Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of ANNUITAS, gives practical advice on how to drive change and innovation at your organization
Last month I had the opportunity to attend and deliver the closing keynote address at B2B Marketing’s B2B Summit held annually in London. The one-day event, which attracted close to 1,000 B2B marketers, was jammed with good content and practical sessions.
The focus of my keynote session to close out the conference focused on change and innovation. It seemed like a good fit as during the day the more attendees I spoke to the more I heard the common theme of innovation. However, like I discussed in my speech, before we as B2B marketers innovate, we must change. The key points I highlighted during my talk were as follows:
Don’t be afraid to cause some trouble!
I began my speech with a story that went back to my software company days. I was given a new role in the marketing department, which was focused on developing a lead-to-revenue process for the marketing and sales departments. Only 30-days into the role, I received a call from my manager who at the time was the VP of marketing. He got right to the point in asking, “what the hell are you doing? Sales and marketing ops are pissed and you are making too many waves.” In essence, I was causing trouble because I was trying to drive change in the organization.
If we as marketers are going to embrace the opportunity that lies in front of us, to be a strategic growth engine for our organizations, we have to come to terms that this very well may make waves and we will be called troublemakers. Look at it this way: We could be called worse!
We must begin with cultural change
I have the opportunity to speak to many B2B marketers over the course of my career. I spoke with one recently who told me, “We are still in the dark ages of marketing; I feel like I am back in 1996. We really need to change things.” After she described to me what they are doing for demand generation, I readily agreed.
This is just one case where a marketing department is not seen as a strategic asset for the organization. Currently, her organization is viewed as a sales enablement department and nothing more. This truly is going back 20 years!
With the changes we have seen in buying over the last decade, the culture and idea of marketing serving sales has to stop! Sales are not marketing’s customer – the customer and buyer are.
So how do you drive this change? In an example I gave during my speech, Apple has gone to the extent to remove words from their vocabulary such as the word “limit”, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, speaks about making attributes and characteristics part of their DNA. Meaning, things become so deeply ingrained in the culture of Apple, their innovation is simply an outcome.
For marketing departments to truly innovate, they must begin by changing the culture, and this begins many times with doing away with the old and adopting the new.
We must drop the tactical and move to strategic
During my talk, I highlighted that according to multiple studies by Forrester, ANNUITAS and others, the majority of B2B organizations, on average, launch 15 or more campaigns per year. Often, these campaigns focus on a tactic or asset that is promoted, names collected as “leads” and thus sent to sales and then onto the next campaign.
Moving to a strategic mindset and approach means building perpetual demand generation programs that align around the buyers and their pain points and challenges. This means we have to operationalize and optimize our demand generation programs by aligning People, Process, Content, Technology and Data to that of the buyer.
Indeed, this takes time and effort, but at the end of the day, it is highly effective and drives better engagement with our buyers and thus a bigger contribution to pipeline and revenue.
We need to equip our people
A recent Forrester survey stated that 96 percent of CMOs state they are being asked to do things they have never been asked to do before. While the pressure is on marketing departments to perform, the time and money being spent to equip them for this new world is hardly commensurate compared to the ask. Consider that:
Seventy percent of marketers report being “self-taught”;
Two-thirds of organizations spend less than $1,000 per year on equipping their marketing team with the needed skills; and
Only 10.2 percent of B2B marketing departments rate themselves as “highly effective” when it comes to demand generation.
If marketing is to become innovative and enable organizations to improve the connection they have with their buyers, then the investment needs to be made in enabling them to do so.
Steve Jobs was noted as saying: “Innovations distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Right now too many marketing departments are not making the changes needed and therefore are unable to innovate. Before innovation happens there must be change and the time for that change is now!
If you’d like to hear other takeaways from the conference, listen to this podcast, which features speakers Joe Pulizzi, Katy Howell and myself, along with B2B Marketing Editor Joel Harrison.