59. Data, sales, strategy: marketing's C-Suite blueprint for success

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 to part two of our exploration with Paul Worthington, head of brand consultancy Invencion In part one, we looked at the big picture of whether or not marketing should be more professional or professionalised. In part two, we're going to dig into the role and ask, how do you use today's data flood to your advantage? And what is the number one thing you should do to be effective in the C suite? And we're going to look at this. Is sales actually an abusive partner? Oh, boy, I can't wait for that, Paul. These days, everyone in marketing has a dashboard in front of them. What is all this data really telling us? How can we make it work for.

00:51: Paul Worthington

Us in the marketing world right now, the zone is being flooded and there is just nonsense coming at you from every side. So the science, what you're describing, like dashboards, are really good examples. So if you work with, say, the meta dashboard or Google dashboard, the one thing you can guarantee that both those dashboards are going to do is tell you that Google products in the Google dashboard and meta products in the meta dashboard are vastly outperforming everything else you might do, because it behooves them to grade their own homework. And then you see the marketing mix modelers come along and the econometrics folks, and they say, wait a minute, you know, that stuff might actually be number four, five, six on the list of most effective things. There's all this other stuff that's not being captured by those dashboards. It's more important.

01:32: Paul Worthington

There's elements of, like, being blinded by the data you're looking at. I think there's elements of trusting data when it, when we shouldn't. I have real issues with the term data driven, especially because I work in the strategy field. So if you're data driven in strategy, you're solely going to use backward looking information to guide your forward looking. Makes no sense. So what I would always say to clients whenever a brief comes in and they say, we expect to work with a data driven blah virus, once is always a hypothesis driven and data informed. We're building a hypothesis here and we're looking for the data to support or discount that hypothesis, and then iterate to the next hypothesis if it doesn't work, because it isn't the thing. And I think you are right about instinct.

02:16: Paul Worthington

My first boss, many moons ago, had formerly been a general manager at Unilever in various different countries, and I remember distinctly speaking to them about this stuff and marketing and what should I do? And, you know, I was 20 odd years old, and he was like, go to supermarket. Go and watch people. Yeah. Look at the products. Look at how they're packaged. Look at what people are buying or not buying. Look at how people are acting. And I've always loved that, and I've always tried to take that forwards, whether it's actually just getting out there and being in places and observing, or whether it's seeking information from a really varied data set. Right. I think we can get really narrow in our thinking. Right. And it gets too much.

02:58: Paul Worthington

You know, if you only look at what McKinsey is saying or the economist is saying, you know, it's like you can get real narrow. It's also useful to broaden that. You know, what are tabloids saying and how do you connect the dots between these different things? And I think the biggest sin that we've made when it comes to the measurement side is the role of measurement is to keep score in the game. And we've mistaken that and we've turned the goal that measurement is the point of the game for a lot of people.

03:25: Dom Hawes

Yeah.

03:25: Paul Worthington

And I think that's where we've got to really rethink this stuff. We're only measuring this stuff so that we can keep score and understand how well or poorly we're doing. I'll give you a really good example. And this is real, right. In the programmatic advertising ecosystem, there is a vast amount of absolute garbage inventory. It's either outright fraudulent or it's MFA websites, or it's something where literally no human being is ever going to look at, let alone click on what they're seeing. It's all bot based. Right? They have the lowest cpms, and then you have procurement and finance department saying that they benchmark the cpms and they go into the lowest quartile and they say that's your maximum cpm you can buy.

04:06: Paul Worthington

So now you have somebody that knows nothing about marketing who's telling the marketer that they're only allowed to buy the worst quality, poorest, least performing, most likely to be fraudulent inventory. You're kind of toast before you even start.

04:22: Dom Hawes

That's almost ruined my day, I have to tell you, Paul, but I know it's going on. Performance marketing, growth marketing. While we're talking about language and we're talking about automated inventory and that sort of digital over digitization piece, I think.

04:37: Paul Worthington

You'Re absolutely right in language we have to focus on. I have this conversation a lot with people where I did an MBA in 2000, it's one of the best things I ever did. I learned two things from that MBA. The first thing I learned was that having an MBA doesn't make a terrible manager great, it just weaponizes them. The second thing an MBA is, and this was the most insightful thing I learned, is it's not a business degree at all. It's a languages degree, because I had not realized prior that every different function within the company speaks a different language. Operations talks a different language from marketing. Marketing talks a different language from finance. Finance talks a different language from supply chain. Supply chain. Everybody's talking different languages.

