Podcast 28: Five competencies you must develop in your marketing team to stand out

As the expectations placed on marketing departments continue to expand and evolve, marketing leaders are under tremendous scrutiny to prove the value of their organisations products and services to their customers.

So today, we’re joined by Stacey Danheiser and Dr. Simon Kelly, principals of Shake Marketing Group and co-authors of the books Value-ology and Stand Out Marketing. They’re here today to share how marketing leaders can help their organisations stand out by developing key marketing competencies in their teams.

1. To begin with, please could you introduce yourself to our listeners. Simon let’s begin with you.

(01:10) I’m Dr. Simon Kelly, I call myself a pracademic now, which reflects the fact I had a long commercial career mainly running marketing and in big telecom organisations. I help organisations with Stacey at Shake Marketing to develop more powerful value propositions and growth. And I’m also a lecturer at the University of York, and I’ve lectured to several universities in the UK and in the US. I’m the co-author of this book that we’re going to talk about today, Stand Out Marketing and Value-ology.

2. And Stacey, how about you? Could you tell our listeners a little bit about your background and your current role?

(01:54) Yes, absolutely. Well, firstly, thanks Megan, for having us here today. Simon and I always love the opportunity to talk about marketing leadership. I’m Stacey Danheiser, based in the United States. I’m the founder of Shake Marketing Group, which, as Simon mentioned, is a B2B marketing consultancy where we help organisations with customer research, value propositions and marketing strategy. I’m also the co-author of two marketing books along with Simon, and before starting Shake, I have a long history of working in Fortune 500 companies across various corporate marketing leadership roles.

3. Now, you both recently released your new book, Stand Out Marketing. Could you tell us a little bit more about this and the research you conducted around it?

(02:37) Yes, well, Stand Out Marketing was born from some initial research that we started to conduct across three different industries. We looked at the telecom data centre in UK university industries to understand how they’re communicating to their potential customers and clients.

And what we found was that really, everybody is saying the same thing. And so, we started to dig into why that was happening and part of the research that we conducted to learn about that was dozens of one-on-one interviews with marketing sales and business leaders across the UK and the US. We led a global survey with over fifty respondents, the case studies, as I mentioned, and then we also have our own first-hand corporate experience in working with over two dozen clients.

4. Now, in your book, you mentioned the phrase ‘copycat marketing’, and the fact that we are ‘swimming in a sea of sameness’. Please can you explain to our listeners what this is and what it means for marketing leaders?

(03:41) Yes, so, as I mentioned, this is based on the research that we did into the three industries. And we did a scrape of websites and Twitter feeds of the top thirty companies in each of those industries.

We found that most companies were using the exact same words, the same “why us” story, the same benefits statements. We saw an overuse of generic business terms, like the word “services,” “solutions,” “business,” and a lot of phrases that start with “we” and “our” instead of being about the customer.

We also found that B2B companies rarely use proof points that are meaningful to the customer. So, for example, there’s a lot of promises to help businesses grow or transform their business but when you ask how, the answer is always something like, “buy my product or service.” So, these are lofty and empty claims as what they’re saying and the bridge from here, how you get a customer from here and where they currently are to where they really want to be, is very weak. So, when every company sounds the same, customers end up really confused about what makes each one different. And so, we call this ‘swimming in the sea of sameness’.

5. How do you think leaders can identify if their organisation is one of those that’s ‘stuck in the sea of sameness’?

(04:57) Yes, so we have various exercises and assessments in our book, but there’s a few things that I would encourage people to look at. And that would be:

1. Do you really understand your customer’s business problems and the problems that your organisation solves?
2. Are you presenting value in a way that resonates with the customer?
3. Does your “why us” story involve the customer or is it all about you, your number of years of experience, your products, and your superior customer service?

And then one that I found a lot of marketers are doing is constantly looking at their competitors and copying, frankly, the websites, social media content and feeds of their top competitors. So, one thing to look at here would be, is your website structured the same? Is the content you’re producing the same? Are the benefits that you’re promising the same? And even looking at colour palettes, logos, and the way that information is presented can be all incredibly confusing if it looks the same as your competitors.

6. Turning to you Simon, the skills and competencies of marketing teams will help businesses emerge from ‘the sea of sameness’ and become more customer centric. So, what are the key competencies that organisations need to begin developing in their employees?

