How To Build Marketing Capability

Businesses that don't understand the importance of marketing face a crucial challenge. Investing in marketing is essential for growth and maximizing profits, making it a priority for every business to build up its marketing capabilities.

In this episode, our hosts, Brenton Gowland and Ron Tomlian, explore how to make sure marketing is relevant, understood, and prioritized in any business setting.

The topics covered in this episode are: 

• How to build marketing capability in your business
• The key thing that will help you grow the marketing capability of your business
• The top-down approach
• The bottom-up approach
• We'd like to hear from you
• About our next episode

A special shout-out to Peggs, the new portable clothesline brand Brenton discusses launching on the show.

Adapt_CO
Helping businesses find their new shape.

SA Business Builders
Business leaders social group based in South Australia

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Brenton Gowland: 0:01

Today on The Business Builders podcast, we're discussing how to go about building the marketing capability of your organisation. We discussed methods for driving your marketing capability from both directions from the top down and the bottom up. It's a jam packed episode today full of practical advice to get your marketing efforts achieving results. Well, welcome to the Business Builders podcast. We are your hosts. I am Brenton Gowland.

Ron Tomlian: 0:26

And I'm Ron Tomlian. And Brenton what's been happening with you lately.

Brenton Gowland: 0:30

Well, I got some news.

Ron Tomlian: 0:31

Fantastic. What is it?

Brenton Gowland: 0:33

I've been working with a client for 18 months now on a rebranding process. And I'm very pleased to say that yesterday we launched the new brand. So it's been a long time coming.

Ron Tomlian: 0:44

Fantastic. What's the brand?

Brenton Gowland: 0:46

Well, I've been aching to give them a plug. The brand is called Peggs. So it's Peggs with two G's. So P-E-G-G-S, or peggs.com.au. Now the brand used to be called Mrs Peggs. But that was 30 years ago that they came up with a name and I started working with them 18 months ago, and we started talking about direction we hummed and harred about the name a whole lot. But then we decided that Peggs was a much better fit for where we're going in the future. Also, speaking of fit, fits much better into the icon spaces in Instagram and Facebook.

Ron Tomlian: 1:20

You gotta think about those things these days.

Brenton Gowland: 1:22

Oh you do, a shorter name, oftentimes is a better name. Not always. But in this particular case, but the thing I'm really excited about is and look, if you're listening, I'm so proud of these guys, because they have one of the basically the best products I've seen on the market. When I when I met these guys, I thought a company that sells portable clotheslines, they want me to work with them. That's exciting. And then I saw the products against the competition and the Peggs portable clotheslines last forever, they literally you push them and they move as a unit you push the competition's stuff in a wobbles backwards and forwards. And the interesting thing is they last 20 or 30 or more years. So they've had, they had a client that bought one of their products right back in day one. And 20 something years after they bought it, they brought it in and they just refurbed the product like changed the plastic parts and they kept using it. They didn't want to buy a new one because they love this thing so much. Look, you might think that Peggs are sponsoring this, they're not.

Ron Tomlian: 2:19

I was just gonna say after that preamble, I think they should be sponsoring this episode.

Brenton Gowland: 2:23

I've been holding this in for such a long time. But once I started working for them, I was I started to see this pattern, everyone loved the product. And this particular day, I was walking through the city holding these two clotheslines as I walked towards the meeting, and I had people shouting at me in the street going, it's Mrs Peggs and I'm like, what the heck is going on here. And very quickly started to realise that people fell in love with these things. But this was a case of the brand was okay, but it didn't match the quality of these products. But now, finally, the brand reflects who they really are and where they're going. So I'm really excited. And it's a really good case study, because obviously we're doing a series on marketing. And we're going to get the owner of this company in in the next few weeks to interview them about, like he had a company of it was three or four people. Now they're about six or seven. But he's gone on a journey. And really prioritised marketing, it'll be really interesting to hear, from his point of view, how this has all come to pass how he's built the marketing capability of his company, and what the early results are, and what he sees as being the long term results. And then we can check in six months, a year's time and see how this rebrand has actually affected their bottom line and their sales and their future direction.

Ron Tomlian: 3:41

That is the best introduction to the conversation that we're going to have that I could have thought of.

Brenton Gowland: 3:47

Well, timing is everything isn't it.

Ron Tomlian: 3:48

Yeah, well, you did. Thank you for that. So today we're going to talk about that whole idea of how do you build marketing capability. Last time, if you remember, what we talked about was the problem with marketing. Then we went out and talk about what what is marketing? What's the definition of marketing?

