14. CMO? You're Fired with Nick Eades

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 back to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This is the podcast for senior executives who want to find out how other businesses are building value through marketing. Last week on Unicorny, I was joined by Sultan of Strategy co host Adam Greener from Digital Radish to interview the really incredible double, john Watton, vice president of marketing for VMware. And we talked about how to scale a B2B tech business. In the show, we dived into, well, this topic, as well as what you'd need to consider when building an integrated revenue generation engine. We also talk about the importance of place in marketing and what is happening in the talent market right now. I know I say this all the time, but it was a belter. It was an absolutely fantastic episode. So you absolutely have to go back and listen to it, if you haven't done already.

00:57
Dom Hawes
I like to think of businesses as organic beings, not machines. Business has always been a lot like a natural habitat filled with different species of life, trying to coexist, try to thrive. When the ecosystem is in spring, the fauna graze, the flowers bloom, and the birds chirp. But recently, things haven't been going so well for one of the birds. And that bird is marketing. Something's beginning to change the habitat. Once upon a time, when the CEO of an established global company wanted to drive growth, they went to their CMO. But there's a problem because the CMO isn't in the nest anymore. The CRO has been invading the marketing nest. Actually, you know what? Let's stop that metaphor now. Joining me on the podcast today as a co host is the perspicacious marketing veteran, Shane Redding, owner of Thinkdirect, a B2B digital marketing consultancy.

01:55
Dom Hawes
And we are going to be interviewing the extraordinary Nick Eades. Nick, like Shane, is a veteran of the marketing business. He has worked for globally recognized brands like BT and Dell, and he's now a board level leader who spent the last 25 years of his life working for companies who need to drive profitable growth and create sustainable value through world class, systematic go to market, or GTM as it's known. Nick is also a brand ambassador for Propolis, and he's been CMO for more companies than I can count. So there really are not two better people than I would rather be in the room with if we're going to talk about the existential issue, which is the purpose of the CMO. So in our chat, Nick tracks how the CRO has invaded the CMO's space. We discuss why companies need to refocus on existing customers. We talk about the P's of marketing and why companies in growth mode die of indigestion, not starvation.

02:54
Dom Hawes
There is so much to get stuck into, but I did enjoy the metaphor. Let's jump in. One day, not so long ago, today's guest was in conversation with Joel Harrison from B2B marketing. Now in the conversation. Today's guest got so mad about the world of marketing, so Joel asked him, if you were going to do a session at Ignite, what would you do?

03:15
Nick Eades
And our guest said, well, I would wander on stage and say you're all fired. And secretly in your heart you probably know why, wouldn't you?

03:24
Dom Hawes
Today's guest is Nick Eades, hugely experienced Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer. Today we're going to talk about and explore the CRO Cuckoo, the Chief Revenue Officer role that's invaded marketing space and is pushing it out of the nest and the boardroom. We're going to talk about what marketing needs to do to get taken more seriously by the business and the risk to business if we actually sorry you don't do something about the cuckoos soon. But before we bring Nick on, I'm very pleased to introduce Shane Redding who's joining me on the show today. Why don't you start by introducing yourself, please.

03:58
Shane Redding
It's very kind. Dom, thank you very much. I fell in, like many as a career into B2B, marketing and sales by accident, not planned, then found. I loved it, I loved the variety, I loved the challenge, the intellectual rigor required. And my career has spanned a wide range both of Plc enterprise startup businesses. Today I do three things. I consult to very large B2B brands around the world. I lecture and train and then for a bit of fun, I've got fauna execs busy.

04:28
Dom Hawes
Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you very much. That's fab. Nick eades. Good morning, Nick.

04:32
Nick Eades
Morning Tom, it's great to be here.

04:34
Dom Hawes
Look, today we're going to talk around a topic that's really close to my heart. The deprecation of the role of marketing in business to business. But before we start, why don't you tell us a little bit about your career, your current work, that kind of stuff.

