33. B2B Buyer Enablement, Community and Marketing Effectiveness

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcriptions 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. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. This is a podcast about the business.  

 
00:12 
Dom Hawes 
Of marketing, how to create value, who's.  

 
00:14 
Dom Hawes 
Doing it well, and how you can help your business win the future. Merry Christmas to you. I hope you've got all your shopping done. Today is the 90 December and I'm due to start mine anytime now. I think I might try and get it done well within the next ten days or so. Anyway, I know this show has steered more and more towards business to business marketing over the last few months and that has kind of been by design. This show reflects the lived experience of the crew that makes it. But more to the point, it's designed to sate the people that listen to it and increasingly, our audience appears to be business to business. If this isn't you, well, please let me know. If you want to hear from a marketing leader that speaks direct to your situation, well, let me know.  

 
01:03 
Dom Hawes 
You can leave me a voicemail at our website at Unicorny Co. Uk please. If you want to nominate anyone to be on this show, that's the best way of doing it. Well, today I'm extremely excited to bring you the silky sounds of the unflappable Richard O'Connor, chief executive officer of B two B marketing and Propolis, which we're going to explain later. Richard is one of those guys that you want to be in your gang, calm, cool and super smart. He's got an incredibly impressive career behind him, which you can check out under the link section on our show notes. So today we're talking overtly business to business community procurement language, and we're going to tell you why you never need to talk about sales and marketing alignment ever again before we come on to meaty topics like B2B marketing effectiveness.  

 
01:57 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to the Unicorny project, Richard, and a very happy Christmas to you.  

 
02:01 
Richard O'Connor 
And a happy Christmas to you. And it does feel like Christmas.  

 
02:04 
Dom Hawes 
Doesn't it just? There's no tinsel in the studio. No, but it's bloody cold outside.  

 
02:08 
Richard O'Connor 
It certainly is.  

 
02:09 
Dom Hawes 
And it was dark when I woke up.  

 
02:10 
Richard O'Connor 
Precisely.  

 
02:11 
Dom Hawes 
Therefore, it's Christmas. Well, happy Christmas to you too. Dear listeners, we are going to talk about business to business marketing today. Unsurprisingly, I thought a good place to start. It's about two years now that you've been at the helm of b two b marketing, and in that time, of course, we've seen the emergence of a really cool initiative and I think we've had quite a few of the experts from Propolis through this studio.  

 
02:31 
Dom Hawes 
But we've never really talked about it.  

 
02:34 
Dom Hawes 
And as you are the gaffer, why don't we start today by looking at Propolis, what it is, who's using it and kind of what the vision is for it.  

 
02:42 
Richard O'Connor 
Timely. We did win two awards at our industry awards, the PPA Independent Publishers association.  

 
02:46 
Dom Hawes 
Well, congratulations. That's fantastic news.  

 
02:48 
Richard O'Connor 
Innovation of the year and digital product of the year, which is brilliant for the team and brilliant for Propolis. I mean, Propolis, it's one of those ones where actually, when we speak to a lot of our us customers, they struggle to pronounce it. So we have propolis, but Propolis means first community in Greek, but it's also the glue that holds beehives together. And the principle behind Propolis was about bringing together the various strands of b to b and the content themed the hives, as it was when it was originally launched together into one place, one community, where b, two B marketing leaders can come and discuss and access inspiration, peer to peer networking, access expertise.  

 
03:29 
Richard O'Connor 
And you've talked about our experts in Propolis who've been, as you say, through your studio, and it's really what we describe as community intelligence and that's what we describe ourselves as a business. And that is the sum of the parts of b, two B marketers who are practitioners who are doing the job, plus experts who have been b, two B marketers and really have genuine domain expertise in everything from brand all the way through to customer experience and data, gives a kind of multiplier effect. And what we've seen in the last couple of years, since we've grown Propolis, is just this extraordinary growing community, growing engagement, more confidence for people to ask questions, to address challenges, share their issues.  

 
04:12 
Richard O'Connor 
And I've said this a lot, but the reason it works is because there's such a generosity of spirit in b to b and people are prepared to show vulnerability.  

 
04:20 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, I think there's something magic that happens when you get a genuine peer to peer group to go to. So I belong to a peer group called pep Talks. It's for private equity backed ceos, because we share a lot of pain points, but the method of our funding and the value creation journey that we are all on is common. And as you say, the generosity of spirit. I think when you get proper community, one that shares both good and bad, it's a really special place to be. And I must tell you, by the way, just yesterday I met with one of the other agency members of Propolis here in this very building to discuss how we might work together to increase the value both that we get and that we can give to Propolis in the next year.  

