Fuelling Growth Through Marketing Technology with Ruth Connor

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 co-host Adam Greener and Amadeus's Global head of product marketing Barbara Moreno to discuss strategy and value propositions. In the episode, we outlined why your company needs to consider a value proposition as part of your strategy and what a great value prop looks like. Barbara also detailed what insight metrics Amadeus uses when building its value propositions. We sought to put to bed that age old tussle. Is it brand or performance marketing? Now, even though I want to say it myself, it was a fabulous episode. Please, if you haven't already, go back and check it out on your favourite Pod platform.  

 
01:07 
Dom Hawes 

Marketing Operations, or Mops, has been a discipline of marketing and revenue operations that's been growing in importance over recent years.  

In our sister podcast, Marketing Trek, which, by the way, we've now rebranded as Marketing Difference, we spoke to a Mops Trailblazer Carla Wentworth, so you might want to check that out if you're looking for a 101 in Mops. Now, if you read a lot of LinkedIn or you read a lot of blogs, you will know that Mops is gaining more and more share of voice when it comes to marketing. Despite all the chatter, there's still confusion about what Mops is, why you might want to build a marketing operations function, and how marketing operations adds value to your marketing department, but more importantly, to your company, too. Above all, it can be really hard to know where to start. Well, as by now, we like to deal with the macro, not the micro. At Unicorny, our listeners are just as likely to be CEOs and CFOs as they are CMOs, so we're fixated on explaining the things that make marketing matter to business marketing operations matters.  

 
01:59 
Dom Hawes 
The earlier adopters of the tech business, particularly software, as a service vendors, well, they're all over it. If you're not yet, fear not, we are here to help you with some pointers to get you on the way.  

 
02:09 
Dom Hawes 
And in today's episode, I'm joined in the studio by B2B and digital marketing expert Russ Powell. He leads Sharper B2B Marketing, an agency that's barely three, but is already winning a slew of awards by running extremely creative campaigns that utilize the output of marketing operations, super smart and superconnected marketing technology. Russ joins me to interview Ruth Connor, longtime VIP of the B2B marketing scene and now VP of Global Marketing for Kalibrate, a UK tech company that removes the guesswork from its client's biggest location based decisions. Today, Kalibrate supports more than 700 organizations in over 70 countries, so they really know their tech and the power of data. We're really excited to be chatting to Ruth today. In the conversation that follows, Ruth explains what Mops is and the importance of time when establishing a strong system.  

 
03:08 
Dom Hawes 
Ruth also shares the order in which they built their marketing stack. If you're stuck on how to get started, be stuck no more. Ruth's going to give you the pointers later on in the show. Ruth, Russ and I also discuss the importance of value exchange with gated content and how the recession might actually be good for creativity. Right, enough waffle. Let's go. Hi, Russ.  

 
03:32 
Russ Powell 
Hi, Dom.  

 
03:32 
Dom Hawes 
How are you?  

 
03:33 
Dom Hawes 
I'm very well.  

03:34 
Dom Hawes 
Why don't you tell everybody about you and Sharper?  

 
03:38 
Russ Powell 
Yes. Hi. Russ founder MD of Sharper B2B marketing, as the name would suggest, a specialist B2B marketing agency focused on giving our clients the fresh ideas and firepower to absolutely nail their B2B marketing.  

 
03:50 
Dom Hawes 
Ruth, why don't you introduce Kalibrate and yourself to our listeners?  

 
03:55 
Ruth Connor 
I'm Ruth. I'm the VP of Global Marketing at Kalibrate. Kalibrate is a data tech business, and we really believe in the philosophy of data to make decisions. We exist to create a world without guesswork. We want to have the right insight available to our customers so they can make location critical decisions with confidence because they've got the right data to hand. My team are responsible for communicating that proposition externally through the website. We're also responsible for generating revenue. We have a team of BDRs that sit within marketing that book appointments for our sales colleagues. We're responsible for customer communications, so we run the MPs survey, internal comms, the Virtual User Conference, and then finally we're responsible for the CRM and putting data at the heart of the sales and marketing function in Kalibrate. We really try and live by our own mantra of using data to make sales and marketing decisions.  

 
04:47 
Dom Hawes 
Fantastic.  

 
04:48 
Dom Hawes 
Can you help me by defining, what is Mops, what is marketing operations?  

