In Part 2 of our conversation with Clare Jones, CMO of System C, we explore the challenges of rebranding, maintaining brand integrity, and the strategic art of prioritising customers.

Clare shares her experience of unifying multiple brands into one cohesive identity while staying true to core values. She also introduces her "rule of thirds" for campaign planning—emphasising the importance of balancing groundwork, execution, and follow-up for maximum impact. What is covered:

• How to manage a complex rebranding process while preserving brand equity.
• The significance of aligning internal values with external brand perception.
• Strategic customer prioritisation through stack ranking.
• Using “time to value” as a KPI to build stronger customer relationships.

Listen for practical insights on rebranding, customer prioritisation, and effective campaign strategies in this second part of our conversation with Clare Jones.

About Clare Jones

Clare has a long history in B2B marketing, developing strategies to build brands and drive growth for software businesses.

Clare thrives on delivering results-driven integrated demand generation programmes with clear goals and outcomes, which have been recognised with industry awards. Clare has successfully executed on brand strategy which incorporates acquisitions as part of an overall growth strategy.

A passionate marketeer, Clare recognises the contribution every member of the team can make and enjoys creating high performing teams. And of course, have a little fun along the way.

Links 

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk 

LinkedIn: Clare Jones | Dom Hawes 

Website: System C

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson 

Other items referenced in this episode:

Gartner

Géraldine Tenten's Unicorny episodes

Chapter summaries

Introduction and recap of Part 1

Dom Hawes begins Part 2 by summarising the key topics covered in the previous episode, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of rebranding and customer prioritisation.

The challenges of rebranding and maintaining integrity

Clare discusses the complexities of merging multiple brands into one, the importance of preserving brand equity, and the internal process of aligning the company’s values with its external brand identity.

Why brand values matter and how to live them

Clare emphasises the need for authenticity in brand values, sharing her approach to embedding these values across the organisation and ensuring they resonate with both employees and customers.

Building internal buy-in during rebranding

Clare talks about the importance of securing buy-in from key stakeholders during the rebranding process. She shares strategies for involving senior leadership and employees early on to ensure the brand reflects the company’s true identity.

Stack ranking and customer prioritisation and the ‘rule of three’

Clare explains her method for prioritising customers through stack ranking, focusing on those most likely to engage while ensuring others are nurtured appropriately. Clare introduces her "rule of thirds" approach to campaign planning: dedicating equal time to groundwork, execution, and follow-up to maximise effectiveness.

Time to value as a KPI

The discussion turns to the concept of “time to value” as a key performance indicator, highlighting its role in building trust and delivering measurable benefits to customers.

Final thoughts and key takeaways

Dom wraps up the episode by summarising the main insights from the discussion, underscoring the importance of authenticity, strategic prioritisation, and effective campaign management in modern marketing.

You're listening to Unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Hello, Unicorners, and welcome to part two of our deep dive into value creation with Claire Jones. Now, Claire is CMO at SystemC, one of the biggest software providers in Britain, and she is an expert at using marketing to create value for her organisation, which is pretty cool because that, of course, is what our podcast is all about. In part one, we looked, well, we looked at a lot demand generation, the relationship between sales and marketing, understanding your clients complex decision making units, how to tackle a decent merger or acquisition, and how to approach private equity. If you missed it, I strongly suggest you double back and take a listen before listening to this. Part two where we're going to start with rebranding. Like how do you maintain your brand's authenticity through growing pains?

And then we're going to look at stack ranking and that is how Claire prioritises customers. Finally today she's going to talk about how she structures their campaigns. Let's go.

We're going to begin today by looking at Claire's recent rebranding activities, looking specifically at challenges and the importance of maintaining brand and a brand's authenticity. So Claire, sounds like you've been busy doing some rebranding, like, you know, in the first half we heard how busy you've been doing other stuff. Talk to me about the challenges you face, you know, of rebranding and the specific issues you faced.

I joined SystemC a little over a year ago. We had five separate corporate brands, so were quite fragmented in our approach. There was no brand strategy. And that's fine, that's what makes it interesting, because we serve two specific markets, healthcare and local government. And they're quite small markets, focused on the UK predominantly. They're relatively small markets. So we didn't feel that we needed to dilute our brand across five different entities. So that was the first kind of key decision I mentioned earlier about research.

So that was the first part of that phase to make sure that were using not just what we thought the market thought about us, but what the true sentiment in the market was to lead us to make sure that were guided towards a brand strategy that would work for us, not just for the here and now, but longer term, should we continue to make acquisitions. So that was really important to understand what our M&A outlook was. I think what could have been a challenge, but, and again, maybe learning from previous experience was involving key stakeholders internally. Any brand has an emotional attachment to it. So involving the C suite right from the get go getting their buy into why it's important for us to do it. Talking them through the stages, I found that really important.