Brenton Gowland: 4:07

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 4:08

The issues associated to problems with where marketing lives in an organisation and an understanding of that. And a realisation that, even if you're not marketing, consciously or proactively, you are marketing. It's just that you're not in control of the process.

Brenton Gowland: 4:27

And I think we struck a chord with what we were talking about last week. And the reason I say that is we've been contacted by a few people got a big old email from someone who's an avid listener, who was like, wow, you've kind of struck the nail on the head because I've got engineers who are my bosses, how do you get them to understand how important marketing really is and how do you get them to understand that growth needs to be focused on you can't just go with what you've always known. So I think I think this is striking a chord because it certainly struck a chord for me, and I was listening to another podcast the other day was Bill Caskey in the United States, the Advanced Selling Podcast been listening to for years. And what do you think he should say? That interviewed some CMOS, and he said, You know what the problem with marketing is, the problem is it speaks different language to the rest of the company. And I was like, timing is everything, it sounds like, other people are feeling the same thing. You know this to, people just don't understand it. So long way of saying, I think we're on the right track here.

Ron Tomlian: 5:27

It's interesting, because marketers often will complain about that as well that people speak a different language in them to them in an organisation, and I'm pretty sure that market is likely to think and they probably do think I languages the language of the customer. I mean, quite frankly, when I was directly involved in marketing in various organisations, I would call myself the customer advocate. Because I worked in organisations where the customer was almost derived and let alone neglected. And to build the understanding of marketing, you really needed to get people to understand the customers. The reason this organisation exists, like we talked about last time.

Brenton Gowland: 6:08

And I think that's true, but I don't think it's true of all marketers, because some marketers don't understand the customers because they sit behind a desk, and it's what they have come to be expected from them. And that is to punch out ads, even listening to the advanced selling podcast, a couple of sales guys who are talking about marketing, they come at it from a sales perspective. And so their idea that marketing marketing are those guys who build the capability statements and build their case studies and build the tools for sales. To us. That's a very small part of what marketing is like a very small part of what marketing is about. Couldn't agree more that and no disrespect to people who were on that podcast, but they come from a sales perspective. That's what they think a marketing though.

Ron Tomlian: 6:52

Well, look, we talked about it last week, marketing is rarely in organisation, the marketing department is rarely in charge of marketing. They usually in charge of marketing communications.

Brenton Gowland: 7:02

So to fix a problem, the first step is to understand the problem is it not?

Ron Tomlian: 7:06

Yes. So there's, there's two ways of looking at this.

Brenton Gowland: 7:11

Yeah.

Ron Tomlian: 7:11

And I think the first way is, if I'm the owner of the business, the CEO of the business, in the executive team of the business, how do I get marketing? Or how do I build marketing capability within my organisation as a leader. And at least at that point, you've got someone who's seen you in the organisation who wants who was interested in marketing. And that's the top down approach. So the first thing I would say is, if you're in that position, you're a leader in an organisation or you own an organisation. And you want to build marketing capability, because you understand marketing is important is to one understand what marketing is all about educate yourself. So what's the second approach? The second one is from a bottom up approach when you're a person in an organisation like I was in a very large organisation many years ago, and everyone was saying, and I think I told people about this, every one from the general manager down to the person at the coalface was saying, if it wasn't for the customer, we could do a good job. When you have a realisation that you need to bring marketing or build magazine capability within that organisation, that's a bottom up approach. I wasn't quite at the bottom, but pretty damn close to it.

Brenton Gowland: 8:20

So what we're talking about today is building the marketing capability with an organisation. So there's two approaches, you're saying there's a top down approach. And there's a bottom up approach. But I would say, and we've talked about this earlier, obviously, the key thing for both of those approaches is exactly the same. The goal if you want to build marketing capability within an organisation, is to make sure that marketing becomes part of the conversation at executive level.

Ron Tomlian: 8:47

And I think marketing becomes a realisation and awareness at all levels. It's talked about at a senior level, but everyone realises they play a part.

Brenton Gowland: 8:58

Well, that'll be a natural flow on from the board, or the owners taking a real interest in marketing. So if it's part of the key conversation about where this business is going, then that will happen. I would imagine it logically,

Ron Tomlian: 9:13

It's the old truism, if you're not serving the customer, then you're serving someone who is.

Brenton Gowland: 9:18

So what are the things that has to happen for that to be part of the conversation? What does that mean? That means marketing is considered, marketing is relied upon, and that marketing is the key thing important to the business. Otherwise, it's not going to be part of that conversation.

Ron Tomlian: 9:35

And there are approaches that have been developed over the years to make sure that people at senior levels board levels, consider marketing to be important, you know, the whole I don't know if you know, the history of the balanced scorecard approach.