 
04:52 
Ruth Connor 
For us at Kalibrate, what that really means is our marketing operations function is designed to kind of champion the data that you'd use to make sales and marketing decisions. That equates to what's in our database and how we go about emailing customers. It's also what's in our database in terms of how we track deals and interactions with customers. It's also the technology that a modern marketing team needs to be able to carry out its demand generation activity and its customer communications. For us, it's a combination of technology, data, and ways of working.  

 
05:27 
Dom Hawes 
What tech does a modern marketing team need?  

 
05:29 
Ruth Connor 
Most marketing teams at least have a starting point of their websites on a particular platform. That could be WordPress or something similar, or it could be through something like HubSpot. The next kind of layer tends to be something around your database, so your marketing database. In our case, we use HubSpot marketing Hub. That's where all our customer and prospect data is held. We send our emails out through that platform. It's our marketing automation platform as well. That tends to be the second layer. Then there is the kind of CRM element and when I first joined Kalibrate, we actually had Salesforce and it didn't really connect with anything that was going on in the marketing operations Hub of HubSpot. That was a key challenge for us as a business that we wanted to address that really influenced some of the marketing operations decisions went on to make.  

 
06:14 
Ruth Connor 
CRM is really important because it's the bit that joins sales and marketing and quite often the rest of the business together. In our business, what we really kind of strive for is having the CRM as the single point of truth for the customer. I think. There's another layer which is around for us is around measurement. One of the key things that's made a really big difference to our team over the last couple of years is the focus on measurement that we have. We use Google Analytics like lots of other teams, and we also use all the tracking that's available within HubSpot and we use Google Data Studio to pull through the Google Analytics data, at least at the moment, to give us kind of visual reports that we can use on a daily basis. I think they're the kind of key things that most marketing teams have that are kind of, I suppose, form the backbone of your marketing operations technology stack.  

 
07:05 
Ruth Connor 
Depending on the business you're in, both in terms of the size and the sector, you might also use some database tools. There are then layers and layers of marketing operations technology that teams can use depending on their strategy and depending on the kind of go to market and also their level of sophistication. So for us, marketing ops has only really been a dedicated function since November of 2021. It's quite new in our business and we've made a lot of progress in six months. There are lots more things that we need to do as well to kind of really optimize our use of HubSpot and to start plugging in some of these kind of additional add ons that will just help us take it to the next stage.  

 
07:45 
Russ Powell 
With that tech stack you described there, was that something that you consciously built or was that kind of you had to cobble together bits that were already there?  

 
07:54 
Ruth Connor 
I think it's a bit of both. Truthfully. I think it was a combination of knowing that there was a kind of benchmark of what a good Martex stack might look like, but also making sure that we didn't implement technology for the sake of it.  

 
08:07 
Russ Powell 
Yeah, I think it's really key that you've taken this and you've developed it and grown it and added bits on based on the need of the business as well. Because as marketers we're like magpies, we're like oh shiny, look at that new toy, look at that new bit of tech, look at this new Whizzy thing. We get excited about it and we bring it in and then it falls flat because it's not really what the business needs or wants. It's just something new and cool. It's like, does new and cool deliver what you need? Does it add value? Does it help your salespeople sell better? Does it help your marketers market better? People end up with like a Frankenstack. They have bits and bobs that they try and mash together and they API them and Zapier is in there and it's all held together with cobwebs and good intentions and doesn't deliver what they need it to.  

08:55 
Russ Powell 
I guess that evolutionary approach instead just iterating bit by bit. Does it work? Yes, it does. We'll do a bit more of it. Does it work? No. Okay. We'll bin it off and try something else. That's the approach we don't see a lot from clients in the market. I think that's really a really nice way to look at it.  

 
09:10 
Dom Hawes 
Are you still using Salesforce or did you end up replacing it?  

 
09:13 
Ruth Connor 
No, we replaced Salesforce two years ago with HubSpot. HubSpot CRM for a number of reasons. To be clear, I think salesforce is a great tool and I know lots of businesses have real success with it. And all of those businesses have a few things in common that have made Salesforce really effective in that they have a dedicated person or team looking after it. There are kind of really well embedded practices and ways of working within the sales team about keeping it up to date. I think if all of those things are in place, salesforce is a really great tool because it does do some things, in my opinion, better than HubSpot. We made a decision to move away from Salesforce because we didn't have a dedicated person in the business to look after it. We already had made a commitment to using HubSpot from a marketing Hub point of view and database point of view and were really driven to be able to kind of track our end to end customer engagement and that was the thing that we wanted to do.  