 
05:00 
Dom Hawes 
So it's not just the cmos on the platform now who are getting together to work out how to collaborate, the agencies are doing it, too. We're literally asking ourselves, how can we collaborate while remaining competitive so we can get extra value from, but also give.  

 
05:15 
Dom Hawes 
Value back to the community.  

 
05:16 
Dom Hawes 
And I think that's really cool and it gives us an idea of what community really is. But I must declare a slight conflict of interest. We are a paid member of Propolis. I'm talking about it because it works, by the way, not because I have anything to gain from it. Propolis has a number of agency members. We are just one of them. And as I was saying yesterday, when we met with the other agency, to talk about collaboration and value, you don't need to compete on everything. And actually, sometimes, especially as a leader, a marketing leader or business leader, it's a lonely place. So to be able to mix with people that have exactly the same concerns, exactly the same obstacles put in their way, it's absolutely invaluable. I'm going to be doing a lot.  

 
05:57 
Dom Hawes 
On that this year.  

 
05:58 
Dom Hawes 
I'm going to try and work with the other agencies in the network, because apart from anything else, I think there are some big issues facing us. Here's one. The client agency model is broken and needs to be completely reset. I think we might come back to that today, but I think propolis might be a really good vehicle for me to learn more about this, which I do on the podcast, by the way, but also to get involved and see what cmos are seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling about where agency belongs in their future. I think it's going to be very different than it is now. It's certainly looking very different than it was just a couple of years ago.  

 
06:32 
Richard O'Connor 
And I think we should throw procurement into that conversation as well.  

 
06:35 
Dom Hawes 
Yes, the P word, the conversation just.  

 
06:37 
Richard O'Connor 
Yesterday that procurement is helping nobody, it's not helping the clients, and it's not helping the agencies or any third party suppliers.  

 
06:45 
Dom Hawes 
So I think when it's done well, it can. There's a podcast devoted to just this subject. I don't know if you know, it's called 20%, the Marketing Procurement podcast, and their mission is to work out how to procure creativity without killing it. And they don't yet have answer, by the way. Yeah, this is a big. I think procurement is a massive issue.  

 
07:00 
Richard O'Connor 
Agreed. Agreed. There's a resignation, I sense, with a lot of the larger global organizations, a resignation from the marketing function, and I'm sure other functions as well, that it is going to take eight to twelve to 14 weeks, sometimes longer, rather than the time to value from bringing on a new partner is just way too long. And it just seems that it is the tail wagging the dog.  

 
07:27 
Dom Hawes 
Let's dig more into that. So marketing hasn't helped. And I say I need to be very clear what we're talking about here because the word marketing means very many different things. I generally tend to talk about the business of marketing rather than the practice of marketing, the discipline of marketing or the department of marketing. They're all different things and they all mean different things to different people. But marketing as a business hasn't really helped itself. Agency side, they've accepted procurement, basically reducing them, commoditizing them by just talking rate card and I think in house marketers probably don't have a choice. But non specialist procurement people have come to the table and tried to turn the pitch process into a very similar process that you would use if you were buying. I don't know, four containers of potatoes.  

 
08:12 
Dom Hawes 
And marketing services cannot be procured that way.  

 
08:15 
Richard O'Connor 
Quite. And also, the initial conversation about cost should be done. That should be the conversation, not procurement coming in and then trying to squeeze another 510 percent off. I've learned marketing over the years and I've led marketing, but my background is sales. And the first thing you learn about sales is, yes, put price into context of value, but don't be apologetic about price because you're buying a service, you're buying something that is valuable and has a price attached to it. And the more apologetic you are about it, the further you delay it and become evasive about price, the more you show a lack of confidence in the value that you're delivering.  

 
08:54 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, and the fact you're not prepared to talk about it, as you say, well, that's just signaling very strongly to the other side that you're not quite sure about the price you're charging or the value you're creating. I think there's another thing going on at the moment, too, which we've just suffered from this week. A very large software application or platform company, I'm not going to say which they are, but they ran a procurement process to find a marketing agency and they asked for something to be delivered in a timeline at a quality level and price that we didn't believe was possible. If they want to achieve the business outcome, you can do what they want to achieve, a creative output at a price, but you can't achieve what they want as a business. They just haven't allowed enough time or budget.  

 
09:34 
Dom Hawes 
But agencies are hungry at the moment. So another agency is going to promise the outcome for the budget in the time they may even believe they can deliver it. I don't know. I mean, who knows? But when they don't deliver, those marketers will then a have an egg on their face, and they're going to have to revisit the pitch list and go back to the agencies that told the truth in the first place. I'm seeing a lot of that right now. People looking for silver bullets, imagining that time quality price triangle doesn't exist. And, you know, as a procurer, I think you probably get the agency and the relationship that your process picks. If you like, you get what you deserve. So be really careful about the process you run.  

