66. Field marketing: where outside-in begins

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. 

 
00:00 
Dom Hawes 
Field marketing. It's the lifeblood of customer connection. It's the sharp end of our discipline. It's a practice that allows marketers to meet real customers face to face in their own environments. By being on the ground, field marketers gather real time feedback on customer pain points, our solution's effectiveness, and the hopes and desires of the customer contacts that we all deal with. Day to day field marketing isn't something that features in the media much, and we've not covered it to date either. But we're going to fix that today when we meet SAP's global head of field marketing, event management, Maya Price. Because as we've heard consistently through the evolution of our podcast, A, it's all about customer experience and B, we all need to think out to in, not in to out. The starting point for out to in is the customer.  

 
00:50 
Dom Hawes 
And the closest thing to the customer in marketing, well, it's the field marketer. Don't go away. You're listening to Unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Maya's story is as fascinating as it is inspiring. She's South African by birth and cut her teeth in business as an entrepreneur. Now, these days she loves and is thriving in the world of big business. Global business. SAP is as enterprise gets, but as you'll hear, she hasn't lost the entrepreneurial spirit. SAP is Germany's largest company by market capitalization. It has regional offices in 180 countries, and it has over 111,000 employees. So I was very excited to speak to Maia to learn more about field marketing, but also the particular challenges she is navigating. Having moved recently from a regional to a global role.  

 
01:48 
Dom Hawes 
Over this two part episode, we're going to cover a lot of ground and I hope you find plenty to take away. In act one, we're exploring the challenges of transitioning from regional to global, and how you find a balance between local and global. Of course, our lens is field marketing, specifically events. But the takeaways and learnings from Maya's story are applicable in many more environments and circumstances. The heart of this story is about resonating with customers. It's about enabling local decisions to be made by those closest to the coalface without sacrificing the potency and consistency of a well managed brand. And as brand is top of the B2B agenda right now, this episode is perfectly timed for the moment. Hi Maya, and welcome to the Unicorny project.  

 
02:36 
Maya Price 
Thank you very much. Really happy to be here.  

 
02:38 
Dom Hawes 
You've just moved from a regional to a global role, and one that's particularly focused on customer experience. So I'm really keen to dive into what that transition's meant for you, both personally and professionally.  

 
02:49 
Dom Hawes 
But first, I kind of want to look at experience and its role in both existing customer relationships and in bringing new customers through the door. I've seen customer experience as kind of as a discipline or as a practice growing in importance, and I just noticed from one of the big networks. Q one, results today is the fastest growing area of their business. I wonder whether it's more than a backlash. It's probably too long ago now to talk about the pandemic, but I think we're still living in a base pandemic world. And I wondered whether, like, the growing importance of experience was a backlash to how things became, and in many cases actually still are, post pandemic people. Now, I was going to say they've stopped saying, well, it's great to meet up in real life because it's just normal business.  

 
03:33 
Dom Hawes 
But I was at a business event last night where everyone was going, yeah. It'S great to meet up in real 
life, in your world, especially one that's now global. What is field marketing, and how do you manage those sorts of experiences for your customers?  

 
03:48 
Maya Price 
I think you're right. I think we've come away from nobody was able to meet in person, and now all of a sudden we can. And we got to a situation post pandemic where you just sent out an invite that said venue, and everyone was like, oh, it's a venue. We meet in person. Of course I'm gonna go to a balance of, all right, why am I gonna go? Why do I need to be there? In field marketing in particular, we are lucky enough that we are the ones closest to the customer, so we really get to hear about the pain points, about what they're looking for.  

 
04:24 
Maya Price 
And I think we've reached a time where experiences are a balance between doing something creative and doing something interesting, to doing something that your audience has to have a takeaway, and it needs to be of value to them from the other side, from a customer perspective. They've got targets to hit as well. They've got efficiencies to hit as well. They need to get permission to be able to go to events, to be able to have experiences. And it can't just be, oh, I'm going out for the day. Well, what are you bringing away from it? So the experience needs to be a balance of something that I've really enjoyed myself. You've given me something that I want to go to. But why do I want to go to it?  

 
05:10 
Maya Price 
Is it because years ago it may have been, oh, we're just putting on a cool speaker, okay, but what am I actually going to hear from them? Is it going to bring something of value to me? So the agenda in terms of an experience becomes so hugely important as well. You're making it experiential from being there, interacting with people, maybe having a cool venue, maybe having a cool speaker, but that's not enough anymore. You need to also bring the experience of the agenda and the topics and what is the audience going to take away from it? And I think if you find the balance there, then you've got something like a secret sauce.  