 
10:11 
Ruth Connor 
We also wanted to put the CRM at the heart of the business. HubSpot's subscription model makes it really easy and cost effective to do that because lots of people can have access without having to have a paid license. Those things were pretty instrumental in helping us make our decision because the marketing team were already really familiar with using HubSpot from a UX point of view through the marketing element and then the fact that we could open it out to more users in the business. So coming back to this idea of a single point of truth and having everybody who interacts with the customer have access to HubSpot and being able to visibly see the interactions, they were some of the key reasons that we chose to move from Salesforce to HubSpot.  

 
10:51 
Dom Hawes 
That's a very good point and I'd like just to stop for a moment to give our first takeaway to our listeners. We got four things here, a dedicated personal team to look after the technology. It always has to be up to date, they have to train people, and they has to be very clear work and guidance processes if it's going to work. The fifth one there was if it's a CRM, it's got to be on everyone's desk. Either everyone uses it or no one uses it. I can tell you we failed on all five of those. If you're going to go and you're listening to this and you're going to go and start building yourself a tech stack when it comes to CRM, those are the five things you need to think about when you're starting to plan it, right?  

 
11:25 
Ruth Connor 
Yeah, 100% agree with that. I think for us, having a dedicated marketing operations manager has kind of really helped us achieve those five things. We have a sandbox environment that we use to kind of experiment with changes we want to make. We've set up a working group that involves finance, sales, customer success, sales operations and marketing.  

 
11:47 
Russ Powell 
I think that's crucial as well, that the marketing tech isn't just marketing's toy to play with to bring in sales, finance operations, senior leadership as well is crucial because if you want to embed this in the organization, it needs to be embedded everywhere. It doesn't even have to be adoption early stage, but at least someone in sales going, yeah, this is a good idea. Someone in finance going, yeah, this is a good idea. That helps it get embedded and ingrained across the business so it's not just seen as marketing are doing some stuff. Again!  

 
12:24 
Ruth Connor 
Thats a great point and one of the things Sarah, our tech manager, and I debated was does the job title of marketing operations kind of give the wrong impression to the rest of the business? Because to your point, does it make it feel like it's another marketing thing when in actual fact it couldn't be further from the truth? I think the job title would become pretty unwieldy if you had to factor in all of the different interactions that the CRM needs to have in order to work properly. I would add one other thing to your list of tips, which is probably not something people really want to hear, but I think time is a really big factor with marketing operations as well. When Sarah first started in our team and she had a vision for delivering kind of the transformation element of our kind of HubSpot journey, and she said, oh, it's going to take kind of nine to twelve months.  

 
13:13 
Ruth Connor 
I was like, can you do it in three? Actually you can't do it in three. You have to be patient with marketing operations because it takes time to go through the process of having somebody who really can understand it and get under the skin of it for your business and work out how your business can best benefit and use the features that are available. Then it takes time to get the rest of the business on board and bought in. It takes time to write the right training and deliver the right training and that be not just a one off thing but a continual kind of engagement with the sales guys. All of that takes time and it can't really be done in three months. You do have to give it enough time to go through that process. So that's sometimes difficult to hear because people want stuff sooner, as we all do, but I actually think it's a really key requirement, so everything takes time.  

 
13:57 
Dom Hawes 
Really key requirement so everything takes time.  

 
14:01 
Dom Hawes 
That really struck me, what you're saying there. Because if you don't have a marketing operations person who's dedicated, whose time is spent putting all these various pieces together because you were talking about notes that are building and then connecting with that and then commissioning, obviously all these systems takes a lot of time. Keeping data clean is also a very time consuming job. With organizations that don't have mops, who does it?  

 
14:25 
Ruth Connor 
There's a plethora of agencies that are really well placed to help companies who are at the start of their marketing operations journey, who might have got a CRM in place or might have got a marketing automation platform in place. And when I first started at Kalibrate, we had an agency partner who did all of that HubSpot piece for us and that was absolutely right for where were at the time as a team and as a business and were still learning about HubSpot. We didn't really have the scale internally to bring it in house. Having the experts of an agency team really made a massive difference to us. I think if you're in that position and you are wanting to kind of build the way you use marketing technology into your kind of marketing activities, there are lots of really good agencies and kind of specialists out there that can help you go through that process.  

