Its very rare I say I was blessed/honoured/fortunate to attend an event, but last week's LinkedIn event in London was quite simply transformative. Featuring guest speaker journalist/author/podcaster Elizabeth Day (big fan!), "Chatham House" rules prevent me from sharing too much detail.
Elizabeth's podcast "How To Fail with Elizabeth Day" celebrates the things that haven't gone right. Interviewees explore what their failures taught them about how to succeed better. And often those failures are being shared in public for the first time, with many being highly personal.
This neatly dovetailed into how as leaders we need to be authentic through sharing failures or vulnerabilities and indeed being more open. Some thoughts :
✨ sharing personal experiences (very hard for us Brits!) only strengthens your professional relationships and makes you a better leader
✨ embrace failure & celebrate how its made you better (which 99% of the time it does)
✨ failure will happen and its fine. (Reminds me of telling my son, new to cycling, that you WILL fall off some time and you WILL get a mech failure or puncture. Its all good, embrace it!)
✨ at work, don't be afraid to say "I don't know" or "I don't have the answer". Infallibility is ok!
Finally thank you to Fredrik Borestrom Luke Phebey for the invite and to Josh Graff for hosting. The organisation, venue, food and company were outstanding. Josh - you have a second career as an interviewer!
And if you haven't already, check out Elizabeth's podcast. Great guests, often deeply moving stories but with moments of great humour!
#leadershipdevelopment #authenticleadership #vulnerability
How to build an elite ABM team
Thank you B2B Marketing for inviting me to talk at the Global ABM Conference in London!
Always great to catch up with familiar faces and get inspired by my peers.
For my part I spoke on "How to build an elite ABM team" (their title, not mine 😀 ).
And whilst elite is an aspiration, I could certainly share some key ingredients for high performance based on my experiences at Adobe, Yext and VMware. Four thoughts:
🌟 Account selection and planning is the new handshake between marketing and sales. It's the greatest opportunity to be set up for success and for marketing to be in the driving seat. Setting criteria is key for accounts to enter the program. Not all accounts need marketing love.
🌟 ABM demands a new set of skills and success is based on marketers becoming a business partner not just an execution centre of excellence. Customer understanding plus understanding business objectives is vital.
🌟 ABM needs to be part of a Go-to-market strategy, not just a cool thing marketing can do for our customers. Top down sponsorship is key.
🌟 AI is not the answer (technology very rarely is). But keep on top of the oportunity and encourage your teams to experiment (but behind the fire wall!)
Thank you Joel Harrison Richard O'Connor for the invite. And to Will of Momentum ITSMA for providing some supporting research data.
And good to meet/chat Ceri, Paul, Matt, Ilvija, Andrea, Louise, Pippa, Rachael, Marina!
Photo : Paul
Does B2B Marketing Needs Don Draper?
Loved taking part in True's "B2B Marketing Needs Don Draper" podcast series, discussing the connection between brand and lead generation in B2B marketing, scaling strategies while maintaining the human touch, and the impact of CMOs coming from a brand and creative background.
But most importantly, we discussed why there's never been a better time to be a B2B marketer. Madmen may be an era for the advertising industry to reminisce on, but now is the golden age for B2B marketing!
Thanks to Nathan Anibaba and Richard Parsons for the invite!
Check out the episode here: https://lnkd.in/gJm4c9rV
#b2bmarketing #b2b #marketing
A little light (yet deep) reading
Summer may be behind us, but I'm sure we've all got time for a little reading inspiration 📖 . So I was delighted to see this recommended reading list from several VMware leaders 💡
My personal contribution was "Deep Work" by Cal Newport - a thought provoking read on how we should all focus on activities that maximise our expertise vs being distracted by more "shallow" tasks (spoiler alert ⚠ : if what you spend most of your time doing can be automated or taught to an intern in 90 days, make some changes. Fast!). Written a few years ago, its never more relevant than in today's AI-driven world.
Also, loved the wonderful range of recommendations from my peers, from Kahneman, Dweck and even Murakami 👏
Enjoy!
#vmware #vmwarelife #bookrecommendations
Why Creativity is Core to B2B Marketing
Creativity hasn’t always been critical in B2B Marketing – but it is today!
Thankfully, long gone are the days when simply getting your product or service in front of a prospect was deemed good enough. But that means we have to be at the top of our game creatively, every day in everything we do.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with Joel Harrison, Editor-In-Chief at B2B Marketing Magazine, which covered a huge range of topics.
Want to see more? You can find further excerpts at https://lnkd.in/eE9cUEAq OR, better still, if you’re an Propolis member, you can watch the complete series on the Propolis platform.
Secrets to Scaling B2B Tech
Great to chat with Dom Hawes of Selbey Anderson and Adam Greener from Digital Radish, on the Unicorny podcast.
The big topic is how to scale a B2B tech business.
In the conversation, John explains what you need to think about when building an integrated revenue generation engine and they discuss first and third party data as the feeder for your engine.
The team also talks about the importance of place in marketing and what is happening in the talent market right now.
Listen here.