05:20: Paul Worthington

And so having a little bit of each language turns you into something of a polyglot, which becomes really useful as a consultant. But when I talk to younger folks right now, the conversation is always like this, right? If you want to be in the C suite in the future, or if you want to be advising the c suite in the future, you need to understand that there's only two languages that are talked at the top of any company. There's the language of finance and numbers, which is largely the domain of the CFO. And there's a language of strategy and business that is largely the domain of the CFO. And if you're going to be influential and either get to that c suite or advise that c suite, you need to learn how to speak one of those two languages extremely fluently.

06:02: Paul Worthington

Ideally, you want to speak both.

06:03: Dom Hawes

Yeah.

06:03: Paul Worthington

And this is where I think we get into a lot of problems on the marketing side, because the language of marketing is no longer the language of marketing. It's actually the language of engineering. I've talked a lot about this in design, because that's more closer to where I live in the brand side. And you look at the language that people in design taught now, they talk about agile and scalable and extensive. And all these words, these are engineering words, right? These are not design words. So what I think we need to do on the marketing side is marketers need to get a lot better at framing what they do through the lens of business strategy and talk the language of business strategy at the top level to talk about what they're doing.

06:42: Paul Worthington

And then they need to get better at the language of finance, not to justify what they're doing, but to demonstrate the proof of what they've done, because that will then give them the permission to do more. And if I had to be really harsh, I'd actually say that the onus shouldn't be on marketers to learn finance so much as it should be on CFO's to learn the language of marketing. Because if CFO's are going to be sitting over the top of marketing, then the number one person that should be trained in how marketing works is the CFO. And if they haven't had that training, they probably shouldn't be in that role.

07:15: Paul Worthington

I'm not going to give hard statistics on this because I don't have it off top of my head, but I think the s and P 500 is something 70% intangible assets, 30% hard assets.

07:26: Dom Hawes

Okay.

07:26: Paul Worthington

And of the intangible assets, I think the majority is patent portfolio value. And then number two below that is brand value. And I'm not a believer in the. Again, the so called precision of brand valuation I think is quite nonsensical because if they were precise, then interbrand and Brand Z wouldn't value the visa brand at a 13 x difference and they.

07:49: Dom Hawes

Wouldn'T be intangible anymore, would they, by the way? It'd be.

07:51: Paul Worthington

And so, but the point is, there's a thing there and it's extremely valuable. And it might be representing somewhere in the region of 2030 or more percent of the total value of your corporation. If that's the case, and you're the CFO of that company, you goddamn well better should understand what are the levers that affect the value of that asset? And what are the levers that affect the negative value of that asset.

08:21: Dom Hawes

Okay, well, there's a call to action for you cmos. Let's train our CFO's in marketing. This digs up a couple of painful and connected. So what moments for me now? One is that I feel very sad that we as marketers have to say that our language when addressing the C suite should be focused on business strategy, because that is exactly what we used to be all about. It's where marketing started life. Of course we should be strategic. Of course we should be focused on the business outcomes. And it pains me to agree with Paul and say that many of us are not that we've lost our way, but we do know how to get it back. And it's as simple as redirecting our focus away from KPI's and back to the overall goal, which should be a happy customer.

09:09: Dom Hawes

That then lets us look at everything through a strategic business lens and ask ourselves questions like, how will what I'm about to do affect my business with my customer? And the second, so what moment from today really, I guess, is a flip side of the first one at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, an institution that has dedicated itself to the art of leadership for nearly 300 years. I was taught if you're going to lead people in the field, you don't need to be able to do what they do, but you absolutely have to understand what they do. So while Paul is right, we as marketers have to get back to speaking strategically to the C suite. His next point about assets is just as crucial.

09:49: Dom Hawes

The C suite itself needs to recognize that it must learn to understand marketing, that marketing has an ability to drive shareholder value. And this may bring up a so what moment for you? Because if you find yourself in an organization that sees the light of marketing, well, my advice is to stick. But if you find yourself in an organization that's stuck in the dark about marketing, well, of course, first you try to bring about change. If you can't do that, maybe it's time to twist. Let's get back to Paul. I want to find out what he thinks about sales and marketing, because a teacher at the beginning saying, is this an abusive relationship? And if it is, how can this couple get along better? There's another role that's starting to appear more and more. That to me maybe is a little bit anachronistic.

