The Challenges Of Scaling ABM with Neil Berry

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 to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This podcast is aimed at senior executives who want to find out how other businesses are building value through marketing. So join us as we sit down and talk with the heads of some of the biggest companies on the planet about the business of marketing.

We'll find out how they run their. Marketing departments, where they're putting their budgets, and the ethos that drives their decision making. I'm Dom Hawes, and in my day job, I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Selby Anderson, a fast growing marketing group that helps businesses in complex markets win the future. Last week on Unicorny, I was joined by cohost Russ Powell, a B2B and digital marketing expert from Sharper B2B marketing, to interview Ruth Connor, longtime leader and all round super talent of the B2B marketing scene. In our conversation, Ruth explained what Mops is and the importance of taking time when establishing a strong marketing system. Ruth also shared the order in which she built Kalibrate's Marketing automation system. And we also discussed the importance of a value exchange with gated content and how the recession might actually be good for creativity. It was another top episode, so if you didn't listen when the show broke, please do make sure you go back and check it out.

01:17
Dom Hawes
We received loads of feedback, by the way, so thank you very much for getting in touch with us if you did to say you enjoyed the show. And by the way, if you enjoy Unicorny, we wouldn't mind at all if you were to review us on your favorite Pod platform. Today, we're talking about something you don't get to hear too often the difficulties of scaling account based marketing. Account Based Marketing, or ABM, is a much talked about subject in marketing, and its proponents usually use platforms like this one to talk about the basic approach or what works well, breaking down silos between sales and marketing and that kind of stuff. Now, if you're thinking, what the hell is he talking about? And you're not familiar with ABM, I recommend you look into Unicorny's back catalog. Go to episode three and you'll find an excellent conversation with Digital Radish's Renee Edwards as my co host.

02:06
Dom Hawes
And we interviewed Fujitsu's Andrea Clatworthy back today. ABM is now seen by pretty much everyone in enterprise as an essential part of their B2B marketing program. But often there are questions, I think that are unanswered, probably because of what I talked about earlier, that people just tend to talk about the good stuff, not the bad stuff. But that's not where we are now. That's not what's going on outside in the real world where people are acting like really timidly in the face of the downturn. And we've seen savage cuts to big tech recently, loads and loads of great people cut. So I don't think a dose of reality hurts too much. And reality is exactly what today's guest delivers. To welcome our guest to the studio today, I'm joined by cohost Chris Willocks, smooth Talking Strategy Director for Digital Radish, the Goto Brand and ABM agency for high growth and B to B businesses.

02:59
Dom Hawes
And today's star guest is the equally eloquent Neil Berry, who was at the time of recording global head of Deal and Account Based Marketing for Atos, a global leader in digital transformation. With 112,000 employees and annual revenue of 11 billion, they are the European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high performance computing, and they're known universally for the effectiveness of their ABM activity. Now, when we recorded this, as I mentioned, neil was in house and he was there, but he has since swapped back to the dark side as Consulting Director for Momentum. ITSMA. Let's jump right into the conversation.

03:46
Chris Willocks
Hello. Good to be here.

03:47
Dom Hawes
Why don't we just get a quick.

03:48
Dom Hawes
Intro to you and to Digital Radish?

03:50
Chris Willocks
I’m Chris Willocks. I head up the strategy department at Digital Radish. We are a B2B agency specializing in ABM and brand. We are Agency of the Year, B2B Agents of the Year as of this year and nominated for this round of awards as well. We are essentially quite a strategy focused business, so very rigorous in what we do. We tend to operate at the business level rather than necessarily just the marketing level. So we help sort of fast growing businesses with their whole growth strategy, so looking at where they should be focusing and how they should be setting up their operations, as well as the marketing and the fun and the creativity stuff.

04:21
Dom Hawes
Cool. Good day to you, Neil.

04:23
Dom Hawes
How are you?

04:23
Neil Berry
Good day to you too. Say yeah, I'm good, thank you.

04:25
Dom Hawes
Why don't you start by explaining to.