I think in hindsight I had learned from previous brand exercises to get them on the bus early. And I'm very fortunate to have a very cooperative and engaged CEO to help me with that. I think the biggest challenge for me was the values part.

Okay.

The external facing brand. And maybe because I'm more familiar with that kind of, that felt that we landed in a very natural place for us to be.

So just to clarify, did you rationalise five down to one? Okay, so for, did they go by the wayside completely or did they become like product names or something within the hierarchy?

So we brought where the research told us we had strong brand equity, we retained that in our product naming conventions and we may choose to phase them out over time, but it's like we want hold on to the good, as.

Much value as you can, right? Yeah.

And it comes back to that premise. We don't want to break anything. We want to build something, that structure, which felt very natural as we worked through that process. And I think when we talk about brand people, think about the shiny new logo, what colour is it going to be and what. And that is always subjective. And, you know, coaching people through some of the selections and, you know, offering them a little bit of choice, but not too much choice, but guiding them, that's important. But as I said, the biggest challenge for me was values. So it's that internal, who do we want to be? And it has to be steeped in authenticity. So the worst possible thing we could do is say, right, we think these four or five values sound really good.

Let's put posters in every single office we have and, you know, job done.

You mean like, don't be evil like that one?

Yeah, yeah.

Google.

I wouldn't have predicted it. That was the bit I pulled over the most. We were operating essentially as five separate organisations, so there's a huge cultural shift. So we did a value survey internally, got a tonne of responses, which was great, but it was like, whoa, okay. There was a lot to unpack in that. We did a values workshop. We got representation from right across our business, making sure that all parts of the business was represented, covering all acquisitions, covering all functions, covering people who've been in the business for less than a year, making sure we had people, you know, with a 20 year tenure. So we got a true cross section. That was a really hard day. That was a really tough day. And then we got back together and then we worked up, actually, we summarised. This is what you said.

So this isn't me as a CMO or a marketeer or a c suite saying, I'll tell you what your values are. They have to be something that we all relate to and it's fine that they might be aspirational. One of our values is do the right thing. And sometimes that's really hard.

Empowering, though.

It is empowering. And making sure that every single member of our organisation is empowered to do the right thing is tough. And that is absolutely a journey. But that was the most challenging part and we're not there. I mean, we launched our brand last November, so it's still relatively early days. We're six months in. And that values piece speaks to the authenticity of our brand. That's why it was so important to get it right.

Values are really hard because you've got to. I mean, especially if you're trying to align a team around them. The amount of repetition and the amount of, like, illustrative work that you need to do to explain what a value looks like in action, I think, can be really hard for a marketer.

It is, you know, I absolutely hold myself to account for. You know, if they do end up being words on a wall, I failed.

Yeah, well, they're meant to inform behaviours.

Yeah.

And the reason we talked about brand authenticity, the reason we want them, of course, is we want to behave in the way that we want to because of the t word. We want trust.

Yes. Our customers need to be able to recognise those behaviours that our values drive and we've got a lot of work to do. Absolutely. Would I expect our customers to recite our values? No, absolutely not. But I want them to be able to recognise. We need them to be able to recognise that, actually, we do want to do the right thing now, from a customer perspective. So we'll have a customer, as a hypothetical example, we've got a customer saying, we want you to do this piece of development work because it's incredibly important to us. And if we say yes to that, we might put another piece of development back that affects 20 customers. So actually that's the right thing to do for that customer, but not the right thing to do for those 20.

So that example of doing the right thing, it's tough to have those conversations. But that level of transparency, I think, with our customers is really valued. We're not going to do that because the impact is this part of that.

Brand authenticity is there's a certain way it feels like to do business with a company whose values and behaviours are aligned properly and they know what it. That it's kind of almost like an unwritten thing. He said they don't. They wouldn't be able to recite your values. They kind of don't need to because they know what it feels like to work with you.

That's such an important part to me.

It is. We're bringing teams together. You know, I go back to the five brands, the five say different parts of our organisation, and we brought all the very, you know, I brought the marketing team together as one example. And I think once you're. Once you're working in a team that represents the whole business, it's easier to start to encourage people to demonstrate those values and keep them alive. And we, you know, we've many organisations, they'll do, they'll recognise values and we do awards and at a board level on what we call our extended leadership team. Team. Just using those values in our day to day language, keeping them present and it's hard to live them sometimes.