 
10:13 
Dom Hawes 
If you make it all about price or you don't listen to pushback, you just might be focusing on the wrong things. Richard, you've got a big background in both sales and marketing, so you must have seen this from all sides. What have you done? How have you helped get over this?  

 
10:30 
Richard O'Connor 
When we train negotiation, and I've trained a lot of salespeople over the years, there's a difference between haggling and trading. Haggling is price. It's the lowest price you can possibly get, and it misses the point around value. When you're trading value, so you're trading variables, and the variable actually isn't price. It might be time, it might be the package, it might be the people involved, but you don't haggle. You trade on value because the price is invariably fair and well priced. So that's the difference. You've got hagglers. You think about street market, give you the best price, you're haggling the lowest possible common denominator.  

 
11:09 
Dom Hawes 
Well, there's a famous triangle, isn't it time, quality, price? You can have two, but not three.  

 
11:12 
Richard O'Connor 
Exactly.  

 
11:13 
Dom Hawes 
And anyone that says you can have three isn't telling the truth. So if you've got time, quality, price, you want to keep quality the same, but you want to do something in accelerated time. Something's got to give, change the package.  

 
11:22 
Richard O'Connor 
Increase the, change the price, change the package.  

 
11:24 
Dom Hawes 
We'll put more resources.  

 
11:24 
Richard O'Connor 
Exactly right.  

 
11:25 
Dom Hawes 
But some things you can't accelerate, like if you are trying to communicate with and influence or educate a market, let's say you've got an early stage technology product and you're marketing to a budget that doesn't yet exist. So you've got to educate your market first. You can't accelerate that. You have to do it the proper way. Our regular listeners may have heard me rant about sales and marketing alignment as an issue before I led into Klukman's episode, which came out in early December, about things that give me mizophonia. They make my head hurt. And one of those is sales and marketing alignment. Now, I happen to know that in Propolis you led a community sprint on this very topic.  

 
12:05 
Richard O'Connor 
We did.  

 
12:06 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me about this issue. Let's see if we can put it to bed.  

 
12:10 
Richard O'Connor 
Well, a community sprint is where propolis really comes to life. It's where we almost create empirical research based on everybody's collective expertise. We did one on sales marketing alignment and particularly sales enablement. And cut a long story short, we ran it over two weeks and the outcome was that the very phrase sales enablement and sales and marketing alignment is fundamentally the problem, because you're looking at the wrong end of the telescope. It's all about navel gazing, it's all about internal processes, and you kind of lose sight of the buyer. So what came from this, and again from everybody's input, was that buyer enablement is actually the focus.  

 
12:48 
Richard O'Connor 
In fact, the more we talk about sales and marketing alignment, you're actually compounding the problem, because you're suggesting that sales and marketing aren't aligned and focusing on the bit in the middle, whereas actually, if you just focus on the buyer, and I know we talked about this at the b two b marketing awards after, probably after a couple of champagnes, but there's an existential argument, really. Is marketing the right phrase and is sales the right phrase? Perhaps that's why we see the rise of the chief revenue officer.  

 
13:17 
Dom Hawes 
I love the concept that it's called buyer enablement.  

 
13:22 
Dom Hawes 
When we try and keep it simple, stupid.  

 
13:24 
Dom Hawes 
The basic role of a business, of a marketer, is to take an innovation to market right, to create value and to design the scheme to do that, which is make it easy for people to understand what you do and make it easy for them to buy it. So buyer enablement talks very strongly towards that. And I love that. The iceberg metaphor here, like the bit of marketing you see above the water, is the bit that needs to be the handover to sales. But there's all that bit below it.  

 
13:49 
Richard O'Connor 
Sales have the conversation and there is a profession, and there's a slight difference between sales and marketing. Marketing is an official profession. Actually, sales has struggled to be seen as a profession in itself. But it is, and there is a real skill in it, and there's a real capability that can be trained and coached and built. Sales have the conversation. They know how to ask the right questions. They know how to identify need, they know how to negotiate, they know how to close. There was the whole cadre of skill development and talent in sales. That's where sales come in. But to almost suggest there is a handoff where marketing goes, okay, my job's done, off you good luck. I just think it's outdated.  

 
14:30 
Dom Hawes 
I have met a CEO in the cybersecurity world. I met him at Infosec who literally said, my work is done. I've handed over a million pounds off the pipeline. That's it. My work's done. I said, are you not interested in seeing how much of this converts into sales? Not my responsibility. He said, that's pretty scary, I reckon.  

