In this episode, Jazz Aujla, global head of digital marketing at Euromonitor International, shares her insights on aligning marketing efforts with customer needs. From her journey starting in research at Deloitte to a leader in digital marketing.

Jazz breaks down why companies often underestimate their customers, the risks this poses, and how to avoid common pitfalls. 

What you'll learn: 

• Why starting with the customer is vital for long-term growth. 
• How to lay the right marketing technology foundations. 
• The challenges and solutions of clean CRM data. 
• Balancing AI in marketing with human insights. 
• How data-driven marketing fosters sustainable growth. 

Understanding your customers isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the difference between thriving and stagnating.  

Jazz’s advice will challenge your assumptions and help you rethink how to align your marketing efforts with what your customers truly need. 

About Jazz Aujla 

Creativity, communication and innovation have been at the heart of Jazz's career for the past decade. Jazz has delivered B2B acquisition strategies for professional services, SaaS and tech-forward businesses, with highly effective results.  

As the current Global Head of Digital Marketing at Euromonitor International, she has led on the successful delivery of the new-look corporate website, growing acquisition marketing channels, as well as evolving the brand’s social media presence.  

Links 

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk 

Watch the episode:  https://youtu.be/aDadDuX2Adc

LinkedIn:  Jazz Aujla | Dom Hawes 

Website: Euromonitor 

Other items referenced in this episode:

Why marketers make the best startup founders with David Hart 

We underestimate how also informed our customers are. Now there's all this information out there. We're not the only ones. So what are we doing?

If you have to go through 12 steps before you can add just one bit of relevant information or update a field, what's going to happen? We've seen it time and time again. Our sales colleagues do not bother.

And then that's when we sit around and complain about having dirty data and we can't do our marketing effectively. Do you even need a massive marketing automation tool when there's three of you in the marketing department? I would argue no.

Welcome to the Unicorny Marketing Show.

I am your host, Dom Hawes, and today we are telling a story of transformation, resilience, and we're going to look at how we should all think about understanding and serving customers. Our guest today is Jazz Aujla, the global head of digital marketing at Euromonitor International.

Jazz's journey from starting a career in research at Deloitte to becoming a leader in digital marketing, I think gives her a unique perspective on how technology and marketing intersect.

Today we're going to explore her take on why businesses often underestimate their customers and how that misstep could be costing them growth, reputation and revenue. So, coming up in this episode, Jazz and I are going to talk about things like this.

Why starting outside in, not inside out, should be a rule number one for marketers. We're going to look at the critical missteps businesses make when they assume they know things about their customers.

And we're gonna look at how you can create value from your customer, insight to improve your products, but importantly also build foundations for sustainable growth.

So whether you're a leader in startup or whether you're working in a mature business, today's conversation, I think, gives you loads of things you can take away to rethink how you position your customer at the heart of your own marketing strategy. So grab a brew and let's get started.

I'm from many places, but starting from the beginning, I'm one of those marketeers that didn't start out in marketing. There are many of us out there. My journey began working in research, of all places. So this is going back a really long time.

I joined Deloitte, their research team hung out there for a couple of years, learning the trade, and then I eventually moved into the tech part of the business. Now, this is the bit that's always quite wild when I try to explain it to people now, but this is the early days of technology.

When it came to working with clients. So my team was actually the Extranet team. I don't even know if people know what extranets are anymore.

No, no, go on, explain. Explain. I mean, I sort of do because I remember it, but explain, explain.

This is going back a bit. So if you think about, especially when you work for a business like Deloitte, you work with clients who.

There's a lot of sensitive information doing the rounds. Now, there was a point where you'd have people transporting boxes and boxes of papers to clients.

Then eventually somebody came up with the concept of, well, we need shared online spaces that are secure. And that's where collaboration spaces and extranets came in. So this is the early days of SharePoint and that is what I started doing.

Wow.

And it was very client facing. And then eventually I moved into marketing and that was corporate marketing.

At Deloitte.

At Deloitte. And that's really where it all began.

I remember Extranet, we had Intranet before that. I remember we. I was working at an agency and we, we did a partnership with bt.

Bt so was signing up creative agencies to go and build intranets for their clients. And I remember the party, it was fantastic. It was in BT Tower and it was a massive party to sign a partnership.

And guess how much business we got out of that partnership?

I'm going to guess a lot.

Zero.

No.

Not one penny.

Oh, no.