Brenton Gowland: 9:51

Not entirely I know a fair bit about the balanced scorecard been.

Ron Tomlian: 9:54

I mean, it was two guys, one and Harvard one, I think, can we get

Brenton Gowland: 9:59

That's right. It was a Harvard article, wasn't it?

Ron Tomlian: 10:02

It became a Harvard article. Yeah. And and then a book.

Brenton Gowland: 10:06

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 10:06

Very successful book called the balanced scorecard approach.

Brenton Gowland: 10:09

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 10:10

Where these guys had realised that in MBA programmes in the United States, if you were doing an MBA programme, you were told repeatedly one thing, get your financials in order, get your financial acumen in order, and you will do well in the business world. And what they noticed, were some organisations who weren't doing very well on a financial literacy level, who weren't doing so well in the marketplace who weren't doing so well as organisations. And there were others who were okay, in that area, but they seem to have skills and focus on other things as well. So they talked to a whole bunch of organisations, and what they noticed that the ones that were considered successful as in sustainable, operating well, in the marketplace, financially successful, had people who wanted to stay with them, and were capable of of competing in a marketplace, they had four areas that they needed to focus on. The first was financial.

Brenton Gowland: 11:08

Yep, make's sense.

Ron Tomlian: 11:09

You got to eat money to be able to survive. The second was we do, how are we doing in the marketplace? What indicators can we use to indicate our capability and success in the market?

Brenton Gowland: 11:21

So that's the marketing function?

Ron Tomlian: 11:22

Marketing, customer, whatever you however, you want to look at it, customer satisfaction, those sort of indicators.

Brenton Gowland: 11:28

And the other two?

Ron Tomlian: 11:28

The third was business processes. How are we improving our business processes?

Brenton Gowland: 11:33

Yep.

Ron Tomlian: 11:34

Because our business processes are the what we use to deliver value to the customer. And the fourth was a capability within our organisation, the growth perspective of our people.

Brenton Gowland: 11:45

Ah, yes. So HR?

Ron Tomlian: 11:47

Well, it's not it's more than HR, it's, how are we building capability within this organisation to improve the processes to deliver value to the customer to get a financial return?

Brenton Gowland: 11:58

Right. Okay, gotcha.

Ron Tomlian: 11:59

Okay. So four areas, that those organisations.

Brenton Gowland: 12:03

So it's almost like those four areas need to be part of the board, or the exec level discussion. Yes?

Ron Tomlian: 12:08

That's exactly what Kaplan and Norton talked about. They wrote a book fabulously successful, and then a company came to them later, Motorola must be well known.

Brenton Gowland: 12:18

Yep.

Ron Tomlian: 12:19

And said, not only are those four areas important, but we've aligned our business objectives for those four areas. And they wrote a second book, the balanced scorecard strategic approach.

Brenton Gowland: 12:29

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 12:30

And so it's now regarded as one of the best, if not the best practice strategic approaches to planning, because it aligns with that one area that is often neglected business processes, but it certainly has marketing in there up with the best of them.

Brenton Gowland: 12:48

How many businesses at a exec level or the ownership level have marketing missing from the conversation I wonder?

Ron Tomlian: 12:55

That's a good question.

Brenton Gowland: 12:56

So that's what we're addressing today. Okay. So for marketing capability to grow in an organisation, it has to be part of the strategy at board level or exec level or ownership level. And it has to be an active part of the conversation. So there's something you talk about often, and that is, marketing is too important to be left in the hands of the marketing department.

Ron Tomlian: 13:19

That's right, Jack Welch.

Brenton Gowland: 13:20

Jack Welsh, tel us about that.

Ron Tomlian: 13:22

What did he mean by that? I mean, it sounds ridiculous. But the truth of the matter is, what he was talking about, is that you can't just because most marketing payments or promotion requirements, you can't just say, if that's their responsibility, we don't have to worry about that now, at the executive level is that as a chief executive, as a board, you have to be intimately concerned with what your organisation is doing in marketing, not just say, I've got that box ticked. And you know, just give me a report every so often. I've covered that one off. Dan Wittenberg in the United States many years ago talked about the three roles of the CEO, Chief Sales Officer, I translate that to see chief marketing officer, chief strategist and chief team builder, which is HR. So he recognised and this was probably 20 years ago, he recognised that the CEO, the chief of the organisation, however you want to put it needs to be intimately involved in the concept of marketing within that organisation. It just can't be left to this as a function that I've got covered off.