 
05:51 
Dom Hawes 
For me personally, I love, I don't go to online events at all now unless there's a very specific thing that I can hear or learn, because what it misses is the number one reason I go out to Ventus is to meet people. It's all about relationships at the end of the day, and those happen.  

 
06:05 
Maya Price 
I agree with you. I register for online events, but very seldom do I actually end up attending them.  

 
06:11 
Dom Hawes 
Also, you don't need to because then you can watch the recording on double time or something.  

 
06:15 
Maya Price 
Exactly.  

 
06:16 
Dom Hawes 
It's just much more efficient the kind of event you're talking about, the thinking you're talking about sounds doable when you're thinking about local or maybe regional, but you've just transitioned into a global role where you're trying to replicate that kind of activity globally. What are some of the challenges that you face in delivering consistency or delivering that engagement now at such a bigger scale?  

 
06:40 
Maya Price 
Coming from a regional role, I will admit to say that, and everybody should be super protective over my team and over the regional team and over our differences and our uniquenesses. And I'm not taking away from that. Every region, every country has its own nuances and differences and cultures and things that need to be done at a localized level. I think stepping away now, being global, and I'm beyond the remit of just kind of Europe and what we call EMEA and looking at Latin America, looking at North America, looking at Greater China, at Asia Pacific, Japan, we have to take a step back and say, okay, let's stop having a discussion about how everything is different.  

 
07:25 
Maya Price 
Let's first have a discussion about what we have in common, because then we've got a starting point and then we can look at all the things that we can help the teams to optimize, to standardize, to do the same. We're not forcing anybody to do something 100% the same way. But if we can give you a foundation and a platform and then give you know, there's 30% leeway where you can localize and you can do it your own way. Because we realize that everybody is unique and everyone's different, but you're not starting from scratch trying to figure it out. And I think there's great opportunity there. The challenge is just like I was in a regional role. Everyone is very protective, and everybody's starting point is with a, but this won't work. But this is different.  

 
08:16 
Maya Price 
And we need to strip that away and go, okay, let's park that to one side. Let's look at all the things that can work. And then what are we left with? And that's when you probably left with your 2030, 40%, depending on your region, that has to be localized, and you have to give them the freedom to do that. And you have to understand that in order for them to be successful, they also need to feel comfortable that they've got control over the things that are totally local. So it's a balance of where do you help from a global perspective to make things easier and also to set the standards that from a customer perspective, we live in a global world as well.  

 
08:53 
Maya Price 
We're no longer in a world where if you live in Tokyo and you go to an event in Tokyo, the likelihood is you will only ever go to an event in Tokyo. You might end up in an event in Dubai, you might end up in an event in London. You need consistency. You need to be able to go in and go. I recognize this is the company, this is their ethos, this is their culture, this is their strategy. That's what they stand for. And marketing plays a huge part of that, because we set the brand, we set the look and feel, we set all of that. And if we can help and take away the pressure of setting that platform and foundation, then field marketing on the ground can really go and be innovative and creative, which is what we want them to do.  

 
09:31 
Dom Hawes 
I think this is a really important discussion, the strategic and the localization bit. And I want to dive into that a little bit more in the second half of today's show. But this is relevant to every marketer, whether they're transitioning from local to regional. This is a story actually about scaling, isn't it? And about how you handle growth of a role as you scale. Because not everybody listening to this today is moving into a global role. But the lessons that you're going to talk to us about, I think, are really important for anyone, particularly because we're seeing more and more decentralization happening in enterprise, where, as you say, the field markets are closest to the customer. They're the ones that need to be making decisions.  

 
10:08 
Maya Price 
Absolutely. And I think it goes the other way around. There has been a perception in a lot of companies where the way to grow as a marketeer is you start off in a local role, then you move to a regional role, then you move to a global role, and it should work just as much the other way around. And people who have global roles absolutely need to come in and do a local role at some stage in their career to understand. I often look at the machine of marketing as kind of like all these wheels, and you've got your local marketeer who, the wheels are spinning super fast, and if you look at the cog that's connected to it, that's the regional marketing, it's going a little bit slower, and then you've got global marketing, who's the biggest, but is going even slower.  

 
10:54 
Maya Price 
And the pressure and that fast, you know, running off your feet, going round and round and spinning like crazy, happens on the ground, and it's where the pressure is as well. So I think people mustn't mistake the growth of only interglobal. The growth also happens when you move from a global role into a local role, because then you are closest to the customer, you're closest to sales, you understand the pressure points, you understand that's where the rubber hits the road. So I would totally recommend to anybody who's looking at any transition to do it both ways.  

