Xmas Special: What Marketers Need To Think About This Christmas

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. 

00:01
Dom Hawes
Hello unicorners. Welcome to a very special episode of the Unicorny Podcast, a podcast for marketers and senior executives who want to find out more about the future of marketing. We have had such an amazing year. We launched the podcast at the beginning of the year with five very special episodes that comprise season one. And we've been absent for a little while, but we've been recording season two, season three, and indeed half of season four. And they are now in the edit suite waiting to come at you in the new year. We're also going to do some really exciting things with our other podcast, Marketing Trek, and I think we're going to merge them into one channel. Anyway, that aside, this is going to be an absolute stormer. So we're not here to talk about promotion. We're here to talk about the business of marketing. And today we are joined in the studio for a very super special Christmas 2022 retrospective.

00:56
Dom Hawes
Nah, we're going to look straight ahead to 2023. And I'm joined in the studio today by the fabulous Nick Eades and Shane Redding. Shane, good morning to you.

01:08
Shane Redding
Good morning back.

01:10
Dom Hawes
Look, everyone in listening to the show should know exactly who you are because you are queen of B2B. But why don't you introduce yourself in case there are people who are not on their game.

01:20
Shane Redding
That is very kind. All that means is I've been around for quite a long time now. I fell into B2B sales and marketing. Like many, just by mistake. But I found it was a world I loved. I really enjoy the variety, change and intellectual rigor involved in B2B marketing. My career has spanned Plc enterprise. I did a management buyout when I was 28, backed by Three I, which was a really good introduction to the commercial world. And then I got that love for building and growing businesses which I've carried on in my career. And now I do some training a lecturing and consulting in the world of B2B marketing and sales.

02:02
Dom Hawes
Cool. And you still have time to do other things.

02:05
Shane Redding
Indeed, just cool.

02:08
Dom Hawes
And Nick, welcome to the studio. This has been an awfully long time coming, this podcast. In fact, dear listener, you are here. You're going to get a bonus today because we're actually in the studio to record a bigger and fuller episode. So some of the things we talk about today we're going touch on in another episode which are coming out in the new year. But why don't you just give us an intro to you, please.

02:31
Nick Eades
Thanks, Tom. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure to be on. Shane as well known Shane for a long time. Yeah, I'm sort of a 30 year marketing tech guy. I actually started off writing code, so I do understand some of the challenges that the SaaS companies I work with these days are going through in terms of how they develop stuff. So I started off writing code, went to pre sales for three years, new business and then into marketing with IBM. Launched and ran the IBM ThinkPad program, laptop program from concept all the way through to Europe. Lived in Paris for a while with that before moving to Dell and joining the beast at the very early stage from 8 billion to 45 billion in five years. That's pretty hairy growth running about 180 inside salespeople with the help of some sales directors and some finance folk.

03:20
Nick Eades
But a lot of fun these days. Well, for the past ten years I've been in the venture capital, private equity backed space, doing company exits, turnarounds and value creation work. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how to grow companies, how to get some people to focus, and working with tech founders on commerciality and things like that. But it brings together everything under the blanket that we call go to market these days. So that glues it all together.

03:47
Dom Hawes
Cool. Well, we're going to have a good discussion for the full podcast, but also for this special edition. We decided to do it really because the world's changing quite quickly and I thought it might be a good thing for our listeners to take a temperature. Where are we? It's December 2022. Where are we? What are we seeing out there? And what are our hints and tips for the year ahead? Shane, what's going on in the world of marketing?

04:13
Shane Redding
So Dom, you mentioned change. I don't think we have ever lived through such a period of sustained and rapid change. I think we sort of thought, oh, pandemic over will just know things will calm down a bit. No pace of change accelerated. What I'm seeing is that actually that's really difficult to deal with. The pace is exhausting. What it requires of us all is a reset and a different way of thinking. And I'm seeing a lot of people who are really finding it personally tough in their careers to embrace this when they thought perhaps not, they'd be walking into the sunset with an easy life, but life is hard.

05:00
Dom Hawes
And these are people at the top you're talking about. These are leaders, both from a leader's point of view, how's that manifesting itself, what are you seeing and hearing?

05:11
Shane Redding
So I'm seeing a lot of uncertainty about the shape of teams. I think we've talked a lot in the past about what's the right structure of a marketing team, left brain, right brain. We thought we got it nailed. Actually that's seeming to become unraveled. We're missing some things and I think we might come on Nick and talk about what we're missing. So there's that realization we're not fit for change, we're not fit for future. Then there's the self reflection. What does that mean for us as leaders? It means a lot. It means we have to change. Some people like change and embrace it. Some people don't.