Brenton Gowland: 14:29

And what we established in the last episode was that marketing speaks a different language to the rest of the company. So it's impossible if you think about it in those terms. It's impossible for marketing to be part of that exact level conversation if it speaks a different language. That's just maybe we're taking the metaphor too far, but I don't think we are. Because if you're sitting at the table and no one understands what you're saying, why would they want you to be there?

Ron Tomlian: 14:53

And unfortunately, this this often happens in organisations that and I think you See it in, in a lot of different areas, it speaks a different language through operations speaks a different language, he speaks a different language. And when you get all of those languages being spoken about, which is the one that wins.

Brenton Gowland: 15:14

Finance.

Ron Tomlian: 15:15

Absolutely.

Brenton Gowland: 15:16

But mind you, operations is more in line with that, yes, there's issues sometimes. But at the end of the day, if you're not, the engine room of the business ain't rocking, the finance department ain't going to be delivering.

Ron Tomlian: 15:28

And, and then you get into the hole.

Brenton Gowland: 15:31

So, it's a natural that that seen as important as one goes not without the other have very clear connection yet.

Ron Tomlian: 15:38

And I suppose that the, the bottom line here is that marketers will often be evangelical about the need to speak from a perspective of...

Brenton Gowland: 15:47

Are you saying marketers are colourful?

Ron Tomlian: 15:51

Let's not get into that one, right now. Marketers are are often passionate about speaking from the perspective of being a customer advocate. And speaking about the big wide world around, and neglecting the fact that when they're speaking about that, inside the organisation, they're speaking to other people, they will talk about, and quite rightly talk about understanding your target audience, and then completely neglect who they're talking to inside the organisation. And look, I'm all for marketers being passionate about the customer. But they have to translate that, I think, into the speak of the organisation at the executive level that speak is typically financial.

Brenton Gowland: 16:34

Numbers. There's one other thing that marketers do that turn people off. And that is they speak about technology and tactics in the latest and greatest thing to use or be involved with, right? So and people glaze over because they missed the strategy part, which I think we're going to talk about in the next episode. Absolutely. We'll get to that later. But so as you rightly said, the onus is on the marketer in this particular sense to learn the language of the rest of the business, in order for them to understand it. But to build capability of the marketing function within your business. marketing needs to be part of the conversation. And we said earlier, there's two ways to approach developing this capability. So let's start with the top down approach. So if we're going to end the top down approach is basically buying into what you said earlier, marketing is too important to be left in the hands of the marketers, so we are talking to business builders here, that is company owners, people who are influencing in the business management level exec level, and people who want to develop themselves Young Guns, anyone who wants to learn about how to make their business work the best we're talking to you. So if your top down approach is to lead the marketing, how do we go about that?

Ron Tomlian: 17:52

You have influence already. And you come from a position of awareness and realise that I need to build an awareness in others at the executive level, and then down for the organisation. So drive it, set the agenda, put it put it on a discussion and happens at every strategic meeting.

Brenton Gowland: 18:11

And this is really the ideal approach. Because if the exec or the owner or the Managing Director, drives marketing, it's got a way better chance of actually becoming critical to the business and being a big influencer in the way the business actually grows

Ron Tomlian: 18:27

To my way of thinking it'd be you become as the CEO, you become the champion of marketing, even if other people fulfil the functions, and do the stuff associated with marketing, it should be something that you're continually focused on, and talking about.

Brenton Gowland: 18:44

So scenario, that's all well and good to say that, but let's practically look at it. Let's say, you are the director, you're the manager, you're part of the exec in an organisation and you, you just have this feeling you know that marketing needs to be a key driver in your business. You've looked at Apple, you've seen that Steve Jobs spent a third of his time in the marketing department, all that kind of stuff. And you know that it's lacking in your business, how do you go out and develop that capability in a way that's gonna get results? So the top down approach, the leaders leading the marketing of the business, how do we go about it Ron?

Ron Tomlian: 19:19

Well, educate yourself, listen to podcast, read books, look at look at organisations that have successfully competed in a marketplace and, and I would argue that every organisation competes in some marketplace, even if it's only for people's head space.

Brenton Gowland: 19:34

Yep.

Ron Tomlian: 19:35

Don't leave the marketing to them to a marketing function, or, you know, if you use an outsourced marketing department, don't leave them hanging in the wind be their champions within the organisation.

Brenton Gowland: 19:46

Even if you have marketing people, they're gonna try and write strategies and so forth. You're saying, leader, even if you've got marketing people.

Ron Tomlian: 19:54

Listen to them. Don't necessarily tell them that you know more than they do, but be interested in to their perspective, be interested in the things that they are doing in what they observe the insights they have. But make sure that it's a priority for you, and other people in the organisation understand that there's a priority for you. Because it is the basis of any organisation.

