Paul Gottsegen sits down with Maxine-Laurie Marshall to reveal why a harmonious relationship between sales and marketing isn’t always key and what he finds the most daunting challenge at the moment.
Paul Gottsegen, CMO of Mindtree, is a self confessed ‘career B2B marketer’ who loves his job. He’s run enterprise marketing for Dell, was VP of marketing at HP and CMO at Infosys before joining Mindtree in October 2013. The first thing on Gottsegen’s agenda was recruitment: “There really was no marketing to speak of, so a big green field of opportunity, I’d say marketing transformation, but there really wasn’t much going on to begin with. I didn’t take over from anyone, there was no leadership but there were a few people hidden away in their own silos, there was no-one here in Europe running marketing.” And with the hires came certain expectations. Gottsegen doesn’t believe his team should pick and choose a specialty within marketing, saying: “Marketing is so integrated.”
He continues: “You used to have role players and could put together a campaign with a digital marketing person, a product marketing person and maybe a branding person. But because the technology in B2B marketing ties everything together so tightly I couldn’t imagine a marketing person effectively running a campaign without understanding how to message and position things and at the same time having a fluid understanding of marketing automation (MA) and listening tools.”
Old-school meets new cool
Insisting it’s not just his team that has to change with the times, he also believes he and other marketing leaders have a duty to keep up with things that are impacting marketing. He says: “I’m an old hand at marketing and there’s some of the old lost art practices like messaging, trying to be a good evangelist and positioning your offering; these are the things that you get better at with age. But then there are new areas, like everything around the transformation of marketing to be a technology-driven practice. Some people who spend a few decades in marketing don’t spend enough time learning about these new areas. So what I have to do is be on the cutting edge of the digital tech marketing wave, while maintaining the old-school marketing capabilities.”
Sales enablement
What’s refreshingly new about Gottsegen’s approach to marketing is his interest in the sales team. At the beginning of the interview he explains his role covers marketing strategy as well as sales enablement. One of the company’s aims is to be seen as a thought leader, and to help with this Gottsegen worked with the sales director and sent the world-wide sales team on an eight-week social selling programme.
Specifically looking at LinkedIn, he says: “In this day and age, with everyone in B2B on LinkedIn, it’s almost an insult if you’re not using it to engage in the dialogue clients are having in the groups, or to comment on posts they’re making. That’s the way to get the sales teams more ready to have conversations long before an RFP would come out. They can shape the RFP so that they’re in the lead position and maybe help write it instead of being in the reactive mode and getting all excited because they got invited to an RFP. When you get invited, it usually means you’ve lost. It usually means the client has already got someone they developed it with, now they have to invite a few others because procurement wants them to have more people in the running.”
Although, while he, and his marketing team, are working to equip sales to be thought leaders, he offers a surprising word of warning: “It is true that if marketing and sales get along too well then there’s a problem. There needs to be some level of healthy tension between marketing and sales.”
Just before he’s whisked away to another meeting he has time to share one of his biggest challenges at the moment. He says: “There’s too many technologies to use right now in B2B marketing, it’s overwhelming. There’s so many tools to choose from, at some point you have to cut short the analysis and say: ‘okay let’s make a judgement call and pick one.’ It’s very daunting for a CMO these days.”
