In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, Graham Wylie joins Dom to challenge the conventional view of marketing.

Wylie argues that marketing shouldn’t be confined to a single department but should be a company-wide responsibility. He explains the importance of aligning marketing promises with product delivery and encourages organisations to involve every team member in creating a consistent customer experience.

Key points:

• Marketing as a company-wide responsibility rather than a department function.
• The risks of inconsistent brand promises when marketing efforts are siloed.
• Leveraging market disruptions to drive change and opportunity.
• Engaging every stakeholder across the business for a unified marketing approach.

Listen now to learn how to break marketing out of its silo and drive growth across your organisation.

About Graham Wylie

Is Graham the world's foremost authority on marketing in organisations going through change? Possibly ;)

With three decades in B2B marketing, across vastly different geographies and industries; Agency, VC, PE and Corporate environments, and always at an inflection point for the business, there is real depth and breadth to his experience. Combine that with a nerd-level curiosity about how marketing actually works, and why businesses struggle with go-to-market, you get a rare combination of cutting edge theory, innovative practice and real world pragmatism that delivers results.

As we recorded this podcast Graham was wrapping up a large corporate transformation and by the time you listen to it he will have started as Chief Marketing Officer for activpayroll.

Links

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk

Watch episode: https://youtu.be/CNdB6sGzYJs

LinkedIn: Graham Wylie | Dom Hawes 

Website: activpayroll

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson 

Other items referenced in this episode: 

The Unicorny Marketing Show: April Dunford 

80. The Unicorny Marketing Manifesto: What marketing is 

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz 

Rory Sutherland 

How many times in your life has the brand promise that a marketing function made been disappointed by the client service experience or the product reality? First, advice for a marketer is never waste a crisis, right?

If you've got a disruption happening in your market, those are all opportunities to start approaching the stakeholders.

Today we are exploring a topic that may just change the way you think about how marketing gets done.

Now, we've mentioned it before at a very conceptual level on this show, but we've never really got into the weeds and today we're going to do just that. And here's the what if marketing a business wasn't just the responsibility of the marketing department?

What if it was something that everybody in your organization should be involved in? Now, in most companies, there seems to be an assumption that only the marketing department does marketing.

After all, it's seen as a separate function responsible for things like promotions campaigns while generally getting the word out. But as we keep banging on about on this, the unicorny marketing show, there is more to promotional marketing than advertising.

And there's more to marketing than promotion. Marketing is actually the whole process of taking a business, a product or a service to market. Now, my guest today is Graham Wiley.

He's an extraordinarily seasoned marketing executive and all round business strategist and guru. And he believes that the mindset that marketing belongs in the marketing department department is outdated and is joining us today to challenge that.

He believes marketing is so important it can't just be left to marketers. It has to involve everybody. As he says, marketing a business is everybody's business.

So whether you're an MD, a CEO, a CFO, head of operations or in internal audit, this episode is for you. Today we are going to explore how marketing can and should be a driving force across your whole organization.

Let's get straight to the studio and meet Graham Wiley.

Pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. I've listened to a number of the previous podcasts.

You've got a good cross section of guests and a breadth of opinion.

I hope so. Well, when we're going to add to that today, why don't we start?

By the words of Cinder Black, maybe you could tell us who you are and where you're from.

So I'm Graham Wiley and I rather like the way April Dunford talks about positioning. So I was thinking about this this morning and I thought the world's foremost authority on marketing and organizations going through change.

So three decades in b, two b, marketing for organizations that are an inflection point.

So whether that's a growth, growth or a turnaround, whether it's VCP or corporate organizations, cross section of industries, cross section of marketers. So rather been there, done that, got.

The t shirt, just the interesting bits. Then when it gets like normal, I.

Have a low boredom threshold.

I don't really do normal for unicorns. You may not know, but before every interview that you hear on the podcast, we have a pre meet.

On this occasion, what I normally do is I ask our guest to identify one topic they really want to talk about.

And while we were talking to Graham on that call, he said something really profound, which is that marketing's too important to be left solely to marketers. And that made me step back a little bit. But actually it's kind of in thinking with some of the themes we've been developing on this podcast.