Yeah. Also because not that our teams are.

Cynical in any way, shape or form, but there's a certain fatigue with corporate initiatives and things like values come out of that. Oh God, this is corporate activity again. But it is so important for the brand.

It is. And I think M&A has a role that has a big influencing factor in that. So if we've acquired a business that is founder, owner, led, it's very small, one location, do you then find yourself part of an organisation that's 750 people, seven offices? It's like, where do I fit now? I used to have a much bigger voice and everyone still has a voice, you just find your way. And I think that instilling those values, and as I say, I don't think you can overdose communicate during those periods of change and understanding that, you know, say we made an acquisition two years ago, then we made one last February, then we made another one last April. So that's quite a punchy timeline. Everyone is on a different part of that journey as well, which makes life interesting.

Have you got an example or a.

Story maybe, where you think brand authenticity has made a significant impact? What does it look like in action?

I guess the most recent example was at the beginning of last month. We held our first ever company wide user conference. Not necessarily a big deal. However, our approach previously was thinking about the previous separate businesses. We'd get these customer cohorts together and we'd focus on their specific solutions that they have. And we decided, actually, you know, as a single brand, we'll bring them together. We have NHS trusts and local authorities that use a number of our products, but they may never say, within a single NHS trust, they may use three or four of our products, but they never talk to each other. You might have an NHS trust, their neighbouring authority use our solutions. They have no need to talk to each other on a day to day basis. And that makes sense.

But we decided to bring it all together under one roof. I was genuinely overwhelmed by the output. I don't mind sharing. I was a little bit nervous as well. The announcement of train strikes did not help, but we had in total 750 people on the day. The resounding feedback we had from customers who did attend said they found it really invaluable. Networking with other people within their trust, with their neighbouring authorities and again, lifting your head out of the day to day and just engaging with people and having those conversations, you wouldn't actively go and seek was a huge benefit. Now, if we didn't have a single brand, we wouldn't have done that. We were then able to demonstrate real intent with our direction as an organisation. So we ran our first ever customer satisfaction survey.

The resounding feedback was, in these areas, we've got areas of improvement, these are the areas we are going to focus on. So, you know, we gave some examples of, you said we did, so we're asking them to hold us to account so we can be real. The other big byproduct I do want to mention is those team members. So members of staff who were at the conference doing demos, presentations, working incredibly hard. I guess it was the first time they'd ever seen the true single brand in all its glory, shall we say. And the unprompted feedback I had from people, they felt really proud to be part of systemc and that was brilliant.

You just cannot put a price on authenticity, can you? Being who and what you claim to be both inside the organisation and externally with your customers, that is pure gold. Beyond everything else that we do, especially the performance stuff, where our effectiveness is most often judged. This aspect of marketing is perhaps our greatest contribution to the value of a firm. Identifying the truth of the company and then helping everybody to live it. That ultimately is what branding is all about. Because when the brand itself functions as the North Star for everything the company says and does, then you know you're doing your job well. I always like to think of this as the moment when you can no longer tell the difference between the external communications and the internal actions.

Are your customers seeing an ad, or are they simply seeing a page of your company handbook? When that distinction blurs and no one can tell the difference, that's when you've got a brand. Right? Let's now draw together what we've heard. Because over the two parts of our discussion with Claire about creating value, we have talked about a lot like the changing role of marketers, the implications of market volatility and uncertainty. We've looked at mergers and acquisitions, private equity, brand authenticity. So, Claire, when we think about all these things, what are the unique challenges you see at the moment in the complex markets in which you operate, those markets that either heavily regulated, intermediated or very heavily legislated, how do you see the market right now? And I. And what do you see demand, Jen's.

Place in it as it stands right now, it's understanding the market, understanding that decision making unit, then understanding who those key influences are. On my way in this morning, I was thinking through in my mind what a typical campaign would look like in some of these complex markets. And I think people think about demand generation, customer acquisition, they think campaigns, and then they think straight to the output of campaigns. So what's the campaign concept or the great creative stuff? I was thinking, actually, sometimes we're in such a hurry to get to the campaign output because we've got that revenue direction and those revenue drivers. Actually, maybe a good rule of thumb is splitting that campaign process into thirds. So the first 3rd needs to be homework.

It needs to understand the market, understand the decision makers, get people bought internally as to why you're doing what you're doing. Stack ranking those prospects. Who do you think is going to come to market? And that's where your market intelligence starts to pay dividends. And that doesn't mean ignore the rest of them. You know, you can put them into some form of nurture. You need your constant brand presence, but make sure you understand who those targets are so you can focus on those.

