57. Sayonara Silos! The power of cross-functional teams in marketing

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 are listening to unicorny and I am your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back. This is part two of a two part episode with Geraldine Tenten, veteran IBM Er and marketer extraordinaire. In part one, Geraldine gave us a beautiful, clear view of where we should all be going with our marketing efforts. And that is to the land of the happy customer. In part two, we're continuing along the road to uniting a company all around this one objective. So we're going to go straight to the thorny issue of competing priorities between sales and marketing. Geraldine, thinking organizationally, what are the internal barriers to creating a happy customer?  

 
00:45 
Geraldine Tenten 
It's about the silos you want to break. It's to your point, being one company, being one experience, the client doesn't care who they are dealing with in the company. They only see the name of your company, they only see this experience and their last best experience is what they expect from you and that's the experience in their lives. So I've been evolving in the b two b environment all my life and I can tell you what works for b two b depends on what's expected also in a b two c context. Also, if I look at where I reported in the organization, I've been in marketing, I've also been reporting into sales. And frankly I've always been in both because if I was not sales and marketing at the same time, I think I couldn't serve the customer for the best.  

 
01:36 
Geraldine Tenten 
So I think it's a matter of mindset of attitude in the organization. Now, when you're in marketing, saying you're in sales is relatively easy, but when you're in sales, saying you're in marketing is not that natural.  

 
01:50 
Dom Hawes 
They know even less about marketing than we do in terms of the definition.  

 
01:53 
Dom Hawes 
Right.  

 
01:54 
Dom Hawes 
So they literally just think we're there to do pretty PowerPoints for them.  

 
01:57 
Geraldine Tenten 
Dom, I will argue I've been very lucky being in smart organizations where it might not have mattered so much, but it all boils down to compensation. So when you look at the sales organization, of course they are driven by sales target. And that's something that is really important to understand because how do you allow your sales organization to make their number? And does it matter? Is something to look into because if you don't pay attention to that point, you could end up with competing targets, which is really not what we want in this context.  

 
02:36 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, that's building dysfunction right into the heart of a company, isn't it? And as you say, customers, it's a hard thing for many people to get their head around. I think that customers genuinely don't care where you sit in an organization. I think even an agency we're really guilty of that. It's like oh, I'm a planner or oh, I'm a creative. And actually to the client they don't care, they just want the result and they want the outcome. But anyway, I think you get the.  

 
02:58 
Dom Hawes 
Point that from a customer's point of.  

 
03:00 
Dom Hawes 
View they see one company and they want the experience to be consistent. Exactly what else does a unified or great customer experience feel like?  

 
03:09 
Geraldine Tenten 
It's about the consistency all along. It's about finding a company that cares for your success as a company, as a client. And this success has to go beyond their own interest. I will argue that in the context of IBM, this is clearly in the nature of the company, that it's always being here when the client needs you the most and that goes beyond the organizational setup that an organization would have. When you build though, and most of the time you see this in the moment where a client has a crisis and they really need help and they really need to find a way forward. But crisis is not the only way to address clients, thankfully.  

 
03:55 
Geraldine Tenten 
And you want to be here all the time ensuring, going back to what is the business plan we're working towards, what is it that we want to address and help our clients with and how do we align marketing, sales, tech support, all the elements of the experience all along? Really, really an important aspect to lay out. And you want to make sure that the ultimate satisfaction goal of the client is what will drive the entire organization and that all the steps that need to be delivered all go in this direction and that the targets, the payments are all aligned to this.  

 
04:36 
Geraldine Tenten 
So that the investment you put in marketing in order to create leads is going to be taken by your sales organization because that's where they're going to get their best conversion and they believe into this, convert it and then that will continue to deliver in satisfying the client with their usage of the product all along so that they buy again.  

 
04:57 
Dom Hawes 
Look, that's golden content right there. If there's one lesson that anyone can take from this podcast so far, because you never know where we're going, but so far it's that if you can get your entire organization totally focused on the success of your customers, you will have long and fruitful relationships with them. Golden content.  

 
05:15 
Dom Hawes 
But speaking of precious things, talk to me about diamond teams because those are also important.  

 
05:22 
Geraldine Tenten 
Exactly. So if you want a happy customer, you really want to understand what matters to them and you really want to be agile and respond to those needs all along. The beauty of gold and diamonds and diamond teams is that you have superpower in your team that you want to bring forward for the value of the customer. You talked a little bit earlier about all these disciplines in agencies. Well, that's actually exactly the same when you look at marketing organizations and even sales organizations. So you want to bring your best talent based on the discipline that it takes to dynamically being able to create the right content at the right time, being able to serve it in the right way, understanding what's happening in the data that you got. So you establish those teams based on the setup and what you're trying to accomplish.  