10:39: Dom Hawes

It may work well in certain businesses, maybe in B, two B SaaS, which is the chief revenue officer, often the route into which is sales. So again, not necessarily an understanding of marketing. Marketing and sales have been blurred significantly over the last few years to a degree that many marketers talk like salespeople and measure themselves in sales metrics. What's your view on the CRO role?

11:04: Paul Worthington

This is going to be a broad overgeneralization, but I think there's been a lot of new terms for old things that are out there. And I think that CRO is really just the name de jour for somebody that is effectively heading sales and marketing. And I think that's fine where we land, though. And I think this is where we get into this issue of marketing as a function versus marketing as a department. Marketing is a function I am classically trained for. P's marketing mix, right, product, price, place, promotion. There's been many variants, but at the end of the day, that's still as good as any as a way to describe this thing. And I think if we think it through the lens of marketing function, in some respects, things are quite robustly healthy.

11:47: Paul Worthington

Where companies are more innovative than they have been, theyre better creating good consumer experiences. So a lot of the things are going well. Theyve been raising prices, which the stock market really likes. And theyve proven that the elasticities of demand work in their favor for doing so up to this point for the last few years. It's bad for society from an inflation standpoint, but I get that there's value in it from a company standpoint. So at a four P's level, I go, yeah, I get it. But marketing as a department has become very focused into the promotional P. I think in the B two B world, that has become even more parsed into the short term sales mentality. I'll give you an example of a bad situation that's super common in B two B companies. And I see it a lot with my clients.

12:35: Paul Worthington

Right, which is you have a big sales team. You've got a very anemic marketing team. Your sales team is tackling this ginormous, Tam like total available market, and they've segmented it all up and they've got sales people who are focused on all these different groups. And then you've got this anemic marketing team, might have three or four people, there's almost no budget. And they're being told, well, you've got a target support the targeting of all of these different segments, and youve got to drive leads and theyve got to be quality leads. And they got to get the sales team to do their thing. Then they have no budget. Right. They cant spread themselves thinly enough. They cant even spread themselves thinly enough to cover all the segments, let alone consider long term brand building versus short term performance or growth marketing.

13:24: Paul Worthington

Everything then becomes locked into what I would call just the sales enablement track. Its basically all theyre doing. And salespeople scream that the marketers aren't doing their jobs. And I look at it and go, it's not that they're not doing their jobs, it's that they're completely under resourced. And your sales structure doesn't marry at all to what the resources you're giving to the marketing group are. So I actually think that they are CRO, not CRO, don't really care. I actually think we should take all of that sales enablement work that marketers do. A lot of it, presentation, building, account based marketing, performance marketing, all that stuff that they're doing that's short term in nature, give it all to the sales team. That is all. A sales responsibility is not a marketing responsibility. Leads are about sales.

14:09: Paul Worthington

And if you want quality leads and you put more money in the pot to resource, getting a better quality lead, which they'll do if it's all their responsibility. But they won't do if it's marketing over here doing that job because they want that money to go sales instead. Right. That's just normal dynamics inside a company. I think if we did that, we actually free marketing to be much more strategic where it should be. I am a huge proponent of Roger Martens. When he said in one of his medium posts that marketing and strategy should be combined as a department, I was like, yes, that makes so much sense. Merging marketing strategy makes so much more sense than merging marketing and sales.

14:49: Paul Worthington

And the only reason marketing and sales are sitting right next to each other today is because so many of the marketing tactics that have been developed over the past 20 years aren't really marketing tactics at all. They're sales tactics. It's technologically mediated sales. It's not marketing.

15:04: Dom Hawes

I completely agree with you. And before actually, like, the whole direct marketing piece is direct sales.

15:11: Paul Worthington

I just love the irony. So when I started my career, the direct marketing folks were always the ones sitting at the back of the room, right?

15:17: Dom Hawes

Yeah.

15:18: Paul Worthington

They were given everybody else did the stuff. They were then given the stuff that they then bastardized and sent out en masse where they would test everything and everything. And I was like, oh, well, this is like a 10th of a percent better response than that. And then everything would just end up being this complete Frankenstein's monster. And then response rates absolutely tanked to almost zero and it became economically non viable to send mail because you just couldn't recoup the cost back over the last 15 years. We literally handed them the keys to the Internet and said, here, go build.