Talk to me a little bit about stack ranking. We mentioned it in the first part of the show and I pretended I knew what it meant. Help me understand in more detail what that process is.

Think about local government. Some of the drivers within local government is they may renew software on a cyclical basis. It's a bit of a rule of thumb, seven to ten year cycles. There might be other disruptors, as we've mentioned. What if we've got 460 authorities across the UK? You might discount certain territories because of centralised decision making and ongoing contracts. Should we say so straight away? You might whittle that down to 150. Then you do your homework on those 150 authorities and it could be any organisation, it could be your target profile for retailers, but you start to refine it down, who is most likely to come to market. So then that's what I mean by stack ranks. So you focus on the ones that are showing the highest propensity to come to market.

So it's being laser sharp on your targeting.

Yeah, but I think it's important not to ignore the rest. They still need to know who you are because of the volatility that we've discussed. You never know what might happen and.

They will come into market at some stage. There could be all sorts of other reasons for them coming into market.

Yeah, that homework phase is really important. If you skip that and you go straight to maybe the more exciting part, which is the campaign execution, you could be targeting the wrong organisations, in which case you're not going to yield the results that you need. So my advice would be use that as a bit of a rule of thumb, but make sure you do the.

Homework first and that's the first 3rd.

That'S the first 3rd campaign execution is the middle third and then the final third is that follow up and nurture. Let's stick to those 150 retailers or local authorities. As you said, they will come to market at some point. You try and map out as best when you think they might, but you want them to put your organisation at the top of the shopping list as. And when they do, so you don't want to ignore any of them. So every organisation is going to be in a nurture stream of some sort. And I think back to that demand creation versus demand generation piece. So if I take system c, I want every potential customer to pose the question, why aren't we talking to them when they are preparing to come to market?

I think that's a really good, like a rule of three, do the homework and spend as much time on that as you do on the campaign execution and then as much time on the follow up too on the campaign execution side, particularly because presumably that's when the demand generation happens. How are you splitting your time and attention between the shorter term performance side and the longer term awareness and brand marketing?

We have quite a balanced product portfolio, software portfolio, so we have products that have a much shorter cycle sales cycle. They are almost, I would almost refer to them as always on campaigns. So we've got that revenue stream, we've got the cross sell and upsell as well. The larger deals. So we talked, you know, they could be anything between six and 24 months. That's the hard yards, that's, you know, the key stakeholder engagement. And it was a Gartner report around influences on buying behaviours that they published in 2020 and really got me thinking about the type of content that we seed serve during those longer sales and marketing nurturing cycles. So enterprise software is not just about the software, it's not just about the feature functionality, it's about.

So when someone makes a purchasing decision and it's 1 million, 2 million plus, that's a huge investment. But they're not just buying the software, they're buying the services that go along with that. Those implementations might be 12, 18, 24 months long. So again, they're not just buying the implementation, they're buying the ongoing support that follows. It's almost like a marriage. It's a much. It's a long term commitment. So if our marketing efforts focus on all the widgets and the feature functionality, we are missing a huge part, because in the main the software will do and should do what the software is there to do. It's how it's used, it's how it's deployed and it's understanding. Again, bringing it back to B2B is all about people.

So those large scale projects about people, process and cultural change, irrespective of whether it's a commercial organisation or a public sector organisation, they are huge transformational projects. That can be scary. And if you just rely on the software and ignore that people, process and cultural change, you won't get the benefits that you realise at SystemC with the markets that we serve. I think a really interesting dynamic, certainly for me, and I know for a lot of our colleagues, is it's NHS trusts and local authorities, we are consumers of the products that they deliver or the services that they deliver. So whilst that might not be a rarity in itself, you add into the mix that it's then taxpayers money. So that's a huge responsibility when you work for an organisation that serves those markets.

So that brings another dynamic, it brings that honesty, it brings a level of honesty and transparency to the software and the services that we provide. So then that brings that back to that brand authenticity that we're not there to say we can solve all of your problems and then go away and scratch our heads and think, oh gosh, I'm not sure if we can with that. We can help you do this.

This and this enterprise software is interesting. So it's not about a software sale. It's about a relationship, as you say, and I get the point then about values and brand authenticity, because there's going to be a lot of contact between your people and their people in an environment that is budget constrained and super transparent. And actually, although they're buying software and buying services, what they really want is value. So we talked before about the concept of time to value and how important that is. And I guess that's delivered by, in your case, by mix of people, process software. How do you use the concept of time to value in your marketing to potential customers?