 
06:16 
Geraldine Tenten 
You make them work in a nigel way where everybody brings their best to the table and you're therefore able to adjust your campaigns, adjust your performance, optimize your execution. Sales in marketing, hand in hand, thanks to those diamond teams that are always on the spot for delivering the best to the customer.  

 
06:41 
Dom Hawes 
And so diamond team's cross functional.  

 
06:42 
Geraldine Tenten 
Exactly.  

 
06:43 
Dom Hawes 
So they're oriented completely around the customer, not about the organization or the silo they tend to belong to, and they're empowered to deliver what the customer needs.  

 
06:55 
Geraldine Tenten 
Exactly.  

 
06:56 
Dom Hawes 
That's very placed to one of my absolute loves, which is the kind of evolutionary organization and the whole concept of decentralization. But that approach does impact on the management style of a business. Like that's not something lots and lots of businesses are currently set up to do.  

 
07:12 
Geraldine Tenten 
Possibly, but it's not that difficult, in fact, because you would keep an alignment by discipline, because you want to make sure that from diamond team to diamond team, people learn from their experience and get better and stronger in their discipline. The thing is how you articulate the organization for the better outcome. And that is a formula that I really like. Now, you need to accept the unknown that comes with the agile process that deploys and unfolds. I know you have a specific podcast on that.  

 
07:49 
Dom Hawes 
We do, we do. We're all over that stuff. I think it's one of your ex colleagues or colleagues maybe.  

 
07:54 
Dom Hawes 
There we go.  

 
07:55 
Dom Hawes 
We'll put a link in that to the show notes. Look, we're all over the concept of agility and cross functional teams and then orienting action around the needs of customers. We started out talking about genuine outcomes or measuring our success by real outcomes. And I think where we've got to now is that you don't measure marketing's success by real outcomes. It's about the customer facing team that is wider than just marketing.  

 
08:19 
Geraldine Tenten 
Absolutely. And you want to make sure the dashboards are the same. You don't want to be stuck in different measurement for marketing, for sales, because all to belong to one another, so that there is no question at the end as of who delivers what part and how. Together we get to the ultimate outcome of client satisfaction.  

 
08:45 
Dom Hawes 
I think it's worth pausing here, because the goal of unified customer experience does give rise to the question, ok, but how the hell do we do that? It sounds out of reach to many because the structures, reward mechanisms and agendas of different departments are so deeply entrenched. The rise of the chief revenue officer role might be part of the solution because it creates one c suite position that's accountable for revenue across the whole customer lifecycle. But creating yet another chief is just papering over a problem. If there isn't some kind of transformation in the departments now blending sales and marketing into one cohesive unit solely focused on customer experience and outcomes, that might be answer. Whether that needs a new chief? Well, only you will know that in your organization.  

 
09:31 
Dom Hawes 
But unless you share goals, metrics and reward mechanisms, the built in dysfunction will persist. After all, if you create different remuneration and reward mechanisms for people who are meant to be on the same team, the unintended consequences of that, they're going to be profound. Shared goals shift the focus from waypoints to destination. They move you from departmental success to business success. Done well, they also help you be more flexible and responsive. When you organize from in to out rather than out to in, you might gain control, but you build rigidity, bureaucracy and slowness into your business. When you build out to in, you have to decentralize, empowering those closest to the customer to make decisions about their experience and success. You cede central control, but you gain agility, speed and intelligence. I guess I better explain a bit.  

 
10:22 
Dom Hawes 
More detail, like into out and out to in.  

 
10:25 
Dom Hawes 
So into out means your starting point is your business. You organize for control, for budget efficiency, for departmental ROI. It's the auditor's dream. Everything in the right place, logical, with super tight controls. And you know what? If the world was still simple and slow, there'd be no issue at all with this approach. But the world ain't like that. The business world is accelerating. It's highly complex, and it's prone to change out to in means. Your starting point is your customer. You're organized for flexibility, speed and impact. You organize for their experience, not your control. Integrated, decentralized teams might be the answer, but they give rise to a problem like isn't there a massive duplication of roles. If COVID hadn't happened, I think the answer for many would be yes.  