Because the Internet thing kind of happened, but it sort of didn't happen. It was a fad and it sort of went. It came and went and Extranet was a little bit the same. But where are you now? What are you doing now?

I'm currently global head of digital marketing at Euromonitor International.

Oh, nice. So back in research, but in a different way.

Yeah. So it's come rather full circle.

Yeah.

Which is rather lovely. But that's really where it all began.

That's where I got my love of digital technology, using tech in the right way to get whatever you need done in that moment. And I get to do that now.

So I think that's a hint at what we've got to come. Unicornus.

Regular listeners will know that before every interview in this studio, we meet online to talk about the one thing that is gonna be our theme. And you said something really interesting to me in that meeting. You opened up straight away with.

You think that many businesses underestimate their customers. Explain that to me a little bit.

Potentially a controversial view.

It is. That's why we started with it.

So what I've seen is when businesses Start out. They start with the best of intentions, right? There's a product, there's a service, and we know what we want, we know how we want to get it.

That's the customer, let's go.

And for that period of time, we're growing, we're succeeding, everyone's happy, and then something happens where we forget about the reason why we're there, the customer has made us. And it's fascinating because I'll give you an example.

Yeah.

Let's say, you know, you've got a new product you want to launch or a new service you want to go out to market and it's okay, well, this is what our customers want. Or have you even asked your customer whether they want the thing? And it's as simple as that. We underestimate how also informed our customers are.

Now there's all this information out there. We're not the only ones. So what are we doing on this pod?

We talk about the need to be outside in, not inside out. Yeah, Always start with your customers and then work backwards from there. But it is true, many companies don't do that.

As you say, they get a product, they think it's right for their product Market fit rule number one of Mark Richardson's mini MBA course is you are not your customer, actually number one. So I think it's a good subject and we're going to dive into that a little bit with a lens on technology today.

What we're talking about of course here is proper marketing, not just promotion. That is understanding your customer, understanding their needs and aligning all of your business to support a go to market.

What risk do you think businesses face if they don't do it properly? So if they do underestimate their customers, what's the risk?

Fundamentally, you risk leaving a lot of money on the table. I talk about this a lot with my teams and with my leaders. So it's really simple concept here.

You've just assumed something about the customer, you've just assumed that they're going to want the thing. Or let's say you haven't even included marketing at any stage of your decision making process. So your risks actually are huge.

If you think about it, the time you've spent in your R and D, the hours and hours of trying to refine and finesse the product or the service and then you get to a point where you go, okay, right, we're ready to take this out to market.

Then all of that budget, all of that effort that spun up just to get it to market and then it falls flat on its face and then everyone's sitting around blinking, looking at each other, going, oh, we didn't think this was going to happen. And all the stuff that comes around after it, which is the damage to potentially your reputation.

We probably shouldn't even have gone out with that thing in the first place. Did we even have permission to play in that space? It just ends up making you look really incredibly unprepared.

And why would any business want to put themselves in that position?

I think that's a good point. I think sometimes, though, there's one thing worse than complete failure, and that's moderate success.

If you launched a product and you've researched it well and you've gone outside in and you've done it well, brilliant. If you launch a product and it hasn't worked, you've got loads of questions to ask yourself. You can go and answer.

If you launch a product and it kind of moderately succeeds and you haven't started outside in, then it's really hard.

There's that, that dissatisfaction that just seeps through everything you do within marketing and then the wider organization, because we were convinced it was going to be amazing. This was the next big brightest thing. And going back to the risk part is, what about the targets that you'd set?

So let's say if they were quite aggressive, there was a revenue target, you didn't quite hit it, you hit some of them, but then that's still seen as it's not really a success. It's still a bit of a failure, isn't it? Because we didn't get that number.

But I think failure is okay. I don't mind failure. Well, I say that like, hey, welcome to my career. I think failure, failure is okay if you learn from it, right?

Because, you know, there's all this sort of psychological safety stuff we talk about these days, and it's okay to fail. It's only okay to fail if you learn lessons. And as they used to say in the army, you can make any mistake you want, but only once.

So I think when launching products, I mean, I think if you make a mistake and you launch a product without understanding what your customer need is or what the compelling need is, the product, you only get to do that once, otherwise you burn your credibility.

But I think if you're launching lots of products or services, you know, we're a service provider, so we're constantly doing project work and it sometimes doesn't work to plan, but you get into that refine mode pretty quickly. If you've got the right foundations that goes back to.