Brenton Gowland: 20:17

Well you can do all sorts of things in that regard, obviously, you can set the agenda about what the marketing department should be doing, you can also set the strategy, it doesn't mean you need to go down and do the marketing strategy. But this is what the marketing department has to deliver. Show me how that's going to happen.

Ron Tomlian: 20:33

Not only expected demand it demanded a like that, ask questions, I find the most effective way to influence people is not to tell them what to do is to ask questions about what you're thinking about,

Brenton Gowland: 20:46

In a sense, then you are actually empowering the marketing department. So if if I was in a business as a marketer, and my board or my exec was really trying to drive our performance, I'd see that as a real enabler.

Ron Tomlian: 21:00

Absolutely, but but also look for the results that they're getting, don't accept that give me more money, and I'll do more stuff. And I'm accurate is when they get lazy. That's what they do.

Brenton Gowland: 21:10

Well, that leads us on to the next thing, if you want to drive the marketing from exit business ownership level, you got to find the best people you can to do the job that you can afford. So obviously, if you're in a smaller business, turning over a couple of million dollars, you're not going to put someone on who's 220 to 150 grand a year, whatever the price of a CMO or whatever it is, but what's the best you can afford? At that particular point? Who can you get in there that knows their stuff?

Ron Tomlian: 21:38

And it kind of might be early on? It's not a person? It's a capability outside the organisation? Like he was talking about? Yeah, but um, but but get the right people to do the work.

Brenton Gowland: 21:47

100%

Ron Tomlian: 21:48

Yeah.

Brenton Gowland: 21:48

So driving it from the top down, you find the best people you can to actually get it rolling. And I think you were talking about emphasising the importance of it, that means also sending KPIs. So even if you are using.

Ron Tomlian: 21:59

Let's not use jargon, key performance indicators. In other words, what am I looking for? You know, and let's measure it. Measurement is incredibly important. And people say, Well, you can't measure everything. Yes, you can.

Brenton Gowland: 22:11

Yes, you can.

Ron Tomlian: 22:11

Yes, you can. You can put subjective measures against things. And it still gives you an indication of performance. So customer satisfaction, how do you measure customer satisfaction? You get people to subjectively rate the organisation. There's nothing scientific about that. It is a an indication of their perception.

Brenton Gowland: 22:32

You can always put numbers on anything actually. salutely anything as long as you systematise it? Yeah. Which means a bit of work from the marketing department.

Ron Tomlian: 22:39

Yeah, or I mean, get help from the engineering department to set it up.

Brenton Gowland: 22:42

But that really is that translation. Okay, we're speaking a different language that is the translation matrix, right?

Ron Tomlian: 22:49

Yeah.

Brenton Gowland: 22:49

If you want to translate marketing, speak into business speak. Measure it. Yeah. So that you can actually say, we've moved from this place to that place, here's a number we've moved from a one to a to we've moved from a gold rating to a platinum rating, whatever you system you use. But that then speaks to one of the most important things about ensuring that the marketing capability in an organisation grows and is invested in is that as you get results, because that whole measurement system that you put in place leads to going, well, this is going to make a result, this is not going to make a result. So but we can see by the measurements, what's working and what's not.

Ron Tomlian: 23:29

And this gets into the difference between objectives and strategy, objectives about what do I want to achieve? Yep. The numbers. Yep. For a particular KPI. Yes. Versus how am I going to do that? Yes, the strategy. So emphasise what you want to achieve first, and then figure out how you're going to get it rather than how we're going to do this. And let's see what the numbers tell us. So be clear about what you're trying to achieve. And because it will often dictate what strategies are viable and One Night. Okay, here's one that I often find, especially as organisations grow. In India, we're talking about a top down approach, make sure that at the top level of the organisation, you are still spending time talking directly to customers? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because what I find in the organisations that I work with, is that as you grow, you know, talking to customers can sometimes be a little bit yucky. They can complain and you know, hence the, if it wasn't for the customer who could do a good job because they always complain about stuff and make sure you're talking to the customers to get an insight that great to my way of thinking great organisations force the executive level to spend some time talking directly to customers.

Brenton Gowland: 24:43

Yeah, that's right,

Ron Tomlian: 24:44

Because you get insights that you can never get through reports.

Brenton Gowland: 24:47

Well, remember, we're talking about building the capability of marketing within an organisation. So that's making sure that marketing is part of the conversation. You'll never be able to do that. If you're not talking to them. customers because that's what you said earlier, marketing is almost like that. translator for customer, I'm going to say the word sentiment, which means what the customer is thinking or feeling about your brand. It's a translation of that into the board language, so that we can understand what's going on with our customers. So you must be out there talking to clients. And I think having the leaders of an organisation talking to customers is it's just vital.

