I used to run the marketing team for British Telecom’s mobile business. Which was difficult, because BT didn’t have any mobility products to speak of at the time.
So, I marched in to the boardroom and demanded some money to build some. And to my horror; they gave me it.
I didn’t really march in of course, but it was a shock when we got what we asked for. Before I knew what I was doing (literally) I wasn’t a marketing guy anymore. I was in product development.
That was how it was for the best part of a decade, until Microsoft came knocking and without even really wanting to be, I was a marketing guy again.
Why am I telling you this?
Because my experience in product development completely re-shaped my opinion of how marketing should be managed.
The first part of my career had been spent linking into sales teams and CRM systems. Now, all of my key stakeholders were techies working in ‘sprints’. It meant, that I couldn’t hatch a creative anymore on the back of a cigarette packet anymore (sic). I really had to have the done the research.
I was answerable to people who were more interested in my methodology. Up until then, things like A/B testing was something ‘we do all the time’…not! But now I was building project management around it and blowing the doors off. I could prove to people why I wasn’t spending money and when I did, it was on small focused initiatives that everybody loved getting behind. I became really efficient at industrialising quick-fire marketing initiatives. The irony of course, wasn’t lost on me then, nor now. That I had to leave marketing, to become a proper marketing guy!
But I loved it. I wasn’t spending my life inventing spurious links to the bottom line anymore, I was focussed on getting to data that nobody could argue with and I was getting good at doing that quickly. That might not sound too radical to anybody outside the marketing industry, but trust me, that’s not how the majority of B2B marketing teams work. Most enterprise setups – whether they want to admit it or not – are sales support functions and most of their market insight comes straight out of the sales guys.
Don’t get me wrong, had I not been the budget holder, I wouldn’t have been able to go down this path. Product development guys are just as wedded to one ‘P’ marketing as their sales equivalents. But when they saw what I was trying to achieve, they were much more responsive to it and that support was really what started to make things happen.
In a startup, you get good at the things that other people cheat at!
In an innovation setup you become very good at focusing in on the really critical metrics; the ones that are important for the business at that point in time. Corporate marketing people on the other hand, are obsessed with micro-management and on finding more elaborate ways of developing tenuous links to the bottom line to justify their existence. That’s not a criticism, that’s the reality of the way most enterprises have evolved. But it’s a self-defeating circle.
In an innovation setup you get good at the things that corporate marketing people cheat at! You have nobody to blame, so you learn how to work across the customer experience. You start thinking about how to create a marketing culture, not just a marketing campaign, because that’s the best way to industrialise your initiatives.
I left as a marketing director and came back as a business manager. But this presented its own problems, because you can’t unlearn how to do things quicker, and old dogs don’t learn new tricks overnight. When I landed in Microsoft, I was surrounded by educated people trying to drive transformational change from within an institution. Like most corporates at this time, they had become too dependent on third parties to understand the digital landscape. They didn’t see it that way of course, they couldn’t understand why small business didn’t just accept their wisdom and pivot. They needed someone then, who could land their plans on the ground. What they weren’t ready for was that guy quoting Ghandi at them.
‘Be the change you want to see’.
If you really want to drive transformation, you have to start with yourself. You can’t expect anyone to follow your lead, if your own process are still embedded in the old ways of working. You have to know what good looks like at ground level, not just on a PowerPoint presentation. That’s what you learn when you’re spending your own money on it.
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