
James Gatoff 
So, yes, I want to come and listen to you, but what's in it for me, ultimately? And I think that's the ways in which we will start to really engage people and get people there. But it's a challenge. I think it's still going to be a challenge, certainly with the younger generation as to getting them into an office and seeing the benefits of being in the office together.  

 
24:08 
Dom Hawes 
Well, big thank you to Jamie for an awesome interview. Now, I thought today, rather than summarizing or trying to find hidden insight in today's episode, instead I'm going to go off at a little bit of a tangent. That's because Jamie has reeled off how he operates and he's one of those people who is clearly unconsciously competent, you know, from the four stages of competence model. Look, if you don't know, I'm going to link it on the show notes at unicorny.co.uk. But what it means that he has mastered his art so well that it's just second nature to him. And if it's second nature to you too, then you will have had loads of huh, yeah, okay, me too moments in the show.  

 
24:46 
Dom Hawes 
But if we talked about isn't second nature to you yet, I'm going to use the idea of selling through and selling to highlight a few things about marketing and communicating in business and specifically in complex markets. So I talked in the introduction to part one about the different challenges of selling through and selling to businesses generally sell through other businesses or intermediaries because either they need services or additional input from partners to satisfy the whole needs of a customer. It's what Geoffrey Moore calls whole product marketing, or because they're trying to reduce complexity and volatility in their end market. And I talked about that with Steve Moore when we discussed Ashby's law of requisite variety. Look up both of those episodes in our back catalogue and you will learn more.  

 
25:36 
Dom Hawes 
Now, businesses that sell directly to other businesses are either someone else's intermediary or they're able to provide a whole product to satisfy their customers need. Now the reason I care so much about through and to is that how you approach the market and your marketing, well, it's going to be different. So let's start with a simpler case. If you're selling two, you'll need to be using push techniques to drive short term performance and pull techniques to drive long term value. It's kind of a long and short argument. The maturity of your business, product and market is going to dictate the split between push and pull. In many businesses of this type, the push is done by people with marketing in their job title. But the pull might not be. It doesn't mean they're not creating long term value, by the way.  

 
26:22 
Dom Hawes 
It just means the marketing department isn't running it. And that, I think, is often why people looking from the outside into our sector think that marketing isn't that good in business to business organizations. Now, if you're Jamie, your world is more complicated than that. You're selling through regulated intermediaries. You're using push techniques to influence them. But it's their job to push to the end customer. Your job for the end customer is to create pull. And what better way of doing that is there than engaging storytelling thought leading easy to consume video. So, thinking back over what we heard from Jamie, he's operating a highly sophisticated marketing technology stack with very well developed dashboards and metrics to drive his push marketing into intermediaries. He's using multi channel content, but his champion is video, and that content works push and pull equally hard.  

 
27:20 
Dom Hawes 
So my takeaway from today? Well, firstly, those people who think that we in our business are not very good at our jobs, they just don't understand our jobs. So we're just going to let them carry on believing whatever they want, that it's all about advertising while we all continue to build our businesses. But more positively than that, Jamie's given me a very clear lens to think about selling through and selling to and the difference between those challenges. It's the push and the pull, the different ways we show up, the way we as business marketers make our products and our services memorable. You know, I have underutilized video, even though I know how powerful it is that changes today. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes.  

 
28:08 
Dom Hawes 
Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.