Is marketing even part of that process from the very beginning because ideally you want all of that information up front. Right.

So if you've done your research, you, you know whether this product or service is a right fit for like let's say not even just your customer base but for who you are as a business.

Yep.

I've seen it time and time again. Just. I've got some great examples just waiting to come out. We'll give it time. But we just made an assumption.

It was a finance management product from a business I worked with many, many years ago.

So it was going to be the next big brightest thing and within that particular space it was a small to medium sized businesses would obviously want to buy this system from us. Why wouldn't they? And but there were multiple providers out there that did exactly the same thing and unfortunately for us did it a lot better.

But what we hadn't done was to actually do that research beforehand. We hadn't checked and then once again launched all these lovely campaigns, put it out to market, spent a lot of money and that it just didn't pan.

Out is really interesting. We got, we've got an. Actually got an episode coming up with a really interesting guy, David Hart. We're going to record him in a couple of weeks.

He was an agency person who then created a product products and turned it into a SaaS product with his. With his co founders and he now consults to startups and he tries to get them to validate their idea before they spend a penny.

1 before they spend 1p actually spend a penny has other meanings in this country. But before they spend $0.01 should we say before they spend a cent they've got a. That's so bad.

So before they spend anything the idea is they go and validate their reactors.

It's better to get a no early than waste load of time and money and then bring a product to market and find that you've got market fit wrong or the feature set's not right or you're out competed or the positioning is wrong. There are so many things that can go wrong and often very few things that can go right. So do you do your. Do you basically get the no early.

I think the other element as well that we forget and this is I'm bringing marketing into this as well because we're part of this is marketing. It's all marketing it.

The whole world is marketing.

Obviously if we are, let's say we are developing that new product or that new service. I Come back to this product I just mentioned, the financial management system. So we already had an existing customer base. We had a.

That profile was already there. We sold another type of product into those finance people, you know, those finance directors, the CFOs.

So wouldn't it have made more sense to go and actually have a chat with our customers first, just to check to see. Well, we've got this thing that we're thinking about doing once again, before we spent anything. Yeah, validate a bit of that.

And this is where we miss a trick because the customers are there waiting for us to ask the question.

I do think it's interesting though, because, you know, I was in a business before I, Before I set up this one, which was we were a service business. We were shipping product. And I made a fatal mistake of asking my customers what they wanted.

I think, I think in some circumstances customers don't know what they want. They want leadership from their suppliers.

Now, that doesn't mean that you don't research them, but I think, I think you've got to be very careful how you ask people what they want because they have their own bias. Right. And they'll give you answers. In this case, they said, oh, we want free shipping across Europe. And I.

And they said, well, if we offer you free shipping, will you order more and more regularly? Oh, yes, they said, we offered them free shipping. No difference. Not a thing. But I said, but, but I prompted them. I led them in that. I think.

So I think a really effective way of doing research, if your customers will let you, is to take a more ethnographic route. Go in there, sit in there, watch them, watch how they. Watch how they work, identify where the weaknesses are.

Because I think what people do is often very different than what they say.

They might not know what it is that they want, but they know what their problems are.

Yeah.

So that is the better question to ask. Right. It's okay. What is the thing that's keeping you up at night?

And normally with especially going back to sort of the finance products and those individuals, the CFO is probably tearing his or her hair out on a regular basis because something isn't right. Those are the questions you should be asking.

And then they could be giving us that information to help us define what that new product or service could be. And also, I mean, everyone wins here. We could tweak our marketing messaging accordingly.

Just imagine, wouldn't it be wonderful if that's what we did all the time?

Let's assume we understand the problem that we're solving. Right. And that we've done that research properly and we've defined our products or service properly and now we need to go take it to market.

One of the things I got excited about when we spoke about, because it's something we're focusing on a lot in my day job at the moment, is how you go about building proper foundations for growth, especially when you're thinking about integrating data and marketing technology. This is what you do day to day. How, like advice for unicorners. How should businesses go about laying those foundations properly?

I feel like I'm always saying the same thing again and again and I become a bit. One note is you start at the beginning, which is knowing your customer. Okay, okay. Knowing what you are about as a business.

Coming back to don't underestimate, you know, what their needs are and what they know and what they don't know. But when it comes to those foundations, let's say just bare bones technology, good example is you already know your customers.

All that data sitting in the CRM. Okay. Simple things like, is your CRM even fit for purpose?

Yeah.