04:46
Nick Eades
Yeah, I'm tech and telecoms hardware, software, born and bred. So started about 30 OD years ago with a company called IBM, started there writing code end up in Presales, then in sales, then on the team that launched the IBM ThinkPad and ran that as the brand manager for a number of years working in the UK and Paris. I worked for Dell after that for five years from 8 billion to 45 billion of revenue, pretty much straight line growth, and then spent some time in other tech companies, including BT, Avaya, and Nortel, before moving to a great company called Scion, P-S-I-O-N. Part of the team that turned around. That with an amazing executive team. And we got acquired by Motorola. So I didn't spend the next in the last ten years. And whereas where I am currently in the private equity venture capital world doing acceleration, growth engineering, if you like, in a strange way for early stage.

05:34
Nick Eades
I work with a couple right now that are sort of two ish million arr all the way up to about 80 million arr and beyond. Again, with a couple of exits in there and near exits. I do understand the challenges that growing a company goes through. And I spend most of my time working on an advisory and consultancy basis with those companies.

05:51
Dom Hawes
So basically, Listener, what you're hearing is we have a very highly qualified panel to discuss this issue. And a big issue it is. So, to research each Unicorn episode, our producers arrange a 20 minutes zoom with guests where we ask what learnings they want to bring to the Unicorn project. Now, our first call with Nick wasn't the usual call. Firstly, it lasted 45 minutes because we just had so much to say. It was just a great call. But also, Nick didn't hold back in his assertion that marketing as a discipline is really on the rocks in B2B, to be specific. Nick believes the role of CMO, the very role of CMO, is at risk, or at least about to change materially, because in most businesses that he's seeing, the role of CMO is, in his words, all about brand and a bit of website.

06:34
Dom Hawes
So, Shane, I wanted to explore that a little bit. Can you maybe expand on where you see the problem right now in marketing, B2B?

06:42
Shane Redding
I think it's really timely to address this because I think there's three root causes to this challenge. With B2B CMOs today, the primary root cause, I believe, is actually the legacy world that we live in, which is in B2B, sales had the power, they had the power, they had the budget. They were seen as the revenue drivers and deliverers. So many CMOS have grown up in that world. That world is no more. Let's be really blunt, actually, if any function is threatened, it's head of sales, not just marketing secondary. We live in a world where I believe there's complete over indexing on growth, not only, but in the majority coming from net new customers. I am always shocked when I go in and ask a CMO, okay, let's have a look at your budget. How do you split it between new customers and existing OOH?

07:37
Shane Redding
We don't split our marketing budget that way. What? What do you mean you don't know where the growth is coming from by those two very different groups? That's a huge issue. And then, third reason, we're a product of our own legacy, of our own experience. Many CMOs B2B CMOs came into their roles as Brandon comms. They weren't coming in as Nick and I, perhaps I started a salesperson. Nick, you come in with a different background, you bring a different lens, and it's very hard if you accelerate quite rapidly to continue to learn new stuff. I believe lots of CMOS need to learn new skills.

08:19
Dom Hawes
Nick, what's gone wrong? What's gone wrong with marketing?

08:21
Nick Eades
Well, I think Shane describes a good chunk of it. I think the other piece is, I often look at the kind of CEO that you have. So I've had a couple of CEOs who've been ex CFOs. So in certain circumstances, that's kind of okay. Because if you're doing a turnaround and you need to preserve value or you need to cut because the business is in trouble, you probably do need a CFO as your CEO. But in growth mode, then very often you end up with a CEO who's ex sales in some capacities. Really, really rare brackets. I don't think I've ever seen it, whereas CMOS move to CEO in a B, two B business. We are living in the legacy of our history, and the question is, are we comfortable with the challenge and the maneuver it would take in terms of skills to get CMOS to CEO?

09:05
Nick Eades
Because I think that would change quite a lot. But we need to have CMOS who are able to do that. So they need to be incredibly commercial, able to stand in for the CEO when the CEO is not in the room with the board or investors. Ultimately, it's a C level role, right? CMO is a C level role. So you have to be a peer with just about everybody else. Know your functional discipline, but be a part of that C suite. And I think we've got to understand what that means a bit more.