But I don't think I've heard anyone express it like so clearly. Maybe you could explain what you mean by it and why you think that that concept is important for any organization looking to transform.

There's a lot of discussion, always has been, within marketing, about its place inside the organization. And it seems to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Should be living in a golden age of marketing when you think about how challenging the market environment is, how empowered the buyers are, but there still seems to be a sense that marketing is an idea, is challenged and in some areas failing. And looking at that, I think actually marketing is probably the most successful idea of the 20th century.

How you think about the structure of a market orientation, approaching the market and driving more than the transactional sales engagement. But it's the marketing department when it's confined to a department that seems to be struggling for its definition and its scope.

I simply think that the idea of marketing has been so successful that it has outgrown the limitations of a silo.

And so the marketing leadership role begins to evolve from the doing of marketing in a dedicated silo to the orchestration of a whole company effort to deliver that promise that marketing makes to the end consumer or to the end user in a business to business context.

I get the concept because I think what I've seen is that so often now in organizations, they seem to think the battle for marketing is territorial rather than ideological. And so you get marketers who are trying to hold onto more and more of the function and being less successful at doing it.

Which then is why I think there are organizations who would tell you that particularly in business to business, marketing is in crisis. Marketing is just fine. I love the way you phrase that the most successful idea of the 20th century.

I've seen all the different models and conversations, so you can think about it and you do the academic study, and we were talking earlier about studying the theory of marketing. There's a point.

Either the academics have it wrong around the application of marketing, or the marketers are doing it wrong, or the business simply isn't understanding. And you can break down the challenge of marketing under those three kind of umbrellas and look at it in granular detail.

And what you find is that actually marketing isn't the same in any two organizations. There's different functions doing different things, but it sets out the same objective.

I know you've spent time thinking about what is marketing and episode when you were talking about the definition of marketing.

Well, if you bring that into a corporate or business to business environment, it needs to be tailored for what that business is trying to achieve and the resources and institutions it has. But in theory, marketing owns everything.

But in practice, in so many different organizations, it doesn't own product, it doesn't have a say on pricing, it's being directed by others on how it does communication. It's different in every organization, which of course means every organization can change and tailor and evolve the way they approach marketing.

Typically that happens at a point of inflection when they're going through a change.

Do you think the fact it is different is a problem though?

No, I think it's what makes it strong.

I think if you take the principle of building around the customer and targeting the customer and providing a level of value to that customer, that should be a whole company effort.

How many times in your life has the brand promise that a marketing function made been disappointed by the client service experience or the product reality?

And if marketing doesn't have an input or review across that, or isn't shaping how the whole organization thinks about it, you end up with almost a schizophrenic organization where it thinks it's one thing, but it's promising something else to the market.

That's really common as well, I think. Interesting, I'm working up a new episode.

It'll be a monologue, I think again about something that's totally overlooked, certainly in software companies, which is that the relationship between customer and supplier is captured in a contract and marketing never gets to think about the terms of those contracts and say you've got a lot of SaaS companies now who are trapping people in contracts with auto renew dates. And if ever there was a promise to the customer that gets broken, it's broken in that document.

And again, I'm not saying marketing should be writing those documents.

If culture is what you do and your brand promises is how you interact and behave with your customers, it seems to me that it comes to documenting those relationships. Maybe more effort needs to be given to it.

I would caution against such a broad, sweeping statement that marketing never gets to look at the customer contract because there are organizations where the marketing team is involved in that conversation. There are parts of the organization where you rethink a product proposition and you're changing a product proposition.

You have to think about the whole product solution and some of that is how you're going to contract. Are you going to drive market share and growth by making it easier to do business with you than somebody else? So we tend to default to.

It's not common.

I'll agree it's not common for marketing to be in there, but there are great marketers working on the detail of public sector contract and tendering processes and I've worked with some of them and they do great work in that specific process.

Well I'm very pleased to be corrected on that one, but I am going to call out some bad companies when that episode comes. I've briefed the lawyers to stand by.

So if marketing is too important to be left solely to marketers in an organization, who else is doing the marketing and how do we categorize them or how do you try and embrace them?

So if you, as you did recently, take a step back and think what do we mean by marketing? And I think the CIM's earlier definition was profitably meeting the needs of a customer.