Ron Tomlian: 25:27

The number of times I've spoken to people who have started to do this after many years of doing it distancing themselves from the customer, because it's yeah, it's easier. They get insights that are suddenly understand what my people have been telling me all this time. Don't get into a situation where they revelations maintain, you know, when you start businesses, you are often talking to the customers, because you're the only one there, you're one of the service delivers. As you grow an organisation. Don't ever lose that connection to the people that you are serving.

Brenton Gowland: 26:02

Yeah, agreed. So look, we've just talked about the top down approach to building marketing capability with an organisation and there will be lots of things that we've missed. So we've just skimmed over the surface. But what we want to give you an idea of that, that is the ultimate approach to building marketing within a company, that it's unimpeded, that the leaders see the importance of it, if you're a leader, go and study marketing, I don't mean at university. I mean, find some mentors, find some people who know what they're doing, as Ron said, listen to podcasts, there's lots of great podcasts around and read books, educate yourself as much as much as you can, if you read a few marketing books, really good ones, and we'll get you some suggestions before the end of this series about things you can read people you can go listen to, etc, will give you some resources, but go and educate yourself. So that is the best approach. But there's another approach. And look, most cases, we're talking to a marketer here, or a business builder, someone in a company who wants to see the company do well, that often it's going to be the marketing department or the marketing person, how do you drive the importance or build the capability of the marketing department in an organisation from the bottom up, which means we have to find a way to make marketing really important to the exec to the board to the owner.

Ron Tomlian: 27:23

And it's the same goal as the top down approach you want those conversations to be having happening at the decision making levels of the organisation, it has to be on the agenda of the board, the executive and so on.

Brenton Gowland: 27:36

So in other words, we got to make the marketing function of the business become noticed. Absolutely. And notice for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons. Yeah,

Ron Tomlian: 27:45

Yeah. So really, we're talking about marketing, the marketing capability concept.

Brenton Gowland: 27:49

Oh, yes.

Ron Tomlian: 27:50

So think about.

Brenton Gowland: 27:51

When the client becomes the Exec.

Ron Tomlian: 27:53

So in this particular case, again, as I was saying before, think about who your target audience is. Yeah. What do they what are they looking for? What are the problems they have? Yes, and how can marketing help solve those problems?

Brenton Gowland: 28:05

Now, we got some suggestions on this. But I'm going to start by saying, marketing people, this is the thing that's going to take your career to the next level, and it's going to be risky, and it's going to be scary. But if you want marketing, but to be taken seriously, you need to step outside your comfort zone. And one of the what we're about to talk about is if you want to really help a business, there's a few things you need to do. And as Ron was saying, the marketing functions clients, or the exec are the leaders of the business. So the first thing you got to do, like Ron was talking about earlier is you got to talk to them.

Ron Tomlian: 28:38

And if you talk to them speak their language,

Brenton Gowland: 28:41

I would say it's finding out from that exact level, what keeps you guys up at night? Ask them out for a coffee. Ask them say, look, I really want to learn about the company and what's going on. Have you got time for a coffee later today? Have you got time to have one lunch in the next month? And awesome, find out? What's keeping them up at night find in that's the old saying, find out what the key things in the business are that they're really concerned about? Because those concerns, if you can help get marketing to help fix those concerns, guess what they're gonna notice?

Ron Tomlian: 29:13

They're gonna notice marketing.

Brenton Gowland: 29:14

Yeah. 100%

Ron Tomlian: 29:16

Speak to them in their language, which is the problems they have.

Brenton Gowland: 29:19

Yep.

Ron Tomlian: 29:20

Look at it from the point of view of an investor and make sure that what you're suggesting has a return on investment using in their language. So that if I'm going to spend X number of dollars, there's a return to the organisation. Now that the easiest way to do it is talking about sales, that type of thing. If that if sales is a problem for the organisation, but but think more broadly, in terms of what is going to, even in the long run, what is going to give us the greatest return for our activity. Yeah, and make sure that whatever your project you're putting forward and focus, only talk about two or three things in solving problems. Make sure that the is the return on investment? Does it solve the problem? Does it give us a positive ROI?