04:27
Dom Hawes
Our listeners a little bit about you, the business you work for and the marketing setup at your business?

04:32
Neil Berry
Neil Berry so I essentially run global account and deal based marketing for Atos. For us, account based marketing really is kind of the one to one element. It's the thing that most people know it for, but it's also one of the more difficult pieces to do. I do actually run a center of Excellence, so that means that other parts of the organization come to us. So when you look at our marketing structure, you've got global central marketing, and then you have the regions as well. And the regions kind of come to us and go, oh, we've got this really big account, we'd really like to do something special with it. What can we do? So we have the frameworks, the tools, the training tips, techniques, all the usual t's. And that gives the guys on the ground bit of experience and a bit of support rather than going into ABM cold, which is really hard.

05:14
Neil Berry
And that's when you get a real inconsistency in the delivery of it Deal Based, marketing Wise. We look after all the big deals. We'll normally support anything 50 million and above. But also we've supported slightly smaller deals as well. But deal based marketing. Rather than treat the account as the market in its own right, we treat the deal. Working for Atos. They are a huge technology organization but not everybody knows them. Despite the fact we've got, like, 110,000 people. We do digital technology, as does everybody else, but it's predominantly looking at things like cloud, it's looking at workplace services, but we'll do everything right the way through to if a company comes to us and says, can you run our entire back office function? Yes, we can. So we can kind of do a bit of everything, really.

05:57
Chris Willocks
You've been running DBM. And ABM. For a while. Atos. What are the biggest challenges you've faced in an organization that size? Because it's a huge organization with lots of arms. And I know you've kind of grown through acquisition and mergers over the years. What are your kind of biggest challenges that you've faced?

06:11
Neil Berry
Things like change as an organization. I've been there, what, three and a half, four years? We've been through two business changes in that time and that reprioritizes the accounts you work on. It reprioritizes. What we want to be known for, all that sort of stuff. So you kind of have to adjust in quite a quick way. So that's always quite difficult because just as you kind of feel like you get moving, you get momentum, the company then goes, well, actually, we've changed our mind on a few things. Can we just do that now? Which is fine, because you can adapt. And that's one of the nice things about being in that world. Sales teams. Classic. A lot of marketers really struggle with sales teams. And I spend quite a lot of time helping to guide marketers on how to work with sales teams better. So I think they kind of feel intimidated by sales.

06:55
Neil Berry
But actually, if you're on a level with them and you go in and you're just reasonably black and white with them, then they generally have a little bit more respect for you. And that's when the relationship can get built. But they're kind of the two biggest challenges, right? But, yeah, that's kind of the two I would go with.

07:09
Chris Willocks
And have you adapted the program over time to take advantage of new technologies and newer thinking, newer ideas as things have moved on over the last few years.

07:19
Neil Berry
Our Martech stack was really crap for quite a long time. That's kind of all changed. I'm a little bit of a purist when it comes to ABM specifically. And when you kind of realize that actually, if you go overly digital, it removes the personal side of ABM. And I've always done lots of real personal stuff that makes customers stop and go, I really want to speak to these people. And That's The stuff where you get the biggest drive. So we've looked at technology and we've done a few different things, we've trialed a few elements, but a lot of the technology side of things sort of goes more to the one to few and the one to many side of the marketing organization. So it's not necessarily sat in my field, but we can utilize it, we can make recommendations. Some of the things that I've found the most useful are insight tools because everything's got to start with that.

08:07
Neil Berry
And data in most large organizations is pretty poor. So being able to kind of get the right data on the right people and the organizations and almost go into those really difficult sales conversations preloaded with something that makes it realize, like, you know, just as much. As the sales guys do goes a long way. And that's when the sales guys go, they kind of realize they know what they're doing. That's probably where I've seen the biggest difference.

08:30
Chris Willocks
And I wondered if there was any kind of big catastrophic failures that you've had in the past, in your career that you've learned from or just in terms of how you approach failure, in terms of doing things better in the future.