So the whole organization is involved in profitably meeting the needs of a customer.

From my perspective, actually understanding who's owning and delivering those touch points and what's their guiding principle, you know, is the operation being driven to reduce cost and eliminate customer touch points whilst the salespeople are being driven to deliver a white glove experience and it's finding those disconnects and looking for that continuity through the buying journey that allows you to actually work out. Is this consistent? In which case, terrific. Everybody's working in separate functions, but they're orchestrated and delivering the same promise.

Or are there inconsistencies? And are those inconsistencies impacting the business adversely?

So I say I've got a track record coming into companies when they're going through change. Typically that's looking at the inconsistencies. It's we've got a pipeline problem or a sales close problem actually.

Maybe youve got the right quality of deals in, but the salesperson isnt executing effectively, or youve got a product market fit problem, or you think youre selling x and actually the audience is trying to buy y. So that framework of auditing the existing business and then saying, okay, where are actually the real challenges?

Where are the things were going to prioritize to make a change that allows you to pick where the inconsistencies are and then focus on those, and then go to the people who are currently delivering and working on those to understand first why there are inconsistencies, and then secondly, whether something they're doing needs to change or if they've got it right all along, because they're maybe closest to the customer and it's what's going on upstream that needs to change in order to create that consistent value.

Raoul so either way, the point of change or that moment of inflection implies there's going to be some conflict because someone's going to have to change what they're doing. And people do get, they like to get territorial about that.

How does an organization, or how does a marketing organization get buy in from EO and fo ideological with the EO and asset allocation with the fO to make the kind of transformation you're talking about?

I'll speak from one perspective, which is I've tended to work with organizations that are going through change. The reason I do that is it gives me the opportunity to affect that change.

There are a great many very smart marketers in large and small organizations that already have a fixed mindset that they're never going to affect that change, because marketing isn't going to drive that change. If the company's making its number, if it's investing in line with its priorities, it's not looking to unsettle the business.

So you're looking for those points where the business is being unsettled externally and then finding out how you lean into those. So first, advice for a marketer is never waste a crisis.

If you've got a disruption happening in your market, a competitor entry, a change in the regulatory landscape, a change in a competitor's offering, those are all opportunities to start approaching the stakeholders and then actually understanding that those stakeholders have typically a very limited view of the marketing function and what it has done historically.

So I said earlier that the cause for that marketing is being challenged is either the academics have it wrong, the marketers are doing it badly, or the C suite doesn't understand what it needs. All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others.

Yes, there are marketers who are doing it wrong, but there's marketers that's doing it brilliantly. Yes, marketing tends to be quite inward looking and chewing over itself on the different priorities.

But the biggest obstacle you've got right off the bat is that the C suite doesn't necessarily understand that marketing can be part of the solution. And the CEO, Ben Horowitz, and the hard thing about hard things has this lovely idea about being a wartime CEO or a peacetime CEO.

That's the first job for the marketer. Understand what CEO you've got and what priorities and challenges they're facing.

And then Rory Sutherland did a lovely piece recently about CFO mindset and stability and predictability above everything else.

So if youre going to a wartime CEO who has a CFO whos based on predictability and stability, and you have an inflection point in your market now youre in an interesting conversation, right. And that opens all kinds of doors to doing things differently.

But if you have a steady state, peacetime CEO, Peacetime CFO, a high functioning organization thats delivering its numbers, the organization wont naturally be looking for change. So its going to be a longer term process for a marketer to orchestrate more broadly across the business.

I would also argue if all those things are going well, it doesn't need change.

Yeah, you're probably tweaking around the edges, although it's interesting, even some of the best examples, and you look at the world of BTC and the FE awards, they always start with, everything was going great until, and everything had been going great, whether it's a soap powder or whether it's a chocolate bar. It had owned its category until typically takes an organization quite a long time to catch on that things are not going well.

A marketer should be at the forefront of that. They will be hearing it from sales. They will be seeing it in the market data. They will be hearing it from the competition in the market.

And they should be bringing that customer perspective into the organization to say, I know the last quarter was fabulous. I'm looking four, five, six quarters out, and I think we have some things that we can do better.