Okay. Just little things. Or do you even need a massive marketing automation tool when there's three of you in the marketing department? I would argue no.

Like the engine that you require in that moment, then you can build on it in time. Those are the basic foundations.

And even going back to the CRM, and we all know like, this is absolutely like, you know, the nirvana, the holy grail we're all working towards is, is your data even clean and set up right. And fit for purpose? And it's, this is the boring stuff that nobody ever wants to deal with because I'm like, ugh.

But simple things like if whatever scene CRM you've got, did you, did you set up mandatory fields so you could collect all the right information? Or if you've set, you've got forms everywhere, you're collecting information on your website.

Did you even make sure that those, you know, those options are consistent and universal so that when it comes to understanding what's happening, you can then make those decisions before you even start getting fancy with, oh, you know, we need like a social listening tool and oh, you know, we need some nice attribution software to sit over that. Those simple things have to be in place otherwise it becomes really pointless. In my humble opinion, my experience is.

Very few companies actually have that. I mean, I'm not sure that CRM in itself at the moment isn't a bit of a myth. It's like customer relationship mirage. Really.

We all Know what we're trying to get to very often I think there isn't one. Data. I mean, the CRM should capture all of that data so we get that view of our customer, but invariably there'll be other databases.

Do we have the right key fields? And as you said, it's a really good point. Do we have the right mandatory fields?

Because we know it's human nature when people are entering data, they're lazy, they take the shortest possible route.

And so you can build, you can set out with the right intentions, but unless you've made that system really easy to use, which means a really easy ui, it's an uphill battle. Right.

If you think about it again from another perspective. Yeah. First of all, there is no single source of truth. There, I said it.

Yeah, I know we do, but pop off in the comments here because I just don't think it's absolutely possible.

Do you not?

No, I really don't think so. But then I'm the one who's out there saying, oh, we.

I just don't think I, I've reformed in that way because I've tried and I've just, I've got close, but not close enough. But the other source of information is, the one that's always untapped.

Okay.

Is let's say if it is some kind of a platform software, you know, if that's what you are as a business. And again, that's what I know. So that's what I'm referring to is whatever it is, you've got a captive audience here.

That's your, those are your customers.

They're logging into your platform, whatever it might be, and you can see what they're doing because that's where, you know, some of the rules around privacy don't apply as much. Okay. So that actually is. It's a goldmine of information so you can understand what's happening.

I would argue that's where you could build a lot of your foundations. Okay, is, okay, what are your customers interacting with? Did they like that new feature that you rolled out?

What is the thing that's making them rage? Click. For want of a better term, that information is also there. But how many businesses out there even have. Well, that's where you need to invest.

Have you invested in any kind of sort of product management tool so you can understand what your customers are doing?

Yeah.

And then that is where marketing again would come in and analyze that information and you can take some insights and think, oh, well, there's some customer marketing we could be doing. Here, there's some in product work. We could work with the product team on that.

Sure. Because you can model actual behavior. Right. And that's the beauty of having a digital product. And maybe like going back to where we started.

I remember when Extranet came out, that was the excitement. Like if you can encourage your customers to come into your environment to do work, you can model them. Of course customers didn't want to do that.

They want you to go into their environment. But so for, yeah, so for platform businesses or digital products, you can, you can see behavior very tightly.

And for those businesses where you don't have that, then customer data is harder to come by. But we all still have process.

What areas of the business do you think are most neglected when it comes to that kind of insight or modeling customer behavior? Let me tell you what I think and tell me whether you think I'm barking up the wrong tree.

And I'm telling you this because I'm, I'm doing exactly what you're telling us we shouldn't do. I'm planning an episode for the future to go out about this subject. I don't know if anyone other than me really cares about it, but so I. My.

One of my big beefs is SAS businesses who sign you up to contracts annual or beyond with auto renewal like three months ahead of the renewal date. Because I always miss them because I've got thousands of the bloody things.

And then when you contact them, they say, I'm terribly sorry, you know, you're now under contract. And what I always say to them is, I am a digital customer of yours.

Surely your customer success team, because everyone has a customer success team, should be seeing my usage data and realizing I am not using the product.

Yeah.

So my answer is customer success. I think they completely neglect the data. Am I wrong?

You're not wrong. But also you're assuming that all of them have a customer success team. That's true because some of them don't.

Or they've got sales people they call customer success, but they don't actually care about.

But they're not that's. Or their account management. They're not the people.