 
15:13 
Ruth Connor 
Even if you have the long term intention of bringing in a dedicated person to work on it on a day to day basis. I think that would definitely be a really good starting point if you maybe can't make the case to invest in a person from the offset.  

 
15:27 
Russ Powell 
When people are at the start of this marketing ops, technical foundational kind of stuff with marketing that it does really help to have that external viewpoint and the handholding of getting stuff set up, getting it running, getting it moving. What we're also seeing as well is on that life cycle with the client that they do want to bring it in house because it's theirs and that's perfectly understandable. There's also still a need for that objective and external strategic viewpoint on it as well. Because as you all know, when you're working on something and you're right up close to it, you get too focused sometimes you don't see the stuff that's happening around it. If you can have the in house expertise, that's hands on, elbows deep in the functional side of getting stuff running, get stuff moving, getting stuff out and working effectively, and then marry that with an external strategic point of view that can say, well, we've seen these guys over here doing this, have you thought about that?  

 
16:22 
Russ Powell 
Maybe you can shift things this way, the other way. That's kind of a real perfect marriage to make sure that value is driven across the stack in its entirety.  

 
16:31 
Ruth Connor 
Sounds like a great combo.  

 
16:33 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, let's just recap that because I think that's another really good learning point here. You're getting started, it can be a good thing to seek external support, get some help from outside to get you going, use external expertise. You then may want to transition as you get more sophisticated so you've got someone running it full time. Always good to have like a strategic top end view from the outside so you can see what else is happening and how you might be able to improve.  

 
16:57 
Dom Hawes 
I'd like to dig a little bit.  

 
16:58 
Dom Hawes 
More, if we can, into the order in which some of this stuff gets built because everybody listening to this is going to have a website and almost everybody listening to this will have plugged Google Analytics in. When you started solidifying on what you wanted to do with your stack and how you were going to do bits, what order did it happen in?  

 
17:16 
Ruth Connor 
I think if you are in that situation of maybe starting from the outset, I personally would start with your CRM. I say that maybe because I've been around in marketing quite a long time and I've inherited a lot of databases that have just not been set up with kind of true customer engagement and prospect engagement in mind. I would say if you are in that really exciting, privileged position to be going right, I've got the opportunity to start over here. I would start with your CRM. In terms of the order we've done it in, the first change we made was to the CRM and we did that at the same time as rebuilding our website. Our website had previously been a HubSpot website and we wanted to make it nicer looking and easier to update and easier to do some of the more interesting things that at the time weren't quite as possible in HubSpot as they are in other platforms.  

18:08 
Ruth Connor 
Not quite sure why we chose to do them at the same time as a team of two, but we did so the summer of 2020 whilst were all in lockdown. I mean, it was a great time to do some of these things, truthfully as well. We rebuilt the website in WordPress and, in short order, like, literally as soon as that project had finished, we worked on CRM migration from salesforce to HubSpot. So that was our starting point. That was kind of partly driven by the fact of contract end dates and with other existing suppliers like Salesforce, but also because of where the world was at the time and marketing teams were going through that kind of really uncertain period of how do we do our jobs in this kind of climate? What should we be focusing on? We decided it was a really good time to get our house in order and kind of build a platform for the future.  

 
19:00 
Ruth Connor 
So we did those things. We're our starting point.  

 
19:04 
Dom Hawes 
Well, that's top advice there from Ruth. One of the major problems when talking mops is how broad the term is. It encompasses so many people, so many processes, so much technology, that when starting out, it's really hard to see the forest for the trees. How do you find the right path to go down when establishing your own marketing technology system? Well, you heard it here first. You start with your CRM. It's the foundational building block of everything else. If you're building a system to improve customer engagement, you have to start by building a single source of truth for your customer data. And that means CRM. Do this and you're already on your way. You're listening to Unicorny, with Dom Hawes, powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Coming up next, Ruth outlines how a canceled live event during the Pandemic turned into a thriving virtual annual conference that generates valuable content year round and how you can learn to do it too.  