 
11:14 
Dom Hawes 
But it did happen, and it changed the way that all of us work in under one year. So now in our final section, we're going to explore how lockdown proved to be both a catalyst for a different working model and an enabler for all the things that we've talked about today. Let's get back to the studio. Jodie, where were you when lockdown happened.  

 
11:34 
Dom Hawes 
And what was the immediate impact to both you and your business?  

 
11:37 
Geraldine Tenten 
Oh, I was in Germany at the time. I remember it very well. It had a huge impact for the business I was in. On one hand, our teams were actually working in the office at that time. All the time. Almost all the time. Of course, the technology was there for working from home as well, but that was, I would say, the surrounding and helping. And suddenly I sent everybody home. And that definitely was a bit of a shock. Although, as I said, the technology was not that problem at all. Everybody could do it, knew how to do it, was equipped to do it. So that went really fast. But the way we worked with another had to change. And I also noticed that, you know, when you are in an open space and people are close to one another, they hold each other accountable.  

 
12:25 
Geraldine Tenten 
Naturally, you remember things better when you're on your own, you're in a different environment. And it seemed everything needed an appointment, a meeting. And the days were getting longer and longer. So it took an adjustment on the way to work, I would say. But it was all feasible now, business wise. The execution, the campaigns we had designed were meant to having component that was digital and a component that was face to face. And suddenly all of that face to face component disappeared, which was about half of the execution, which was a big shock because you cannot overnight buy more digital. You could, but it's only one part of your journey anyway. And there were not enough property to purchase at the time anyway at that point in time, and to be executed fast enough. So we had to reinvent what a journey would be.  

 
13:19 
Geraldine Tenten 
And reinventing what a journey would be was not doing more of what we used to do digitally and doing less of what we couldn't do anymore. You had to replace it. I really enjoyed the thinking that we had to put behind it. So how are we going to compensate? How are we going to replace, how are we going to challenge the experience? So it's even better than it was before, because that's part of the question. But also, really importantly, how are we going to make our numbers. So from that, there's an expression that we invented, which is breaking the analytics. You couldn't take your analytics based on the past and project them into the future and imagine it's going to work.  

 
14:04 
Geraldine Tenten 
So there were a few things to do here, which is, how do you reinvent what your conversion rates needed to be from digital in order to get better? So, forcing ourselves to better at every stage of the digital experience, then how do you insert into that journey moment of deep exchange that could look like the face to face moments you had before? And in fact, a lot of our execution was via events, and we decided not to replace them, maybe with webcasts or things like that. I mean, some of it existed, obviously. We decided to recreate an event experience which we had built, which was a pop up experience, meant to be experienced face to face. We created it in the metaverse. Yes. So went really, really fast because we wanted it launched very, very fast. And we tuned it on the go.  

 
15:05 
Geraldine Tenten 
We launched it first, we thought, do we need the Googles? And then we said, no, it's too complicated. Not everybody will have that. And we trimmed down the technology to the point that it was enough of a metaverse experience, but so easy to use without too many technical difficulties that clients would want to engage with it. And were able to recreate a face to face environment.  

 
15:32 
Dom Hawes 
So we're using the metaverse, but the.  

 
15:33 
Geraldine Tenten 
2D version, I really love the way went about it, because we really had to work fast. We had to establish minimum viable product. Everyone was welcome with their ideas, and I think the team felt really empowered, that it was a moment of transformation that they could shape and that they could. So both on what is that next experience, and how do we make what we do work even better so we can convert better? And what we found is the combination of the, what we do and whom we target was really important, because originally we saw a lot of attendance in the virtual events and so on, and then we had to decide, okay, but how do we go about what audience in order to really hone down the revenue? And that's what we worked on systematically.  

 
16:25 
Dom Hawes 
That's really cool. I also love that you've applied exactly the same thinking to this challenge that we've been talking about so far in this podcast, starting with what makes a great experience for our customers, but a great relevant experience, and actually, by removing that immersive side of the metaverse, removing that complication, actually, you've simplified your task, but you've also made it much more accessible for them and easier for them to get to great faster. And I think my observation of many of the businesses that were playing with metaverse, both during COVID and afterwards, they got too carried away by the concept of the VR and the immersive side and less carried away or maybe not paying enough attention to the relationship side, which you managed to get to pretty quickly through an approach of MVP.  

 
17:13 
Geraldine Tenten 
We were really looking daily at the feedback the clients were giving us. We were paying huge attention to technical difficulty around the solution.  