 
14:48 
Richard O'Connor 
Speaking to one large, us, very large, privately owned us manufacturer, tech manufacturer, where marketing reports into the CRO, and his responsibility extends to sales. So they are measured on the same things. So they follow through their ABM programs, literally all the way through to revenue generation. And I think if you've got that joint responsibility for the end goal, which is revenue generation growth, it's a good.  

 
15:19 
Dom Hawes 
Way for things to be going, I have to say. So I would extend it even further. I'll start it from the very first point or pre contact. So your very first point of trying to educate a market all the way through the nurture process, all the way through the sales process. I'll come back to sales in a minute into customer success. Because once you've got a customer, your role is then to turn them into an advocate.  

 
15:38 
Richard O'Connor 
Couldn't agree more.  

 
15:39 
Dom Hawes 
And that is part of the process, too.  

 
15:41 
Richard O'Connor 
And customer success is one of the, I think, the fastest growing and most important parts of the kind of buying cycle.  

 
15:49 
Dom Hawes 
So I think what's really interesting from a marketer's point of view is that marketers, as well as effectively being sales or helping out with a sales process, are also buyers. And we all know what a good salesperson looks like and feels like when we're buying, and we all know what a good customer support or customer success person looks like post sale. But sometimes there's a disconnect between what we consume, I think, and then what we try and create for our customers. But if we try and create that best experience every time, the concept of sales and marketing alignment also disappears, because it's what's best for the customer.  

 
16:24 
Richard O'Connor 
Exactly what you were saying, it's the buyer journey. It is the buyer journey.  

 
16:29 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, it's the buyer's journey. It's their journey.  

 
16:32 
Richard O'Connor 
Previous life, we had a whole process, FTSE 250 organization called Ditlock Day in the life of a customer where the sales and marketing team were targeted with spending time with customers. What was eye opening about it is the lack of understanding of the buyer process, the overestimation of the value they saw in our products, in our relationships, and the fact that really, where we thought were kind of top of mind, were low down, a very low list of priorities. But the important thing is, when they needed us, when they needed to have that conversation, that's when we needed to react, that's when we needed to be really good, that's when we needed to be available and professional.  

 
17:14 
Richard O'Connor 
But I think when you sit on the customer side and they're understanding that the number of priorities they're juggling, particularly in senior leadership roles, you just sit somewhere really small. And I think we talked about the buying cycle. It might take three to six months, but actually there'll be a point where the customer says, right now I'm ready.  

 
17:30 
Dom Hawes 
We all think we're far more important in our customers lives than we actually are.  

 
17:34 
Richard O'Connor 
We overestimate in the short term. Underestimate in the long term.  

 
17:42 
Dom Hawes 
Doesn't Richard have one of those voices? He's so easy to listen to. You know, in our interview, I ramped up my normal rant level to see if I could get him to follow suits, but he just didn't. Ever the professional, he stayed calm. So calm I actually felt the need to edit out the worst of my indiscretions this time around. But what a clear vision he has. We started talking about Propolis, how it's becoming a genuine community of marketers who give to get, who combine practical experience with domain expertise to create a multiplier effect. And now agencies like mine can play too. I think we're all part of something that's pretty powerful. Communities have rules, otherwise they become chaotic.  

 
18:24 
Dom Hawes 
And I've seen first hand how growing community engagement in propolis has increased the confidence of its members to share challenges, ask questions and exchange knowledge that's beneficial for everyone involved. I have nothing to gain but the community effect. So if you're not a community member but you like the sound of it, why not drop me a line? There's a generosity of spirit in that community which allows for vulnerability. People who don't know stuff, peer to peer sharing, both of success and failure. It really is a special place to be. So if you like the sound of it, give me a shout. We also talked about the procurement problem. We criticized the current procurement process, which many believe is flawed and doesn't adequately account for the value of creative services. And there is a whole podcast dedicated to this one subject.  

 
19:09 
Dom Hawes 
Drop me a line if you want to know more about that. No one ever needs to use the phrase sales and marketing alignment again in my presence. By the way, Richard, to my mind, has killed this forever. He's also killed that awful phrase, sales enablement. We need to focus on buyer enablement and stop being so inward looking. There you go.  

 
19:29 
Dom Hawes 
I reckon that was a pretty good first half.  

 
19:31 
Dom Hawes 
And next we are going to tackle more touchy subjects for b two b marketers. And to try and make up for my academic underachievement, I tried to impress Richard with an Oscar Wilde quote. I think he humored me. You decide.  

 
19:45 
Dom Hawes 
So maybe next year, 2024, Richard, is the year where the marketing revolution will be complete. And I'm going to quote Oscar Wilde here, the revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. I know this is something very close to your heart. Talk to me about your theory on the need for marketers to be bilingual.  