Brenton Gowland: 30:05

So if you're talking about being an investor, then that's really good. Because that means you're seeing the marketing department has been given a pool of money. So how do you invest that pool of money? Well, we have to understand what's driving the thinking of the leaders as we were talking about. And as you said, we need to pick one, maybe two, or at most three things to focus on. And they need to be big things, not the small things. Because if you come to the Exec and talk about how many likes you got on Instagram, or Facebook, or in LinkedIn, or whatever social platform, their eyes will glaze over. But if you find out what their challenges are, or what's dominating their thinking, then you come back and present how marketing will solve those things. They're gonna pay attention. So for example, one of the companies I'm working with are doing pretty well, there's lots of work, but they've got a new GM. And what that James discovered is that there's some problems with the account management. Now, they're great at taking orders, but there are questions about their experience in building relationships. So the GM's, worrying, what's going to happen if there's problems with those clients, or they face pressure? Are the relationships with those clients strong enough for them to stay on as clients if they face issues. So what can marketing do to help? Well, we're developing a scoring system to measure client health. It's a score that scales from zero to five, where zero represents that we just a supplier to them. And at the other end of the scale, five represents that they see us as a partner business. So what we're going to do is each week in the sales meeting, we're going to get the account manager who manages those clients, to give them a rating on that scale, and then report on what has to be done to improve the score but by including this rating in their CRM, and then reporting on the client health each week in the sales meeting, we'll be able to help the account managers build awareness and develop tactics to improve these critical client relationships. And in doing this, we're going to develop a language about client health, that we can report up to the board in a language that they can understand. So we're effectively translating our activities into something we can measure. And that's helping us at this point, address the problem of the moment. And by doing that, we're helping the new GM and the higher ups to see the value of marketing in the business because we'll align our activities with delivering a highest supplier partner score.

Ron Tomlian: 32:36

And the board level what what board are worried about is risk risk management. If you are lessening the risk of customers.

Brenton Gowland: 32:45

Leaving.

Ron Tomlian: 32:46

Leaving the organisation, you are speaking the language of the board is I'm mitigating the risk associated.

Brenton Gowland: 32:52

So, if you in now, here's another thing about doing the bottom up approach. We talked about the management walking the floors. And going out and talking to customers. Well, Ron, you were saying that if you want to do the top down approach, you got to market the marketing capability to the rest of the organisation, you got to get out from behind your computer. I know sometimes that might be hard if you're one of these marketing people who has to punch out a lot of work via computer platforms and so forth. But there's always a way to find time to talk to people the watercooler. At the end of the day for lunch, whatever goes sit in the lunch room, if you've got a factory, go sit with the workers,

Ron Tomlian: 33:30

Go sit with the people who are interfacing with the customers. It could be the salespeople, it could be the service delivery people, there could also be your suppliers.

Brenton Gowland: 33:38

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 33:39

There's there's no reason why you can't use information from suppliers.

Brenton Gowland: 33:44

Yep.

Ron Tomlian: 33:44

As a mechanism for finding as an example, what competitors are doing.

Brenton Gowland: 33:48

In the case I was talking about with this particular company, that's about getting involved with the salespeople in the GM and understanding what's important to them. It's making sure that you can find a way or trying to find a way to be in those meetings, to actually hear what people are saying even if you can't do it every day, once a month, we'll get a report. But the marketing people look for insights. So you need to find if you want to drive the capability of marketing within an organisation and you want to get it noticed, find the most important things. Go find information about it within your own four walls, find a way to contribute to solving those key problems. Don't come to people with tactics about lots of little things, find one, two or three if you want to move this along quickly, and get results.

Ron Tomlian: 34:33

And then n you've got to tell people, not only that you that you're going to do it that you did it and what the results were.

Brenton Gowland: 34:41

Because to be noticed, you've got to become relevant.

Ron Tomlian: 34:45

And as I say, don't underestimate the importance of being able to sell and I'll use that word advisedly sell the achievements that you've made because you are trying to convince people of the worth the value of this activity.

Brenton Gowland: 34:59

Yep, now out. In having said all this, our advice to leaders in the business was to go out and learn to listen to podcasts to get mentors to get the best people. So Ron, what's our advice to marketers or people within the company who see the value of marketing? Who are not at that board level or exec level? What do they need to do to upskill to do this? So we've we've talked about things they can do solve big problems, but you might not know how you might go, Oh, I found the problem. How on God's earth, do I fix it?

Ron Tomlian: 35:28

Well, same thing, go out and find a talk to mentors, talk to people outside the organisation, talk to people inside the organisation, how do I influence within within large organisations? There's a whole nother strata of achievement that's about how do I influence within this organisation?

Brenton Gowland: 35:46

Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 35:46

So talk to people inside, who are interested in what you're doing, and how best to make that noticeable and make yourself relevant.