05:49
Dom Hawes
Okay, Nick, what are you seeing? Where the hell are we at the end of 2022? Because it's been a very strange year.

05:56
Nick Eades
It's been especially strange in my space because we came into the year with incredibly cheap money in vCPE and valuations at ten X arr, and we're probably half that in terms of where we are on enterprise valuations. So we've gone from ten X to five X. Money's got much more expensive. There's been investors looking at their portfolio and trying to work out who's going to make it to the end and who's not, who needs support and who doesn't. How do they redress the balance? Have they got the right teams to Shane's exact point in place to get them where they need to? I think when money's been incredibly cheap, life has been incredibly easy. If you make more money by putting into a high risk business than in the bank, you start to roll the dice a little bit and it can get a little bit exciting.

06:52
Nick Eades
I don't like using the word stressful, but you can inject a lot of capital and a lot of hope goes in. And I'm a big fan of books that you don't have to read the book, you just read the COVID My favorite books is Hope is not a Strategy. Strategy is strategy. So the world's changed dramatically. People are doubling down, inspecting the business. We're going through business review after business review, revisiting ICPS, revisiting pricing frameworks, revisiting the competitive landscape, looking at Boltons and roll ups and M A and other bits and pieces. Part of that is survival, and part of that is thinking, I've got a three year exit expectation on this. Still, the EV is probably changed. How do I get there? So it's long game and short game because you have to finish this year in some way, shape or form close to plan.

07:42
Nick Eades
It probably is going to be a miss for most people. But how do you start next year? Well and how do you push on?

07:48
Dom Hawes
Okay, so we need a reset, basically, as Shane said, and we're saying, look, this year is done. We're going to forget it existed. So let's look at top tips that our listeners can think about over Christmas. What should they be getting their gray matter to work on to get ready for the year ahead?

08:09
Nick Eades
I think Shane and I could both start this with one word.

08:12
Dom Hawes
Go on, then.

08:13
Shane Redding
Strategy.

08:14
Nick Eades
There you go. Okay, every time.

08:17
Dom Hawes
Talk to me some more about that.

08:18
Nick Eades
I come back a little bit to what I said, which is like, so where do you always start with destination? Right. I do not start with today. It's like, where are you trying to get to? What does the path look like that if you could describe the destination you're trying to get to in sufficient detail for it to be real, like, you know, how many people, how many customers you know, what your cost? You literally model the company infinite detail, as it were, as much as you dare do, say, two years out, and then you work backwards. What would have to be true for that to be true? What would have to be true for that to be true now? Are you back where you are? And because that has changed, you have to do a lot of recalibration. And some of it is now in the left hand of guesswork.

08:57
Nick Eades
But guesswork is where you just have that's an excuse, right? It's a victim mentality. Do some guesswork. No. Work harder, double down, get more data, think a bit more logically, or just rein it back a little bit until you can stand on something as concrete as possible. Because if you haven't got concrete, it's too fragile.

09:18
Shane Redding
I'm really worried about the lack of time spent thinking strategically. So I bang on about this all the time. And people who do know me know that I've been saying, where's your ecommerce strategy in B? Two B marketing five years ago. Why weren't you testing it? Oh, my goodness. If you're not going into next year with some budget dedicated to testing ecommerce, I'm sorry, but you should be not enrolled. Shall we say the reason being is to your point, Nick's.

09:52
Nick Eades
Change.

09:53
Shane Redding
The world has changed. And it's an excuse to say, can't do B2B ecommerce. It's too difficult. We don't need it. We have sales. No. Wrong.

10:05
Dom Hawes
So, strategies number one, and particularly, we're saying, because the world is increasingly complex, things are changing all the time. Set a vision for where you want to be and do the hard yards. Work all the way back today and say, what do I need to do today in order to get there? And then, presumably, when the ground gets pulled from underneath you because you still know where you're going, you've just got to shift.

10:27
Nick Eades
Yeah. And I think the other thing that I would say is a top tip, and I learned this from my wife, who knows a thing or two about making garments, fabric and whatnot is measure twice, cut once, you do not. I went through a process with Nortel back in the financial crash. We lost half the value of the company in the first hour of training on the New York exchanges. We were junk stock. By the end of the day, the entire company was basically broken up and sold within three months. And most people, pretty much everybody, left the company with nothing. Zero. No pension, no payout, nothing. And I personally left and it took me five months to get another job. So you learn a lot on the downside. It's very easy on when you're surfing a growth wave from 8 billion to 45 billion.