What a true customer success team as I am understand them and I think they should be, is they are sitting there on a day to day basis looking at the account, looking at the usage, drilling deep into that data. So those customer success people, they're actually the data analysts, for want of a better term. Right.

And then they're feeding that information maybe to the account management team. Again, your structure is Your structure, set it up, how it works for you as a business.

But that actually is a fundamental and not everybody does that. And even if you're not a platform business, you're not a digital product business. The same principle actually applies if you're service led.

Likewise, there should be somebody, an equivalent of a customer success team. Right. Looking at what's going on. And I always feel this is me saying this and I really mean it.

I sometimes feel really bad for our sales colleagues, especially those have, who have to manage those accounts, the account managers, they're the ones that are working on the retention side of things. Okay. We're not giving them a lot to work with.

They have to become data analysts as well as, you know, sort of, you know, charm the customer and sort of do all the legal side of things and then keep abreast of everything that's going on. It's a lot.

It is a lot.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. A lot. So I think there's a lot that sits with customer success or whatever that looks like.

But I mean, I'm going to say again, it's across the business, it starts from the top, it works its way down.

You know, there are pluses and minuses. Right.

So if you're a digital platform business, you get to model customers, customer behavior, but you might not have much physical interaction with them. They don't want it, that's why they're buying a digital business. So you're going to have to make assumptions about what, why.

Either you're making assumptions about why they're doing what they're doing, or you're trying to build a cohort and actually saying we're just going to model for the, for the majority. In a service business where you don't have a platform, we get to speak to our customers.

So I have exactly the same challenges about customer success in our day job. And our job then is to go to our customers, say, what are you trying to achieve? How are we helping you achieve that?

And if you're not helping, you know you're going to get fired. So we don't get to model our customer behaviors.

We don't get to understand them in the same way or their day to day behaviors as you probably do in a digital business. But what we do get to do is understand their intent. So I think there isn't one thing that's better necessarily than another.

But what you also get to do, of course in your business is you get to connect up all of your various different platforms. So if you're running PPC campaigns or paid social, you get to connect all of that up and get one picture of what everyone's doing.

Talk to me about some of the pitfalls people should be avoiding or some of the considerations maybe if you are deploying paid.

I think even within marketing, if I think about my colleagues and colleagues I've worked with in the past, some.

The understanding of what those paid search or paid social activities, and I'm not even talking about organic social, just the paid element, what can actually do for your business. And everyone almost treats it standalone. And I always come back to, you know, your. All of your marketing activity.

You know, it needs to be omnichannel, whatever, it needs to be joined up, multi channel, whatever the languages that we're using out there. You do that now with PPC campaigns, specifically Google Ads, what always happens is, oh, we need to run some ppc. Great. Why?

And it's because we want to, you know, we want to be known and we want leads, we want demos, et cetera. Yeah, great. But first of all, within this particular space, we've got some heavy competition. So let's go away. And I would go.

Let me go away and just check to see what's going on here. First of all, the cost of entry might end up being quite prohibitive. So is this actually even the right channel for us?

And maybe it's, oh, let's just do it, let's go for it. And because our competitors are doing it. Okay, fine, I get that, but I use this expression a lot. Do we even have permission to play?

Would that potential customer that we're trying to grab from that competitor, would they even know that we offer this service or this product? So there's all of that that happens here and that you just run with it, you do it.

But what you are running the risk of is just throwing in a bunch of not very good leads and data and just throwing into the top of the funnel and it's sort of okay, we've done it. We got X amount of conversions. Oh, yeah, this campaign ran. It didn't cost us this much. Or maybe it did cost us a lot. We've got 50 conversions. Great.

Successful. No, because then the next step is the attribution part. And that is where we. Oh, we've fallen.

I've fallen down on many an occasion because the attribution model wasn't set up correctly.

Attribution's a nightmare, though.

Oh, God, it is. Because, you know, and there's all these providers and all these platforms, a lot of it's bullshit. Yeah.

I mean, they promise you the sun, moon and stars.

Yeah.

And I mean, I've fallen for it and then I've gone, okay, look, I can absolutely tell you from this campaign, this specific keyword that converted into that opportunity and sales. Great, thank you so much. Please cmo, give me more budget so I can do more of this.

So there's a mountain of work behind that one click no one gets to see. I mean. Yeah.

And so then the attribution model actually is completely faulty and it came back to what PPC is the thing that we need to spend money on. No, we don't. It's all the other stuff that we've got to do beforehand.