08:40
Neil Berry
I don't think I've had anything massively catastrophic. I think we've had elements where we've gone, it's not quite what we wanted it to be. And I think that's the biggest challenge with ABM is that you always hear about all the fantastic, really cool, good stuff, the award winning things, and then when you're trying to do it and you're going, I'm not hitting the same numbers as they are, but I'm doing it in a similar way. And we're all in this really weird predicament at the minute where we're all trying to differentiate in a world of differentiation. So we all end up coming out to trying to be different to the same customer. And the customer's like these guys are like all over the place, what's going on? So I think there's a challenge there around. Most marketers will look at it and go, I'm competing with them and I want to better than them in that kind of results driven mode that we naturally fall into.

09:29
Neil Berry
But I think in terms of where people often see it, they don't see the numbers at such an extremity that other competitors maybe are performing at. And that, I think, is where people go, well, I'm failing and you're not. You're just marginally gaining. And there will be one or two really specific examples that you will look at and then it will suddenly go click. And at that point onwards, you then start to see the bigger results. And it's all about how you measure, because if you measure the wrong things, it will always look really poor. So I'm judging marketing awards at the minute and it's really interesting. So they kind of pull out certain things and you look at it and you go, that's a very interesting statistic, but what about the bits that you've not mentioned? And there's certain points that you'll look through and it all comes back to how you measure, right?

10:17
Neil Berry
If you can measure things in a way that is going to affect the business and shows the growth, even if it's just marginal gains, at that point in time, you'll be in a much better place. I suppose it's more of a call to other marketers to say, look, you're not failing, you're making the gains that you need to eventually achieve any of the big results that you might want to, but just stay focused on those big achievements. Don't feel like you've got to keep up with the times. I think there's a really good statistic come out in an ABM report. I think it's about the use of ABM and how most programs now are two, three years old. All of a sudden. That's the pressure time, right? That's when the business goes right, we've invested in you or partially invested in you for like two or three years, where's the results?

11:02
Neil Berry
And that's when people suddenly go, I don't know if I'm doing what I should be. And I think most marketers probably beat themselves up a bit too much.

11:10
Chris Willocks
I saw another stat around. Most marketers kind of measure success for a campaign over six months. So when you're talking about success and failure, it's also like what's your window that you're evaluating that across, isn't it? If sort of deal lengths are 24 months in some cases and complex deals and you're measuring over six months, obviously that's not going to fit, is it? But then you raised that really good point around. Some programs are mature and actually, I think even though it's a three year ABM program, it might still be made up of very short term actions and sort of switching the mindset to much longer ABM programs. Very focused to your point, I think is the way forward, isn't it?

11:46
Neil Berry
Yeah. And I think you've got to be really honest with the business. So if you are, there's a bit of a call out to anyone that's listening. If you are at an organization that's going, let's start and try and do ABM, be brutally honest and tell them it is going to take years. This just doesn't come overnight. Right? ABM is not an overnight fix. And if they're expecting that, then maybe adjust what you think ABM might be. And that always has to come back to your definition of it because every organization should have a different definition always.

12:14
Chris Willocks
And the flip side of failure, just explore that for a second, is if you're not prepared to fail, you're not prepared to try anything new, right? So the whole Jeff Bezos thing of fail fast, fail often, how do you kind of embrace that sort of culture of failure is okay, and therefore use that to kind of keep programs fresh or to try new things in your activities.

12:32
Neil Berry
I'd probably look at it and say, well, if we failed on a small project or a big project, what did we do? Well, firstly, because there's always something back to the metrics piece. There's always something you can pull out and go, actually, do you know what? That part of that campaign was great, but it didn't succeed because of these things or it didn't reach the targets it needed to because of these elements. So I think there's always a mentality with us to go positive, negative learning and kind of deal with it in that cycle because otherwise you can really demotivate people. And the failure piece is something that I wrote a blog about it. It was really about kind of making sure people understood that it's okay to look at things and go, I didn't really get what I wanted from it. And that's absolutely fine.

13:18
Dom Hawes
And what we're going to do is we'll put a link on the show notes to that blog, which is called That's Not Flying, It's Failing with Style. I read it before you came in, actually, and I really enjoyed it. I think it's really important for marketers to be able to be honest about what's working and what's not, because otherwise.