09:31
Dom Hawes
Like if you come into marketing from sales or from product dev, if you come in with a different perspective, do you think you then find it easier to be that C level person?

09:40
Shane Redding
I think you possibly do, actually, yes. I think some of the best CMOS I've worked with have had a very different background, and they're also perhaps slightly or even a lot more willing to admit what they don't know, because there's no fear if you've come and you're qualified in a different area. One of the best CMOS that I had the pleasure of working with, Phil Gosner, you're getting a shout out here. Most drilling as where he was previously was a commercial lawyer. One of the best CMOs I have worked with because he challenged everything. He bought his legal brain to sort of say, why are we doing that? And that is just lacking sometimes. So yeah, I think it can be a real strength.

10:17
Nick Eades
The job that you have at the sea level is not know the answer, but it's to know the question. And I think you have to have an understanding of your market and your product to be able to ask the question. If you're the person answering the question in the room, you have hired very badly. A hires A, B hires C. You should hire your successor without any shame, without any remorse whatsoever. But build strong teams so that they push you up. You can't ask all the right questions. If you've got a team around you who aren't prepared, haven't got the skills to go deep and find you the answer. If you don't know the answer, go find it. I don't think you should be the person in the room knows all the answers. You should know all the questions.

10:54
Dom Hawes
Wow.

10:55
Shane Redding
I'd second that. And I was always impressed. I used to do a lot of B to B strategic training and digital training with the DMA IDM. When a CMO would turn up on a course on, for example, Martech, you think, well, that's really interesting. And that was exactly their point. I want to know the right questions to ask. I don't want the detail, Shane, but what I do want, I want enough to be dangerous. I want to be able to ask my team the questions they should know the answers to.

11:25
Dom Hawes
Let's shift a little bit, because we talked about the CMO and maybe some of the shortfalls of the CMO, but suddenly there is a CRO in the room. Nick, what's the CRO all about? Where they come from?

11:35
Nick Eades
Let's just disassemble it a little bit. Chief easy, senior level, potentially the next CEO. Revenue. This person in this role owns all aspects of revenue. To Shane's point, it's the net new as well as the retention and growth. 80% of your growth should come from your install base. If your product portfolio, et cetera is driving that way, you should design it to be that way. You should be able to survive on your retention base. If worst case, you don't win anything new. But they do own revenue. And the pressure that puts on marketing is on late stage funnel and mid stage funnel in particular late stage because actually, sales are forecasting that's within their gift. And by the way, they can beat the out of you with, we don't have enough lEades. These lEades are rubbish. What's going on? I can't make the quarter straight to CEO.

12:21
Nick Eades
I can't make the quarter because of them. All of a sudden, you're on the back foot, right? And I have seen CMOS over the past year in portfolio companies in real trouble, where the pressure on them to deliver more and higher quality is intense. And then they start spraying and praying, then they start breaking everything that they've put in place that actually did work. So I see a lot of people shifting from an ABM strategy where you might be doing one to few to one to many to try and hoover up more lEades. Quantity over quality. It's quality all day long. The CRO puts an incredible upward pressure in the late stage funnel, right? The sort of pipeline cover stage up the pipe, and that draws the CMO into their space. And if they're not delivering, that's where the friction turns to fire.

13:06
Dom Hawes
There's a very quick transition from like, long term more strategic to short term tactical completely. And so are we saying then that CROs are applying the pressure? And if CMOS aren't equipped to deal with that they're making themselves vulnerable.

13:21
Nick Eades
Yes, because as I come back, one of the things that I'm a huge advocate of, and I've failed to deliver on this yet, is actually, say, part of the CMO function or part of the CMO's remit. Part of the CMO's bonus should be on SQLs and closed one. The closed one should be part of the revenue growth. It should be part of your overall comp. But if you're not focused on Closable lEades, what kind of lEades are you generating? We're not here for the stuff. We're here for the stuff that we can convert into revenue and profitable revenue at that. So, yeah, that's where the friction starts to come in.

