Keynote speaker at this year’s B2B Summit, Paul Higgins, head of marketing at TalkTalk Business, reveals his biggest challenge and why a bad manager made him a better leader
What was your first B2B-related job?
I worked for the Manchester Evening News in the promotions and distribution department selling into both the wholesale and retail trade channels.
What do you most enjoy about your job?
The breadth of activities we carry out and, more importantly, the number of business areas we interact with as a result. Every day I speak to colleagues in sales, operations, commercial and product because of the work we do.
Which B2B brand do you most admire?
Salesforce really ‘gets’ B2B buyers. It has been consistently strong over the last few years in engaging its audience and building its brand in a really creative way, using digital and social tools better than most.
Whose job would you like most?
Mike Atherton, David Gower or anyone in the Sky team. To be paid to watch cricket home and away and have a laugh about it with your mates has to be hard to beat.
What is your favourite B2B ad campaign?
I thought Microsoft putting real WiFi hardware hotspots in copies of Forbes was pretty cool. Going back to my first job, we thought we were cool mounting a CD cover on a magazine.
What’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Treat the budget as if it were your own. I worked for four years in Australia for a medium-sized financial services company whose owner was the MD, he always used to tell me to be careful of how I spent his kid’s school fees and his mortgage payments. He was only half joking. It brings it home to you that the activity is only as good as the ROI.
What is your proudest achievement?
Watching the marketing team here at TalkTalk Business grow into one that delivers some of the most innovative and sophisticated marketing programmes I’ve been involved with – I just get in the way.
To succeed, a B2B marketer must…
Deliver on the four Cs – creative, commercial, customer and consistency. Creativity doesn’t just mean great campaigns it also means innovation in technology and ideas. We all have to be commercial and deliver ROI as a given but also develop real growth opportunities. Consistency of activity, message and delivery is critical but the customer needs to be at the heart of everything we do.
What’s the next big thing in B2B marketing?
Technology is evolving all the time. Being able to link social into web analytics and automation tools will really drive engagement at the most personal levels.
What are the traits you most and least admire in yourself?
I’m pretty good at cutting through noise and thinking about what the customer wants. My desk is organised chaos without the organisation.
What marketing challenge are you currently wrestling with?
Getting social content into our lead scoring automation, while at the same time driving more search activity at points further down the funnel by linking GA to our Eloqua data.
What was your last marketing epiphany?
Sat with Google and Eloqua in a meeting and realising we could serve one-on-one ads through display. I am consistently amazed by what some of our suppliers come up with.
Which marketing or business books would you recommend?
There are a couple that stick in my mind – It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden and one of the first business books I picked up Good to Great by Jim Collins.
Who has had the biggest influence on your career?
A sales and marketing director I had; he taught me every single way not to behave as a leader. I now always think what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of something.