13:32
Dom Hawes
How the hell do you get better? Boom. Neil's words should resonate with every marketer. Too often we see marketers being held to account over very short term results. The expectation seems to be first try, first time or else. But building a brand, building reputation, developing difference, takes time. And you need to take risks and experiment if you want to create value for your organization. You know, a study by executive recruitment firm Spencer Stewart reports the average tenure for a CMO is 40 months, the lowest in a decade. But more in than that, the median was just 28 months. And that is not long enough to make a mark in marketing because failing is a natural part of life. It's going to be something you encounter if you're trying to develop difference, if you're trying to innovate, if you're taking risks. So I think we have to acknowledge failure as part of a marketer's journey, because by acknowledging that, you're going to attract people who are less afraid to take better risk.

14:30
Dom Hawes
Companies that get this reap the value rewards. Companies that don't, well, they won't hold on to their talent. In the current climate, marketing is hard. But you know what isn't hard? Making sure you never miss an episode of your favorite podcast. So tap the follow button on your podcast and you'll never miss out on the latest episodes of Unicorny or Marketing Difference. You can even go back and listen to our back catalogue of amazing episodes. If you do that, please leave us a review. It would mean so much. You're listening to Unicorny with Dom Hawes, powered by Selbey Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Coming up next, Neil explains why Atos is changing its approach to be more specific and specialized, and how that's helped shape its marketing team. We also discuss why keeping the customer at the heart of things is critical for ABM and what the future looks like for Abmrs.

15:24
Dom Hawes
But first, let's get stuck into what good what for you ABM looks like.

15:30
Chris Willocks
I wanted to sort of just chat about Want a few and some of the other types specifically want a few. Some of the challenges I've seen around Want to few is if you're clustering by sector. For example, you try and cluster just by FSI. It's such a complex myriad of subsectors within FSI, isn't it? You're not going to speak to Nat West in the same way you would do Morgan Stanley, so you end up with lots of different kind of subsectors. I think another challenge, if you don't get it right, is that the personalization per company that you apply can feel a little bit kind of vanity personalization. It's not actual real personalization, but it's still a lot of work because you've got more accounts. But I wanted to know whether you were doing any one to few or whether you'd seen any successes in that program.

16:07
Neil Berry
We've tickled one to few a couple of times and it is good. I think if I was in a kind of smaller organization, I think it's a brilliant way to develop personalization because otherwise you kind of look at it and it's just too hard. So if you know that you're an organization that is specifically strong in public sector, find 20 accounts and look at the commonalities between them. So the way that we break them down isn't always based on subsector or sector. It might even be based on business challenge. Some manufacturers might have the same challenges as retailers or logistics companies. There's a real commonality between some of them, but then there's also things like job roles. CFOs might have the same problem if they're in a bank or if they're in a retail organization. So there are different things I think you can cut them down on.

16:58
Neil Berry
We did a campaign when I was in the global financial services industry. We had this massive piece of research. It was really strong and actually the data points really interesting. And we sat there as a team and said, well, what do we do to make it relevant to our ABM accounts? We had 15 to 20 accounts at that point in time, so we didn't want to let this great piece of campaign material slip us by. But by the same token, if we just went, there you go, Mr. Customer, what do you think of that? They'd go, Bill, thanks for that pointless, it's not going to get you anything afterwards. So what we actually did was we got the data cut based on their submarket financial services. So whether they're capital markets, retail, bank, insurer, so we cut it into those elements, we then cut it into the regions as well.

17:43
Neil Berry
And what we did was for a big German bank, we would provide a personalized version, a snippet of that particular piece of research in their own region, in their own language, with an intro from the client executive partner and from our CEO. And it kind of personalized it to an element that they looked at and went, this has been done for me. But then at the end it said, if you want to read the whole global research because we know you're also a global organization, please take a look. And it provided a snippet to then go into the other research so the one to few thing can work. And actually I personally believe marketing's going down a route of what I'd classify as like community marketing. So if you can build this kind of ABM community of accounts, that's the nirvana, right? That's where you want to get to.