13:50
Shane Redding
I think CROs have been brought in for exactly that point of failure is this obsession with lEades. Volume. You mentioned it. There's three V's in a good marketing funnel. There's volume, but it doesn't mean that more is always more. More can mean less. And velocity. Speed. But the one we all forget value. And why? Because I'm going to blame the Martech here. I adore Martech, used brilliantly. However, abuse of Martech has led to the MQL, which has meant we have this scientific inverted, commas way that we can justify our lEades. If you do not link your MQLs to your CRM, you are not doing your job as a CMO. And the number that tell me, oh, it's too difficult. What do you mean? You can't tell me that lead, what value they have potentially to your business. You're more interested in the behavioral, the fact that they visited the website five times.

14:45
Shane Redding
Oh, thanks very much. That's a student researching their latest paper.

14:48
Dom Hawes
What we're talking about here, of course, is marketing and marketing communications now being synonymous in most organizations, I think, because a lot of the marketers that I meet are obsessed about promotion. They don't get a look in when it comes to price or product or place. I was at a CEO forum about two months ago. There was a dinner. There were 20 CEOs round the table, all private equity backed, and were talking about price. The sole subject of discussion was price. And I interrupted the speaker to say, look, can I run a straw poll? Would anyone who brings their senior marketer into the pricing discussion please put their hands up? And out of the 20 at dinner, three put their hands up? Only three. Isn't it just? It means that marketing as a function has no say in pricing strategy. Just bizarre.

15:34
Nick Eades
It is stunning. I ran a product PNL. Twelve quarter PNL, so four quarters of history, two quarters of actual current year, two quarters of forecast in the quarters ahead. So say we're doing this half year, and then four quarters going ahead. Right. Full cost allocation all the way through to operating profit at PNL level. And I've done that on several times from anywhere between about 10 million to about a billion, two in sort of product portfolio terms, a price is driven by the three C rule, right? We've got four P's, three V's. I'm completely with Shane on volume, value, velocity. Three C rule costs competitors and customers and what they'll let you charge for something. It's our fact that is like page one, book 1101 of the pricing. So if the CEOs of the other 17 were saying, oh, I wonder who does my pricing, then?

16:17
Nick Eades
If it's the CFO, it's going to be cost up. If it's the salesperson, it'd be discount off. None of those. Neither of those are right. Right. Follow the competition. Well, assume they've got their cost stack the same as yours. Never a price war. It's always a cost war. In SaaS, you're trying to drive 90 95% gross margin and run this thing relatively hot on the rule of thought in a whole bunch of other bits and pieces. But who sets the price? If it's sales, you're in real trouble. If the CRO is setting price, it's because they're thinking tactically about what can I win this quarter, next quarter, this year? And they might not be with the company next year. So why are they setting price? Because price as a function of enterprise value. I had a conversation this year about the proliferation of discounting and how discounting affects arr.

17:00
Nick Eades
Do you subtract discounting from a price and you roll it up into arr, then you multiply it by, say, five or ten times, which is what we're doing the beginning of the year. The compound effect of 10% off versus levy is in the millions. You could take ten K off 100K deal and have a million come off your arr, your EV. So it's like, hang on, CEOs, stop with this pricing abdication, right? The responsibility for pricing is directly connected to how you create value. The easiest thing to do, I mean, there's loads of pricing consultants out there that would say that in this environment, the best thing you can do, and I'm doing it with lots of portfolio companies right now, is lifting price by between ten and 30%. And most people, most customers are just sucking it up, right? It's easy. Do we have to grow that much next year?

17:44
Nick Eades
New through new logos? It'd be much harder to grow at 30%, but if you can lift your base by 30%, do it.

17:49
Dom Hawes
The price is always a lot more elastic than people think.