And that's why, again, I admit I'm a bit of a reformed sort of attribution model. You know, I used to be preaching to the choir about it. Ah, we need to have all of these in place and then it will be perfect.

Now I go, ah, okay, we are missing out the rest of the story behind it.

And then it's not good for us as marketeers to do that because then when we go to our leadership, when we go to the board to talk about the value that we've added, all they can see is we, you know, oh, okay, so you need to run more of these campaigns and not all of the foundational work.

And then totally, it's like a farmer thinking that the way to run a farm is to harvest all the time because that's where the crop comes from.

Yeah.

You've got to plant, you've got to sow, you've got to sit, you've got to do all those other things. So I think, actually, rather than. I don't know enough to be saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway.

I genuinely am not bothered about attribution at all. What I want to do is just take a step back and say, right, Is the business succeeding? Are we achieving our objectives?

Do we feel like this is an appropriate amount of money for us to be spending on our marketing programs? And is our EBITDA big enough? And if all of those things are in track, then for me anyway, that's good enough.

Now, I know that doesn't work for CFO because somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a formula in it and that doesn't fit into a formula. The enlightened CFOs understand that, though it's about, does that amount of money help us secure the business?

There's two things in that conversation. The budget conversation is Again, let's just, you know, let's not mess around here.

It's very simply whatever you're about to do or whatever you're about to acquire. So you want to, okay, oh, you want to buy this fancy platform over here, and it's going to help you do all the good marketing.

Is it going to help us make money or save money? Those really are the two questions that I would have to go in and answer.

Okay.

And usually I need to have an answer for both. Okay, so this is how it's going to help us make money, but this is also how it's going to help us save money. We're not promising you the.

The world here, but, like, and you don't want to fall into that trap of, you know, promising everything because then you will be held to that promise. But the example I'm going to give is, okay, so how is this going to help us save money? Right.

Well, if we invest in this marketing automation platform, you've got five marketeers over here who spend, I would say, 50% of their time doing manual work, uploading data leads, et cetera, into the CRM. Okay. They shouldn't be doing that. What happens if we just shrink that down to 5% of their time?

Then there's 45% opened up to do more valuable marketing activity. So we're actually saving time there. Great. How are we going to make money?

Well, with this platform, we're going to run more campaign activities that are targeted to the right people because hopefully we've done the job of making sure we've got the right data and we know who our customer is and we're going to talk to them in the right way.

And then what we're going to do, these are all the activities we're going to run, let's say webinars, and actually we'll be able to run some events because, you know, people like people and people buy from people, and then from that we will be able to show, oh, okay, we've closed opportunities, we've got leads, and there's all those metrics, those harder numbers.

And, you know, people may agree or disagree with this approach, but that's the way I've gone about it is we're going to make money and we're going to save money and having the answers for both.

It's a different take on the. Like, we've seen in. In the downturn, a lot of. We had a few people in the studio come and talk about, you know, the demand of doing more for less.

Yes.

And I have a real issue with that phrase but I quite like the make money, save money because you can do different for you can do different for less, you can do more for more, you can do different for more, you can do all sorts of different things but you can't do more for less. But coming at it with a make money, save money angle is quite interesting.

I'm going to think about that one and then by the time I've thought about it, I'm going to come back and put something witty in the closing paragraph of this show to make it look like I just sort of knew.

I was talking about you on it like that.

Exactly, yeah. Without having to give specific details away because it's probably commercially confidential anyway.

Talk to me about your current kind of of tech setup and how you've managed to bring your current teams up to speed with the kind of the.

Foundational technology would say it's still a work in progress. So we've got all the basics. Our tech stack is very robust.

So as a business we use Salesforce, we use Marketo and it's about all of those marketing automation platforms, really powerful. So we can do a lot and quickly. And the stuff that sits around it is we've got the Google Analytics, the GA4S which.

Okay.

Oh, I always have to take a deep breath when I like the old system. I really did. I miss it. I'm like, I'm going to say it.

I'm so nostalgic for UA, I can't even tell you because it took me 10 years to get my head around it and now it's away.

There's this new system with. You can't understand what's going on. Oh, I can't, no.

But they've changed the names of things and that is what always throws me. And this is where I'm like did you even think about your customer? Google? That's all I'm going to say because well, they're monopoly.

They can do it like.