15:55: Dom Hawes

The future of marketing and have all the budget too.

15:58: Paul Worthington

It's wild. It's becoming really complex. It's becoming really confusing. There's a ton of voices out there. There's a ton of people trying to get you to spend money with them. Why would we professionalize that? If you're sailing around in all this chummy water, you want to be the great white shark.

16:17: Dom Hawes

I'm with you. I like the thought the marketing and strategy get most instead of sales, one of my big bet noir, I'm preparing some ranty content on it actually, is about how marketing has actually just become sales and that many of the markets, it was uncanny. You described the b, two b companies that you meet. I sat in my office this week with someone who almost verbatim described the situation that you just gave us almost verbatim, except one thing worse, because one of the things she's been challenged with by her business now is to go out and create demand, which of course is impossible.

16:51: Paul Worthington

Well, aggregate demand for sure. You can't just invent it out of whole cloth. I mean, maybe if it's a nascent category and you've got a vc throwing hundreds of millions at you can.

17:02: Dom Hawes

That's exactly what I said. Exactly what I said to him is that if you're in a new category and then maybe you can, but then you're into the realms of education then, because you've got to teach people because they don't have a budget.

17:14: Paul Worthington

Are you going to inspire them? I have to say, all kidding aside, the single most useful thing that's going to come out of OpenAI is almost certain. And like LLMs in general, the single most useful thing is almost certainly not going to be video and photographs. But they're really smart because that's what they've led with, because it's so magical and inspiring to us who can't draw, who can just write a prompt and create something that looks amazing. It just feels like magic. And theyre really smart to do that. The real value is going to be in speeding up things like cancer development drugs and speeding up a discovery of new isotope, whatever. But youre going to find all these scientific things. But I actually dont think the real value is going to be in putting an artist out of business.

18:04: Dom Hawes

Mister Worthington, thank you. Hands together emoji repeated three times. That was a deeply insightful conversation, especially for me, as I felt Paul both rocked a few of my beliefs and simultaneously helped me clarify some of the kind of cloudy, boiling tensions erupting within me. Maybe that's exactly how his clients feel. Cleansed, clear of mind, purposeful. Anyway, here's what I think I've learned from both episodes. In part one, we talked about the importance of dynamism over rigidity, and that kind of emerged as a theme. I was looking for answer to the question, should marketing become more qualified? Should it be more professional? But the great power and joy of what you do and what I do lies in our gut instinct that we've honed over years and years of experience.

18:53: Dom Hawes

So yes, training is good, but like our response to the data and science we're swimming in right now, it's our ability to think rather than blindly follow doctrine that sets us apart and gives our organizations a competitive advantage. And in part two, we broke that down. We got into the weeds of the role itself. And for me there were three big one, don't let measurement become the game. It's just how you keep the score. And I'm going to repeat that in a minute because we've got close to this point in previous pods, but I think Paul's description of the issue absolutely nails it. And here it is again. Don't let measurement become the game, it's just how you keep the score.

19:37: Dom Hawes

The more we focus on measurement as the be all and end all, the further you and I get from business strategy, which, by the way, takes us perfectly to big takeaway number two. We marketers need to reclaim our strategic high ground. Now, that doesn't mean being loftier or more strategic within our marketing, it means aligning what we do with business strategy, so it's hard to tell the two apart. To quote Paul quoting Roger Martin, marketing and strategy should be combined in a department. This approach could be the key to unlocking the C suite and that in turn leads us into big takeaway number three. If we can get the C suite to pay attention to the shareholder value we can add, then we should be positioned and scoped further away from sales.

20:29: Dom Hawes

In practice, that means letting our better resource sales partners take care of more of the things they need to take care of. Things like lead Gen, which then leaves us the space to do the thing that we should be doing, building a brand for a happy customer. Now wouldn't that be a beautiful thing? In the in the meantime, please do one small thing for me. Subscribe right now, only 42% of the people who listen regularly to our show are subscribed. The small act of clicking makes a huge difference to us. The more subscribers we get, the bigger and better our show becomes. So let's move that needle and I want to report back to you that 60% are subscribed. Next time, click now. Unicorners, thank you. You have been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalised business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes.

21:22: 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.