That's always, my caveat, actually, is that things can be going very well, therefore the business could be doing it well. But is it sustainable? And we know that plateau inevitably leads to decline. If you're not growing, you are going to decline.

There is going to be that moment where things go wrong.

And that problem with the level of C suite understanding and marketing being the most successful idea of the 20th century people believe it's a really weird situation.

They believe that marketing can do anything, that I can come to you in the final quarter when the numbers are low with money I found down the back of the sofa and say, can you fix this situation for sales two months later at the beginning of the fiscal year? There's no money available because it's not visible or tangible results that we delivered.

So if that plateau is left and if you wait for the inflection point, the marketing organization is going to be under pressure to do just the short term quick fix.

The time to have those tough conversations, the time to think about broadening the influence of the marketing organization, is when you can see the change coming down the pipe, but it hasn't yet hit the business in a meaningful way. And that's the nuance of then engaging with the executive senior leadership team to say, okay, this is what's going to happen.

This is the way the market's developing. Do we all agree that you have a conversation about the market and that drives towards outcomes?

If you walk in there and go, hey, we marketing function have done research and we see this, everybody will be like, it's not there in our data. We don't see it because the business is performing well.

And you've mentioned it already, though the time from action to reaction can be enormously long when you're trying to affect change. So short term results possibly can be tinkered with normally at the expense of the future because you're probably dragging demand forwards.

But if you actually want to instrumenthouse a proper change, it takes a long time to turn things around.

Yes, in a lot of organizations that change often gets hooked on a product cycle.

So you are in the conversation where you're saying, hey, okay, so there's new market players or there's a different buyer need, and the default response is, well, we'll fix that in the next release. We'll have that feature or we'll have that functionality.

And that's where having marketing in the room as the product conversation starts to develop, which I know we've talked about in the pre call, that becomes incredibly important because so much energy and so much of the cadence of an organization gets tied up in the product timetable and the product launch process, that if you're not bringing that market change into the room with the product team 612, 18 months ahead of when it's going to happen, then you're stuck again, further out of sync with the market.

So when we were talking about product, you mentioned stage gates in product development. Explain this to me a little bit help me understand how marketing can influence those.

Again, sitting across a number of different industries, I've worked with hardware businesses that by default have to be really thoughtful about what they're going to develop, how their features are going to build.

So they've got a really tight philosophy about product management and that product manager's job is to build the product and get it on the shelf to a certain set of specifications.

Then product marketing comes in and they're going to take it off the shelf and push that hardware product out through a variety of different channels, generate demand for it and see it into the market. In the world of software and services, everything's much more malleable.

And so what you can find happening is that the conversations between product and the existing customer base index towards certain feature functionality. The sellers are being tasked to talk to a future customer base.

The sellers will also filter what they're hearing based on their own experience and they will prioritize features that probably were discussed in the last conversation with their biggest potential deal. That deal probably is going to close in the next quarter to two quarters. The product lifecycle is possibly six months to a year ahead.

So there's all kinds of disconnects and challenges in the way that operates and product. People are in product by and large because they love product. They get excited about building feature functionality.

They go to great lengths to do user testing and user work, but they're talking to people who are using the product today or the potential future users. They're not talking to the next segment that's going to be the growth driver of the business.

So there is a disconnect between product, between sales and the market.

And when that goes wrong, you have product building what it wants to build, sales, selling what it wants to sell, and a very poor customer experience when they get the product and it doesnt quite deliver, even if its down to the contract terms and conditions not being quite what the buyer had expected.

So putting marketing into that process and bringing the customer, the future customer, the future segment, the future growth driver into that conversation you start to drive a much richer dialogue. But it needs a framework because otherwise products are going to go, no, no, no, we're under a mandate, we got to go build this thing.

So an NPI or new product introduction framework is a stage gated process. So what that means is you have to pass through cohesive stage gates before you can advance with the work.

So stage gate one typically comes in an early conversation with product that says, can we do this?

We think we see an opportunity in a particular geography or in a particular segment, can we be the people who build the product that solves that problem for that client? And that's typically when you get the nice strategy deck that says, hey, this is a billion dollar market.

If we take 1% of this, we've paid for the R and D, by the way, we can do it all in incredibly quick time, etcetera. You normally get to that, can we do that? And then there's a second question in that stage gate, which is should we do that?

