The marketing director reveals why RBI is focusing on connecting marketing with sales and product
What does your role include?
I head up the global marketing community across our company. It’s a great role that covers many activities, all of which are focused on connecting with customers to help solve their problems and make the company money.
As the point of contact for RBI’s brands, as well as the central and specialised marketing teams, is it possible to keep all the plates spinning?
I try to focus my time on the things that will have the largest impact, while having systems in place to check-in with areas I’m not deeply involved with. Plates do smash, though, but that’s life and there’s always good learning that comes out of these situations.
You’ve been at RBI for over 10 years, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen within the marketing function over that period?
Has it really been that long? When I started the company, we were a magazine publisher, focused predominantly on advertising as a business model. Now, we’re an online, data subscription business, serving customers around the world, which requires a completely different approach. Our approach to gathering insights and sharing content and ideas to generate demand, enabled through some clever technology, has all evolved over the last five years.
What do B2B marketers need to do to succeed in the future?
I believe B2B marketers need to be obsessed with understanding and connecting with customers. It also helps enormously if they can empathise with sales as well as products and flex their behaviour as necessary; have a real interest in evolving marketing technologies and modern marketing channels and techniques, plus a curiosity about the wider commercial business.
You’ve started a wellbeing programme at RBI, why is this a priority for the marketing function?
Our people are our greatest asset and without them we haven’t got much. We talk a lot about how we can help people grow and develop and wellbeing is very much part of this objective. We all know intuitively that happy and healthy employees equals more productive employees; which equals a higher performing business.
I’m aware you feel marketing and product should work together, why and how should they develop this?
In many ways, marketing is the bridge between product and sales and over the last few years we have seen the rise of the product management role as an important function, focused on customers and bringing everything together around a product vision. From a marketing perspective, the starting point is to dig out one of the useful product management frameworks around, like the pragmatic marketing framework, which we used to good effect.
Working on sales enablement is on your agenda, why do you think this is important for marketers?
In the main, the best B2B marketing programmes can’t be successful unless sales are engaged as they are a key part of the customer experience. They are also the most expensive part, so the more enabled they are to present their stories; counter objectives and feel confident, the more productive and successful we will all be. One of the first actions is going out on some sales calls to understand the sales process and work out what could make those experiences better.