 
20:04 
Dom Hawes 
Ruth also talks to us about how important it is to think value exchange when you're considering whether to gate your content or not. We talk about why the recession could actually be good for creativity. Before that, let's find out from Ruth what kind of content she thinks you need to be putting through your system.  

 
20:23 
Dom Hawes 
This is Unicorny, and we're talking about marketing operations, and we've been talking so far about getting the plumbing right, getting the system set up, the architecture, what the stack looks like. Let's assume that everyone's done that and we've got our single source of truth. We understand our customers. We've got a pipeline. We can do all that stuff now. We've got to do something with it. There's a lot of noise out there because a lot of people are self publishing. Maybe we could shift our attention now to what you do with your stack once you've got it, because I know this is another subject, Ruth, that's close to your heart, isn't it? Getting the content, right, that you're pushing through your system?  

 
20:57 
Ruth Connor 
Yeah, I would say most aspects of marketing are a bit like a greenhouse in that it needs constant tendering, you can't have a set and forget mentality. I'm really passionate about content and I'm really passionate about using content in the context of PR and in the context of events as well. For us, one of the reasons we brought our team in house, our marketing efforts in house, is because we've got quite a broad product set, but we've got a really good bank of subject matter experts in the business. For us, we wanted to be able to kind of produce more regular content and be a bit more reactive and a bit more dynamic. Having the skills internally to do that means that we can do a bit more of that. We still work with an agency partner on really big thought leadership pieces where we're commissioning research for those one off annual kind of greenfield pieces.  

 
21:50 
Ruth Connor 
At Ignite this year, were talking about the link between content and events. For us, this is something that has been quite game changing, I suppose, over the last couple of years. In 2020, like lots of marketing teams, were oh, so we're turning off all of our lead generation activity because nobody is actively buying the market. We were due to hold a customer user conference in the September of 2020 in Amsterdam, and it was becoming pretty apparent that weren't going to be doing that. We decided to turn into a virtual user conference, just like lots of other teams who were making that shift. Our user conference was a two and a half, three day affair, roughly 25 sessions, stuff about best practice, about trends in the market, about what was happening in the business in terms of product roadmaps and things like that. It was only afterwards did we realize that we had inadvertently created 30 hours of content off the back of that.  

 
22:47 
Ruth Connor 
Because actually what we'd set out to do was to deliver event not actually create content, but to actually have the luxury of your subject matter experts preparing and speaking to customers on a range of topics that, that are of interest to them. Actually turned out to be really beneficial in terms of feeding our content marketing activity for the remainder of that year. Fast forward three years on, we've just done our third virtual user conference and we completely flipped the way we think about it. We started with the end in mind. We started with what does our content marketing strategy look like for the rest of the year? Well, for us, it's connected to revenue. We devised an event agenda around those principles so that we knew not only would we be delivering something really helpful for customers, but also could help us with our demand generation activity in the second half of the year.  

 
23:39 
Ruth Connor 
We ran the event again and at the outset we work with each of the subject matter experts to say, could this content be reused or is it something that's just for customers? It's got some commercial sensitivity about it so therefore it will stay within the realms of the VC and not be used on the website thereafter. We did all of that due diligence on the content at the beginning so that after the event were left with knowing exactly which sessions could be reused and repurposed 30 minutes of a webinar. We use happy scribe to transcribe them, we turn them into blogs, turn them into blog series, turn them into interviews, turn them into ebooks, turn them into slide decks, turn them into micro videos to use. Because you've already worked with a subject matter expert, you actually are doing them a favor because you saying come and record this one session for me.  

 
24:33 
Ruth Connor 
Yes, you do need to do some prep but it's going to take 45 minutes of your time. You're off the hook for the rest of the year in terms of introducing color or else because we're going to reuse what you've helped us deliver in lots of different guises.  

 
24:44 
Russ Powell 
Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts on gated content?  

 
24:48 
Ruth Connor 
It's really tempting to gate everything and I think what you really need to do is think about your customer journey and think about the quality and the value of your content. Whenever we ask for somebody's data we need to see it as a value exchange. If it's something that is really needy and really helpful and you probably would pay for, you really have to think about it in that context. There's got to be a clear value exchange of somebody giving me their data in return for something really meaningful value adding that they can't get anywhere else. If it's a piece of your sales content, I don't think it should be gated. I think things like case studies shouldn't be gated. I think we gate short demo videos of our software. That's quite deliberate. People who are at that stage in the buying journey and wanting to watch a demo video, rightly or wrongly, we think that signals fairly strong intent that they're wanting to see how the software actually performs.  