 
20:05 
Richard O'Connor 
Bilingual is right. At worst, bilingual. I mean, ideally speaking the same language, but at worst bilingual. And what I mean by that is that the language that happens within the marketing function that everybody understands, everybody knows, and everybody kind of rattles out as if it's a collective understanding, is not the same that is required at the board level or with sales or with product or other parts of the business, because they don't care. I mean, arguably, sales care about the leads they get. They don't care whether it's an MQL SQL Sal. They understand what those phrases are. But is this customer ready to buy? Is it a lead? A hot lead? That's actually what they care about. Is this a hot lead? If not, I'm not really interested. Brilliant.  

 
20:49 
Richard O'Connor 
Whatever it is you do to get them to be a hot lead, go off and do it, then come back and have a hot leak. They don't care. The most important language barrier and opportunity is for marketers to understand what the CFO cares about. The finance function cares about, the CEO cares about. And in some fortunate businesses where the marketer becomes the CEO, you might get a bit more understanding. But broadly speaking, they care about growth, and they care about delivery and execution of the strategy. What often happens in organizations is that there's just too much navel gazing. The strategy is set at the start of the year, there's a roadshow that happens perhaps over a period of a month where the CEO or his plus ones go around and talk about the strategy. And then that strategy, it still remains the same.  

 
21:41 
Richard O'Connor 
The CEO is thinking about it, the CFO is probably thinking about it. But then sales, marketing, other functions go off and start to do their own thing. And over time, actually, I think in organizations, those functions, unless they are constantly looking back at the strategy and making sure that what they're doing aligns to the strategy, they get further and further away. And I think that's where the challenge lies about what a really good CMO does is come back to the board or come back to their senior leadership team and say, right, okay, where are we with the strategy? Is there any deviation from strategy? And I know what the overarching, arching objectives are, and this is what we're doing to make sure that we're delivering on that strategy, not talking about MQLs, SQLs.  

 
22:20 
Dom Hawes 
It's hard, I guess, though, if you're being very hard driven quarterly to produce results. And I know a lot of us businesses, particularly public markets, they have to deliver strong quarterly results or their toast. I've seen a lot of COMs in this market who are completely misaligned by their incentive programs, where they just are measured by MQLs. And the challenge, I think, is that you end up with a lot of marketing departments where the process of marketing becomes a mean unto itself. Like your job is to produce MQLs that the sales team don't want, that, you know, are useless. But if you don't produce them, you get fired. So what are you going to do? Right? And I absolutely buy 100% what you're saying about tying it back to strategy, that in an ideal world you need to say the so what?  

 
23:05 
Dom Hawes 
We want to do this because, okay, so what? What's going to happen? How is that going to work? And I don't think that rigor is often applied. So the marketing department and their agency partners then get all tied up in the outputs. It's like, oh, we're going to do a campaign without bring why we're doing the campaign or what the objective is. It's a very broad generalization. I know, and I'm sure a lot of people want to tar and feather me again, but I think a lot of people get caught up in the process of are we going to win an award with this campaign? It's like how brave can we be? So they get caught up in the process, not the outcome.  

 
23:37 
Dom Hawes 
And I think one of the most damaging phrases that I think has become common in business is follow the process, not the outcome. No one cares about the process. It's all about the outcome. And if you can produce the outcome without a complicated process, I think this is why AI is so important. If you can achieve the outcome by having less process or fewer steps in your process, so much the better. So I take it, Richard, I'm going to give you a high five on that one strategy. Everything must tie back to strategy and.  

 
24:09 
Richard O'Connor 
You'Ve got to challenge yourself because in large organizations, having worked in large organizations, I'll give you a really good example. We did a value stream mapping exercise. We did a large transformation company called UBM, big sales and marketing transformation, Salesforce rollout, new sales process. We took 115 sales job titles down to a family of 13 in EMEA, Asia and Americas. Really complex project over three years and we did a value stream mapping exercise. So value stream mapping is looking at process, what's value added to the customer, what's wasted effort. And during that process we found somebody who worked in finance who spent four days a week producing a very complex financial report thinking it was going to the board where it was getting real scrutiny, good coverage, big tick, great report.  

 
24:55 
Richard O'Connor 
What we found in that process is that went to their boss and no further.  

 
24:59 
Dom Hawes 
No way.  

 
25:00 
Richard O'Connor 
Four days a week. Four days a week. Terrible. And they cried. Actually they were really upset. I'm not surprised that when we uncovered this and that is the problem. And if you put that into any function. But let's think about marketing for a second. If you're not pursuing strategy and you're not aligning to strategy, nobody will notice until you get much further into the year because everyone's busy, because your priorities, you're a functional head, there's an expectation that you are going to be following strategy and not slightly going down a different path. Nobody's really going to notice in large organizations because everyone is getting on with their own job.  