(06:18) Yes, it’s a great question. Before I dive into that, I think it’s probably important to say what we see as a competency.

A competency, we think, is the combination of the knowledge, skills and the behaviours added together to be successful in your role. Now, for example, if you look at chapter four in the book, which is about what are the key roles for marketing and sales. When we interviewed leaders across the world about this, lots of people said, maybe not surprisingly, that the most important role for marketing is brand management. So that’s a key job to be done by marketing: differentiating the brand in a meaningful way to customers. As Stacey said, what do you need to know to be able to do that effectively? What do you need to be good at? And how do you need to behave to develop and mobilise a brand within your company and crucially, in the market?

So, if you were a brand manager, adding that together gives you an equation for what the competencies are that you need. Now, at the top level for marketing and salespeople, five competencies came out of our research and taken together, the initials spell the word VALUE:

• V is for visionary, which is about foreseeing potential changes in a broader business environment.
• A is for activator. That’s about getting buy-in to initiatives to help drive growth in the business.
• L is for learner, which is to learn from changes in the environment, changes in what your customers value, changes in what sets you apart from competitors.
• U is for usefulness, which is differentiated in a way that’s relevant, practical, and resonates with customers.
• E is for evaluator. This is about evaluating, not just the ongoing success of marketing and sales campaigns, but at the front-end evaluating potential opportunities to decide whether your organisation should pursue these opportunities or not.

7. I’d like to look firstly at the visionary element, which as you mentioned, is about looking ahead at the broader environment to develop new ways of doing business. How important is it for marketing leaders to develop a vision for change to continually adapt to external influences?

(08:38) Well, it’s extremely important. At any one time, there are lots of things going on: happening now, coming up on the near horizon or that you could foresee in the far distance. Let’s just look at what’s happened recently.

In the US, there’s a new president who on his first day, brought America back into the Paris Global Climate Agreement. Reflecting on that, that could be a move towards a much more unified global trading environment rather than the one that existed before.

In Europe, there’s Brexit with the UK withdrawing from the European Union. And of course, this year we’ve seen the dramatic effects of COVID-19 sweeping the world, which has affected us all in many ways from changing shopping habits, meaning that we’re always in Zoom meetings, putting a focus on mental awareness because of the effects it has on people and dramatically affecting organisational performance in different ways.

Now, you think if you were the CEO of Pfizer now versus being the CEO of British Airways, you’re in an entirely different position. So, when we think of what’s happening on the technology front, it’s just eyewatering. It’s difficult to believe that the first iPhone was only launched in 2007, and the last time I looked, there were 3.5 billion globally.

And what’s happening or coming up on the horizon. We’ve seen 3-D printing, we’ve got robotics, AI and all these things have impacted customer behaviour and competitive behaviour. So, for example, we’ve seen the rise of Airbnb and Uber and Lyft, which are organisations that don’t own any assets but have developed offerings by effective uses of these new technologies. So, taken together, you’ve got to understand how this will impact your customer, how your own company will be affected by these things and how it will affect your industry.

In the words of Wayne Gretzky, who was a famous Canadian ice hockey player, you need to be able to do this in order to skate to where the puck is going and not where it’s been, to try to predict what’s going to happen into the future and then to portray that to your customer. Now, people disregard the use of that analogy that Wayne Gretzky’s saying and say, “Oh, well, you’ve got to have a certain amount of talent because Wayne Gretzky was the greatest ice hockey player ever to walk the planet”. But I think that’s why it’s relevant in what we’re talking about in this book. You must have a level of competence that you need to be able to develop to be an effective visionary.

I think that’s a great analogy, thank you and probably the first time that Wayne Gretzky has been referenced on our podcast.

8. Now, how would you recommend marketing leaders encourage idea sharing from their teams to build a collaborative vision of the future?

(11:42) I think ideas are great but informed ideas are even better. And so, I think there’s a point that needs to be made before idea sharing takes place. The first one will be read and take reference points wisely. So, don’t just start with an inside out viewpoint, which is what really shackles lots of companies. They’re always having meetings, which start by their own perspective. Now, look from outside in, think about the customer world, take reference points from industry experts and commentators, look at other disciplines, other industries; get people going on to Ted Talks or listening to Hays podcasts.