11:12
Nick Eades
Adele, you think this is fantastic? You try doing the reverse. It's an incredibly steep, short, sharp drop, and it hurts. So if you're going to cut teams, budgets, whatever. Measure twice, cut once, just run your scenarios to the end. You do not want to do death by 1000 cuts. I had a team of 80 people. We were taking people out week by week, day by day, and everybody said, when's it my turn, do it once, get it done right. I mean, it's really heartless. Just feels grim. But I did y two k as well with Dell. We let half the salesforce go because companies said they were going to keep buying tech all the way through. From July, August, were polling our customers every week. Are you going to still going to buy. You've got your Y two K things settled? Yeah, we're still going to buy.

11:57
Nick Eades
Still going to buy. September they went no. But you said we've positioned materials. No, we have changed our mind. We're allowed to never ask a customer.

12:07
Dom Hawes
What they're going to do.

12:08
Nick Eades
They will change their mind. I'm more cynical than I've ever been.

12:15
Shane Redding
Wise words. I mean, not just measure twice, but measure the right stuff. Because again, it's not about your social followings because you've got very excited in B2B because you've finally got on Instagram. What about the bottom of the funnel? And this is something Nick and I are completely passionate about, is sales conversions from your marketing leads. The number of marketing teams that I go into and I ask that question and they don't know what is your close rate? Is it one in three? Is it one in five? Is it one in 20? If I can go in as a consultant and guess it from one in 20 to one in five, actually, I should be changing my pricing structure. It's taken me that long to reason. It's about value, price, selling, petty drop for me. But no, we do not laser focus on the measuring the important stuff.

13:10
Shane Redding
And the second point, completely agree. Having gone through, I think it's two recessions. Cut deep once. Do not do death by many cuts.

13:21
Nick Eades
That's so bad.

13:23
Dom Hawes
Let's not talk about cutting things anymore because it's depressing enough out there. Shane, what on earth should a CMO be thinking about when there's so much going on?

13:34
Shane Redding
It's all about focus. I mean, I mean, this bottom of the funnel matters so much. We do not spend enough time looking at it, analyzing it, understanding it. Believe it or not, you may have too many leads. What? Too many leads means that actually your whole sales team fall over because you're sending them through. They're chasing round and they're not converting the ones that are absolute gold in terms of lifetime value or whatever. So less is more in my book. Really focus. Going into next year. Really focus.

14:10
Dom Hawes
Okay. One more.

14:12
Nick Eades
Well, I love it. I think it comes to something we may talk about later, Tom, which is marketing should be accountable for revenue. And I don't think it feels like that most of the time. But if you're accountable for what happens in late stage funnel right at the bottom to Shane's exact point, if you can go from let's just do if you can go from a three to one conversion rate to a two to one, you've literally doubled the value of the inflowing revenue. Right. You were converting one in three. You're now converting one in two. Hopefully you want to positive. Fantastic. You've added one to your win rate. That's double. It's amazing. And you should do it. But I think the sort of flip side of this is that it's an opportunity to zoom out at the same time. So zoom in and zoom out.

15:03
Dom Hawes
Right, okay.

15:03
Nick Eades
You have to be able to do both. Fly very flat to the close to the ground at one part of the day and then your other heart, your brain, has to be able to zoom out. So if we're winning here and we're losing there, so everything you lose is insight. Right, don't. Oh, we lost some deals. Why? When? To who? How come? Was it the salesperson? Was it the product? Was it the price? Was it the market? Do not leave any of that on the table. Right. Go deep into that, then zoom out and go, okay, how do we get more of what we win? Follow the 80 20 rule. Where are we winning? Where are we losing? Just simple tools, but if you don't zoom out, you can't work out where you're going to win next.

15:40
Shane Redding
Chase the winners. One of the best entrepreneurs I ever worked with, mark Baldri. You're getting a shout out because that was his mantra. It was like, we beat ourselves up. We do need to understand what's not working, but we also need to understand what is working and do more of it.

15:58
Nick Eades
Exactly. It's so simple, really.

16:01
Dom Hawes
Well, there you have it, guys. There are five top tips you to think about while you on your Christmas break. And just to look ahead to the next episode, where you're going to hear us all in the studio. We're going to look at the marketing department, Cuckoo, the dreaded Chief Revenue Officer, who's moving into our nest and kicking us all out. So look for that, please. You'll find it on your normal channels. You can subscribe to us on just about any decent podcast platform and you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Dom Hawes. If you want to join the debate, find us there. Thanks very much, folks, and we look forward to seeing you again in the early new year. This podcast was designed, conceived and produced by Selbeyanderson.com. The serious producer is Nicola Fairley, the anchor is Dom Hawes and it is recorded at turnmillstudios.co.uk.