18:28
Neil Berry
We're not there. Hands up, we're not there yet. But that's where you want to get to where actually accounts. And the customers probably know that you're treating them as VIPs and you've got to be honest with people. You've got to say, look, you're a special customer and this is why, and this is what we're going to give you as part of that and don't dilute that. And I think if you can build that community and make them realize it, that comes straight into one's view. It really does.

18:50
Dom Hawes
At the ABM conference last year, you did a keynote speech on how you take an award winning DBM approach and then expand it and scale it. And I think given know actually our listeners, they come from enterprise and startup, they're all levels. So assuming that they're not people that start with one to many and then eventually start getting to one, if they are enterprise and they're doing some more focused stuff that they need to scale, can you give any tips on how they might go about doing.

19:18
Dom Hawes
That from your experience?

19:19
Neil Berry
If you're kind of enterprise level and you're looking at where to start, always tell people to look back at what the organization's objectives are. It's so important and we can all get lost in going, well, I want to be relevant, customer relevant, customer relevant. If you're actually setting up something that you need to scale as a program, you need to be more focused on the drive for the business that you're working for and why you're doing it. Because if you don't have that, you then won't get the sales buy in, you won't get the exec buy in, and you're just essentially then beating on a door that is going to a customer that maybe the sales team aren't that bothered about. So you've got to be able to be really aligned with them. That would be top tip number one is look at your group objectives how am I going to help my organization win?

20:05
Neil Berry
And that's a big part. You're kind of abming yourself, I think. Any other top tips? I think it's also to take people on the journey with you. It's not just about buying because it's all well and good, saying, well, certain CXO supports my program, that's great, but you've got to get people on the ground to support and run and work with you to do that. So I think there's a certain element of openness that you've got to go to the rest of the organization to say, look, if we're going to do this, how's this going to work best for you? And I think if you do that and you're open with the internal organization, most of the time, you'll get the support all along the way. So you've just got to take them on the journey with you as well. But they're the internal things.

20:43
Neil Berry
And I think when you look externally, that kind of customer at the heart piece will always has to be there and you've got to look at them, but don't take your eyes off them. Because I've seen before where marketers will sort of go, right, we've got this account. I'm going to focus on them. And this is our story. And all of a sudden the customer goes, we've got a new CEO and our goals have completely changed. You then need to go, crap, how am I going to deal with this? What do we need to do to change? So it's being able to prepare yourself to be agile enough to change with the customer as well. So don't lose that focus of the customer.

21:19
Chris Willocks
We often get kind of clients coming to us and they might have picked some accounts from the footsie and the one to win, but they don't know anything about those accounts. There's no insight. It's almost not worth the heavy lifting if you don't have some kind of indication of what their challenges are, what their pain points are. Have they got projects coming up? Let's invest because we know that in which case the more one to many or the one to few programs tend to be a little bit more sensible, I think, in terms of using that as an engine for learnings and seeing what type of content they're engaging with and maybe even moving them later on down into a one to one program.

21:47
Neil Berry
Yeah, I think if you're trying to set up a program and you want it to last more than two years, you've got to have the vision to go from whichever end you're starting at to then go, well, where do we take them after that? Do I expand and grow the program by filling out on what we're already doing? Or do we change it and twist into another form of what ABM or deal based marketing might take shape of? Because there's always different ways to look at it and I think if you can either do one or the other, it gives you a structure to go with. But if you kind of hit a year and you go I don't really know where this is going. I think that's when you're going to start to struggle.

22:23
Chris Willocks
In terms of the one to many piece, where does Atos kind of delineate that with demand gen and how do you guys work together as a marketing function?

22:30
Neil Berry
Essentially the demand gen element and the one to many sits within the regions. So I'll be totally honest, we don't touch it. So I kind of make sure that the ABM side of things isn't just about demand. I've had other marketers in other regions come to me and say we want to do this campaign with one of our partners. And I say always is it about getting leads? And they go, yeah. And I go, what's? I'm probably not the guides to speak to. Some people are brilliant at it. We've got such a good function in our digital team and in our campaigns team who are so good at this stuff. For me, that's where you've got to start, that's where you've got to go from a big enterprise organization. And I know organizations that have stopped doing demand gen because they don't need to, right?