Don’t be myopic. I mean, at the very heart of marketing is that famous article by Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia, which bemoans the decline of the rail industry of the US because they didn’t foresee the rise of short-haul flights because they’re focused on their own industry.

So, don’t be myopic. Look more widely than your usual reference points and then at that point, draw people into what the Americans call brown bag sessions, which were effectively bringing your own lunch, sitting around a table and encouraging people to bring new things in. But don’t let those things be about, “let’s have a meeting about how to do effective copywriting” – you can do that in a different way. Have them about these new perspectives and then you could work with people like us to do things like scenario planning, to think about what potential combination of things can happen.

And then having considered all that, if you’ve then got to sort of Zoom in and predict, okay, after we’ve taken this eagle eye 2000-foot-view, what could happen? What would we place bets on what is likely to happen? Because that is, if you like the end of the vision building, you’ve got to develop and take to your customer for insights.

9. Following on from that, I’d like to talk about the second element, activator, which to remind our listeners of what you said earlier is all about being the force that successfully drives the team to growth. How can marketing leaders effectively get buy-in to initiatives and activate these visions that we just discussed?

(14:06) If you’re a marketing leader, I think firstly, you’ve got to create the environment and that’s by focusing and prioritising. So, coming out of this visionary phase and thinking what are the things that you believe to be important to drive as change initiatives and ongoing programs in your organisation and set clear priorities.

And then to lead, train, coach and appraise people on your team along the main sort of facets to this advocacy, activate your competency that we talk about. The first one is this thing called a balanced advocate, which is if you’re a leader, you should know, not only what is good for the customer, but what is good for your own company. In the book, we have a simple Venn diagram, which shows an overlap between what’s good for the company, what’s good for the customer, and in between that is your sweet spot where you can do things that are good for both you and the customer. 

So, when you’re then trying to mobilise things inside your organisation when you’re trying to get a good feel for what is important to customers, you need to be able to listen emphatically, not just listen in order to reply; to really listen to what concerns people. And above all, if you’re leading a marketing organisation, you must make sure that your team understand that they must be able to negotiate.

And don’t get sensitive about if you take an idea forward and some senior leader or the salespeople need to change it, because they’ve got some view about how it could be more effective. You must negotiate, and you must be tenacious because to get an idea over the line, you’ve got to keep going and going. And if then it’s approved, all the time there’s another new initiative coming in that field, which might be from HR or from IT that you’re competing with, you’ve got to keep driving people to remember that you’re running this important initiative. They are some of the main things I would recommend.

10. Now we just discussed what marketing leaders need, but what can marketing leaders do to drive their teams to push for change themselves? And what do you think are the benefits of doing that?

(16:29) I think leaders themselves must be more self-aware and reflect on what they’ve got in their team and what type of capabilities they must have to effectively activate and mobilise. So, get the team to consider:

• Are you a balanced advocate?
• Do you know how this company makes money?
• Can you therefore develop business cases, which are compelling because it can move us forward in the marketplace that they can be profitable for this company?
• Do you go into situations with what we call “fully baked answers,” where you think this is what the thing needs to look like? Or are you prepared to negotiate, and do you have the skill to negotiate?
• Do you understand what motivates the sales force?
• Do you understand what motivates one of your senior executives so that you can get buy-in and they can develop programs that everybody’s prepared to take forward together?

They’re really the sort of things that need to be done and to courage, coach, advise your team and be there by the side of them to help drive change if need be. And if they need you to call on a senior leader in a business from another function to get something moving, then you should do that.

11. Thank you, Simon. And now, Stacey, looking at the third competency mentioned, which was learner, so learning new skills or ways of doing business. Why is it so important for marketing leaders to encourage their team members to upskill particularly in this increasingly hybrid and remote working world of work?

(18:06) Yes, well 2020 perfectly sums up the reason why being a learner is so important. Marketers started off last year with one set of plans and strategies, and then six weeks into the year, everything changed from switching to online events from in-person events. And suddenly there was this massive need to immediately learn new technologies.

Companies that had strong learners were able to quickly understand that business and customer expectations had changed, and they were able to adapt. We say that being a learner is about having a mindset of curiosity. So, it’s somebody that’s open to new ideas, can be a critical thinker and somebody that’s deliberate and self-directed rather than waiting for someone to tell them what to learn.