Brenton Gowland: 35:57

You know what it would be really good to find somebody that we could interview that's done something like this, I don't know how we'll find them, we'll find a way.

Ron Tomlian: 36:05

We'll find them.

Brenton Gowland: 36:06

I'd like to talk to both like so, as I said, Peggs, the brand that we've just launched, it'd be great talking to the person who's running that and we'll introduce him in a couple of weeks, I won't give it away, you can do the research, just go look at Peggs.com.au that's Peggs with two G's, P-E-G-G-S.com.au. But that person started life as an engineer, became passionate about this particular brand, purchase that for three, four years ago, sat on it for a couple of years, developed a strategy and, and then we put it all together. So that person's learned an incredible amount. But while being really impressed with him is that he's gone out and learned himself. He's gone out and attended. He went to Queensland, about a year ago, I think, and attended a conference to learn about how to develop a business strategy and all those things. So it was constantly working on himself. And that's massively important. That makes him a business builder. He does. And so I'm looking forward to interviewing him. And a few other people will do that in a few weeks, I think I hope. So just in summary, do you want to give us a summary, but you want me to do that? No, you can do it. Okay. So the summary was if you wanting to build the capability, or the marketing capability of your business, the key thing you want to do is make marketing part of the conversation at executive level, which means it's important to the organisation, it's a consideration. And you want to develop strategies and approaches that you can pass down through the organisation to be implemented by the Marketing Department and others. So it's got to become part of the conversation, we've got a top down approach. And the top down approach really was for the leaders of a business to go out and educate themselves and learn about marketing, not to leave marketing in the hands of the marketing people, as you said, to drive and set the agenda, to emphasise the importance of marketing by setting key performance indicators, by finding the absolute best people that they can afford to be able to implement the marketing strategies and drive the marketing capability of the business. And really importantly, to make sure that marketing gets results. And part of that means going out and talking to customers yourself and understanding them.

Ron Tomlian: 38:17

And the bottom up approach is making maximum become noticed. It's all about getting the executive level to be talking about marketing. So marketing, the marketing capabilities, in this case, the leaders of the business, so your customers, find out what they really want, what are their challenges, and how marketing, figure out how marketing can help solve at least some of those challenges, focus and look at it as from the perspective of getting a return on investment for the marketing that you're intending to do. Take some risks, get out from behind your desk, talk to customers, talk to suppliers, talk to other people in the organisation, and see how you can influence and that might mean getting some mentors to do that.

Brenton Gowland: 39:00

Yeah. So you're basically becoming an entrepreneur within your own business?

Ron Tomlian: 39:04

Absolutely.

Brenton Gowland: 39:05

Is that called an intrapreneur?

Ron Tomlian: 39:06

is that's the term that's been coined. And I think it's a wonderful one.

Brenton Gowland: 39:10

Yeah. So we really hope you've got something out of this episode, because we're trying to make it really clear, we've got a fair bit of experience, but we're not necessarily the experts. That's why we're going to interview a bunch of people.

Ron Tomlian: 39:23

And if you've got experiences in, as you said before, we don't have all the answers now. And we certainly haven't got all the experience. If you've had experience in how you've done it within an organisation either top down or bottom up, we'd love you. We'd love to hear from you.

Brenton Gowland: 39:41

I'd love to hear from as kind of people because this whole marketing thing. I think it really is the time for marketing to rise up and you know, in a couple of episodes time we'll talk about how marketing is going to change later this year with digital space, but we won't go there right now. But it's just so important and I think marketing needs to become a really big part of the conversation of our businesses this year, even if it hasn't been before. So that's all for now. But let's just talk quickly about the next episode because I think it's worth giving people a preview. What's the next episode going to be about Ron?

Ron Tomlian: 40:15

Well, one of the things that I often say is the people focus a lot on the tactics associated with marketing. Do I use a brochure? Do I use a podcast? Do I use a social media platforms on? What works? Yeah, without thinking beforehand, from a strategic perspective? What is the landscape I'm operating in? What am I trying to achieve? And what's the overall strategy we're trying to achieve? What are my customers want all this sort of strategic stuff that sits above what tactics I'm going to use? And though in that area is I think quite badly handled by most organisations

Brenton Gowland: 41:00

Agreed. So next episode is going to be strategy versus tactical market.

Ron Tomlian: 41:05

Yes. Strategic versus tactical marketing. What's the difference between the two? And how, how they interplay between each other.

Brenton Gowland: 41:12

Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to that. And for those of you listening, it's goodbye from Ron.

Ron Tomlian: 41:18

And goodbye from Brenton.

Brenton Gowland: 41:20

Thank you. See you in a couple of weeks, everybody