Does that align to our core competencies, mission and value as an organization? Do we have the right skills? We can build it, but do we have the right commercial go to market?

So that kind of can we, should we, is those first stage gates. And that's not a marketing driven stage gate. This is about an orchestration of the organizations where I've seen it work most successfully.

Product is presenting the initiative with a product marketer who's thinking about the whole product solution. And the decision making panel is general management, operations, sales and the leadership of the business.

And you really need, depending on the size of the business unit or the size of the company that's a president or chief executive buy in that says, okay, yes, can we, should we, right, go away past that stage gate, come back when you figured out how we do it, so that next stage you get the first stage gate, which is can we, should we? Then you can go off and you can talk to all sorts of customers, all sorts of prospects. How do we take this thing to market? How do we build it?

How are we going to price it? Who's going to be the distribution channel? What are the opportunities? How does it compete with the competition?

And then you come to another stage gate, which is we figured out we can, we figured out we should, we figured out how does it stand up to the stress test?

Do we actually understand that we built the whole product, that it delivers buyer value at a competitive price, which drives profitability for the organization? And if you can get through that, then you go through to right now we're into the stage gate to launch. So how long to orchestrate every department?

How long for legal to sign off the trademarks in multiple countries? How long for legal to put the terms and conditions in the contract together? How long for marketing to pick the launch window?

How long for product marketing to train the sellers and ensure that we're ready with enablement. That whole go to market so that you land in market on the day that you go and there is a stage gate decision for go.

There is a go no go that says Yup, products ready, we built to our mvp or our threshold. Sales is ready and trained marketing is ready to launch. Then everything goes to market together.

When you do that and you execute it well, you get a much richer conversation and you start to also reverse engineer some of the timelines.

So in large and complicated organizations, typically product will have their timeline and they will say, right, we've shipped 31 December, we're done. You may not have the sales team together for training and readiness until the 1 April. So you have a dead three months when you run on that basis.

So actually looking at everything that's going to be successful for launch, whether it's the developer conference that you're going to launch it at, or whether it's the timing of sales readiness and sales availability to your channel, onboarding, you work from the backend to launch point back. That MPI process creates a structure and a framework that everyone can subscribe to.

And then once you put that through, everybody goes, oh well, this is a much more constructive conversation. This is much easier, this is much less painful.

And when you land a product in market, in my experience, you will typically sell more of it and you will have happier customers. It's never smooth sailing, right? There's always problems. But marketing makes a promise.

The sales walks through the details of that, the buyer buys and the product shows up and fulfills that promise. That is quite rare in a lot of business to business organizations.

So putting that process around it to raise the confidence level is extremely valuable.

It would also, by the way, solve just about all the whingeing I hear about siloed departments and didn't get consulted and all that kind of stuff. Because a lot of people talk about accidental marketers. We call them untitled marketers, people who are nothing.

They don't have marketing in the job title, but still do it. Like who cares? The most important thing is coalescing the whole organization, as you say, to bring a product effectively to market.

And what you've just described, I think probably might be my favorite segment in a show so far. Hard to deliver, but wow.

The power of being able to do that, of bringing everybody onto the same process is, it's not something that we've heard in such clarity.

It stops the product team over engineering. So it keeps your cost base down.

It allows the sellers to get immediate traction with the product, which improves their confidence and it moderates that price and value conversation. And that's really important because we talk about price being part of the marketing mix.

And I think the whole industry had forgotten that until inflation came roaring back and inflation came roaring back. And suddenly there was a conversation that says, well, who does pricing?

And the reality is in most organizations, product sets the cost price by how they engineer and design the product.

Then finance will set a selling price based on previous models and some black box, which quite often is an excel spreadsheet that's full of flawed assumptions and history. No one really reviews what's the new customer value we're delivering and what's happening with the competitive lens.

So those three lens of price in terms of cost, value and competitive, the NPI process gives you a brilliant framework to bring that to the table and the opportunity to start to play with some of the variables.

So a salesperson whos motivated by an overall sales number, but a customer whos put off by an installation cost, for example, how you structure that pricing and what you make payable as a commission structure can hugely impact whether a new product is going to be successful. So again, putting it all in a framework neutral, it's not I built this thing and now you're telling me you want to price it differently?