12. How can marketing leaders support their teams in upskilling and what are the benefits of that?

(18:56) Yes, well, I think the first thing is encouraging the team to take ownership of their own learning. So, one thing that we were surprised when we talked to marketing leaders is that most of the organisations said that they did have a budget for learning and development. That would be to send the team members to seminars or workshops or trade industry events, but that people are rarely taking advantage of these.

And so first and foremost, it would be to get the team to come up with their own plan for learning and that understanding this is completely within their own skillset to do. Secondly, we outlined five key areas in our book that we think all marketers really should understand. There are specific questions that we outlined so I’ll just briefly go through these:

• The first is the market. How well does your team understand what’s happening in the market? As Simon mentioned, all the things that is required to be a visionary, somebody that can look at trends and really understand what’s happening.
• The second is customers. So really, what does your team understand about who the ideal customer is, what the customer’s top needs and pain points are, what they’re trying to gain or achieve in their business and why specifically do they work with your company.
• The third is competitors. So, we mentioned that a lot of marketers are looking at other people’s websites and copying and pasting what’s being said there, but there’s a little bit more to it than on the competitive landscape. You have your direct competitors and then you have the indirect competitors that are how people spending their time and resources. So, getting a full broad picture for how your company fits into that competitive landscape. 
• The fourth area is your company and the product and services that you offer. So, we found, and this is a common complaint amongst the C-level team that marketing does not really understand the business. They don’t really understand how their activity fits into overarching business goals. There are profitability questions: Which products and services are the most profitable? What’s the mission of the company? Why are they even in business?

So, all of these are broad level questions that really need to be understood at that company level. And then, finally, is their specific role. So, what skills are needed to be done within their specific job? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Where do they need to improve within their current job and how can they grow and elevate their career from there? So, that’s the five key areas we would say that those are good reflection questions to implement within the team.

And then there’s a culture piece to this as well, which is a culture of learning. And that has to do with, firstly making sure that people understand why things are being done. We find that a lot of marketers are executing programs not fully understanding the big picture and maybe just taking things at a surface level. So, for example, one of the famous sayings is, “why are we losing business?” Oh, it’s all about our price because our price is too high. And so, then everybody goes to immediately start fixing the pricing, but there could be more to it about the value understanding what customers are trying to achieve and digging deeper. Maybe the answer is not just the prices are too high but that we need to explain it better to customers what they’re getting for their money.

And then one of the key pitfalls to learning that we frequently hear from marketers is that they just don’t have time. So, they’re too busy executing and they’re not making the time to learn. So, the best organisations encourage learning and aren’t worried when people are taking time to sit and think and reflect on what they’ve learned. They use that as very productive time versus just the standard sort of definition of productivity in the amount of volume and output that that person is doing.

And then lastly, I would say it’s around encouraging the team to experiment. One of the leaders we spoke to called this Fearless Experimentation, and this is encouraging people to try new things and not just have to follow the herd, where we end up copying and pasting old business playbooks that aren’t really aligned with the changing customer needs.

13. Now, it’s becoming more important than ever for organisations to be able to articulate the usefulness that they can provide to customers, which is the fourth competency you picked out. What role do marketing leaders have in this process? Does it start with the product or service offering?

(23:29) Yes, so first we define usefulness as the ability to connect the dots from what your company does to how it solves a customer problem. So, this really includes everything from products and services to the sales approach, even marketing content, programs, and customer service. So, really everything that a company is offering should be useful to their end customers.

We have a little usefulness triangle in our book that we described and there are really three elements to being useful.

The first is about knowledge and skills. So B2B buyers want to work with sellers that really understand their business. So it starts with spending the time, again, going back to the learning component, really understanding what customers need, what they want, what’s going to fit into their business and how you can help them achieve their goals?

The second is what we call preparation. So, this is being proactive, ready, and willing to help. This is putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and realising that there really is no one size fits all. This is the element of how much time you are spending here to develop new things versus being reactive and waiting for somebody to come to you and ask you for something.