23:12
Neil Berry
They know the brand, they have customers going through this and they might turn it on at a later date, but sometimes you don't necessarily always need it. So the one to many piece for us kind of does sit more centrally and they kind of run a lot of that stuff and it filters out into the regions for them to do the field.

23:28
Chris Willocks
I know that Atos is kind of going through a period of transformation at the moment. Some companies are going, although I think more theoretically to this idea of revenue, combined sales and marketing or commercial engine or something like that. I just wondered if you foresee kind of where Atos is heading or where you'd like them to head in terms of the sales marketing general relationship.

23:46
Neil Berry
Yeah, so the way that we're restructuring is allowing us to have a more simplistic relationship with sales, which is absolute thumbs up. You don't get that in many places. So even at a global level I can pick up the phone to our global head of big deals, I can speak to our global head of accounts and he has his diamond list and all this sort of stuff. So there's only three or four of us and we're all quite tightly knit, but some organizations are just not like that.

24:14
Chris Willocks
And has the way that you sell change or is it changing? There's a different way in terms of people want to buy. We always hear about more millennials in the business as buyers and increasing need for self service and the declining role of sales. That's a big narrative at the moment. There's that side of it. But then. There's also, I suppose, the changing nature of your business. And there's the core service business, isn't there? But then there's also some great products that you're creating and whether that changes the way that you sell.

24:38
Neil Berry
Yes, it does. Because of the way that the organization change is going, a lot of kind of our product side of things will essentially sit elsewhere. Most organizations now are kind of trying to be this digital transformation organization, and actually, we're starting to try and make ourselves more specific. It's really good because it means that we've tried before to essentially be a jack of all trades. And you can't be that all the time. We're trying to now become the masters of specific elements. And that, I think, is really useful from an ABM perspective. And any marketing, right? It's not just ABM because it gives you kind of specifics to go after. So not only do we have the right list of customers, we have the specifics of the things we want to be known for. And when you're in massive organizations, it's really hard to get those answers, because then you're trying to map what you want to be famous for versus what the customer wants to achieve.

25:29
Neil Berry
When you try and map that together and you've got all this stuff that the sales team just want to throw at the customer, you sit there and you go, this is going to be terrible. You've really got to nail them down and get specific. So, yeah, it's not easy. But we are starting to get more specific, which is good.

25:43
Dom Hawes
I want to focus on the future. So the next twelve to 18 months is difficult. I think most people see it as going to be a fairly difficult period of trading. Neil, you have a very specific point of view from a marketer's point of view, particularly an ABM's point of view about the future.

25:58
Neil Berry
For me, a lot of the views that I have, actually, because we've been building this centre of excellence, a lot of what I've tried to do is set up a career path for Abmrs. And you could be a junior executive starting in their first ever marketing role. And you might get to just work one account with a more experienced ABM, which is great experience to get. Then you kind of evolve up to the point where you're working in the center of Excellence and you're working on the biggest accounts, biggest deals, all that sort of stuff. But I think there's a shift coming in marketing where we've all started to get really customer centric and customer focused. And it's all the usual cheesy marketing taglines that you can imagine for customer stuff. And actually ABM is becoming part of the norm. To your point earlier, Chris, about the emergence of one to few and one to many and kind of one to one, where do they all fit?

26:43
Neil Berry
How do they overlap? Who Works on what actually it's kind of becoming the norm. We've been doing customer marketing ABM for years. It's just that it's kind of shifting its name into different areas of the marketing world now. So I think when people say ABM, everybody, like I said earlier, has a slightly different definition of that. But I think that in the career of a marketer, I think it's going to be less I'm an ABM, it's going to be more about I'm a customer marketer or I'm this or I'm that. Because I think it's just helped to shift the mentality of some marketing organizations, some marketing departments, because if you were a channel marketer before, you'd never have really thought about ABM. And now you're seeing channel ABM and you're seeing how the emergence of ABM is changing the game slightly. But I think we've always been doing it's just that mindset, because that's all ABM is, it's a mindset and a methodology is filtering into new areas of the marketing departments and they're now looking at it and going, yeah, we probably should be more customer focused, actually, and what can we do to be like that?