 
25:39 
Richard O'Connor 
And unless you've got a really diligent manager or leader who is keeping a really close eye on the day to day, which frankly nobody has time to do, then I think over the course of a year it doesn't get noticed. So you can very steadily just get further away from the overall business objectives. And I think that's where some of the challenges come, with the credibility of sales and marketing. Unfortunately, marketing often gets the, because of the history of marketing and because there's this, we talked about this whole attitude about coloring in PowerPoint presentations in the basement, that sort of thing, that moniker, I think that's partly where it comes from. And I think the strongest, best marketing leaders are the ones that actually break free from that.  

 
26:20 
Richard O'Connor 
And no CFO, no CEO is going to be upset if a marketer, a senior marketer, doesn't even need to be. The CMO comes back and says, I just want to check any deviation to strategy. I want to make sure that the business that I'm running is aligned to our overall objectives.  

 
26:37 
Dom Hawes 
I mean, we've seen two very strong marketing leaders in this studio talk actually about the solution to this problem, both of whom are doing marketing transformation work. They're both centralizing their brand and strategy piece into an in house agency, and they're decentralizing the activation of that at the same time. So it's centralization and decentralization at the same time. And in doing so, they're keeping a very firm grip on making sure that the whole of the marketing effort is aligned to strategy, because that's the piece that's been centralized, whereas they're enabling all of their field marketing people to get on and do what they do best, make local decisions, interpret locally, but they're keeping a very tight control. So it's interesting hearing the problem. So I knew that they were creating a solution to something. Now you've given the problem that solution is fitting.  

 
27:24 
Richard O'Connor 
Not all organizations. Some are really good at it, of course. Yeah, but I think there is a problem, and actually the larger and more complex and the bigger the headcount and the more locations, and we probably could go down this path, but let's not. The less people are in the office, it's harder to spot.  

 
27:45 
Dom Hawes 
Let's not go down that one. A actually the driver is more for less, which is one of the key drivers everyone's got. And actually you can achieve a more efficient, more productive marketing business by hybridizing between in house agency and external agencies. We know that and we support that, by the way, even as an agency group. But also digital, particularly large language models and generative models, not going to use the a word, particularly those enable people to do stuff locally and the risk of shadow marketers becomes much larger.  

 
28:16 
Richard O'Connor 
Right.  

 
28:16 
Dom Hawes 
So by transforming in that way, they're seeing a problem off before it starts to happen.  

 
28:21 
Richard O'Connor 
I completely agree. I think that's right.  

 
28:23 
Dom Hawes 
Language. So we've started looking at some of the problem. We've talked about how marketers need. Ideally we want to talk the same language as the rest of the business and stop inventing garbage that we say to each other to make ourselves sound either trendy or important. Let's talk about return on investment. That's one of my little bet noir, this, and I really actually don't have a very good way of articulating. I've been trying on several of the episodes. My challenge with it is that if you say Roi to a marketer and you say RoI to a CFO or a CEO, they both understand what you're talking about. But in their minds, they're building very different pictures. And I don't really know where I'm going with this one. I'm looking for help, actually. Richard, help me out.  

 
29:02 
Richard O'Connor 
It's not just ROI, although I agree, Roi to the CFO and arguably the CEO is a very different ROI to the marketing function. So almost divided by a common language and I think an understanding of, we talked about the marketers being bilingual, but understanding what matters to the audience that you're talking to, in this case, the.  

 
29:24 
Dom Hawes 
EO and the fo, right? Yeah, quite.  

 
29:27 
Richard O'Connor 
Is really important. And CFOs and finance directors and heads of finance get bad press sometimes and feel like they're the enemy of the marketing function. Quite the opposite. If you speak their language.  

 
29:39 
Dom Hawes 
I agree.  

 
29:40 
Richard O'Connor 
And you understand as a marketing function how you are delivering the business's fundamental objectives. And we're talking about strategy. Again, you'll find the CFO will be your greatest ally.  

 
29:50 
Dom Hawes 
It's about value, isn't? It's all about creating value. So I think one of the challenges I have with the ROI phrase is it seems to assume it's all about money, profit. And sometimes value isn't necessarily about revenue or profit. There's an enormous amount of value created in other ways, as we've explored on this podcast in the past. Like quality of revenue, EBIT does one of the levers, but it's only one of them. There's quality of revenue. There's market focus. There are intangible assets like brand and brand value. There are all these other ways that you can create value. And I think as long as Mark says, we can communicate that properly to the rest of the business and they can see exactly how value is being created, then in the EO and FO, you'll have amazing advocates.  