Embracing Marketing's Constraints
Great to be a guest on the "How to Grow a CMO" podcast.
The series looks at what it takes to be a successful B2B CMO in today’s ever more complex world.
What’s the right blend of science and art? How do you keep the C-Suite happy? How do you balance short-term and long-term? And how do you inspire the CMOs of the future?
In my episode I discuss :
1. Marketing a brand's vision for the future
2. Powerful marketing philosophies to flourish sale pipelines
3. How to maximise your time with stakeholders
4. The hallmarks of a strong working relationship
"Behind B2B" : a little bit about my career in tech marketing
Thank you to the team at Octopus (now Publicis Pro) for inviting me to a “Behind B2B” Q&A.
A nice chance to have an informal chat about B2B marketing and a bit more about my career vs debating a strategy (or tactical!) point. Thanks again! Original article here.
John, you’ve had a seriously impressive career – but as we know, very few kids grow up dreaming of becoming a B2B marketer. How did you get into this line of work?
It’s true that no one aspires to be a B2B marketer – in fact, relatively few marketers even go to university to study marketing. But I’m in a specific subset of B2B marketing, the B2B tech industry, and technology was my route in.
I studied computer science at uni – as a teenager, I was very much into the whole home-computing thing, which was just kicking off. After uni, while I loved tech, I vowed never to solder or program another microchip ever again.
But I did like technology; I liked the application of it. So I went to work at a succession of software businesses, first as a consultant and then in more ‘salesy’ roles with customer-facing activity. But being at the coalface of technology sales often felt very short-term, very repetitive.
In sales, you’re only ever as good as your last month or your last quarter. I wanted to get involved in the long term, strategic direction and vision of the company. And it seemed to me that marketing was a great place to be. So to cut a long and winding story short, I became a marketer – and I’ve been doing this now for probably 25 plus years, maybe a bit more.
You’ve got a technical background, but we know you’re also a creative type with an interest in music. Do you think that mixture of skills serves you well as a marketer?
Yes, I’d say so. I’ve got a computer science background, but marketing also speaks to my creative side. I like music production, I was in bands when I was younger, I’ve definitely got that balance. It’s funny – my father is a retired engineer. He loves classical music and art, and he always says: a lot of engineers are into art as a hobby, but not many artists are into engineering…
I think there’s real value to be found in hiring marketers with a passion for creativity but a technical background (and even more so in B2B tech, unsurprisingly). After all, as a B2B marketer, your task is to translate very complex technology concepts, either to technologists or to senior business decision-makers. You don’t just need to understand what you’re talking about, you need to make it engaging, make it relevant.
In my career, I’ve found that people appreciate me having that background. Being able to demonstrate those skills can really help you build relationships as well, because you can prove you’re adding value, especially when you’re working with product or subject matter experts to create content or campaigns.
You’ve worked at some of the biggest names in B2B tech. What have the highlights been, and what’s driven your passion for the field?
I look back and think: this has been a great time to do what we’re doing. I entered the industry at a point where the profession was really maturing – I’ve been through dot com booms, internet revolutions, transformations in cloud technology. And at the same time the shifting dynamic of the population means that almost everyone is comfortable dealing with tech in their daily lives now.
I think that’s bled into the B2B side of things, and our industry now has a lot more in common with consumer marketing than it did, say, three decades ago. We have to inform and get our point of differentiation across, but we also have to engage and, dare I say, entertain.
So about my career, I’d definitely say: right time, right place from a generational point of view. It’s given me great opportunities to work with big brands, fast-growing brands that value both the art and science of marketing: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Adobe and now at VMware.
As for what’s driven my career, I’m someone who’s interested in marketing – it always amazes me when people don’t seem to be that interested, actually. We’re not in double-entry bookkeeping, after all. It’s a big, exciting world full of ideas and technology, channels and experiences – and an interest in exploring those things has always kept me going.
What work are you proudest of?
The way the profession’s gone, we’re able to get so much data and insight into what we’re doing – not like 15, 20 years ago when it was primarily ‘good execution, gut feel on the results’. Now we can measure the metrics and really know we’ve created work that’s done well.
Which is to say: some work I’m definitely proud of is my time at Adobe, working on global brand campaigns. I actually relocated to the US to work with Adobe, and spent a lot of time building awareness of what we offered, the digital experience. We knew that the most important thing for us was to tell stories to and about the customer – our mantra was ‘no customer, no campaign’. Everything had to have a customer focus.
I was so proud of the work that came out of that. We focused really heavily on creating genuine engagement, rather than just awareness. Because, ultimately, it’s great if people know what you’re doing – but are they actually engaging? Are they checking out our content in the digital world? With that work at Adobe, we really managed to engage our customers and prospects – we measured metrics by engagement, and were very successful in doing so.
And finally, what’s the best B2B marketing campaign of all time? More to the point: what’s the key to B2B marketing success?