27:49
Neil Berry
So I don't even know if there's going to be ABM roles per se in the future, but that's my perspective, right? Not atos's. So I think there's going to be a big shift. I really do believe that. And I genuinely believe the future of marketing is going to be this community marketing element where you can build one big community for your customers that helps with demand, but actually there'll be sub elements to that community that allow you to then be more focused, give them more VIP elements and it will just keep that journey slightly more aligned.

28:22
Dom Hawes
That was an amazing chat.

28:25
Chris Willocks
Yeah, it was brilliant and so much insight know it's great just to get into the weeds of how these ABM programs, such massive organizations, are set up. Every program is different, so it's great to learn what everyone's doing.

28:35
Dom Hawes
When we talk about sales, you tend to think of sales as one thing, but when you got 110,000 employees, sales is loads of different things all at the same time.

28:42
Chris Willocks
Yeah, exactly. And they've got such a myriad of products and services, and then you've got salespeople leaving and going and coming and organizational change. So it's a monster to try to kind of create a standardized program across.

28:54
Dom Hawes
Yeah, there were two things that struck me immediately that I really wanted to dig into more detail in. The one which we mentioned at the end, which was the whole concept of community marketing, and the other one is centers of excellence. If you're trying to get an ABM or a DBM program running, how do you go about trying to take advantage of either community or centers of excellence?

29:13
Chris Willocks
Well, community, I mean, there's lots of different ways to look at that. You could look at, say, what salesforce do with their trailblazers piece whereby they essentially kind of engaged users of the technology as become advocates and train them up and hopefully that those will become buyers in the future. You've also got another way of looking at community. One of our clients, they essentially offer their basic technology out for free and they've built up a community of 200,000 users of that technology. And as soon as that technology so the customers that they're selling to, they've got people actually using the tech in the business already, who then become advocates at the point where that technology becomes needs extra security, whatever, then they can sell the license. So there's that sort of side of community as well. But I think Neil was kind of looking at community from the aspect of if you have a selection of accounts, how can you kind of encourage them to talk to each other and learn from each other?

29:58
Chris Willocks
And one of the things that we've been doing a lot of recently is our virtual roundtables. So recruiting people from various different companies, lots of different industries, to discuss one topic peer to peer. And I think a lot of innovation comes from learning from what other industries are doing and adapting it to your industry. So I think that sense of community and sort of encouraging people in businesses to talk to businesses they never would ever come across in any other function, is another really strong element of community.

30:21
Dom Hawes
And I think that was one of his key takeaways cross fertilizing customer segments. One of the reasons people use agency, of course, is that in agency you see lots of different businesses, you see lots of different environments, lots of different tech stacks. So when a client asks you a question, often you come in and answer them from a very informed point of view. And I thought he expressed that really well, that bankers don't just want to know about financial services, they want to know what's going on in other sectors.

30:44
Dom Hawes
And as you say, that's one of.

30:45
Dom Hawes
The great routes to innovation, isn't it? To look at something people are doing in other sector. Well, that's what we're doing in our business, actually. I'm heavily influenced by what went on in the DevOps world and how they restructured their organizations and their teams and saying look what happens if we bring that to marketing.

31:00
Chris Willocks
Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, another example of one of our clients, they essentially offer these monthly experiences where they take in new ideas from their other clients into their clients. So completely different sectors taking ideas from public sector into financial services, for example. So there's definitely an appetite there and they get great attendance for those types of meetings.

31:18
Dom Hawes
Let's go back to segmentation because I think you made a really good point there as a strategist, when you're looking at an account for a client, presumably how you choose to segment and their value proposition or their positioning. I mean, that's key, isn't it?