 
17:23 
Dom Hawes 
Are you still using any of those solutions or is that now disappeared back into the annals of COVID history?  

 
17:30 
Geraldine Tenten 
A lot of the face to face is possible. So the concept of that we had established are still in action, but mainly in a face to face environment.  

 
17:41 
Dom Hawes 
Nowadays, how do you think COVID transformed generally about how businesses think? Is digital as part of the customer journey? I think beforehand very much it was seen as media that brought them to the door and then there had to be some kind of event.  

 
17:56 
Geraldine Tenten 
I think many steps of the journey get done digitally, will remain digital, goes really deep into that aspect. At the same time, though, I will argue that I think the community building, face to face community building is growing. People want to meet, people want to discuss their challenges of the record, and this is not about to go away at all, in my view. So having the right mix still matters. This said, I observe with companies I talk today that when a client comes in a store to buy something, they're very advanced as of what they need, which I think has accelerated in the times of COVID There's less consultancy done in person, it's coming more for the exchange and the transaction.  

 
18:59 
Dom Hawes 
Now that was formidable. So let's take a breath, step back and analyse the three areas we've discussed today, because an unexpected insight has emerged. We've talked a lot about organizational design built in dysfunction, and how a new approach to customer lifecycle value might just lead to a different way of working. And there are probably incremental steps we can all take over the short term to improve relationships with our sales colleagues and to start to think much more out to in. But the big insight for me in today's episode is the central role of digital transformation in bridging all of those areas we discussed. Now, anyone that knows me knows I love my technology. If I see a problem, my first thought is often platform. But in this case, I'm not thinking about one platform in particular.  

 
19:50 
Dom Hawes 
I'm kind of more thinking about a macro approach, not like a micro implementation. Digital platforms in general make location less relevant. They can offer new ways to measure real outcomes in marketing. Using live data. They can foster a closer relationship between sales and marketing through sharing of data and insights. Digital transformation the technology, it's an enabler. It's what underpins modern working practices to allow for organizational transformation. Making decisions that are closer to the customer. Focusing on customer experience and outcomes, not your own organizational efficiency generally being more responsive to the market. Now I started this two part show by introducing the premise that businesses are on the hook to their stakeholders for helping customers to create value, for creating sustainable growth, to return value to shareholders, and to create stimulating, rewarding experiences for their people. I suggested that in many corporations, something is missing.  

 
20:51 
Dom Hawes 
That's because we've built and organized our businesses for technology, culture and society of a bygone era. So many businesses have dysfunction built into them because literally everything has changed apart from the way they manage the business, by the way they control themselves through building siloed departments. And it's that very hierarchy that I hate so much. It leads to operating disparate and sometimes competing remuneration models between departments that should actually be cooperating. Instead, it puts them in competition with each other for the same piece of pie. Guess what? Customers don't like being pieced. That view applies short term KPI's instead of measuring the things that matter most, are our customers happy? Are they going to stay with us? And how do we know? Can we create even more value for them? And are they good reference material for our next customers?  

 
21:47 
Dom Hawes 
These are the kinds of questions that leaders of sustainable businesses ask themselves. Because in sustainable businesses, the customer comes first. So when you consider all of these things, it really comes down to this. The future of sustainable value creation lies in an approach that prizes the whole, not constituent parts. This approach prioritizes customer happiness, success and experience over traditional metrics. It makes it imperative for organizations to adapt to a digital first approach in customer engagement, team collaboration and performance measurement. What it comes down to is if you integrate sales, marketing and customer success efforts, and you focus that integrated effort on real outcomes for your customers, you will create sustainable success for your people, for your business and for your shareholders. Now, just so you know, in my day job, I am actually practicing what I preach.  

 
22:40 
Dom Hawes 
Our agency group Selby Anderson is moving to measuring success by client success, not by our own KPI's. We're joining together to solve problems faster and we're adopting a much more commercial outlook based around hard outcomes for our clients. I tell you this because I think we're actually in the same boat in the end. It's not about where we are. It's not about who we are. It's not even about why. Sorry, Mister Sinek. It's about how well we understand and connect with our customers. That defines both our future success and our legacy. And speaking of what's to come, my dear unicorners, next week is equally insight laden. So please do this one small thing for me. Would you subscribe to the show right now? It's so easy to do, it means you won't miss a pod. And the bigger we are, the better we become.  

 
23:32 
Dom Hawes 
Thank you in advance. You have been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairleigh is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor. Peter Powell is our scriptwriter and editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.