I think that time to value and value for money go hand in hand. So the value for money, we focus a lot on what we call benefits realisation. So what benefits will you see if you implement this bundle of software? And we can be quite specific, and again, it's being data driven and we talk about cash releasing and non cash releasing benefits. Cash releasing, it's going to save you money. That's quite straightforward. The non cash releasing benefits become really quite interesting, because what that might mean is if you're a social worker, you get to spend more time with the people you are there to support. That is huge. If you are a doctor, you spend more time at the bedside with your patients.

Software needs to be there to make those experts, their day to day jobs easier and give them more FaceTime where it can really matter. That's really important. The time to value is really working. We work with our customers and map out what those implementation projects look like. We need to work really closely with our customers because they are resource intensive. You know, there are a lot of people that need to be trained up to make sure you get the most value. People involved, say, on the customer side, they might never do this once in their careers. We've got the benefit of having done it many times over, so we can share that expertise and offer advice and guidance. And what we tend to find is by being able to demonstrate time to value, so you start to realise those benefits quicker.

One, it's in the form of the cash releasing and non cash releasing, but again, a huge byproduct is building confidence in the rollout itself, in the software itself. So I mentioned that we could be asking people to use software that they've never used before and they just, they don't want to break it. They think they can bring the whole system down by pressing the wrong button. So there's a whole level of confidence. We're asking midwives and nurses to use software that they've never used before. Their expertise is with the patients. So we have just as much of a role to play working alongside our customers to make sure that those users are confident and they have the right training and skill set. And if they are confident that time to value, then it comes forward exponentially.

And is time to value a KPI?

Is that something you share with your customers? Do you work alongside them?

Is there a clear understanding of what value is and how you work towards it?

Yes.

I love that we should do that.

Why don't we do that, Nicola? I mean, I think it's so crystal clear.

And obviously in our instance, it wouldn't be cash releasing and non cash releasing.

But there'll be an equivalent for us.

But being so crystal clear about what.

Value constitutes and how you're going to achieve that together, that's my big learning from this whole conversation. It's fantastic.

These enterprise wide projects, as I said, they can be scary. And it's so important to make sure that everyone involved has clear line of sight of what it is we're trying to achieve and when. And it sounds quite basic when you put it in those kind of rudimental terms, but with so many people involved, it can be like a runaway train. So that really benefits us and it really benefits our customers.

So there you go, folks. I told you Claire was epic. And you don't need to miss future epicness neither. Make sure you subscribe to the show because the bigger we get, the more you get more guests, more insight, more Unicorniness. Right, let's talk about Claire's rule of thirds of for securing demand. 1st, 3rd, do your homework on your customers stack rank the ones with the highest propensity to come to market. 2nd, 3rd execute your campaigns at those targets whilst always building brand in the background. Final, third follow up and nurture. Well, that seems straightforward enough, but it's really easy to miss the power of this approach. What makes it most effective, in my opinion, is that it helps you linger at both the beginning and the end of the exercise.

The norm is kind of to lurch headlong into middle, the campaign execution bit, where we all spend the bulk of our time. But instead this approach forces us to commit a third of our time and effort to figuring out exactly who it is we need to be talking to right now, so that when we do execute, we're more successful. And then, of course, when we've done the fun bit in the middle, it also forces us to commit the same time and energy to the follow up, because following up is not a quick checkbox afterthought. It is a whole 33% of the job, and I love that. And by the way, I think I found a new KPI I can love, too.

And I really didn't think I'd be saying that when we started the show today, because, you know, I'm a champion of the one true KPI, a happy customer. That idea beautifully distilled by a former guest on this pod, Geraldine Tenten. But I think Claire's time to value KPI is genius, too, because time to value is about establishing a relationship with your customer. You're able to show them exactly what they can expect first and what they can expect later and what will stay with them long term. You're working together for a common goal, and you're being radically candid about the effectiveness of your offering. Of course, we'd all love to promise our customers instant success, but unless you make axe deodorant, that's just not on the cards for most of us.

Time to value is a really great way of both standing out as a brand and building truth into it, which brings us nicely back to authenticity. Being authentic has played a strong role in both parts of our discussion with Claire about delivering value, because she always relates her task back to the people it concerns. And she's in healthcare and education, so she has a tremendous sense of responsibility to those people. But it's still a good lesson for all of us. So it doesn't matter whether you are selling a service to a business or whether you're onboarding a new entity as part of a merger. You're always, always dealing with people. And people know instinctively when we mean it, when we're true, when we're authentic. And they also know instinctively when we're just ticking the boxes. Don't tick boxes. You have been listening to Unicorny.

I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.