It's we built it together through a process. And as I say that we built it together through a process, the only thing you have to remember is it's not designed by committee.

Everyone owns their own piece. Otherwise you do end up with the three humped camel or whatever the analogy is for design by committee.

But that's the ideal process and it seldom happens that way. What are some of the signs or what are the things to look out for? If that process is broken and the silo behavior for example, is still going.

On, how does that manifest coming into the business?

If you look@your.net promoter scores assuming you're in an organization that's tracking CSAT or net promoter score, you very quickly get a feel of is the product and the whole product and the total experience doing what the customer thought they were buying. A positive net promoter score says yep, okay, the salesperson made a promise or the website made a promise.

Depending on which kind of product you're delivering, customer bought it. They're achieving their outcome. They don't buy products, they buy that outcome that we always talk about.

If you have a strong NP's but you're losing to competitors, then okay, let's look at what competitors are doing and why. And where are you losing to competitors?

Are we losing to competitors right upfront at the first pricing conversation or are we losing to them at the detailed demo and using that sort of framework to understand where is it dysfunctional and where are the problems that helps set your priorities to look at it, we've talked about no function is unconstrained. I think part of the opportunity for marketers is to embrace that constraint.

There's never enough money, never enough people, never enough time in any business, in any function. So looking at that constraint and saying okay, how do we view that positively as helping us prioritize what we're going to work on.

We're going to be all focused on how we improve the NP's. Everybody can align around that.

If it means you've got to change the product or you've got to change the sales process, or you've got to change the demo, then people will buy into it.

And marketing's role in many cases, actually the new role under these circumstances is to be an orchestrator to bring those assets and the talent and the skill together to make those things happen rather than feeling like they have to do it themselves.

Yes, I don't think there is a function in the world these days going back to being constrained that has all the resources to do that inside their own organization, and nor should they.

If you think about how an organization is structured today, if you're a member of a reasonable size organization, there's going to be a strategy team. That strategy team are delivering the strategy plan. They're separate from marketing. They're looking out at the overall industry.

The dialogue with them is very much around core competence, addressable segments, and trying to make sure that what their positioning in the business matches with what the customer and the future prospects are saying. You've got the product organization, you've got the finance organization.

So many in the service industry, the reality of the product experience is delivered by a person, that's the HR team, who are all by the way, incredibly busy and resource constrained and running around trying to make things happen so the marketers can't own the entirety of it. But what they can do is work back from the customer to say this is the promise we're setting.

These are the things that we said we would do in the market.

These are our guiding Northstar, if you like, as an organization which is different for every organization, let's make sure we're delivering those and let's make sure we're delivering those in a way that's attractive to the buyer, has a level of differentiation that might justify the price premium or price positioning that we're looking for in the segment.

How do you think realistically that kind of technology is going to be embraced by marketers? Is this an efficiency thing or is there a capability angle?

So I think we're just at the beginning of figuring it out. I do think it's interesting. I've been in a number of different forums and conversations.

I think some of the use cases around customer service and replacement of agents and the ability of technology, people are looking that as a value add. So yes, you can increase the customer service experience at a lower cost and a lower experience. So people have kind of jumped on that quite quickly.

The ability to do call summarization and data management, the ability to build into a product, the agent to agent interaction, I think is, is super interesting in terms of what thats going to do to the product development cycle. And were only just beginning to see that because it takes so long to embed that into a product strategy.

But interestingly, for marketing, so often the conversation is youre going to value ad, youll value ad, youll value add. Yeah, content. You guys can just do it more cheaply now because language is easy.

I think its a real challenge for marketing leaders to sit in the room and say, actually there is value to be had here.

But I think if you find yourself pegged in that its going to be efficient and you can shut down your content team and chat GPT will just generate everything. Youre in a pretty tough conversation right off the bat because youre clearly not seen as a strategic value driver for the business.

And if youre seen as a strategic value driver for the business, then you should be in there having the conversation that says, hey, this is how my team is experimenting with this tool. These are the directions were thinking they can take us.

And actually working around using AI to accelerate your market insights, your market research. I mean, these things are trained on the entirety of the web as it stands on any cutoff date.