And then the third is timing. So, 90% of buyers are open to engaging with salespeople earlier in the process. So, it’s a matter of getting in there early. And there’s a stat that says 35-50% of sales goes to the vendor that responds first. So, these are having systems and processes in place that help accelerate the timing, especially if a customer needs something, they don’t want to sit around for four months waiting for you guys to come up with it. So, the timing aspect is important here. The question becomes well, who owns this, who owns becoming whether something is useful to the business. And marketing absolutely has a key role in understanding and presenting data back to the business that reflects what the customer sentiment is.

So, every department is impacted here from the product team coming up with product roadmaps, to the sales team and how they’re presenting this information. So, marketing really has a hand in driving that and making sure that there is discipline around implementing things that are going to be useful.

14. Now, keeping on this theme of usefulness, how can marketing leaders make sure that their teams have their finger on the pulse of the customer to appeal to their requirements?

(26:03) Yes, so, the first I would say is having a budget for some customer research. One of the things that continues to be shocking when we work with clients is that many of the marketing teams especially, do not have a budget to talk to customers and cannot remember the last time they did any customer research.

What does that mean? That means they rely on their sales team or their customer service team or data that they’re collecting about website visitors, or email open rates and making decisions on that versus talking one to one with customers to really understand at a deeper level what their business problems are, what’s changed and how that might fit into their world.

And then it goes back to the theme that we were talking about earlier, around making time to learn and it’s the same thing here. There must be time spent on reading and digesting all this information and making sense of it so that the business can use the information to make decisions. I mean, we are all overwhelmed with big data. The challenge becomes how are people acting on it? We have no shortage of information. It’s a matter of getting the teams together and talking through what this really means for our business.

15. Can you share any examples of organisations that have, or are currently proving their unique value well, particularly during this uncertain time?

(27:23) Yes, well 2020 was an exciting year for this competency to see how businesses emerged. There are a ton of B2C examples that we saw, especially during the early days of COVID. So, think of the distilleries that started making hand sanitizer or the large clothing retailers that started making face masks.

On the B2B side, we’ve seen a lot of technologies and even specific marketing and sales content aimed at helping people be more productive working from home. And I think what we’re seeing now, now that people have been stuck at home, one of the trends is how do you get people to unplug since we’re all connected what seems like 24 hours a day. So, you’re starting to see more research and reports and tools that help you block certain things. I mean, there are apps where you can close down and put limits on social media, as well as just mental health in general, making sure that you’re taking breaks, going for a walk and getting unplugged so that you can avoid the burnout, which is happening to so many people right now.

16. Thank you, Stacey. Turning back to you, Simon. The final key competency that organisations need to be developing in their employees is evaluator. Could you tell us a little bit more about what this means and why it’s so important to organisations?

(28:52) Well, first of all, before I get into what we believe is the competency for this, let me just talk about the difference between this skill to be able to do this in the competency.

So, firstly, you need to have people who can measure. Stacey mentioned some digital type measurements like click-through rates or likes, which can move you down a line of chasing vanity metrics. So, you must have people who have the skill to be able to do the measurement and connect the dots to the end about how it’s affecting revenue overall, or sales growth. But over and above that, you have to be able to have people who can evaluate new opportunities to decide which to take forward or not; whether to stop initiatives, change initiatives or just keep going with something that you’re moving forward with.

And if you go and do that well, you either burn a lot of cash and calories focusing on the wrong things, or you can miss out on big opportunities. And so, in our book, the overall competency we think is much more in keeping with what is not just a numeric thing, but a human and very political thing because most of our senior leaders that we spoke to around the world in sales and marketing were bringing the idea to the table, which we’ve all experienced.

It’s okay, say now you have to measure a new mover after evaluate, but people don’t like having their ideas thrown under the bus in front of other people and people don’t like to see their pet projects killed even if the numbers suggest that they do need to be. And so, to be a good evaluator, you must be able to in the end, say, this has worked, we should keep doing it. I’ve looked at the business case for this and it is going to be worth us doing as an organisation because it brings value to us and the customer.

Then there are some key things that you must be as a human being. And the first one is that you have to be somebody the organisation believes has integrity, that you are prepared to measure things and be objective and you can go to the evaluator as a person who you could trust will not follow somebody’s unpolitical agenda, that will measure correctly and accurately whether the thing’s been successful or not in the face of some political pressure. And they must be able to be this balanced advocate, which we talked about before on one of the other competencies. You have to be able to know how it’s affected customer value, not whether the thing turned up on time and whether the service was all right but if you promise that customer that the thing you sold them would help them be more productive, could you actually measure that and has it actually moved the needle in your own organisation? 