 
11:34 
Dom Hawes 
Let's pause and recap, because Maya shared a lot of good stuff there. Unicorners, if you're taking notes, these are my main three observations from what Maya has said so far. Number one is proximity. You're never going to be closer to your customer than when you're in the throes of field marketing. Even if you're doing qualitative research or talking to your sales team about their experiences, you simply cannot beat the amount of time and candid closeness you get with customers at an event. And of course, it's at scale. You're not just going out to dinner with two or three clients. So why am I bringing this up? Well, if you're in field marketing, you probably know this already. I'm really talking to the marketers listening, who aren't doing this aspect of the job, or who don't attend customer events. I urge you to do so.  

 
12:27 
Dom Hawes 
Get out there, ask to come along better yet work in field marketing because you will learn so much. Maya's last point was very telling. Even if you've gone global, even if you're at the top of your game, come back and do something local. Because that renewed proximity to your customer will ensure you keep learning. And that means you keep improving. Number two for me was consistency. Stop trying to customize local events to the nth degree. I like Myers approach. Instead of starting from a point of view that sees every branch or region as wildly different, start by seeing what they have in common and there's always a ton of commonalities. It also, by the way, makes your life a lot easier. Like using established branding. Using established staging the nuts and bolts of your event is what I'm talking about.  

 
13:17 
Dom Hawes 
All of this means that you get more time to focus on what should be localized and unique. And as Maya points out, today's customers will notice basic inconsistency. After all, they are just as global as your brand. Which brings me to point number three, customers thinking about how your customer will react to your event is absolutely key. It might be obvious to say, but it's remarkable how many events I'm invited to that I just. I really don't see why I should be there. I can see what the event holder wants out of it, but to get me to say this is important, I absolutely must go. I have to understand the value I'm going to get and it must be clearly communicated. Okay, let's go now and explore the second of these points in more detail.  

 
14:03 
Dom Hawes 
I want to learn how Maya manages to maintain the essence of a brand while also making each event feel unique and locally focused. Maya, what's the secret sauce? How do you balance global branding with local tastes and expectations?  

 
14:17 
Maya Price 
There is no such thing as global branding. There is just branding.  

 
14:22 
Dom Hawes 
Controversial.  

 
14:23 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
14:24 
Maya Price 
Your brand is your brand and you either believe in it or you don't. And your brand represents you, whether you're sitting in a local market or whether you're part of a global team. I have this argument with people every single day because we often get, oh, but it's just a local event. But it's just a local campaign. But we want to put our own twist on it. That's fine, but you still belong to a company that carries a certain brand and how your brand is perceived out there. Regardless of whether it is seen globally as a big advertising campaign or whether it's seen on the ground because you've created a small, 20 person executive roundtable, your brand should still be represented in the same way. So I think it's a matter of look at your brand holistically and then have a look at locally.  

 
15:15 
Maya Price 
What are the nuances that you need to think about that will appeal to your local audiences, whether it's culture, whether it's, you know, different ways of working, tweaks that you need to make. And that's where I think localization. So it's the localization of the execution, localization of certain elements of it, as opposed to localization of a brand.  

 
15:39 
Dom Hawes 
I get that, especially when you've got a brand as well known as SAP, that experience needs to feel the same wherever you are in the world.  

 
15:47 
Maya Price 
Absolutely. If you walk into the airport and you see airport branding, if you walk into an event and you see a pull up banner, the customer and the employee should feel like, this is part of SAP and this is part of a certain company.  

 
16:04 
Dom Hawes 
Now, I was interested in the first half of today's show. I loved the image of the cogs moving at different speeds. I hadn't thought of it in that way before, where the closer you get to the customer, the faster, the more frenetic, the more energetic things become. I mean, have you got examples from your career that you can talk about where local customer feedback or where that local energy was able to then help drive global thinking?  

16:27 
Maya Price 
Absolutely. So in my current role, I specialize in events, and not the execution of the events, but looking at how we bring the customer experience and kind of a standardization around what we create with customer experiences. And I think from a global perspective, they can look at holistically what needs to be done from an execution. We need this type of venue, we need this type of experience. But there have been situations where, you know, we've got events now that started off as country events and it was because we have global events, but actually, people can't travel, there's no budgets, there's restrictions, and people need something fast and quick to be able to take away in one day. They don't have the luxury of time to go and fly over and spend three days at a global conference and then come back.  

 
17:20 
Maya Price 
So they started off as a necessity of, well, we need something local to bring through the message. However, the content and the requests of what the customers want to hear often manifest themselves on a local level. And we end up being able to feed back to global and go, this is actually more of a message, and I'm not talking about the big global message and the strategy and what we want to say, but actually being in field marketing, it's all about creating opportunities. It's helping our sales team to bring pipeline in and all that sort of stuff.  