 
30:31 
Richard O'Connor 
And you're right, it's not just about top line revenue, and it's not just about EBITDA, because no business leader is short sighted enough to realize, I mean, they're ultimately what matters, but they're not short sighted enough to realize that there are staging posts along the way that help with long term value. Brand is a very good example. And actually measuring brand is becoming, I wouldn't say easier, but actually there are companies like brand finance who do a very good job of recognizing and putting a financial value against investment in brand. Yeah.  

 
31:07 
Dom Hawes 
And they're blazing the trail in that.  

 
31:08 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, they are. They really are.  

 
31:10 
Dom Hawes 
Let's move on a little bit, but only a little bit. So we're talking about ROI, we're talking about building long term value. What we're actually talking about, of course, is marketing effectiveness. And effectiveness is something that is on everyone's lips at the moment, big mouth for the sector. And I say that with great respect because I've done his mini MbA. Ritzen, of course, great conservancy earlier this month when he said the whole of the USA is less effective than the whole of the rest of the world when it comes to marketing. I think he was, as he normally does, principally thinking about consumer marketing in.  

 
31:40 
Dom Hawes 
B to b, how top of the.  

 
31:43 
Dom Hawes 
Agenda is marketing effectiveness?  

 
31:46 
Richard O'Connor 
High. Very high. Notwithstanding the point around ROI not necessarily being the right measure or lens. So we've actually been asked by our community in propolis to research some b, two b marketing metrics, and we've launched what we call the Propolis Community Index, which is a set of benchmarks on budget and ROI and headcount and organizational design. In January, we launched our second set of metrics on ABM performance and campaign performance. And the reason it's important is because we haven't seen out there, and certainly our members haven't seen out there, a set of metrics that are not static. So there's lots of people who publish metrics, but almost by the time you've done the three months of research and printed them, they're out of date. So what we've done with the community index, it's what we call a contributory data model.  

 
32:32 
Richard O'Connor 
So our members contribute their data in return for the aggregate data of the community. And we top it up with some market research as well. What it does is reflect market differences. So we cover a number of verticals as well as regional differences, but it also reflects cyclicality as well. So we see this quarter by quarter changing. So when there's an upturn, we get a reflection of how those marketing metrics are reflecting an upturn. An upturn would be nice, wouldn't it?  

 
33:00 
Dom Hawes 
Wouldn't it be?  

 
33:00 
Richard O'Connor 
Hopefully, hopefully next year. But in a downturn, it also reflects that cyclicality. And we know from our members that they're using this to inform budget planning, inform conversations. That's really interesting at board level to be able to actually go with a set of numbers that can help convince and wrangle for more budget or headcount or help other people understand the value that marketing delivers.  

 
33:26 
Dom Hawes 
That's quant, yes.  

 
33:28 
Dom Hawes 
And you're taking sentiment and opinion on the market. What I'm interested in is your effectiveness, or the marketing effectiveness that propolis is talking about is at a market level, which is, I think, much more relevant in b to b, because as you say, cyclicality is a really big influence on what you do and when.  

 
33:49 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, and there are genuine variations between markets. The tech spend, tech headcount changes in the last year have reflect a market that's been significantly more challenged. Financial services, who tend to have a more even performance in an up market or a down market. We've seen that those metrics have remained broadly steady, but there is definite variation in key markets, in certain markets and in regions.  

 
34:16 
Dom Hawes 
So I'm fascinated by this stuff and it's interesting. So I talk to a lot of people, obviously in my role, and I'm picking up from early signs and people I'm talking to that financial services at the moment is catching a bit of a cold. They're starting just to be just that little bit more cautious. They're looking at the market next year. They don't like what they're seeing and they're not stopping activity, but they're just.  

 
34:35 
Dom Hawes 
Slowly pulling their horns in.  

 
34:36 
Dom Hawes 
And it's the first time I think I've seen that in FS really since pre Covid.  

 
34:40 
Richard O'Connor 
Actually, we're going to see that flow through into the metrics, because at the end of the year we stop, reset, start again, so that we get quarter by quarter and then year on year reflection of changes in the market. If that is the case, and I do agree with you, there is a small sniff of it. We'll see that come through in the numbers.  

 
35:00 
Dom Hawes 
And manufacturing, I think, had a really hard year this year, but I'm hoping that there may be a slow recovery next year.  

 
35:06 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, I think it's been a tougher year for manufacturers, albeit I think we're still seeing the sort of bounce that they had for marketing from COVID where field sales teams, where manufacturers, where sales drove the bus and then field sales teams couldn't get out and realized that actually they need to invest a bit more in marketing. I think we're still seeing some of that come through. I think a lot of manufacturing firms have invested quite heavily in marketing because they realized they were a little bit behind.  

 
35:38 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah.  