That means you've got all different customer profiles and customer prototypes in there. So you can go have a conversation, set up a customer profile, talk to that customer, see whether it gives you any insights.

I'm still somewhat skeptical because I think it is. That's the lowest common denominator. It's going to gather together all of the common data and just give you a more accessible way of getting to it.

So I think it has value, but insight, judgment, the human capabilities that make us the advisors and orchestrators to our business. I don't think it's going to change that quickly.

It is a new and interesting thought partner to the CEO and CFO, and you do find they get interesting questions about why don't our products show up in a perplexity search or a chat GPT.

So perplexity algorithms are front of mind for me at the moment. I haven't cracked that one either, but it was interesting.

So I think one of the challenges I think we're going to have is that vendors are now starting to push the marketing is content argument to try and sell their products.

I saw today a series of Microsoft Copilot, I guess they're promoted linkedins, I don't know, but it's all about accelerating content development in organizations, and there's a very well known organization talking about how is revolutionized their content creation.

So I've downloaded some of their ebooks and some of their white papers, and it's very clearly generated, it's very clearly generated by chat GPT, which of course is copilot. I think we're not there yet.

I'm much more excited, as you said, that once you understand the totality of the information that they've got, the scope of it, and if you have a basic understanding of how embedding works in those models, so how it sees relationships between things, then you can start asking it some really interesting questions. And that's sort of the lowest common denominator, or maybe mean reversion, whatever.

You're going to get a bland answer because it's got all the crap people's opinions as well as all the good people's opinions. But with a bit of judgment skill and I think careful prompting.

I think there's really good intellect, intellectual work that can be accelerated by using it. Sort of more strategic stuff.

Yeah, I think it's being curious, right, and asking smart questions and not being intimidated. I mean, it's slotting in some space for curiosity and experimentation with artificial intelligence.

In your normal day job, when you're busy, it's not easy. The team I've worked with for the last few years, we did limited exploration because we felt that things were moving so quickly.

We would be better placed to actually understand the use cases and think about the fundamentals rather than try to add on another layer of technology. When you talk about the vendors, you're uncovering a whole other issue that marketing is going through recently.

And why is marketing siloed and constrained, and why does it struggle? It's because the marketing department is an absolute sucker for what's going on. In the tech industry.

And marketers have to realize we're not our own customers. We're a very unique breed. We're curious, we like to learn. We will jump on the next bandwagon.

And the vendors actually have a massive influence in what's going on in the landscape. You look at any conference, trade show event, it is always now funded by the technology vendors.

And I spent three years working for an ad tech technology vendor, pulling some of those strings myself in terms of driving demand.

If marketers only look at that which they're being fed by those organizations and don't get out and take a more holistic view of what's happening and look at the broader use cases, they will repeat some of the same mistakes in the past. And the places they're going for information are sponsored by those vendors, they're shaped by those vendors.

The training, the certificates we ask our people to have are supplied by those. It's a big problem for the industry that I think AI will just, just amplify because people are going to get one view of what it can do for them.

It almost feels like heresy if you go to challenge any of that orthodoxy.

So actually, I was having a conversation this morning with Gerry from labs in our organization, and he said, this is going to be a really weird question, but how useful do you think CRM actually is? It's like, oh my God, that's definitely heresy. But if you start thinking about.

We've all been trained to think about our customers in terms of a number or a table or something that feels very artificial, but if we don't do that, it feels like we're being told we're doing it wrong. And somehow everything that we know or that we do comes within the framework of the technology that we have to use to execute it.

That's a very strange place to be. So for me, AI removes some of those barriers. Now, it's not going to replace CRM with AI. The tools are built in.

But in terms of looking for understanding, actually being able to interpret datasets and get assistance from a good model is invaluable.

Yeah, we've all been through that. Marketing department needs a data scientist, or the organization needs a data scientist.

And I do think there's a real value in the fact that the accessibility of these tools mean you can ask a straightforward, common question, and as you can begin to learn, that maybe actually you don't need to understand the data analytical tools because these things will get replaced by AI tools or the interface will be different. But I do think that the question is the important thing, how you approach the question, where you focus your effort.

