Yeo reflects on his 23 years in the business and reveals what he’s learnt
You’ve been in B2B marketing for 23 years, how has the discipline changed over that time?
The core elements of marketing in B2B have not changed regardless of technology. For example, you can’t generate leads without first raising awareness of your company and products with your audience. That has been there since dot. I would even argue that the noise we see in marketing now is actually a lot of fads.
Every marketing manager has a limited budget, every marketing technique is in competition with other marketing techniques to deliver the best results with the budget available. What I see is, some of the basic things that maybe aren’t as sexy, or aren’t the latest fad, actually deliver some of the best results.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
One of the most important things I’ve learnt is actually that criticism is advice in an unfriendly wrapper. Listening to other people’s views, even if it’s criticism, can be extremely valuable. Obviously not all of it may be relevant or true, but there will be other pieces that you have to be big enough to take on board.
How can marketing gain morerespect internally?
Marketing has always had a challenge in B2B of being a valued and recognised function. With modern tools such as CRM and marketing automation we can now measure exactly what the impact is, and that has changed the status and value of marketing in organisations.
We’ve implemented them at Panasonic. It was challenging but the results have been fantastic. We can now see every lead that comes in to the company, we put SLAs on them so they’re qualified by telemarketing and passed to sales, if they’re not accepted by sales within five days, or they are rejected, then an alarm goes off, they go in to breach, we make sure sales follows up. There’s no drop, there’s no leakage.
What do you look for in a marketer?
I value ingenuity, curiosity and, increasingly, an understanding of technology. And the final thing is breadth of capability. If you’re good in marcomms, are you good in product? Often they are the polar opposites. One is more technical, the other more communications, if you want to get to the top in marketing you must have both skills. If you want to get to the very top, the final one I’d add is commercial awareness. Sometimes marketing folks fall down on that and I think if you want to gain the respect of the organistion you must be able to understand, speak and lead the company commercially.