 
25:50 
Ruth Connor 
We gate that process and sometimes we go through a period of where we might gate something initially whilst it's fresh and new and it's serving a different purpose in a campaign and then we might open it up and we might open it up by repurposing it or by just making it available to download. I think gating content is still important. I think there's got to be really clear value exchange for the reader and I think teams should really think about where in the journey something is and therefore how relevant it. For it to be gated at that stage in the journey.  

 
26:27 
Dom Hawes 
I think we've hit a really important point here, actually, about Gating or not gating, and I think, Ruth, you mentioned about really understanding the stage of the process you're at when you're going to ask for a value exchange. Because I think if your gate stuff too early, you're ignoring like one of the most important behavioral nudges, which is the law of reciprocation.  

 
26:44 
Dom Hawes 
If you give someone something and it has value, subconsciously they owe you and it starts to build trust. Of course, what we're all trying to do with our content marketing is build trust and affinity so that people come to us because they have a feeling that they have found us, not the other way around, because none of us like being sold out. Now if I go on a website and there's a gate, unless I really want the content, I just flip straight off it or I'll Google search it and see if someone's put it somewhere else because I don't want the phone call ten minutes later and more companies seem to do it right.  

 
27:18 
Dom Hawes 
Let's now turn our attention to the future, because wherever you look online, in papers, on blogs, everyone's talking about recession and that we have to change our behavior. You surely if we think that persons are going to get tighter and I can't see any way that they're not going to get tighter, I'm hoping our recession will be shallow. We may even have a new government by the time that we will have a new government by the time this goes out, judging by, I think everyone's resigned today. How do you see the future and how do you think marketers should be reacting to the storm clouds on the horizon?  

 
27:50 
Ruth Connor 
For me, there will always be some overarching principles from a marketing point of view that don't change. It's these kinds of kind of circumstances where you actually need to remind yourself what marketing is really all about, that fundamental understanding of your market and knowing that you have got a product that solves people's problems that they're willing to pay for. I don't think marketers should ever lose sight of that. And that's why things like the seven Ps are really important because they're the fundamentals that don't shift and change with every new shiny thing that comes along from a marketing point of view. I think sometimes when there are periods of uncertainty, it's really good to go back to basics and just make sure you still have the common view of the target customer that shared with your sales team that you. Have the kind of right personas and data to support that and that you still have really well communicated value propositions and the right kind of product marketing content.  

 
28:50 
Ruth Connor 
That would be the first thing that I don't think we should lose sight of, regardless of what changes over the coming months that some of the marketing principles will still play the same. Most marketing teams will be faced with the challenge of getting more from their efforts. There were some really good things that were talked about at Ignite this year. In terms of the use of data and intent data in whichever guys you decide to go with being more creative, I think. And so I think there are some of the things that marketers could look to deploy tactically over the coming months and years if it's right for their business.  

 
29:26 
Dom Hawes 
You're saying kind of experiment with data, not with instinct?  

 
29:29 
Ruth Connor 
Yes.  

 
29:29 
Dom Hawes 
We need a higher degree of certainty, I think.  

 
29:32 
Ruth Connor 
Well, Kalibrates mantra is success starts with data driven decisions. I still think that's true from a marketing point of view as well. I recognize that in periods of uncertainty, that might be quite hard to achieve, but you might be able to have enough data to start with the hypotheses that you're going to look to prove or disprove through some kind of marketing activity. I think in periods of uncertainty, the more data that you can kind of lay your hands on to kind of set a bit of a foundation of right, we're going to make this decision based on what we know now, what the data is telling us now would be a good place to start.  

 
30:03 
Russ Powell 
I always enjoy the old Sam Walton, the guy who founded Walmart's, quote that we heard there was going to be a recession, but we decided not to take part.  

 
30:14 
Ruth Connor 
That's great.  

 
30:15 
Russ Powell 
And yeah, I completely agree with what you said, Ruth. I think the two things that will be dialed up that we're kind of seeing from working with clients and heading into this potential recession is a clear focus on ROI. Marketers need to know that they're getting bang for their buck, that the budget they are investing is delivering pipeline opportunities, MQL's revenue, whatever that looks like. Really second in your point around creativity, I think those brands that effectively plan and still keep their name out there still go out to market when the recession ends. They will be firing on all cylinders coming out the end of that, rather than those that stop and will have to go from the ground up again. And we're big on creativity. It's what we love doing as well. Like you say and it's not creativity in the sense of big splashy ad campaigns that cost multimillion pounds and involve rock stars or big brand activations and stuff like that.  