Marketers are always keen to move on to the next thing – every day, we’ve got a new toy, a new tool, a new focus, even a new campaign idea. And us B2B marketers in particular are a funny breed; we get 3% click through on an email and we celebrate it as a success! Think about that. We go down the pub and celebrate the fact that 97% of our audience hasn’t even read the work! Then, even though most of the audience hasn’t even seen it, we become scared to repeat the same thing twice and feel the need to create something else.
So the B2B marketing I admire the most is that which has real, long-term consistency in market. Marketing that isn’t afraid to keep repeating itself – because it knows that’s the only way to reach everyone. Marketing that’s consistent and persistent is really important.
The most significant example of that has to be IBM. All the way back in the nineties, they became synonymous with ‘e-business’ – a phrase that seems a little antiquated now, but they basically went big on e-business, to the point where if you thought ‘digital’, you thought IBM.
They were a great example of someone creating a category and really owning it through a set of consistent habits, advertising and messaging. I don’t see many B2B tech companies being consistent in the market with the same campaign for multiple years. Even now, 25 years later, their ads have the same visual identity – and whenever an IBM ad comes up, I know it’s an IBM ad because they always have the two blue bar strips top and bottom of their ads.
Their ads today have those same stripes that they had in 1997. Which is a bold and wonderful thing to do.
Why small business is the future of retail
I had the privilege of hosting a webinar recently with Holly Tucker MBE. Holly is a champion of small business. She founded the UK’s first e-marketplace for small makers/retailers, NotOnTheHighSteet.com, and is now running Holly & Co, providing small business support & advice. She’s a passionate, whirlwind of energy and incredibly optimistic about the future of small business. And so I am.
Why? Well, this year for all its challenges has shown me the incredible power of small businesses when it comes to providing a quality product and, more importantly, a great, personal experience. All at a time when many large businesses have been unable to change course/pivot or reinvent.
Now, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and have no nostalgia for the high street of yesteryear. Service was poor, shops were unpleasant and range was limited. The experience, quite frankly, was awful and many retailers were outmanoeuvred by big box retailers, who gave a cheaper and ultimately better, if somewhat impersonal, experience.
But two things have changed. Firstly, experience now is king. Many consumers are making decisions not necessarily on price, but on customer experience. Secondly, digital technology has been democratised via eCommerce products such as paypal, iZettle, Shopify and Magento, meaning smaller businesses can now offer a slick(er) online experience to complement their previously non-scalable personal approach.
I’ve lost track of the number of small businesses I’ve turned to this year (Full disclosure : its a blended approach - i still buy commoditised items via amazon) and they all provide a “frictionless transaction” together with genuine gratitude for your business.
And that is what the future of retail is about. For those retailers struggling to figure out why people don’t want to buy their sub-standard products in an impersonal warehouse, staffed by disconsolate staff who make you feel like they’re doing you a favour, learn from small business. The future is a personalised, human experience. Small business is doing it REALLY well. And Holly summed this up nicely as, when it comes to marketing, it’s all about “Community, Storytelling & Connection.”
Finally, shout out to some of the small, local businesses that I’ve come to love in 2020. Many are local to me in West London, and most deliver nationally in the UK (of course!)
PAI Skincare (@paiskincare) for hand sanitiser, that match-donates to key workers
Chief Coffee (@chief_coffee) for coffee beans ordered via Instagram and delivered to my door within 2 hours
Lost in Scent (@lostinscent) for amazing, perfumed candles with a lovely handwritten note
Pearson Cycles (@pearsoncycles) for cycling know-how, and getting stuff delivered by bike
JJJ Vinyl (@JjjVinyl) for my mystery monthly vinyl record selection, always accompanied by a handwritten note on their choices
The Rib Man (@theribman) for the best hot sauces
La Latteria (@lalatteriauk) for freshly made burrata and mozzarella
Buns from Home (insta: bunsfromhome) for cinnamon croissant-buns
Dorothy (@Dorothy_UK) for beautifully clever prints and artwork based on pop culture
Unknown Pleasures (insta: unknownpleasuresdrinks) for premium ready made cocktails (try the Espresso Martini!)
Only With Love (insta: onlywith_love) fresh beers & kombuchas
Bookshop to order books from a network of local bookshops
Image : https://holly.co/campaign/marketing-kit
Sometimes, Just One Golden Nugget Can Change Your Life
i was privileged to get involved with Steven Foster’s “One Golden Nugget” project last year. Steven is an amazing character full of energy, ideas and enthusiasm and committed to spreading inspiration and wisdom. His idea was simple - to compile a list of “nuggets” of advice that people could turn to in their careers or personal life. It came from a personal motivation to seek advice from others to address some challenges he was facing in his own life. That personal project became a book, and Steven has compiled over 700 short pieces of advice from CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, celebrities, lawyers and, ermm, marketers like me. Think of it like tweets for good.
Now, all this was done pre-pandemic, and you would argue that now, more than ever, people need wisdom and inspiration. Which is all the more amazing that One Golden Nugget is now available as a free download. CHECK IT OUT. Steven has now created an Online community which is worth checking out too.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, here was my one (golden?) nugget of advice : “Focus on what you are good at. Focus on your strengths and find work where your strengths can be magnified.”