Category 2: Marketing team of the year
Open only to client-side marketing teams, this category recognises the group of B2B marketers that has pulled together to meet its objectives and challenges for the year, and which truly demonstrates that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Sage category campaigns team
Sage
Who are they?
The Sage category campaigns team is the embodiment of the new Sage vision for one centralised, marketing function responsible for campaigns across all 10 global markets. This tight-knit team of just 10 didn’t exist before 2016, and it shares the enormous task of marketing five solution categories, which together cover hundreds of products, to an audience of more than six million across 24 countries. The team comprises category campaign director Joe Edwards, Georgia Pantazis, Kirsty Topping, Laura Scampini, Daniel Parker, Vanessa Muff, Shannon Richardson, Aliénor Basile Combeuil, Sarah Reveillard and Charlotte James.
Big achievements
The task of campaign delivery for hundreds of products across 10 countries, to a disparate audience of over six million, sounds pretty enormous. But the team met the challenge in a way that streamlined how products were presented, and used best-practice demand marketing. First, they developed a research programme to gain a deep understanding of the campaign audiences and their pain points. Campaign creative and messaging was then developed to focus on solving customer problems rather than simply selling Sage products. Prospects were nurtured all the way through the funnel with content relevant to their experiences at each stage.
In 12 short months, the team has achieved 89% adoption in FY16 and 59% adoption in FY17 to date, meaning they’re on track to exceed last year’s adoption rate by the end of the financial year. And in the first six months of FY17, the team has already achieved more marketing-qualified leads than in the entire FY16, bringing the total to 54,184 MQLs since the team was created in 2016.
Team EMEA marketing
HCL Technologies
Who are they?
The EMEA team, led by Ravi Kathuria, VP and head of EMEA and APAC marketing, has led several strategic programmes in the last 12 months to generate and influence US$2.7bn+ of pipeline, while creating more than 1500+ engagements with key decision-makers and influencers in the region. The team includes Ravi Kathuria, Utkarsh Srivastav, Christina Herden, Jasmeeta Dubey, Anna Wennblad, Tilak Prakash, Aditya Panwar, Abhishek Sengupta, Chetan Nandwani, Chinmayee Raju, Eswar Prasad Buraga, Gaurav Kumar, Gaurav Sharma, Jyotsna Sachdeva, Prashant Kumar, Sachin Daharwal, Shivangi Chauhan, Supriya Gupta and Tenjit Dev Sharma.
Big achievements
Key to this team’s success is its approach to collaboration and cross-organisational support, and examples of where this has paid off are plentiful: a global thought leadership platform called Straight Talk with 279 members in Europe, and more than 100 analyst and advisor engagements created across events with 10 customer engagements are just two such examples. The marketing team also collaborated with the analyst and advisory team to provide customer references and submission data, generating favourable reports and/or mentions in at least eight reports for Europe alone.
The Cartus global marketing team
Cartus
Who are they?
There are 24 members of the Cartus marketing team, based in Swindon, Singapore, Danbury, Memphis and Dallas, who all work to support Cartus as industry leader in relocation support to organisations across the world. The team’s goals include creating a positive brand perception in the market, driving qualified leads to sales, and supporting client retention and expansion, and their tenures range from nine months to 36 years.
Big achievements
Where to start? The most recent industry survey ranked Cartus as the number one relocation provider, but scores have improved year-on-year for every attribute measured. In particular, scores for ‘quality of service/people’ and ‘responsiveness’ are the highest they’ve been in five years. Qualified marketing-driven leads to the Cartus sales team are up 160% year-on-year, and marketing-generated signings are up 60%. The team is also aware of the importance of their relationship with internal stakeholders, so have kicked off a number of initiatives to help get them onside. To measure internal campaign effectiveness, they carried out an employee survey three months after launch: 78% of respondents were aware of the campaign, and 57 shared positive comments.
SIS marketing team
SIS
Who are they?
A market leader in B2B satellite broadcast of live pictures and data to retail betting, SIS has diversified its product range to ensure that it remains relevant to the betting and gaming sector. And 2016/2017 has been a significant year for the SIS marketing team: they’ve led a company rebrand, developed and implemented a new internal comms strategy, and continued to execute cut-through marketing comms to raise awareness of its products among online bookmakers.
Big achievements
As well as the major brand development programme, the team has coordinated an internal engagement programme, led a change in company name (from Satellite Information Services to Sports Information Services), developed a new, contemporary brand identity, and led a cross-functional project team to roll it out across all touchpoints. Marketing has also continued to take a proactive approach to PR and has managed a comprehensive content marketing plan, which in the last 12 months has included 24 press releases, generating over 400 positive new stories, and 22 thought leadership pieces with subject-matter experts across the company. Overall in the last 12 months, the marketing communications activity has generated more than 300 new leads for the business. The quality of the leads is significantly better than the preceding 12 months, and to date has resulted in generating a seven-figure return with a healthy pipeline that should generate significant further revenues.