And so, therefore, this person has to have a lot of political-ness and persuasion skills because there’s one thing measuring as I said, and then the other thing is turning around and saying to a senior executive, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to carry on with your pet project because the numbers don’t stack up.” So, if you’re a marketing leader, I think you have to understand there’s evaluation and the need to be able to do the evaluation numerically and objectively but that you’re taking the outcome of those decisions into a political environment. So, you need people who can handle that.

17. And what can marketing leaders do to help their teams effectively balance what’s good for the plus customer with return on investment for the business?

(32:32) Well, I think this is a key thing had we mentioned this balanced advocacy more than a couple of times now. And one senior leader in particular, I won’t reveal because the research that we did was anonymous and that’s how it should be, but got really catatonic with anger about how they believe that marketers don’t often understand in the round what’s actually good for the business, how the business actually makes money. And so, they’ll talk about marketing campaigns in isolation without really joining the dots.

So, I think the marketing leader has to make sure that they know and their team know how the business makes money and what the mechanics are there, and how the thing that you’re proposing is going to influence that.

18. To change direction slightly, Simon, I want to ask you how marketing leaders can role model the five competencies that we’ve discussed in this podcast?

(33:36) I think it’s probably important to say before they start role modelling, leaders have got to create that environment. There is a chapter at the end of the book, which talks about the fact that all these competencies are built and developed in the framework of the overall culture that’s out there in the organisation.

Now many people said, “One of the things that’s constraining me doing visionary or being a better learner is having time”. So if you’re a marketing leader, you’ve got to set the agenda, set the environment to allow people time and, as I said earlier, to clearly encourage prioritisation and focus on not the volume of factory output mentality.

Once you’ve created that environment, I think if you’re a leader, you need to always look at yourself first and think, well, where am I in these competencies in the context of my own organisation and customers? Is it important for me to have as an individual and where is it okay to hire in? And then to put these competencies on the agenda with your team and to, as Stacey said earlier, understand how the competencies are spread around the team and to hire and develop to fill those gaps.

So, for a leader, I think reflect it on yourself: do I take all the other perspectives? Do I do that as a leader? Do I bring new perspectives into the discussion? For example, all these other industries or competitors are doing this or this other organisation has taken a completely different stance in the marketplace, or an external observer is saying that we’re not doing very well in this particular area, despite what we may think ourselves from an activation standpoint. I think as I said earlier, you’ve got to discuss and develop people around their ability to mobilise ideas in the organisation and to take part in that mobilisation when it helps.

And on the learner side, do you bring things to the team that helps with their learning? Do you create that environment? And do you, is all about something we’ve talked about a couple of times, do you encourage and reward targeted quality versus quantity? I mean, I can’t let this be finished without reminding myself that I worked in one organisation where the marketing organisation wasn’t very well perceived by the salespeople. And adjoined to the conference thing, the marketing leader says, “Oh, we need to bring in every sort of piece of brochureware that we’ve done for sales and customers”. And it’s an enormous table, it must’ve been ten foot by twenty foot. It was absolutely creaking with all this sort of brochureware that had been produced and yet the marketing team in question was poorly perceived because it was just responding to volume.

So, all of which weren’t useful to the salespeople really, and weren’t useful to the customer. So, encouraging and rewarding targeted quality versus quantitative for the sake of it is important role modelling of the usefulness. And then the E, try to demonstrate objectivity and balanced advocacy in front of the team, help them understand what that is. And to be honest, to kill your own pet projects. If you’ve got an idea or you wanted something to move forward and you can see that that’s not working, be brave enough in front of your own team and the rest of the leadership in the organisation to demonstrate that you’re killing that because it’s not worked.

19. Excellent. And I think there’s a lot of room there for our listeners to think about and to digest. Stacey, you’ve touched on this briefly, but do you think that the need for these competencies and marketing teams have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began and will this importance continue to increase in the new era of work?

(37:42) Yes, well, absolutely. I think, everything that we’ve talked about here really has been amplified because of COVID. Now we talked about how everything just changed so suddenly, and we’ve seen a need for everything that we talked about.