 
35:38 
Dom Hawes 
Which you would then expect to start emerging. And there's been some good big announcements recently about massive investments into the northeast. So, look, hopefully manufacturing. How often do you publish? Or is this an ongoing.  

 
35:49 
Richard O'Connor 
It's ongoing. So we've got three tranches of data. So we've had the first tranche of data, which is about budget and ROI. It's about, as I say, organizational design. It's been about customer attrition, customer metrics. The second set of data, as I said, is coming out in January. So that will be on campaign performance. So more granular budget and ROI. And I'm sorry, we have used the word ROI.  

 
36:14 
Dom Hawes 
Look, if there's a campaign. I get it. Exactly.  

 
36:16 
Richard O'Connor 
It is campaign ROI. That's very true.  

 
36:18 
Dom Hawes 
Money goes in, money must come back.  

 
36:22 
Richard O'Connor 
But also ABM. And I don't think. I haven't seen a set of really granular metrics on ABM performance. So we've spent a lot of time creating the questions on how do we measure the impact of ABM. You came to our ABM conference early in the year and it feels like ABM has just had. Not that it needed it, but it's almost had a shot in the arm.  

 
36:46 
Dom Hawes 
It's had a renaissance.  

 
36:47 
Richard O'Connor 
It really has. I don't think it was moribund, but I think it was reaching a sort of a plateau. And certainly from our ABM conference this year, there are more people doing it, there are more people accelerating. AI has hugely refreshed the opportunities with ABM for more businesses, just because the cost of entry with AI gets lower, so more opportunities. So having some ABM metrics, I think, will be really powerful. Looking forward to it.  

 
37:15 
Dom Hawes 
Of that data, how much is public and how much is community only?  

 
37:19 
Richard O'Connor 
It's behind the membership paywall. It is a membership benefit. We do publish bits of it because I think it's good for the community and we take a wider responsibility for informing the b two b marketing community beyond propolis.  

 
37:34 
Dom Hawes 
So I'd love someone to come back. Just bring the public stuff and bring the headlines. Sure. And, like, if you're going to do once a quarter announcement, we'll do a slot one of our episodes. Great to feature that. That'd be great.  

 
37:45 
Richard O'Connor 
Really good. Really good. It'd be a good discussion point.  

 
37:47 
Dom Hawes 
Richard, thank you very much for coming to see us. And look, let's get together a little bit more regularly in the new year.  

37:53 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, great.  

 
37:53 
Dom Hawes 
Maybe to discuss the public bits you can talk about from the index, because I'm really interested.  

 
37:57 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, love to.  

 
37:58 
Dom Hawes 
Great, great.  

 
37:59 
Richard O'Connor 
And again, happy Christmas.  

 
38:00 
Dom Hawes 
Happy Christmas, everyone. Actually, I've just realized I've been a real grinch all episode, haven't I?  

 
38:06 
Richard O'Connor 
Yeah, but it's fine. It's fine. It's all for the good of b to b. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of festive spirit, but there wasn't, was there?  

 
38:13 
Dom Hawes 
Oh well, next week we've got the unicorny Christmas party. We'll have some festive spirit. I think we're going to ran together the Christmas party, but there you go.  

 
38:23 
Dom Hawes 
Well, it's Christmas, so I'm going to keep this very short. Thank you very much indeed, Richard O'Connor, for coming to see us at such a busy time of year. I loved our chat and I have a feeling we're probably going to have.  

 
38:33 
Dom Hawes 
More to talk about in the new year.  

 
38:35 
Dom Hawes 
I'm going to publish a timeline on the show notes and we'll also link a blog there with some considered takeaways. Thank you to you for listening, especially.  

 
38:43 
Dom Hawes 
At this busy time of year.  

 
38:44 
Dom Hawes 
Although I know a lot of people like to put their earbuds in and listen to us while they go about their daily chores.  

 
38:49 
Dom Hawes 
Well, that's it.  

 
38:50 
Dom Hawes 
No smart sum up, no piggybacking my guest brilliance, no sassy sign off? It's Christmas. I hope you have a fabulous time with your friends and family, but if your Christmas is crap, well, you could always join us for the Unicorny Christmas party on Boxing Day. Yay. Bon Noel, fro Vineachten, Feliz Navidad, Bonnale Feina Kersht and all of the rest.  

 
39:12 
Dom Hawes 
Have a very merry Christmas.  

 
39:19 
Dom Hawes 
You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote.  

 
39:22 
Dom Hawes 
To post rationalized business books.  

 
39:24 
Dom Hawes 
If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review.  

 
39:29 
Dom Hawes 
Us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and.  

 
39:32 
Dom Hawes 
It only takes a few seconds, but it means a lot to us. Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn. Tagging at unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production. Now go win the future.