Well, precisely. I mean, you know, they own us. It's as simple as that. So that sort of stack is in place.

See there's information that comes from our financial management system. See I'm not involved in the day to day on that. So as a marketing function we've got the basics in place.

I'm a real fan of Salesforce. I was pretty much alone in my organization, I think in liking it, but I was a real fan of it.

I found it kind of intuitive to use, easy to understand, easy to get a picture of the customer so, but if that's your. Have you experienced challenges getting other people to use it and keep the data up to date and populated?

Always. I think this is probably where the listeners will feel very heard and seen.

That whole thing of, of this, the CRM Salesforce, whatever it might be, set up, it's created and it just sort of takes on a life of its own and nobody owns it and manages it properly. It's. And it's, well, whose responsibility is this? And that's a whole other conversation.

And then what happens is if it's not been set up correctly, if it's not easy to use, we've talked about this quite a lot. And primarily it's sales who are using that, and they're the ones that are having those conversations.

The information's being updated in there, and if you have to go through 12 steps before you can add just one bit of relevant information or update a field. Yeah, what's going to happen? We've seen it time and time again. You know, our sales colleagues do not bother.

And then that's when we sit around and complain about having dirty data and we can't do our marketing effectively. That, I think, is the, the biggest problem. And how do we even get beyond that? I've got thoughts. All right.

Okay, let's hear them.

Well, it's very simply, this is sort of. It comes back to that, is it going to cost me, like, make me money or save me money?

And now the third thing that we don't like to talk about is, is it going to cost me? And this is where so many businesses, you know, of a certain size, you've got all of this data, you've got all this information.

Why don't you have a proper analytics team in place? Don't leave it up to marketing to do a bit and for tech to do a bit and product to do a bit.

And you've got maybe one analyst in a corner who puts together nice dashboards for you in tableau.

That does not help bring in people who know this stuff, whose life is data, who live in that, who can then can analyze, contextualize, and help it make sense for you. And then they are actually almost the guardians of that system. Why don't more people do that? Well, we know the reason why, because it costs.

But the benefits in the long run is then you don't miss out on opportunities and then you don't do something that you really shouldn't have done.

I think sometimes people don't think about it as well now, because if you can remember pre GPT like before OpenAI, when was it? November 22 or something like that.

The world has changed before that.

Like data scientists were everyone's heroes and everyone wanted a data scientist. Then AI came out and people thought we don't need data scientists anymore. But you do.

It's short sighted.

You do, I would agree. Because actually certainly the LLMs like they're language models, right. They're not statistical analysis models.

They can do some stuff like that because They've got certainly OpenAI's got some of those skills built into it and it's embeddings but, but they're not great at it.

And we're building, we've been building some really cool models for clients that allow them to do like live real time segmentation of their product portfolios and it integrates Obviously with either HubSpot or Salesforce, those kind of things. But that stuff isn't coming from AI, that stuff's coming from as you say, good old fashioned data science and analysis.

And I think people overlook that at the moment, particularly large organizations where you've got a lot of data.

In a previous role this is, I had a very forward thinking marketing director who sort of understood the need for knowledge, information data analytics, whatever it might be. And I actually had her official title was Marketing Data Analyst in my team. It was a great time and I think all marketing teams should have that.

I mean ideally you need a whole team but if you've got one individual as part of your marketing ops function or whatever you might want to call it, having somebody whose job it is to look at everything that's out there and then putting all that information together and giving you those insights.

Because with the best will in the world, especially for those of us who are doing the job on a day to day, how much time do we actually have to do that?

None.

I mean none whatsoever. But then it then comes back to if we don't have this information, how can we possibly partner with the rest of the business?

We talk about, we want that seat at the table, we want to have that conversation. We want everyone to believe in what we do.

Like you know, we're not just over here coloring in, we promise, blah blah blah, we have to have that information, we have to be credible. And the only way to do that is to say okay, this is what we've seen.

Actually the analyst is an interesting approach. Maybe that's the starting point because like the first task is to look at what data have we got?

Yes.

And how joined up is it? And like we talked, we talked a little bit about bad data. Worse than no data. Bad data, I think, or in separate subjects.

But someone needs to look at what data we've got and then try and connect it, make sense out of it. Maybe that's the. Maybe that's the first task of the analyst to say, go across the organization, find the data.

Because finance is going to have data, sales is going to have data, product is going to have data. I mean, it's going to be data everywhere.

