Paul Higgins, marketing director at TalkTalk Business, walked away with the marketer of the year trophy from this year’s B2B Awards. Maxine-Laurie Marshall discovers what others can learn from his success
While doing some pre-interview social media stalking, I noticed something unique about Paul Higgins. He’s the only marketer, I’ve seen, to include a revenue figure in his profile summary on LinkedIn. And it’s an impressive figure; he’s contributed £7.86 million of annualised revenues over the last two years.
That figure also appeared in his winning award entry, Higgins was named marketer of the year at this year’s B2B Awards, and probably went some way towards securing his success. ROI is something many marketers talk about, but not all can prove. So because he wears his ROI figure so proudly I had to ask Higgins if it was the most important measure of a good B2B marketer?
“I don’t think it’s the most important but I think it’s the measure that allows you to do all the other great things that you need to do. It’s the must have. Without being commercial you don’t get a chance to be creative.”
The language of finance
Offering insight on why some marketers struggle with the idea of proving ROI Higgins suggests: “It all depends on the type of organisation you’re in, the type of role you think you are playing and the type of role you believe you should be playing.
“If you are there to just support sales and be more of the pre-salesy bid, glossy mags etc, you’re probably never asked about ROI and you’re probably never asked to have a commercial conversation. If you want to be a marketer that’s involved in the middle of the business and having the right conversation with the right stakeholders, then you have to speak the same language. You have to talk about sales volumes,
ROI, cost per lead and you have to talk about revenue generation. If you don’t then you’re talking a different language to every body else.”
Ironically Higgins found his way into marketing after a business studies degree when he realised he wasn’t a finance person. “I knew I was never going to be a number cruncher.”
Despite this, he’s doing pretty well as far as the figures are concerned. On his award entry it also said he increased ROI by 40 per cent while decreasing marketing spend by 25 per cent. Another hard-to-ignore stat. Higgins revealed marketing automation was one of the main catalysts for this.
Technology
TalkTalk Business is in its third year of using marketing automation and Higgins explains by default it’s also in its third year of content production. “All those things combined allow us to sweat our assets, hence the 40 per cent increase, but doing that and by having a more granular view of what we were doing and how we were doing it means we stopped spending where we didn’t need to and we reduced our cost base. What that meant we could do was reinvest that money in things we’ve not tried before, and testing and learning. Just as you have a vicious circle of getting stuck into a rut of budget, you can have a virtuous circle of testing, learning and doing new things.”
Teamwork
Higgins was very good at remaining humble while I questioned him about his successes, almost to the point where I had to check if he was pleased to receive the award. That’s when I saw beyond his exterior, Higgins said: “It’s nice to be recognised, it’s nice your peer group think you’re doing something good and worthwhile. I feel a bit embarrassed at times.
“Above everything it’s just great recognition of the work my team has been doing, it’d be completely unfair to say this is just me. I’ve got a good team that has worked hard and come on the journey with me, they’ve been enthused to do something different, take a few risks, use new technology, use new ways of working, try things and get some things wrong to be able to then get more things right.”
Technology has clearly made a large impact on TalkTalk Business’ marketing and Paul’s team has had to adapt to new ways of working. So it would be easy to assume Higgins feels strongly that marketers need to be skilled technology users. Meeting me half way he agrees it’s now vital for marketers to know the capabilities technology can offer and to keep their education levels up, but he says: “To actually build in the software, we do outsource that because it’s doing not thinking. I’d rather my team inhouse spent their time, thinking, planning and analysing rather than doing what is in effect a laborious task of building something.”
Higgins seems very proud and protective over his team, while noting how they dealt with the changes inevitable with technology adoption he said: “If you can give your team sound and solid direction and strategy about where everyone is going, and let them understand you’re there to catch them if they fall off, and help and support them in what they do you’ll generally be okay, problems arise when people are operating in a void or have mixed views of where the end goal is.”
