All journeys have to begin somewhere, and the starting point for Thomson Reuters two years ago was to gather all its marketers together. But before it did, it asked them to send a picture of what working in marketing felt like for them at the time.
Gary Hurry, VP marketing at Thomson Reuters told B2B Marketing Ignite: “What we heard a lot of was people running on a hamster wheel, faster and faster each year but not getting anywhere. We had a lot of people talking about a finger-pointing culture within the organisation, that was very prevalent in sales and marketing. The final one was the feeling of being pulled in all different directions. The modern marketer needs to be a multi-headed beast – and expert in many different things with many different priorities.”
This negative perception led to the acknowledgement of a brutal reality, which Hurry says is vital in any team transformation programme. The truth was that the team wasn’t in control of its destiny, success or happiness.
“That was a really big moment for our team to acknowledge and verbalise how we felt and were at that point. But the good news was we had a start point so could start to think about how we could move to a new level.”
There were six key elements of the transformation project, not necessarily sequential, but the foundation was blending the rational with the emotional.
“Like all killer marketing initiatives, when you can meet rational and emotional it’s incredibly powerful. We set about building a transformation programme that resonated on both of these angles. For example there was little point talking about the importance of people if we didn’t back that up with investment in training.”
There were three main questions for the team to answer:
- Where do we want to go?
- How are we going to get there?
- How will we know when we’ve arrived?
Watch Garry Hurry explain how to build a high-performance, award-winning marketing team
6 steps to build a high-performance, award-winning marketing team
1. Create a brave and unambiguous vision for the future
To answer the first question, the team needed a vision. Not one that just existed on a poster or mousemat, but one that resonated with everyone. The whole team was invited to contribute, which drove emotional engagement because everyone felt they had a part in shaping it.
The vision they came up with was:
“To be recognised as the most fearless, insightful and commercially impactful marketing machine within professional services.”
2. Underpin the transformation with data
With the vision in place, TR introduced what’s called a “functional maturity diagnostic”. This was essentially a framework to conduct a full gap analysis of the marketing function that benchmarks performance against 30 different criteria, such as demand generation, value proposition and insight and analytics.
Conducting this rational analysis allowed the team to prioritise the areas most in need of development. Gary says: “This was a £40-50,000 investment for us, but it gave us such clarity. We wanted to change the world, but you can’t change 30 dimensions straight away, so it allowed us to hone down which ones really made a difference to our business model.”
3. Bring everyone on the journey with you
The gap analysis was also useful because it helped engage stakeholders in the transformation. By inviting them to participate it showed this wasn’t what marketing thought it should do, but collectively what marketing’s priorities should be moving forward.
“If there’s one thing we’ve all learned, if you don’t bring stakeholders with you on the journey, you’ve got a really tough gig,” Gary adds.
Enhancing the way the team dealt with a myriad of stakeholders – “supersizing”, as Gary puts it – was another key plank of the project. The team came up with a list of all the stakeholders who were either interested in marketing, or had an influence over its performance.
These were then mapped against the grid below (where power represents influence over marketing success), so they could be segmented and specific stakeholder strategies could be developed based on that. For instance, those in the ‘manage closely’ quadrant require a key account management-style approach, where as the others can get by with a broadcast-type strategy.
The second aspect was to engage and energise the team. The important thing was to show them something different was happening. They did this by inviting the team to a non-descript London hotel expecting an eight-hour day of PowerPoint presentations. Instead they got an Ibiza house DJ pumping out tunes at 9am in the morning.
“We just wanted to say something different is happening here, and in the way we need to engage the business. I’m very passionate about needing to engage marketers so they feel excited, energized and know they’re part of something amazing. We’ve kept this level of disruption all the way through to keep people buzzing,” says Gary.
4. Develop a big signature action quickly
When undertaking a project such as this, you need something “epic and amazing” that shows the team and wider business that you’re bringing the vision and programme to life.
Thomson Reuters was experiencing a difficult trading period at the time, being challenged by a smaller, more disruptive competitor. The team reacted by launching a campaign, ‘Good enough is not good enough’, which told the market if you’re buying the number two brand because you think it’s good enough, you’re wrong.
“It was different, brave and ballsy and put our brand where it needed to be,” Gary explains. “We brought it to life through programmatic, contextual, ABM, outdoor – a whole new media mix for the business, and signalled something different was happening.”
5. Build team capabilities
There are 50 people in the Thomson Reuters marketing team, and Gary wanted everyone, no matter their specialism, to have the same foundation of marketing knowledge and skills.
The company invested a lot – 7% of salaries – in training. Everyone on the team had the opportunity for an individual skills assessment and was presented with a gap analysis. A self-paced online learning platform was also provided as an always-on training resource.
“70% of marketers have no formal qualifications in marketing. That investment is rational, and really important to make that promise a reality.”
6. It’s all about culture
Like with the vision, the whole team was invited to develop a consensus around the culture they wanted to create. As a result collaboration is at the centre. “If you can’t be a team player, you can’t be in this team,” says Gary.
The other elements include:
- Diversity. Not just traditional measures, but also diversity of thought.
- Safe adventure. The ability to take risks without the worry of being sacked.
- Fun. If you’re not smiling and having fun while you work, it’s a long day in the office.
- Restless curiousity. Always thinking is there a better or faster way to do things?
- Celebrate success. Take the time out to enjoy the good things that happen.
Living up to the vision
A team transformation such as this never really ends, but so far the results have been impressive.
In terms of recognition, the team has picked up three awards, had three further nominations and repositioned internally.
To show they’re fearless, they’ve implemented the braver brand positioning, and a test and learn culture where failure is welcomed.
They’ve implemented more intelligent media and targeting, analytic-drive automation and grown account-based marketing to prove they’ve become more insightful.
And commercially the team has had record sales attribution, growth in all core metrics and strengthened its partnership with finance.
Those are the rational results. As for the emotional, Gary simply submits the picture below to show how the team felt having been crowned B2B Marketing team of the year.