That is actually the first exercise. I'm actually just finished doing something similar. Yeah. And this is just within the marketing team. So same thing.

You know, we talk about single source of truth, but does that even exist? No. Oh, I don't know. So the debate will rage on, I think, for forever and ever.

But we'd got to a point which was like, we've got all of these platforms, we do all of this reporting great, but it's not joined up. It's in spreadsheets, it's in PowerPoints. There might be a nice little dashboard over there.

And we know, we know as marketeers the information that we need to help us make those decisions. We know, okay, sometimes you just need a little bit of help putting it all together. So I actually quite liked it.

I spent like a day putting a list together of all of the sources of information that we have as a team. And it was everything. And it was not just the obvious stuff, but it was all the platforms that we're using.

You know, we've got this content creation platform that, okay, there's information sitting in there, even stuff like teams. By the time I was done and then. And again, this is not just within marketing and digital. We've got a communications team.

So they've got their platforms, they're using the events team. There's, you know, there's platforms there. So right now we've got a list of 40 different platforms, places where we can get information.

This is not even including all of our socials. So, you know, there's, you know, there's native apps and there's the platform that we're using. So I looked at it and went, oh, my God.

And then the next thing was all of the reports we create and then there's a lot of PowerPoints floating around. And that is just within marketing. If you then replicate that across the business, it's quite overwhelming.

And I think that's why a lot of the time we get a bit scared and businesses get scared and go, oh, my God, this is too much. Let's not even do this. Let's worry about this another day and then another day comes.

Particularly if it's unstructured data. Like some of. Some of the structured data is fine.

I mean, and to me, what I'm talking about specifically here is stuff that's already in a system with key fields and, you know, and all the metadata in place. Structured data, unstructured data, conversations, social channels, all that stuff. There's. It's really. I mean, it can be rich, that stuff.

Like in a service business like mine, I've got 13 terabytes of client data sitting on SharePoint at the moment, which is. We've done nothing with nothing at all. But it's gold dust.

You need time and people to make sense of it.

Time, people and money.

Yeah.

And I haven't got any of those three things.

No, I don't really have any of those. So then what do we do?

Do? Yeah.

Okay.

Do you. Do. I think you do what you can.

Right, right, exactly.

You start somewhere and then try and build. No, I think, as you were saying, I've identified 40 sources of data. I suddenly realized I haven't even gone through that process yet.

You know, we've had, we've had a good chat about, about some thorny subjects. Data. Everyone talks about data all the time. We've talked about some of the difficulties with getting a hold of it.

Make a list of all of your data sources.

Yeah.

Then what?

Once you've finished freaking out.

Yeah.

Then the next step is, okay, what is important?

So you've got the sources and look, you could have all the metrics, you know, all the numbers, but that just again, will mean that you will never get anywhere. Number one, what is important? What is it you need to report on? What will make sense. And I will always link it back to the commercial targets.

Again, it feels so obvious to say this, but the reason we are doing what we're doing is because we're trying to hit a number. You know, we're trying to achieve growth. There's a revenue target we are here and tasked to get to.

So if there are, let's say, four or five key metrics, as a marketeer that you're like, okay with this, I can then go back to the business and I can say we have contributed to this. Sometimes it could be that. It might not be that easy, but that is the way I've approached it.

I feel like there's a quadrant here maybe, maybe you've got measurability on one axis and importance on the other axis.

It's definitely.

And you're looking at your data sources and so you're gonna focus on those. I mean, particularly if you're using it to report back on, let's use the word attribution without meaning specific causation. Effectiveness.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Cause then, you know, so this is the data that can help me be more effective. Therefore I'm going to focus my effort on that. I like that.

It's one way of going about it.

Thank you to you for tuning into the Unicorny Marketing show and of course a very big thank you to Jazz for coming to see us and spending time with us.

Now, today's episode reminds us all how important it is to truly understand customers properly if you want to set your business up for long term success.

From the importance of avoiding assumption to building strong foundations with clean, actionable data, Jazz, I think has given us a blueprint for success and value creation. So if this episode gets the thumbs up from you, please don't forget to subscribe. And please, if you have time, leave us a review. Now.

You can connect to me, Dom Hawes on LinkedIn, you can follow us on all major podcast platforms and of course you can also find us us on YouTube. Remember, at the heart of great marketing lies a very simple truth. It is really all about the customer. Until next time, unicorners.

Stay curious, keep learning and please never underestimate the power of listening to your customers. See you soon.