17:52
Shane Redding
Value based pricing is misunderstood. It's a term that is banded round the CMOs. I admire they get it to Nick's point. They completely understand it. They understand where their brand is leading in a market. And let's face it, if you're a good brand marketer, that's the bit where you can bring huge knowledge and say, no, we're worth know, we are worth that because we've invested in our brand. We're giving that security to the buyers. Let's face it, if we're going into an economy, I know you don't want me to. Negative Dom. That is risk averse. What are people going to buy? They are going to buy job security. That means they buy safety. What can you sell in your product and service range that provides that emotional comfort? Blanket b to b. Marketers need to think about that as part of their value based pricing.

18:46
Nick Eades
So true.

18:48
Dom Hawes
I love this point made by both Shane and Nick that it really captures the essence of why marketing has so much value to a business. Because marketing is all about long term growth. It's a foundational piece of any business, and it's something on which businesses should be building. A big part of safeguarding your value as a business is to protect your price discounting luck. It may help boost your volumes in the short term, but to pick back up on the avian metaphor that I love, you can end up leaping off a branch and engaging in a race to the bottom with your competitors. And when you hit the forest floor, boy, does it hurt. A marks's. Real strength is not only to create value, but also to see value. And that's why you need to protect the position of your CMO at all costs. You're listening to Unicorny with Dom Hawes, powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future.

19:46
Dom Hawes
Coming up, we discuss what marketers can do to fight the cuckoo in the nest. And Shane and Nick explain why marketers should try to learn more about sales. But first, Nick identifies why companies in growth die of indigestion, not starvation. Let's take a listen. So we identified, I think, what we think the problem is so far. Why do we think this is happening?

20:12
Nick Eades
Some mixture of things. I think some of it started to emerge before the latest crisis with capital cost right where growth was everything. And therefore you put mostly a salesperson in a CRO role so they could drive growth faster and hotter. And I think you add in pricing, you add in lack of commerciality. On the marketing side, the fact that marketing in the main is focused on MQLs and you have this hiatus between MQL and SQL, literally the gap in the funnel, people say, isn't that it is there. That's the problem. Because when you're driving growth, you want that velocity of the right value coming through at pace so that you can literally hoover them up. In growth companies, we talk about the fact that in growth modes, companies don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion. And that is the inability to onboard clients at quality so that they stay really like that.

21:08
Nick Eades
Yeah, that's great. You can generate if you're really into growth and it's really happening for you, but you can't deliver your reputation tanks and everybody goes to the next one in the queue of peer group companies that do what you do at roughly the same price. So this has come about, I think, through that gap between MQL and SQL. And because growth was everything, it may change 23, 24 because things are a little bit more uncertain. And it's not growth at all costs, it's more like profit at all costs. So path to profitability is what we're talking about now. But again, if you only have a commercial CMO to talk about profit and profits related to price and price related to costs, you still got the same problem. It's just moved around.

21:48
Shane Redding
So what lEades to indigestion? Eating too much? Sorry, I don't know why that came straight.

21:55
Dom Hawes
This method is going to run.

21:56
Shane Redding
It is going to run and it's going to run because the buffet for marketeers is so huge, actually, we can make the job as big as we want. What we're not good is saying, though, cutting it back, because, yeah, we could do employee internal marketing. Is it the most important thing that we do, we can do and should be doing? Of course we should, because it's about the onboarding CX. But actually there is a limit. There's a limit to our capacity. Where do we focus? And actually being brave enough, confident enough in the numbers to say no or actually give me some more so I can do more, is what we need to be doing. But that's the problem. To me, the buffet we could graze on is huge.

22:44
Dom Hawes
Got to love a good food metaphor. So the other thing that strikes me is that if you are a CMO and you're having some, like, self doubt, or you've got the CRO breathing down your neck and you're having to shift from a longer term to a shorter term, where are you going to find out what everyone else is doing? Or how are you working out whether what you've got is normal? Because the people that have influence are generally partisan because they're trying to sell something. I mean, Shane, this is something you and I have talked about. LinkedIn. The LinkedIn institute, for example. It sells LinkedIn b.