Everybody has limited time and resources and actually just understanding that it's going to be all about the customer in your segment. Does the customer see a value for AI? How are they going to think about it?

There's so much AI noise getting added on to products, but it does create an opportunity to streamline and provide efficiency, but with all kinds of weird dependencies. So you're building on top of someone else's large language model.

And if marketers learned one thing in the last decade, it's the danger of building on rented land. So, yeah, how quickly do you want to go? Where do you want to put your energies? It's still early days, as I said, as we adapt to it.

So coming back to the theme of the show, which is marketing is everyone's business, not just the marketing departments.

We've looked at sort of behaviors and structures and culture a little bit, and now we've looked at technology for our listeners who are thinking still of marketing as a department, because that's the framework they have. What advice could you give them to try and think outside of that box?

I mean, we know that many marketing departments are actually promotional departments or communication departments. How do they take a step back and become useful in the way that we've been talking about today?

The first one is to be rigorous about your own discipline and professionalism and what you deliver. And that means actually doing things like zero based budgeting. So you are creating the space in your own budget to do more.

And this more for less is a bit of an insidious if marketers just accept that more for more is good, but you have to be able to go to the table and have that conversation. You need some evidence for doing that.

Again, one of the things I like about working through organizations that are going through change is typically youre coming in after a period of a plateau or an inefficiency.

So there are ability to self finance new things, but only if youre rigorous about that zero based budget model and actually orient yourself on the value to the customer.

So actually finding a metric that you can be accountable for, that the business cares about, thats going to drive your conversations, because that metric then drives your credibility.

So in the organization I was with most recently for the last seven or eight years, went in and realized that actually marketing was busy doing stuff, but it wasnt really connected to the sales outcome for the business. So we sat down and looked at the performance of the business and said, at our best we drive 30% of the sales number.

At our worst we drive 5% of the sales number. So the new benchmark is 30% of the sales number.

How are we going to orientate ourselves around that as a marketing function and what are we going to do to drive that out of.

So then your communications activity starts to become crystal clear in terms of what good looks like does it drive leads into a process that convert well that deliver at the value that the sales team is looking for to grow the business.

And as you do that you start to find different conversations coming because youre no longer talking about share of impressions or media coverage or the event that you were at. You end up having conversations about how is the business performing, what's happening with the why is the market dynamic the way that it is.

And then if you've got your beautiful constraint lenses on as you're thinking about the business you can start to see where the business has an inefficiency. So you touched earlier on CRM.

If the sales organization isn't tracking and reporting their deals well within the CRM, you're going to struggle to establish the impact of marketing. Before you even think about attribution, its partnering with the sales organization. Say actually lets just understand whats driving growth together.

How do we improve the overall and so common dashboards, common metrics, shared dataset, thats a multi year piece of work in a large complex organization. But that journey builds credibility.

That when you get to the data point and you start looking at it and going actually the problem is we dont have product and sales joined up so now we should start thinking about a new product introduction process. Or actually the problem is that we are excluded at the first RFP because our book price is too high.

Or actually we're seeing that we're missing because we're slow on our speed to demo, then you're into a conversation that says well how do we solve for that?

You've got the insight as the marketer, you've got the capability and that's how you build the business case for expanding the responsibilities of marketing and more for more. And you're having a conversation with the business. That said, we can help you solve this problem.

Yes im going to need to hire a pricing specialist, but look at the upside of what we did in the last year around performing and simplifying our book price. We have sold more of this product at a better margin. Would you like more of that?

And it very quickly becomes well yes actually that seems to make an awful lot of sense so you can start in quite a tightly siloed function.

But if you establish a reputation for excellence, if you establish an ability to drive the number for the business, you begin to enter into the conversation that says, well, whats the next thing to do to drive the number for the business?

And actually if thats price or its product or its distribution, youre in the room having the conversation saying, well, maybe if product took more to sales and we could create a mechanism for that that would help accelerate our process. And then someone eventually always says, is anybody going to put up their hand to run this?

And then you just got to make sure its marketing puts its hand up quicker than say, the product team put their hand up or the sales team put their hand up. Does that make sense? So you kind of build your ability to drive the organization forward.

Well, there you have it. Much indeed to Graham Wiley. And thank you for taking the time to watch or listen to this episode.

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