So, continuing to have your eye on the horizon, or what we say was a visionary; activating new ideas and programs and the ability to get buy into those; constantly learning about the customer and the changing landscape; and then creating useful products, content programs, and evaluating what’s working, especially considering all this online shift versus in-person tactics. I think what to do about that is really evaluating job descriptions. So, we often joke about some of the marketing job descriptions that we see, which are looking for unicorns. There are pages of responsibilities that this person is responsible for, and we think this framework of the five competencies that we outlined will not go out of style. It’s what marketing leaders should be looking for as none of us can predict what new technologies, businesses, or even approaches that are going to emerge from this, the events over the past 12 months. 

And if you bring employees in with these specific competencies, it shouldn’t really matter about their industry experience, which we see as sort of a constant requirement on job descriptions, but in fact can be a benefit in an asset because they can bring a new perspective to what your team is missing because they came from a different industry.

All in all, yes, I think these are going to continue to be extremely important because we’ve heard an alarming stat recently that said 83% of marketers are burnt out right now. And that went up 10% after the pandemic, so it’s really important not to just keep piling on more volume of activity, as Simon mentioned, but about developing smarter strategies with your marketing approach and clearing out the things that aren’t working, even if everyone else in your industry is jumping on the bandwagon. So, we see a lot of companies that are constantly chasing the shiny object, Clubhouse being the new social media platform to be the latest that everybody feels like they need to go rush into. So, it’s just being mindful and careful that you don’t get caught up in that cycle.

20. Thank you very much, Stacey. Now, I’d like to end this podcast with a question that we ask all our guests. Stacey, what do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader and, crucially, do you think these qualities have changed because of the pandemic?

(40:15) I’m not going to use all our competencies that we laid out here, but one of the first qualities I think that makes a strong leader is somebody that has vision. Somebody that can set a strategy and direction and provide clarity for where they want the business to go. Because it’s about getting people to buy-in to that vision and getting your team to see the broader picture.

The second, I would say, is somebody with courage. It’s having the quality to be bold, to be creative and the willingness to try new things.

And then lastly, just my overall ongoing quality that I think is important just in humans, in general, is communication and the ability to keep everybody informed, to maintain that alignment and to be constantly aware. As I mentioned, of the stat eight out of 10 marketers are burnt out right now, what conversations are you having with your team to help make sure that that isn’t everybody on your team? So, my personal philosophy is I think these are, these have always been important qualities. I don’t think the pandemic has necessarily changed these. I think it’s just, as I mentioned, amplified the need for people to develop these even stronger.

21. And finally, the same question to you, Simon. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader, and do you think these qualities have changed since the beginning of the pandemic?

(41:40) It’s a great question and as ever because you’ve asked me second, Stacey’s nicked all the good ones! So, building on what she said, I have vision on my list of three, and that’s really important, but I think that preceding the vision as a marketing leader, you have to demonstrate that you have the ability to bring an outside-in focus to always be concerned about the customer’s world, how the things that are happening around the customer’s world and then around your own environment could change things.

And then use that to help develop the vision and then to lead the change coming out of that vision. So that, two, leading the change from the vision and developing it from an outside-in perspective.

And then I think you’ve got to be able to finally, because you can tell, I like sporting analogies, bring in stuff from outside elsewhere we’ve talked about a lot is crucial. So, cricket in the UK, in England, the fielding got a lot better because people who coach cricket teams realise that people who play baseball field a lot more athletically than in cricket. So, it took a lot of learning from baseball. And I’ve just read that today, the coach of Leicester City Football team extended an invite to the new coach of Leicester Tigers Rugby Team so that they can share ideas on leadership. And I think, that’s both of those examples, the baseball meets cricket and the football meets rugby. In this country is good examples of what leaders should do, bringing thinking in from elsewhere.

Did you enjoy this podcast? Here is some related content that you may be interested in:

• Podcast 15: How can leaders develop their teams to adapt to the key changes in marketing?
• Podcast 22: How B2B marketing leaders can help their organisations and teams succeed
• Podcast 34: The impact of COVID-19 on B2B marketers’ careers
• Q&A with Jen Knowles, Head of Marketing, New York City FC