23:16
Shane Redding
Two b. Media owners have always done a fantastic job at selling their media. And we have to remember one of Wise words again back in the day that I learned was don't build your house on rented land. Facebook, LinkedIn, that is a rented property, it's not freehold. So as marketeers, you need to understand that there's a lot more to it. But I'm really passionate about you can use these things brilliantly, but you can also be, if you like, miss sold. I'm not going to say those words apply to any one particular media owner, but we need to be really cautious.

23:51
Nick Eades
Yeah, Shane said it so politely, but they're only selling what they can sell. Anybody who knows me well knows that I have feelings for those folk because they're doing us all down. Right? This is B2B marketing and B2B marketing is just fundamentally business, right? Take the marketing out of it. This is business. So what exactly are you trying to do? Trying to win and keep customers. That's the basis of all business, right? If you're distracted by someone else saying, oh, you should do it this way, and you didn't interrogate it well enough to understand they're a media company, they sell media, so you're buying media. How does that fit in your strategy? How does that reach your customer? So, for example, in my world right now, in vCPE, we spend a lot of time inspecting the ideal customer profile. How do they buy?

24:34
Nick Eades
If you understand that, then you respond to that, not to some shiny advert on LinkedIn that says you should put more ads on LinkedIn because it's no. No. If your client base doesn't use LinkedIn for very much, apart from putting up their CV. And that's a great contact strategy, okay, fine. But actually just focus on the ICP and build back. So I spent a lot of time over the summer going back into commercial due diligence, reevaluating and tearing apart the ICP, rebuilding the ICP, using data. And then we start with the ICP and go up because you can calibrate everything off the ICP. So, for example, volume, value of velocity, value. Let's take the value part then. If I've got a lot of big companies that are prepared to spend half a million pounds on a particular deal, I need ten times more. I need one of those for every ten that spend 50K.

25:22
Nick Eades
So I would start to understand how customers buy and ignore this frothy nonsense that's out there. It's just disappointing that people believe it. And they're not alone. There's more. There's a couple more that I've stopped interacting with because they're driving a personal agenda. They're not good for you. It's like sweets, right? So what? It's a sugar hit. Get off it.

25:46
Shane Redding
So those conversations aren't starting with strategy, are they?

25:49
Nick Eades
No.

25:49
Shane Redding
That's what's driving us nuts, both you and I. If they were, then I know. For example, in the account based marketing world at the moment, LinkedIn in deal based marketing is fantastic. It is delivering amazing results. But it fits to your point that the customers are there. They're the ones you want to talk to, and you're talking to them in a really controlled, narrow way. What you shouldn't be doing is signing off 30 accounts for premium LinkedIn when you realize that actually half your sales team's profiles on LinkedIn, they still work for their old company.

26:28
Nick Eades
Exactly. You have to do a lot of cleaning up.

26:30
Dom Hawes
I mean, look, LinkedIn, we know that it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. Other times, as you say, it depends on who the customer is. It's not just them either, is it? The data vendors are the same. We all get pestered daily by the thing you should be doing, because everyone else is doing it.

26:44
Nick Eades
Right? Just start with the basics. CRM, CMS, CDP. If. You like it and marketing automation over the top. Run it against your ICP and just learn.

26:52
Shane Redding
Where do you go? You talk to other marketers. And I think that actually this honesty and transparency, I am seeing a lot more sharing within the community. And I have to great shout out to B, two B marketing for setting up Propolis community of B, two B marketers senior who can talk to these points, what's working? What's not working? Does intent data work for you to your point? And the great thing is, it's really shortcutting because we're sharing our live experiences. I am always passionate about benchmarking. Benchmarking is a fantastic way to understand where you are. You have to take care with it. I think Nick's an expert on understanding in his world, the tech world, what good looks like, and we need to share more of that.