 
17:53 
Maya Price 
Because the reality in B2B marketing, that really is how we're tracked and how we have to work very closely with sales and hearing the feedback right there and then on the ground of, well, a customer's not interested in this, a customer's not interested in that, they are very interested in that. We're able to really take that back very quickly and help to guide things like the agenda, guide things like how long an event should run for, how many breakout streams it should have. Because I think somebody at a global level can put a model together of something that they think works.  

 
18:28 
Maya Price 
But unless you're on the ground seeing it and figuring out in reality, does that work for a group of 20, not a group of 7000, you need that consistent feedback going back up the loop to tell you what's working and what's not working.  

 
18:42 
Dom Hawes 
It's something I'm trying to do in my day job we've got 200 odd people who every single day of the week are exposed to market, customer, client, their customers data and intelligence. And it's very hard as an organization even of our size, to try and harness that intelligence. We know that, I'm going to use the s word, I'm afraid, but we know that research informs strategy. But research doesn't have to be just something that you do once. The real experience of your field. Marketers out in the field every day, I would think is essential in ensuring that corporate strategy remains on track. Because you are the eyes and ears of the company.  

 
19:19 
Maya Price 
Absolutely. And there have been so many examples of we need to create an experience, we need to create an event, we need to run a campaign. Here's what we think we should be saying. Well, actually, why don't we just ask the audience what they actually want to hear about? And you do a short survey, you do a short questionnaire, you actually ask your customers, we want to put an event together, would you come? Because we're talking about a, we're talking about b, or we're talking about c. And if they're all saying c, why would you put together an event that talks about b? Just because that's what you want to say, because no one's going to come. And then of course it's the marketeers who have failed. And our event wasn't successful because we didn't do a good job.  

19:58 
Maya Price 
But actually we need to push back and say, we need to be where the customer is at. This is what they want to hear. So let's do that.  

 
20:05 
Dom Hawes 
I think it's interesting in B2B, where particularly if you're talking about enterprise sales, where your addressable market could be quite small in certain markets, or certainly within vertical markets. I was reading again when I was looking at the networks today and looking at where they're investing. They're putting a lot of money into AI at the moment to try and predict what their mass market customers want to hear. We don't need to do that. B2B.  

 
20:30 
Maya Price 
We can actually ask people, absolutely.  

 
20:32 
Dom Hawes 
That's much more powerful.  

 
20:33 
Maya Price 
It's much more powerful and it's much more effective.  

 
20:35 
Dom Hawes 
What sort of mechanisms are there, or have you seen for transmitting that kind of ground level intelligence back up to global organization?  

 
20:44 
Maya Price 
I'm very lucky that I work in a really open communication, open feedback, consistent feedback, and we have different areas. I'm in field marketing. We have corporate marketing. We have our chief solution and marketing officers. We have communication. And we try to have open conversations and listen to each other. And yes, sometimes we come from point of differences, but at the end of the day, I think all of us really, really care about making our customers successful. We want to hear the feedback. And we have forums, we have quarterly feedback reviews, you know, very formulated, very formal, where we have an agenda, where we discuss things that are working and aren't working. And it's not a one way conversation. It's not the Mus, which is market units sit down and the countries sit and just listen to feedback.  

 
21:40 
Maya Price 
They have an opportunity to give the feedback as well. But we also have an open forum where we don't wait for those formal quarterly reviews. Anytime you've got a feedback or you've got a question. I work in an environment that allows you to challenge and allows you to push back if you feel, you know, in a respectful way. Of course, we have a lot of psychological safety around challenging and pushing back, which sometimes if you're receiving it on the receiving end of things and being challenged, it's not always comfortable. But there's so many aha moments and so many times where you take a step back and you go, actually, they have a really good point. And that open communication just allows, again, back to the loop of creativity, innovation, allowing you to trial and do things differently.  

 
22:33 
Maya Price 
We also have a fail safe culture where try something, it's okay if you fail. What have you learned out of it? And then make sure that you share that information so that other teams aren't now going through the same pains and trying and failing in the exact same way, but actually share what has been successful and what hasn't been successful so that we all learn from each other.  

 
22:59 
Dom Hawes 
How do you manage that though?  

23:03 
Maya Price 
Now at a global level, it's building. Your relationships with people who can then give you the feedback and then having the trust that they're doing it, that they're feeding the right feedback to you. When I was leading a small team, it's very easy to have one to ones and have the conversation, but now you need to take that same ethos and culture and belief and get those around you to kind of build that with you and believe it with you and grow with it. And it's really lovely because I do honestly believe that the only way to succeed is through people. I've always believed that.  