 
31:18 
Russ Powell 
It's being creative with data, it's being creative with process, it's being creative with messaging and psychology and understanding the audience as well. You can still engage, interact with and help that audience. What you were saying before about helping your audience get through this as well, so that you are that trusted, revered, loved voice that they always come back to.  

 
31:45 
Ruth Connor 
I think that's really good insight and that in itself is really helpful for marketeers because I think when you read about creativity, you have a kind of view it is those big brand activations and it comes with big budget. It is those big brand activations and it comes with big budget. Somebody mentioned yesterday the Jean clan band Epic splits with Volvo trucks. But actually creativity can wears many hats. To your point, it could be about the way you use data or the way you reposition your product or the way you kind of go to market and sometimes the tactical things that you try. I think this was true for a lot of teams during the first bit of the pandemic. Some of the tactics they had to deploy because of the circumstances ended up working really well and then became part of their strategy.  

 
32:31 
Russ Powell 
Maybe a recession might even be good for creativity.  

 
32:34 
Dom Hawes 
There you go.  

 
32:35 
Ruth Connor 
You talked about measurement and a couple of years ago I worked for a CEO and held his mantra about what gets measured gets done. I think your point about measurement is really important because first of all, it kind of focuses a marketing team on, okay, so what is it that we're trying to achieve during this period or during this quarter? It also kind of gives people kind of more accountability. Every Friday we have a let's review the week session. We have a tracker that we track our top OKRs in. I'm quite relaxed about where and when and how people choose to kind of do their jobs. You come on a Friday and you tell me what the impact of what your activity has had. I think that whole mantra of what gets measured gets done is quite important in terms of focusing marketing teams in periods of instability, but also could generally and then as somebody mentioned yesterday, about thinking more like a CFO.  

 
33:29 
Ruth Connor 
I think that would kind of buy you a lot of goodwill in your business if you are being seen as a governor of your pocket of budget and that you're spending it wisely and you can understand the impact that it's having on the business. I think that is a really good habit to be in as a marketing leader. In particular, that mentality of thinking like a CFO and being that guardian of the money in the same way that the CFO would be.  

 
33:56 
Dom Hawes 
Look, Ruth, thank you very much indeed for spending so much time with us and also giving us the benefit of your wisdom with systems and content, et cetera.  

 
34:03 
Dom Hawes 
Russ, thank you.  

 
34:04 
Dom Hawes 
You've been a great cohost. We're going to carry on now and we're going to just summarize some of the learnings that we have from here.  

 
34:10 
Russ Powell 
Thank you. It was wonderful to nerd out with you. Ruth.  

 
34:13 
Ruth Connor 
Yeah, big. Thank you to you guys for inviting me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about all things Marcoms.  

 
34:19 
Dom Hawes 
It's fabulous marketees. We love it. Wow, that was a really good interview. I really enjoyed talking to Ruth and hearing she's got so much expertise and also being a trainer and a board member and all that kind of stuff, too. It was cool, wasn't it, right?  

34:36 
Russ Powell 
Yeah, I loved it. Great.  

 
34:37 
Dom Hawes 
There was a lot there. What struck you that you would want our listeners to take away from this?  

 
34:43 
Russ Powell 
Kind of looking back? There were kind of four key takeaways that I took from it. I think one is making sure you've got that evolutionary approach to Martech, that you don't end up with this frank and stack of stuff cobbled together, as I said, and making sure that you iterate and review and ensure you're building based on what the business needs rather than just chasing the next shiny new thing. I think we then dug into those five or six key considerations that you need to look at when building that tech stack. They'll be in the show notes.  

 
35:14 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, I'll put them on the show notes on the website. Yes. If you go to Selby anderson.com under Insights, you'll find the podcast, you'll find them there.  