31:32
Chris Willocks
So in terms of how you segment, I think, yeah, it's looking at what are the commonalities between clusters of accounts. So that could be the maturity piece, it could be use cases for your product. So, for example, one of the companies we work for is a technology platform and one of the things you can use that platform for is fraud, essentially. So lots of different types of businesses can use it for fraud. So that isn't even a sector play, that's just a use case play. So there's lots of different ways to cluster and try to find commonalities and ultimately try and scale your program.

31:58
Dom Hawes
Okay, so the advice to listeners is look at your content, look at what you're trying to communicate and find common threads and focus on their need rather than traditional segmentation routes maybe I think.

32:10
Chris Willocks
Looking at your accounts that you want to engage and looking at where you can share messaging and commonalities. So where can you cluster? Are there a whole bunch of financial services accounts that you can then look at sharing messaging across, or a whole bunch of manufacturing accounts, or if that's going to be too high level, what are the particular pain points within those accounts and creating content and clustering accounts around those. So there's a million ways to sort of cluster and segment, but it's all about creating, efficiencies and using content across multiple accounts.

32:37
Dom Hawes
Now, next up, in my shorthand, I called it don't be a keeper upper. We're always told we need to benchmark and measure success, and I think what we're saying today is by all means measure success, but don't feel like you have to measure it against competitors, measure it against your own objectives.

32:53
Chris Willocks
Yeah, I think that was a really good point. We always look at what competitors are doing. I think it's important to see what they're up to and making sure that you're not going out with exactly the same message, et cetera. But I think one trap maybe that companies often fall into is just looking at what their nearest competitors are doing, whereas what we try to do is look at who else is selling to the audience that we're selling to. So that might be small startups over here, or it might be different types of consultancy businesses over here. Who else is speaking to the same people and looking at what we can learn from them as well. But I think to your point around keeping up, absolutely sort of focusing on your goals and where you're heading and being really kind of determined and clear in that and not getting too distracted by the next thing that comes along, either the competitors doing or a new technology toy, et cetera.

33:35
Dom Hawes
Great, well, look, sage words of advice for us to end today's show on.

33:39
Dom Hawes
Thank you so much, Chris, for your time.

33:40
Dom Hawes
It really has been a fascinating conversation and we will definitely get you back at the Unicorn Studio in the near future.

33:46
Chris Willocks
Look forward to it. Thanks for having me.

33:49
Dom Hawes
Well, that's the end of today's episode. Thank you very much indeed to Chris Willocks from Digital Radish for being such an excellent and smooth talking co host today. And, of course, thank you to the brilliant Neil Berry for coming to join us in the Unicorny studio. Next week on Unicorny, we're going to look at thought leadership in a little bit more detail with co host Sophie Norris and guest Nicky Davies from Proto Labs. Now, we met one of Nicky’s colleagues, Peter Richards, in episode four of season one. And shortly after recording, I saw Nicky present at the Ignite conference in London. She was telling the story behind some of themes that Peter talked to us about, and she was, believe me, an ace guest. You will think so, too. In the show, we talk about how thought leadership is evolving, and we also dive into the nuts and bolts of one of their aerospace campaigns.

34:40
Dom Hawes
We look at how it's conceived, how they executed the campaign, when they expected return on their investment, and what they actually got. We also touch on repurposing and optimizing content. It is an amazing episode. Bookmark it, subscribe, do what you have to, but please, whatever you don't forget to 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. Please take the time to share, rate and review us, help us get found, and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast. It's a community of leading marketing minds. And pretty soon, we're going to be running events too. If you're interested in joining our community, please get in touch by following the Unicorny page on LinkedIn or connecting to me on LinkedIn.

35:33
Dom Hawes
My name is Dom Hawes. H-A-W-E-S. You've been listening to Unicorny with me. Dom hawes. Powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Unicorny is conceived and produced by Selby Anderson with creative support from One Fine Play. Nick Fairly is the executive producer, connor Foley is the serious producer, kazra Ferruzia is the superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at turnmillstudios.co.uk. Thank you for listening and we will see you in the next one.