 
23:37 
Maya Price 
I think technology and execution and all those things can be learned and anything in marketing you can teach somebody who's got the right attitude and wants to not just be successful, but wants to interact, wants to learn, wants to give feedback, wants to want to receive feedback. And I try do that regardless of who I'm speaking to. And I try have that openness, show my vulnerability, show the openness, show that I'm willing to learn and that trickles down to whoever I'm working with, whoever they're working with, and then they're open to give me feedback and it just becomes links in a chain that we're all working together.  

 
24:17 
Dom Hawes 
And trust is so important. I mean, you use the word trust, obviously when you're working with a team who you've worked with for a while, both sides have been able to earn that trust. But when you move into a new role and you don't know the people, you still need to trust them anyway.  

 
24:34 
Maya Price 
It's really interesting and I've been through that in the last few months. I've been in my new role officially for six weeks now. And I do, I think anybody knows me knows I have a very informal style. That's just who I am. I often laugh that I say, if you had to read one of my emails and you squint your eyes, you'll see a lot of yellow because it's just filled with emojis because that's just who I am. And they'll always be a smiley in there and I'll always ask how you are and I'll. It's, it's just the way I am.  

 
25:03 
Maya Price 
And I think I came into a new role and there was a little part of me that went, oh, I'm sending my first email and it has to be a little more formal and it has to be a little bit more official. And then I thought to myself, do I really want to start down that track? Because then am I being my authentic self? And that comes with the safety of vulnerability. I'm now making myself vulnerable. I'm now positioning myself. This is who I am. Are you going to accept me? Are you not going to accept me? I think I've been working long enough to know that I don't want to spend my energy pretending not to be who I am.  

 
25:36 
Dom Hawes 
Exactly.  

 
25:36 
Maya Price 
So I've got to not just trust others, but trust myself that I'm just going to go for it and see how it's received. And for the most part, I get that back. And then you can see, obviously people have different communication styles and I am never going to expect somebody to match me, but they can then see what I'm comfortable with. I can see what they're comfortable with. And we meet somewhere in the middle. And I think that's where safety and trust comes. It's trust isn't. I'm going to be myself and you have to accept it and you have to come and, you know, just meet me exactly where I want to be. It's I'm going to trust that I'm going to show you my true self, you do the same, and then let's meet in the middle.  

 
26:20 
Dom Hawes 
Maya has really helped me clarify something big here.  

 
26:23 
Dom Hawes 
Unicorners.  

 
26:24 
Dom Hawes 
As you might know, I'm an advocate of the out to in company. This is where an organization starts with its customer, the outer. It figures out what pain or needs that customer has, and then it works inwardly to build a business that solves those things. It's very different from the in to out company that starts with what it wants to achieve and then figures out how best to position that to its customers. In my experience, that version, the in to out, it's a much harder proposition. You're always working uphill, you're always pushing, whereas in the out to in version, it's like you're marketing and selling downhill. The gravity of the pull that comes from customer need ensures everything wants to.  

 
27:09 
Dom Hawes 
Move forward towards solving that objective.  

 
27:12 
Dom Hawes 
So then it's pretty clear when you're on course or when you're off course with your marketing. But what Myers really helped me to see is how we make this beautiful business model work. Naturally, it all starts with a customer. And this is where field marketing can have such a positive influence on the whole company. Because as Maya has shown us, field marketing is already an out to in discipline unlike a distant global strategy, the epitome of into out working that says here's what we need to communicate. Please design us comms and events to get this message across. Field marketing can meet the actual customer and ask them what do you want to hear about? But more than that, field marketing can then communicate that finding up and down the company.  

 
27:56 
Dom Hawes 
They can inform the strategic leads, they can tell product what customers like, what they’re not liking, how they use it, they can establish ways to do things, winning approaches the whole organization can follow, mistakes the whole organization can avoid and so on. What all of this requires is trust and openness. And from what im seeing its the organisations whose culture is built on trust and openness that are the most successful. That means having a culture that encourages this kind of dynamic up and down feedback. That means leadership, having the confidence to ask, what are you seeing and hearing out there? This is the defining difference, in my opinion between companies that are set up for the future and those that are stuck in the past. And on that note, we end part one.  

 
28:44 
Dom Hawes 
In part two we're going to open up the age old event debate. Standardization versus customization. What are the rules? Where do you draw the lines? How much of each do you need? Don't miss it because it has big learnings for the whole organization. And all you need to do to make sure you don't miss it is to hit subscribe. Now's a good time to do that. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.