 
35:21 
Russ Powell 
There we go. Cool. I really liked what Ruth is saying as we're around the content approach with building those events, you then get one big piece of content that you can then chunk up, reversion, pull apart, put back together in multiple different ways. And what you would think is one piece of content can then become 10,12,15,20 pieces of content that you can then use over time as well, which will only ever help to reinforce and repeat that message that you want to get out to market. So I thought that was great. I think kind of when we're talking about the recession or the impending incoming recession, which when choosing not.  

 
35:52 
Dom Hawes 
To take part in. Right.  

 
35:53 
Russ Powell 
Choosing not to take part in. Yeah, as Sam Walton said. But yeah, I think making sure now, the fundamentals, you go back to the four plus three Ps and you really focus on who you're marketing to, how you take that to market, and then ensuring that you deliver the returns. It may even be that we see that creativity thrives and develops and gets taken to new levels with the constraints that are going to be placed upon us.  

 
36:19 
Dom Hawes 
There's one other thing I just want to cut back on, which was the content side. I agree with you. I think that kind of making and repurposing content is really cool. There's loads of content out there and you, with Sharper, have built a business that in two years has gone from like, nothing. I think this year you're going to do seven figures and you're doing most of that with very creative content. If any of our listeners want to learn from what you've been doing, like with cut through and stuff. What's the secret?  

 
36:45 
Russ Powell 
The content. Your ebooks, white papers, whatever, that content is still valuable. You don't bin that off because that is really good, insightful stuff that prospects, clients will want and will want to read. For me, for Sharper. It's the mechanism of the ebook, the white paper. It's been done, everyone's seen it, everyone's a bit bored of it, especially gated white papers, 20 pages long or whatever. People, if they download them, they sit in their browser for two weeks, they don't read them and then they get deleted. Instead, what we do is we still take that great, rich, lovely content, but we present it to market in a different way, in a more humanly, engaging way as well, because it's the age old thing of B2B is still P2P. You're still marketing to people who they don't turn their emotions off when they open their laptop in the morning.  

 
37:34 
Russ Powell 
They still want to be entertained, intrigued, engaged, caught off guard. The front layer, that the first thing they see, needs to click and it needs to grab attention. It needs to hit people right between the eyes because there's so much noise out there. Another white paper, is another webinar, is another one page. You're going to do that? Probably not anymore, but what we found does do that is building games, quizzes, interactive elements, looking at behavioral science and psychology behind it as well, so you can tap into underlying fears, ambitions, things like that. It's really all about taking that brilliant worthwhile, which is still worthwhile content, just taking it to market in a completely new, different creative way.  

 
38:19 
Dom Hawes 
The delivery system is the same, but the creativity comes in how you engage and interact with the audience. Good. Right, I think that's all we've got time for. Thank you so much, Russ. We'll do this again. I enjoyed it. It's been good.  

 
38:30 
Dom Hawes 
Till next time, guys. Well, that's it, the end of another show. Thanks again to Russ Powell from Sharper B2B Marketing for co hosting with me. And thank you to our brilliant guest, Ruth Connor from Kalibrate for sharing her time to join us on the show and give us the benefit of her wisdom. Next week on Unicorny, we are going to be taking a look at how to scale account based marketing. I'm joined on the show by co host Chris Willocks, all round guru and head of strategy at top ABM agency, Digital Radish, and Neil Berry, who, when we recorded the interview, was global head of account and deal based marketing at tech giant Atos. In the show, we discuss the complexities and the detail of how ABM works. We're going to get stuck straight into frustration with how misunderstood ABM is outside of marketing, probably because of the industry echo chamber.  

 
39:27 
Dom Hawes 
We only talk about the good stuff, not the stuff that is painful or hard to do. In this episode, we're going to look at the reality, we're going to look at the complexity, and we're going to talk about what it takes to scale successful account and deal based marketing across enterprise. We're also going to ask a controversial question will the role of an account based marketer even exist in a few years'time? Tune in next week to find out more. 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.  

 
40:07 
Dom Hawes 
Please take the time to share, rate.  

 
40:09 
Dom Hawes 
Review us, help us get found, and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast. It's a community of leading marketing minds. 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. You've been listening to Unicorny with me, Dom Hawes, powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. 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 series producer. Kasra Firouzyar is the Superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at the turnmillstudios.co.uk. CASRA Faruzia is the Superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at thermostudios Coe UK.  

 
40:55 
Dom Hawes 
Thank you for listening and we will.  

 
40:56 
Dom Hawes 
See you in the next one.