27:38
Nick Eades
If you're in B2B marketing and you're not Encropolis, you're not in B2B marketing, there's a community there. And I think some of the things that shout out to Dave Stevens did with the BMC over Lockdown, that was my sort of therapy group, frankly. There are people out there struggling with the same problems. That was when it was most intense. And you need those communities around you and build those communities. And I need to know who else has got the same problem, who's facing the same issues, who's got a CFO, who's now the CEO, who's got a salesperson, who's now the CEO? And how do you live in that world? You need community now. And I think Propolis is a remarkable step forward. But we do need to get back to more face to face. We all miss it horribly. The new normal is the old normal.

28:17
Nick Eades
Get back round the table in sessions like this and bigger and beyond, but meet some folk out there and have a bit of a heart to heart and just how's it going for you. And be truthful, put it out there a little bit. We're all a bit more comfortable doing that.

28:29
Dom Hawes
Well, I saw yesterday the BMC is coming back in the new year, so very excited about that. Okay, so we've looked at what we've looked at why, let's look at what marketers can actually do about it now. So what practical steps can people take who are listening to address the issue of the cuckoo in their department?

28:46
Shane Redding
Maybe they should make friends with the cuckoo. So here's a different thought. And this has only just come to me in terms of if you want to build the best team possible and you know, the role that you can play in building brand, in really doing a fantastic job in building value. But actually, the number side is something that you need some help with. There's a couple of ways you'd go. You could go and recruit a CRO, actually, that might be a way to go. There are other routes too. Nick, thoughts?

29:16
Nick Eades
I think that's my enemy's enemy is my friend. If you want to go head to head with a CRO, you're probably going to lose. You have to come alongside. Look, it's all one team. It's the C suite. You're all there for the second purpose. So potentially tactically and strategically, if you don't come alongside, you're in all kinds of trouble. Right? So you have to understand that. I think you do need to spend more time with the CFO. I think CMOS should be more like CFOs as the trusted partner to the CEO. It's professional, it's evidence based, it's numerical if you make it that way, and you should be. But to be a trusted advisor to the CEO means that you can run more as a peer around the CRO. I've always said marketing is not a service to sales, it's a partner. So this leadership team has to work as a team.

30:04
Nick Eades
So you've got to get together. I would also say if you're earlier to sort of mid career with being a marketer, get a job in sales, it will scare you witless. You might do it for three to six months, but you'll be asking the following questions where are my lEades? Why aren't these lEades in the ICP? What do I say to the person on the phone, on the email right now? Where are all the other tools and bits and pieces? How do I do this thing that salespeople do? And if you don't understand how sales works, there's no better way than being a salesperson for a you know, I did it for three years as new business sales with IBM. And by the way, IBM wouldn't let anybody go on the road in those days without nine months of training, right? Nine months. Including how to iron a shirt and what tie goes with your hair color?

30:52
Nick Eades
Now, that was a challenge for me then. But it's all those things. How on earth do you walk in another person's shoes? Walk in the other person's shoes? It's really simple. The answer is in the question. Do it, do it, do it. You'll never regret it. You might, but you'll learn more there and then. The flippers say, is spend more time with the CFO. Understand how the P L, what's next year and the year after. I would say, what's the difference between sales and marketing? And for me, the answer is time. Right. Marketing has got to be about a year to two years ahead, depending on your sales cycle. But ultimately it's the same outcome. We're trying to win and keep customers. And if you spend time in salespeople, you understand how the short term works. But as a marketer, you should understand how strategy works and how you run strategy and operate and position the company so that it can deliver on that strategy, because nobody else does positioning and brand and reputation.

31:41
Nick Eades
I worked for a brilliant CMO. Once a lady called Lauren Flaherty. She was at Northeal and Computer Associates and Juniper and so on. Absolute dynamo. She said four things that marketing runs on reputation, brand lEades and revenue. These days I focus on reputation and revenue because it sweeps up most other things. And the confluence of that for me is positioning. It's like positioning now, positioning in the future, and then execute on that. But you've got Exeon as a peer group in this sea level team.

32:06
Shane Redding
Such wise words. If you do one thing, make friends with your CFO.

32:12
Nick Eades
True.

32:12
Shane Redding
If you haven't, had them, train your marketing team on how to read a PNL book it in for next week.

32:19
Nick Eades
Great idea.

32:20
Shane Redding
And sit in the meeting, too, because it might be a bit of a refresher course. And see the questions that your marketing team ask every level graduate entry all the way through to whoever, and you will know in your team who gets it. That is really important. Second piece of advice, promote the opportunity for your middle management team to go and get wider, diverse experience. Sales. Yes, but there's an alternative. I learned so much by going and sitting on voluntary boards. So, Federation of European Direct Marketing, age 30. We were responsible for the budget as volunteers. The whole budget were running, it was a company board. You can get that experience that teaches you so much so early. Do not leave it too late.

33:09
Nick Eades
Wow.

33:10
Dom Hawes
You know what? Unfortunately, we're sort of out of time today. But you've both been on fire, I can see Nicola, our producer's Pen, is literally smoking from writing down all the show notes. So thank you very much indeed, Nick and Shane, for joining us in the Unicorny studio. There was so much else that we talked about in the first meeting. Once this one's gone, we'd love you, please, both to come back because there's all sorts of other really fascinating areas that I want us to talk about.

33:36
Nick Eades
Thanks, Dom.

33:37
Shane Redding
A pleasure. Thank you.

33:41
Dom Hawes
Wow, this has been a really big episode. So let's jump right in and look at some of the key takeaways. Let's begin with something Nick said early in the show. We know the Chief Revenue Officer owns all things revenue based. And as Nick pointed out, they can put pressure on the mid and late stage funnel when there isn't enough revenue forecasted in the quarter. When there's an issue with lEades, they go to the CEO. But as Nick pointed out at the end, marketing isn't a function designed to help you in that part of the funnel. The marketing you do now is for a year or two years time, not necessarily right now. So the cuckoo might be pecking at the wrong bird. But as Shane and Nick alluded to at the end of the show, your business is an ecosystem that functions better in synchronicity.

34:28
Dom Hawes
So the chief revenue officer and the chief marketing officer probably actually need to be collaborating. That also means marketers would benefit hugely from having a greater understanding of sales as well. Marketing would benefit the business more if it had a greater understanding of those different functions. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And when all these different roles and functions come together, respect each other's space and value each other within an organization, that is when your business is going to thrive. And when that happens, well, it's spring all year round. Next week on Unicorny, we have an amazing treat for you. I'm joined in the studio by Ian Henderson from the amazing advertising and creative agency AML Group, and we are speaking to royalty within marketing. The amazing Mark Evans, who at the time was at Directline and he had the most extraordinary tenure there as the Managing Director Marketing for Directline.

35:33
Dom Hawes
He oversaw some of the most iconic campaigns that, well, any fan of advertising will have seen. And we get stuck into the weeds with him on how and why he stopped advertising one of the most iconic campaigns in mid flow to rejig it. And I tell you what, it's a fantastic listen. You may well have heard Mark speak before. He's been a guest on pretty much any serious marketing podcast. We loved spending time with him, so please do tune in then. Thank you for listening today's show. Together, we're building a body of reference to make marketing work better for business. Now, it takes us eight to 10 hours to produce each and every episode of Unicorny. Please take the time to share, rate and review us, help us get found, and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast.

36:27
Dom Hawes
It's a community of leading marketing minds. And pretty soon, we're going to be running events too. If you're interested in joining our community, please get in touch by following the Unicorny page on LinkedIn or connecting to me on LinkedIn. My name is Dom Hawes. H-A-W-E-S. You've been listening to Unicorny with me, Dom Hawes. Powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Unicorny is conceived and produced by Selby Anderson with creative support from One Fine Play. Nicola Fairley is the executive producer, connor Foley is the serious producer, kazra Feruzia is the superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at turnmilstudios.co.uk Thank you for listening and we will see you in the next one.